You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

I opened the door to the study, which held some of Father’s old belongings and Mother’s books. It looked the same as it always did. I went back out through the living room and walked into the kitchen. That, too, was clean. No footprints or blood anywhere. The blood was only around Mother’s body. If that was where she had been killed, everything nearby should have been sprayed with blood.

I looked around the rest of the flat. The balcony behind the kitchen, Hae-jin’s bedroom and bathroom. Everything appeared normal. On my way out of Hae-jin’s room, I glanced around one last time at his bed, television, wardrobe and desk, his workout gear hanging on his chair.

Outside of work obligations or travel, Hae-jin always came home to sleep, even on nights he went out, even though Mother didn’t insist. But last night… last night of all nights, he’d stayed out. Then he’d called me around the time I usually woke up to ask if everything was all right. As if he’d known something was up. To lure me downstairs, perhaps.

A script wrote itself instantly in my mind. Hae-jin comes home after I fall asleep post-seizure. For some unknown reason, he attacks Mother. Mother flees, but he catches her and kills her. He comes upstairs, tracking footprints and blood all over the place, and covers me with blood to frame me for the crime. Then he saunters out of the flat.

I quickly backed away from that thought, and as I closed the door to his room, I put it out of my head for good. That wasn’t possible. It was insane. I knew Hae-jin. We’d lived in the same flat for ten years. It was more likely that Mother would kill him ; that was the kind of person Kim Hae-jin was. The most rebellious thing he had done in his entire life was to go and see an adult-rated move before graduating from middle school. But even then, he’d asked Mother to come along as a guardian, and invited me too.

I slid open the door to the entrance foyer. Four pairs of shoes were in a neat row: Mother’s slippers, Hae-jin’s slippers, Mother’s white trainers, and my wet, muddy black running shoes. I never left those shoes by the front door. I hid them in the ceiling of my bathroom and retrieved them only when I went out through the door to the roof. If I’d come home via the roof the way I usually did, there was no way they would be here. So I had come in through the front door last night.

Strangely, Mother’s trainers were also wet. Not just damp, but soaked. I tried to remember what had happened when I came back last night after the party. When I was struggling to unlock the door, Mother had come out wearing those trainers. Were they wet? I couldn’t remember, but Mother wasn’t the kind of person who would shove her feet into wet shoes. That meant she had gone out again afterwards. But she couldn’t have taken the car. She must have run around in the rain like I had. It was the only way her shoes could be this wet.

I closed the door and turned around. I noticed a black Gore-Tex jacket and quilted vest crumpled in the corner. I’d been wearing those last night over my sweater. Why were they here?

Maybe this was what happened: I ran through the front door, hearing Mother’s scream. I discovered her collapsed in a pool of blood in front of the kitchen. I took off my wet jacket and vest and placed them carefully by the entrance foyer door, then came inside. That made no sense. That made the least sense of all the things that had made no sense since I’d woken up this morning.

I was picking up the jacket and vest when I heard ‘Hakuna Matata’, the song from The Lion King . Mother had recently changed her ringtone. It sounded like it was coming from the living room.

I rushed in, jacket and vest still in hand, and spotted her phone on the edge of the coffee table. I hadn’t noticed it when I’d called the police. She often left it there. An unexpected name was on the screen: Hye-won. Why was Auntie calling so early?

It rang half a dozen times. Then the cordless began to ring. Auntie again. It was 6.54. Hae-jin and Auntie were doing the same thing, separated only by an hour and a half. A thought popped into my head. Did Mother call Auntie last night, too?

I picked up Mother’s mobile. I knew as much about her as she did about me, so I was able to unlock her phone. According to the call list, she had rung Hae-jin at 1.30 a.m., but they hadn’t talked. She’d called Auntie at 1.31 a.m., and they had spoken for three minutes. So she had been alive at least until 1.34 a.m.

I thought back to last night, back to the point in time where my memory was the clearest. At midnight, I had been at the pedestrian crossing by the sea wall where I’d seen the woman getting off the last Ansan-bound bus. That crossing was about two kilometres from home. It would have taken me twenty minutes if I’d walked, fifteen if I’d alternated between running and walking, and ten if I’d run the whole way. I remembered running; if I’d run the entire way home, I would have entered our building around 12.10 a.m. and would have been at the front door of the flat by 12.15. Even if I’d walked up the stairs, which I didn’t remember doing, it would have been before 12.30 a.m.

So I’d walked into the living room around 12.30 a.m., and Mother had died after 1.34 a.m. between the living room and the kitchen.

My brain felt tangled. It was impossible to figure out what had happened. The intruder disappeared from my conjectures. Maybe I’d missed something important, something that would tie all of this together.

With my jacket and vest and Mother’s mobile still in my hands, I turned towards Mother herself, lying neatly in the pool of blood, looking as if she were asleep. For the first time I noticed something unnatural about the way she was positioned. A person who bleeds out from a massive wound to the throat wouldn’t have time to rake her hair forward to cover her face and place her hands carefully on her chest before dying.

I went over to her. I now noticed things that hadn’t registered before. It looked as though a big, heavy object had been dragged down the stairs, smearing the blood. An object like Mother’s body. Next to the smears were footprints heading both up and down. Someone had murdered Mother on the landing and dragged her down to arrange her like this.

But why? Who had done this? If not an intruder or Hae-jin, the only other possibility… I looked at Mother, terrified, and shook my head. I remembered what my mind had thrown up earlier: You might as well tell them that she cut her own throat.

That could have happened, I thought. For some reason she cuts her own throat on the landing, and for some reason I can’t stop her. Because I’m about to have a seizure. She collapses and tumbles down the stairs. I come downstairs and move her to where she is now, which is probably the bare minimum I can do before my seizure takes over. Maybe I put her in a sleeping position, since I’m dazed and unable to think, then bid her goodnight like I do every night.

I felt a glimmer of hope. If I could figure out why she cut her own throat and why I couldn’t stop her, I could call the police without worrying about becoming a suspect. I could figure it out. Or at least I could make it make sense. I had always had a gift for reshaping a scene to make it comprehensible, though Mother disparaged this skill, calling it ‘lying’.

I ran up the stairs, taking care not to step in the blood or footprints. The blood on the landing was beginning to congeal. The footprints were disorderly, stamped in every direction. Someone had paced around in confusion.

‘Yu-jin,’ Mother called from somewhere in my memory, in a low voice, suppressing emotion, the kind that forced a response. I stopped and looked over at the solid wood-panelled wall, now stained deep purple. I could see myself leaning back against it, cornered. I stopped breathing.