You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

‘Who is it?’ I asked, pressing the speaker button.

The man moved away from the screen and straightened up. ‘I’m responding to a call. Open the door, please.’ Another man in the same outfit was next to him. Police. Goose bumps spread on my cheeks. The giant man flashed in front of my eyes. I heard Mother say, Now what will you do?

I took my finger off the speaker button and took a step back. Now what will I do? Should I run, Mother? Should I confess? Should I kill myself?

‘We’re here from the Gundo Patrol Division. Can we come in?’ The police officer stood outside the doorway. He was young, at most in his mid thirties. His partner looked to be around the same age. Their question sounded rhetorical and so I nodded as they entered and walked past me.

‘Do you live here?’ asked the first officer.

If I didn’t live here, why would I be here to open the door for them? ‘Yes.’

‘Is anyone else at home?’

‘No.’

‘What is your relationship to the homeowner?’

‘I’m her son.’

‘What’s her name?’

Where was this going? If their purpose was to arrest me, they should have checked my identity, but they were focusing on the flat and the homeowner. ‘Kim Ji-won.’

The two police officers glanced at each other. They both looked me up and down. I was wearing a T-shirt and jogging bottoms, nothing on my feet.

I looked them over too. If the giant man had witnessed last night’s events and reported them to the police from a belated sense of justice, and if they had evidence that pointed to me, they wouldn’t send just these two. An entire investigative team would have descended on me.

‘So you’re saying you’re Ms Kim Ji-won’s son?’ the first officer asked.

I nodded. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’d like to see your ID. We need to take a statement from you.’

I quickly guessed that they hadn’t come at the giant’s urging. They were here to see Ms Kim Ji-won, so it couldn’t have much to do with what had happened last night. But no one knew Mother was missing, so what was going on? I stood in front of the interior door. ‘What’s this about?’

The first officer craned his neck to look behind me. ‘About an hour ago, your mother called to say that there was a burglar in the house. She said she was afraid to go inside and asked us to come out immediately.’

‘My mother called?’ I didn’t have to try to look surprised; I was genuinely shocked. What was this ridiculous story? ‘She’s gone to a retreat. She’s praying.’

‘She’s praying? When did she go?’

‘This morning. Is this a false alarm?’

‘We confirmed the caller was her.’

True, they wouldn’t have come blindly. They would have confirmed the caller’s identity first.

‘What was the number of the person claiming to be my mother? I can tell you if that’s her number or not.’

‘She called from a pay phone. Let me see your ID.’

I didn’t want to leave them here and go upstairs. Who knew what they’d do? ‘It’s upstairs. I’ll give you my ID number.’

‘Go and get it,’ the first officer said, crossing his arms and squinting at me, clearly annoyed that I was dragging it out.

‘Wait here, please,’ I said, and went into the living room. I put my foot on the first step and glanced back. Just as I’d thought he would, one of them poked his head in and looked around. I ran up the stairs three at a time. Mother was inside the table on the roof, Auntie was at her office and Hae-jin would have arrived at Muan station. Mother couldn’t call and Hae-jin wasn’t a woman. Auntie. She knew Mother’s citizen ID number, she was around the same age, and she could easily pretend to be her. I’d have to figure out why she called them.

It didn’t take me more than a minute to return downstairs. I handed over my ID to the first officer. He glanced at it, and then at me, before handing it over to his partner, who took it outside. I could hear him talking on his radio, asking someone to look me up. The first officer and I stood there, staring at each other.

‘All clear,’ the partner said, coming back in and handing my card to the first officer.

The first officer slowly gave it back to me. ‘So, your family…?’

‘It’s the three of us. My mother, my brother and me.’

‘Nobody else living here?’

‘No.’

‘By the way, how long have you been home?

‘Since yesterday.’

‘Then why didn’t you pick up the phone earlier?’

‘The phone?’ The unknown number I’d ignored earlier must have been the police calling to check before coming over. Maybe the fake Ms Kim Ji-won who’d called from a pay phone had given the home number as her contact information. It had to be Auntie. ‘I didn’t hear it. Maybe I was in the bathroom.’

The first policeman’s radio went off. They were being called back to the station for an emergency meeting. The second officer held out his business card. Gundo Patrol Division. ‘When your mother comes home, please ask her to call us right away. If it turns out that she made a false report, she’ll be required to come down to the station.’

I nodded and watched as they left, closing the front door behind them. I heard the lift whirr. I ran over to the living room balcony and opened the window to look down. The light on their patrol car flashed under the white fog. They soon disappeared towards the back gate.

Considering that it hadn’t even been a day since Auntie had spoken to me, this was too risky a move. She knew she could get in trouble for making a false report. She must have had her reasons for doing it. I mulled over the possibilities: 1. She knew something. Or she knew something that could lead to the truth; 2. She wanted to check if what she knew was true but was too scared to come over herself; 3. She wanted the police to see if there was anything going on here.

She would have chosen robbery from a list of possible incidents she could have made up to get the police to come over. She would have had to reveal her true identity to report a missing person, and it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since Mother had disappeared.

I thought back to when Hae-jin had gone into his room and closed the door to talk to someone. That had to have been Auntie. What had she said to him? What had she said about Mother? About me? She must have been concerned about Mother’s safety, since she’d got the police to come. And since she’d called Hae-jin, the source of her worries must have been me. I needed to work out what she knew.

I sat back down at my desk. I took out the journal and flipped to 2015. Only a few entries that year. The same with 2014, 2013, 2012 and earlier.

He says he wants to go to law school.

He’s back in school.

He’s working in public service instead of going into the military.

He took a break from school.

He got into an undergraduate law programme.

He, he, he… It was all about me. There wasn’t a word about Hae-jin, the one she loved so much. Nothing about Yu-min, whom she missed so much. Nothing at all about Father. These records, for whatever reason, were focused entirely on me. But I didn’t see anything special. Most of the entries were only a sentence. The longer entries didn’t reveal much. But then I flipped to late April 2006.

Thursday 20 April

His eyes beg me every moment of every day. Please let me get back in the water. How can I ignore eyes like that, coming from my child? Just now, I called Hye-won to see if there’s any way we can let him keep swimming. She said the same thing: ‘No, it will happen again.’

I know this. Of course I know this. I know my son. I’d basically asked her, Can’t we stop the drug regimen? She told me not to forget: the important thing was not whether Yu-jin became a champion swimmer but whether he could lead a harmless life.