Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

  That session had been a disaster. TJ screamed when the documentary started. “Look, TJ, it’s about dinosaurs, just like Barney,” Elizabeth tried to say over TJ’s howls, but all hell broke loose when TJ yanked off his helmet and started banging his head against the wall. Henry cried that his ears hurt, and Matt screamed for Pak to put in the Barney DVD, ASAP.

  After summarizing the incident, Matt said, “After that day, Pak always put in Barney, and Elizabeth always sat Henry away from the DVD screen. She said Barney was junk, and she didn’t want him near it. So for her to suddenly change her mind and have Henry sit by the DVD—that was beyond strange. Kitt even asked if she was sure, and Elizabeth said it was a special treat for Henry.”

  “Dr. Thompson,” Abe said, “did the defendant’s seating change affect anything else?”

  “Yes. It changed which oxygen tank everyone was connected to.”

  “Sorry, I don’t quite understand,” Abe said.

  Matt looked to the jurors. “Before, I explained that you connect your helmet to an oxygen spigot inside the chamber. There are two spigots, one front and one back, each connected to a separate oxygen tank outside. Two people hook up to one spigot and share an oxygen tank.” The jurors nodded. “Because of the way Elizabeth changed the seating, Henry connected his oxygen tube to the back spigot instead of the front one like always.”

  “So the defendant made sure Henry would be connected to the back oxygen tank?”

  “Yes. And she told me to make sure to hook up mine to the front and Henry’s to the back. I said, okay, but what difference does it make?”

  “And?”

  “She said I’m closer to the front and Henry to the back, and if we got our tubes crossed, Henry’s OCD—obsessive-compulsive disorder—might flare up.”

  “Had Henry exhibited signs of this OCD ‘flare-up’”—Abe drew quotes in the air—“in any of the thirty-plus dives you’d done together?”

  “No.”

  “And then?”

  “I said okay, I’ll make sure we don’t cross our tubes, but she wasn’t satisfied. She crawled in and hooked up Henry’s tube to the back spigot herself.”

  Abe walked over, directly in front of Matt. “Dr. Thompson,” he said, and as if on cue, the air conditioner near Matt sputtered. “Which oxygen tank exploded?”

  Matt fixed his eyes on Elizabeth’s and spoke without blinking. Slowly. Deliberately. Each syllable punctuated, coated with venom, and targeted to hit her and make her bleed. “The back tank blew up. The one connected to the back spigot. The one which that woman”—Matt paused, and Pak was sure he’d raise his arm and point his finger at her, but instead he blinked and looked away—“made sure was connected to her son’s head.”

  “And after the defendant set everything up the way she wanted, what then?” Abe said.

  “She said to Henry, ‘I love you so, so much, sweetie.’”

  “I love you so, so much, sweetie,” Abe repeated as he turned to Henry’s picture, and Pak saw the jurors frown at Elizabeth, some shaking their heads. “And then?”

  “She left,” Matt said, his voice quiet. “She smiled and waved, like we were going on a roller-coaster ride, and she walked away.”

  MATT

  “SO THE DEFENDANT LEAVES and the evening dive starts. What happened next, Dr. Thompson?” Abe said.

  He’d known the dive was seriously fucked up the moment the hatch closed. The air had been unnaturally still, which, combined with the baked stench of body odor and Lysol that permeated the chamber, made it a bitch to breathe. Kitt asked Pak to take the pressurization extra slow for TJ, who was recovering from an ear infection, so that took ten minutes instead of the usual five. With the pressurization, the air got denser and hotter, if that was possible. The portable DVD wasn’t hooked up to the sound system, and the filtered sound of Barney singing What’ll we see at the zoo-zee-zoo? through the thick glass porthole made the dive feel surreal, like really being underwater.

  “It was hot with no AC, but otherwise, things were normal,” Matt said, which wasn’t really true. He’d expected the women to spend the dive deconstructing Elizabeth’s unexpected chumminess and obviously faked illness, but they’d both remained silent. Maybe it was the awkwardness of talking with Matt between them, or maybe the heat. In any case, he was glad for the chance to sit and think; he needed to figure out what to say to Mary.

  “What was the first sign of trouble?” Abe said.

  “The DVD went dead, right in the middle of a song.” The silence of that moment was absolute. No hum of the AC, no Barney, no chattering. After a second, TJ knocked on the porthole, as if the DVD player were a sleeping animal he could wake up. “It’s okay, TJ; I bet it’s just the batteries,” Kitt said with the kind of forced evenness you used when you happened upon a sleeping bear.

  The next part he remembered in jags, like one of those old-fashioned films that go tat-tat-tat when they turn, the scenes spliced crudely, jumping from one image to the next. TJ pounding his fists on the porthole. TJ taking off and throwing his oxygen helmet aside, then hammering his head on the wall. Kitt trying to get TJ away from the wall.

  “Did you ask Pak to stop the dive?”

  Matt shook his head. Now, in the light of day, that seemed the obvious thing to do. But back then, everything had been fuzzy. “Teresa said maybe we should stop, but Kitt said no, we just needed to restart the DVD.”

  “What did Pak say?”

  Matt glanced Pak’s way. “It was chaos in the chamber, very noisy, so I couldn’t really hear, but he said something about getting batteries, it taking a few minutes.”

  “So Pak’s working to fix the DVD. Then what?”

