Our Happy Time by Gong Ji-young Read Free Book Online Page A

parking garage when the image hit me: his shackled hands. It was like a pill that you took in the morning but that didn’t kick in until nighttime. Was it because the cold parking garage made me look in my purse for my gloves? I pictured the tips of his ears red with frostbite, the dark red scars on his wrists from where the shackles bit into his skin, and the way his firm lips had twisted into a sneer whenever he spoke. When he said he lacked the will or the hope to go on living, the nervousness in his voice struck me as familiar. I probably sounded that way all the time, too. I had said the same words to my family, screamed it at them, in fact:
Just let me die!
    The department store was packed. Men and women with more shopping bags than they could carry were loading purchases into their cars and leaving while more cars kept coming in. Christmas was on its way. I thoughtabout how Aunt Monica had pleaded with him:
If you hate yourself, then you’re exactly who Jesus came for. He came to tell you to love yourself, to tell you how precious you are.
I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that he was not the only one who needed to hear that. If we had met him in the department store instead, Aunt Monica would have jokingly added,
Jesus did not come to earth to tell you to shop.
I thought about how I used to go to church when I was younger. Back then, I was a good kid. I wore the frilly clothes my mother dressed me in, politely helped my teacher, and never missed a day of Sunday school. I memorized every passage in the Bible and won awards at catechism competitions. And then, that day came when everything changed. The sun hid its light and never again shone brightly over my life. The sun rose and fell, but it was always the same night for me. I didn’t know why I was reminded of it while standing in a brightly lit department store parking garage after having met Yunsu. But after that fateful day long ago, I went to college, albeit not a good one, appeared on Daehak Gayoje, and won. It was a nationwide singing contest for college students, and winning it launched my career. The glory was brief, but I got to do concerts all over the country. Then I left to study art in Paris without a single worry about money, and when I returned, I was made a professor. Though the fact that I was so unqualified to be a professor was a secret known only to me and my family, I was nevertheless a decent member of society and, with the exception of my advanced age, good enough for a snobby lawyer to want to marry, even if he was a liar. At least, that’s how it looked to other people. How easy it was to fool others!
    I drove out of the garage. The streets were packed with cars. Fancy Christmas lights twinkled from every tree, making it look like golden flowers had blossomedon the bare branches. In the seven years that I was gone, Korea had changed. It looked glamorous and wealthy and crowded. But if I walked behind the buildings that towered nearly high enough to block the sky, the wind was as strong and cold as ever.
    When I returned home, I looked up his name online.
    Jeong Yunsu. As soon as I searched for his name, news reports popped up one after the other. Judging by the date, it had happened a year and a half ago, while I was still in Paris. He was the main culprit in the so-called Imun-dong Murder Case. He and an accomplice had murdered a woman they knew named Bak, raped and killed her seventeen-year-old daughter who was sleeping in the next room, and then killed the housekeeper who was just returning from market.
    When I read that he had raped a seventeen-year-old girl, I stopped breathing. A sour, metallic taste, like blood seeping from between my teeth, filled my mouth. This was the person I had to visit with Aunt Monica for the next month? I felt humiliated to have thought that he and I had anything in common. I wondered why the government couldn’t hurry up and kill those people when they asked to be put to death. And