“Who’s my sweet, sweet boy?” He smiles, a wide grin pulling at his lips as his mother ruffles his hair. She takes his hand and presses it against her distended belly. Vaguely, he can feel a soft thump against his palm. “Say hello to your brother and sister.” She smiles warmly at him, and his eyes widen in wonder. Some of his friends have siblings, and it seems like a good thing, something to celebrate, something to be happy over. “You’re going to be a big brother.” At the happiness shining from his mother’s eyes, Jin Goo’s eyes curve into crescents of their own and a bubbly laugh breaks out in the kitchen where they stand. “What should we name your brother and sister?”
-
She’s holding a bundle in her arms, one twin in each arm, and Jin Goo rocks onto his tiptoes to catch a sight of his new siblings, eyes practically sparkling in anticipation. She puts the twins into their cradle and lifts him up to stand on the edge of the crib so he can get a better view. Her arms wrap around him, also making sure he won’t fall. “Aren’t they pretty?” she whispers in his ear. He can hear the exhaustion in his mother voice, but she also sounds happy and content. He nods with a wide smile, gazing at the two babies sleeping side by side. He feels the soft lips of his mother grazing the top of his head as he stares. transfixed by the slight rise and fall of the babies’ chests. “You love them, too, don’t you?” Jin Goo nods vigorously, and smiles when he hears his mother’s warm laugh behind him, her warm arms surrounding him.
-
His father gets laid-off nine months later. Despite his best efforts, he doesn’t find another job. Meals get gradually smaller, his mother’s smile gets more and more strained. Six months after being laid-off, his father turns to drinking to relieve his anguish. It takes a few weeks, but eventually when he sees the bottle, Jin Goo learns to avoid the man who used to laugh deeply and play hide-and-seek with him. The first time his father lays a hand on his mother, Jin Goo is sleeping, but the raised voices wake him. When the man sobers in the morning, there are tears and apologies from two of the people Jin Goo loves most in the world. His father begs his mother not to leave, that he won’t ever do it again. A few days pass and Jin Goo sees a bottle on the coffee table, one that wasn’t there the day before. His father never sobers again. Thing get worse. Jin Goo’s mother grabs him by the arms one day, her hair frazzled and eyes wide with terror. “Protect your brother and sister,” she urges him, “Promise me you’ll protect them no matter what!” Jin Goo can only nod dumbly. He thinks she means to protect them from the outside world, from strangers. After all, he has never connected the black eyes and bruises his mother sports to his drunken father.
-
His brother and sister are crying. He’s holding onto them tightly, close to him. His father holds a half empty bottle in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other, his eyes wild and unfocused. Jin Goo is terrified. He scuffles backwards, underneath the dining table pushed against the wall, under a naive belief that it will provide any sort of protection. His mother lies unconscious on the floor of the living room, blood flowing from an open wound on her upper arm. The home phone lays on her limp palm, the screen black. His father advances slowly, step by heavy step. “Please...” Jin Goo’s words are whispers, barely whispers. “Dad please...” His words do nothing to quell the anger he sees burning the man’s eyes. “It’s all your fault.” The words are not aimed at him. No, his father’s eyes are locked onto the two crying infants Jin Goo is holding close to him. “If it wasn’t for you bastards, things wouldn’t have gone to shit! If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened!” His father is screaming. He’s at the dinner table now, only holding the knife, the beer bottle having been dropped a few steps back, the amber liquid spilling out onto the carpet. Despite his efforts, his father is stronger, and wrenches his baby brother out of his grasp. Jin Goo sits there hugging his sister closely to his chest and only watches, stunned, as the kitchen knife, the one he’s seen his mother use time and time again to cook, continuously enters his little brother. There’s a lot of blood. The police burst through the door just as his father turns back towards him, intent on taking his sister as well. Jin Goo doesn’t realize he’s screaming and shaking until a kind-faced policeman hushes him with a warm blanket and an embrace within strong, comforting arms.
-
A large part of his mother disappears along with his baby brother and father figure. She tries, and to her credit she tries so hard. But there are many times where she stares off into space, mind elsewhere. There are many times where he is woken in the middle of the night by the soft sobs of his mother. And there are many times where he has to hold her hand tightly to stop her from shaking. But she tries her best to keep up jobs, to bring food to the table, to keep a roof over their head. And it doesn’t always work. But they always had a protective mother to guard them from the outside world. Until they didn’t. She collapses one day, and Jin Goo, eyes wide, watches as the neighbour she was talking to, calls the ambulance. She’s diagnosed with a late stage of brain cancer, whatever that means. All he hears is ‘cancer’ and he grips his mother’s hand tightly. Cancer is bad. That much he knows. Cancer is expensive. And they don’t have the money. So what else can they do? They watch from the sidelines as the tumour grows, prying their mother from them. They watch as the doctors wheel her bed into the surgery room, promising to try their best. The doctors make the surgery sound so easy, their words filled with positive tones, putting the two children at ease. But the moment the head doctor comes out from the surgery room, Jin Goo can tell it’s not good news he’ll be receiving.
-
His mother doesn’t get buried in the ground. They don’t have the money for a burial. She gets cremated, the fire licking at her body until there’s nothing but her ashes, ashes that at procedurally swept into a small can. Hell, they can’t even afford a proper urn. She deserves better than being stuck in a tin can forever, so Jin Goo takes his sister on a long bus ride a few days later, to the pier. They aren’t allowed to throw things into the water, he’s been told before, so they do it quietly, in a corner when nobody’s watching. His mother, when she was still happy, his mother was free. And the water was a free a force as he ever knew, free to roam where it wished, free to stretch into the distance, bound by nothing. So he scatters his mother’s ashes and watches with his sister as they sit on the edge of the pier, as the water washes her away.
-
The year afterwards, his baby sister gets taken from him as well. He watches quietly, off to the side, as the man and woman sign the documents. He eyes them warily, unable to trust that the man won’t become the monster his own father turned into, unable to know that the woman won’t contract a horrible disease that will leave his sister with more loss than she deserved. But from the way they’re dressed, Jin Goo can tell that they’re well off. They have money. Money that can be used to enroll her into school, to buy her nice clothes, to treat her to restaurants, to buy her toys. And with everything she’s been through, she deserves at least that. So he smiles and promises her that he’ll try to see her often, though he hasn’t a clue where she’ll live. He hugs her one last time and forces his fingers then arms to loosen and let her go. He holds back his tears until she leaves and night comes when nobody can detect the silent tears that get absorbed by his pillow.
-
He fingers the ring hanging from his metal chain around his neck. It’s about the time of year that his mother died. He doesn’t remember the exact date, though he should. It’s too muddled in his memory. It’s been almost two decades since she was taken from him. He can’t hear her soft laugh in his ear anymore, nor can he feel her arms wrapping around him lovingly. He can’t even remember really, what she looked like. But he’s at the one place that reminds him of her, legs dangling from the pier, sitting in the same spot where he had scattered her ashes so many years ago. The water still looks the same, knocking gently against the stone wall he sits on top of. It still stretches out into the horizon, as far as his eyes can see. He’s as close as he can get to her ever again, but she still feels so far away. He hears a playful shriek behind him, and turns to see a man and a woman, strolling along the pier in the sunset with their two children, two girls. A happy family. He doesn’t lie to himself, sometimes when he sees pictures like that, he feels envy. Why did some get to grow up with a happy family and some a broken family? His father, jailed. His brother and mother, dead. His sister, lost. But there’s nothing he can do about it, there’s no way he can change the past. So he turns back to the family member he can barely reach anymore, looking back out to point where the water meets the horizon, and tries to remember what she looked like, and what her laugh sounded like.