  “Kitt calmed down TJ and got the helmet back on him. She sang songs to keep him calm.” It had been one song, actually: the Barney song that cut off when the DVD died. Over and over, soft and slow, like a lullaby. Sometimes, drifting off to sleep, Matt would hear it: I love you, you love me, we’re a hap-py fam-i-ly. He’d jolt awake, heart thumping his chest, and he’d picture himself ripping Barney’s fat purple head off and stomping on it, its purple hands stopping mid-clap and decapitated purple body toppling.

  “What happened next?” Abe said.

  Everyone had been still and quiet, Kitt half murmuring, half singing, and TJ leaning against her chest, eyes closed. Suddenly, Henry said, “I need the pee jar,” and reached to grab the urine-collection container in the back for bathroom emergencies. Henry’s chest smashed against TJ’s legs, and TJ startled, jolting his arms and legs like he’d been defibrillated, and started kicking, out of control. Matt pulled Henry back, but TJ yanked off his helmet, threw it in Kitt’s lap, and started banging his head again.

  It was hard to believe that a child’s head could repeatedly strike a steel wall, producing such heavy thuds, and not crumple into pieces. Listening to the pounding, being sure that TJ’s head would crack with the next blow, made Matt want to pull off his own helmet, slap his palms over his ears, and shut his eyes tight. Henry seemed to feel the same, turning to Matt with eyes so wide they bulged into circles with pinpoint pupils. Bull’s-eye.

  Matt took Henry’s small hands into his own. He brought his face closer to Henry’s, smiled eye to eye, their helmets between them, and said everything was okay. “Just breathe,” he said, and puffed in a deep breath, keeping a steady gaze on Henry’s eyes.

  Henry breathed with Matt. In, out. In, out. The panic in Henry’s face began to dissipate. His eyelids relaxed, his pupils dilated, and the edges of his lips curled into the beginnings of a smile. In the gap in Henry’s top front teeth, Matt noticed the tip of a budding tooth. Hey, you’re getting a new tooth, Matt was opening his mouth to say, when the boom sounded. Matt thought of TJ’s head cracking open, but it was louder than that, the sound of a hundred heads banging steel, a thousand. Like a bomb going off, outside.

  Matt blinked—how long did that take? A tenth of a second? A hundredth?—then, where Henry’s face had been, there was fire. Face, then blink, then f
ire. No, faster than that. Face, blink, fire. Face-blink-fire. Facefire.

  * * *

  ABE DIDN’T SPEAK for a long time. Matt didn’t, either. Just sat there, listening to the sobs and sniffles from the gallery, jury box, everywhere except the defense table.

  “Counsel, would you like a recess?” the judge asked Abe.

  Abe looked at Matt with raised eyebrows, the lines around his eyes and mouth saying that he was tired, too, that it was okay to stop.

  Matt turned to Elizabeth. She’d been remarkably composed, to the point of appearing disinterested, all day. But he’d expected the façade to break by now, for her to wail that she loved her son, that she could never hurt him. Something, anything, to show the devastation that any decent human being would feel, being accused of murdering her own child and hearing the gruesome details of his death. To hell with decorum, to hell with rules. But she’d said nothing, done nothing. Just listened to it all gazing at Matt with a casual curiosity, as if she were watching a show on Antarctica’s climate pattern.

  Matt wanted to run up and grab her shoulders and shake her. He wanted to shove his face into hers and scream that he still had nightmares about Henry in that moment, looking like some alien in a kid’s drawing—a bubblehead of flames, the rest of his body perfectly intact, his clothes untouched, but his legs thrashing in a silent scream. He wanted to zap that image into her head, transfer it or mind-meld it or whatever it took to pop that fucking composure off her and heave it way the hell away where she could never find it again.

  “No,” Matt said to Abe, no longer tired, no longer in need of the break he’d prayed for. The sooner he got this sociopath hauled off to death row, the better. “I’d like to continue.”

  Abe nodded. “Tell us what happened to Kitt after the explosion outside.”

  “The fire was isolated to the back oxygen spigot. TJ’s helmet was also connected to that, but TJ had taken it off and Kitt was holding it. The flames shot out of the opening, onto Kitt’s lap, and she caught on fire.”

  “What then?”

  “I tried to get Henry’s helmet off, but…” Matt looked down at his hands. The scar tissue over the amputated stumps looked glossy and new, like melted plastic.

  “Dr. Thompson? Were you able to?” Abe said.

  Matt looked up. “I’m sorry. No.” Matt forced his voice to be louder, his words to come faster. “The plastic started to melt, and it was too hot; I couldn’t keep my hands on it.” It had been like grabbing a red-hot poker and trying to hold on. His hands refused what his mind willed them to do. Or maybe that was a lie; maybe he’d wanted to do just enough to tell himself he’d tried his best. That he hadn’t let a boy die because he didn’t want to damage his precious hands. “I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my hands to try again, but Henry’s helmet started disintegrating and my hands caught fire.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Kitt was screaming, smoke was everywhere. Teresa was trying to get TJ to crawl up, away from the flames. We were all screaming for Pak to open up.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes. Pak opened the hatch and pulled us out. Rosa and Teresa first, then he crawled in and pushed TJ and me out.”

  “And then?”

  “The barn was on fire. The smoke so thick, we couldn’t breathe. I don’t remember how … somehow, Pak got Teresa, Rosa, TJ, and me out of the barn, then he ran back in. He was gone awhile. Eventually, he came out carrying Henry and laid him down on the ground. Pak was hurt—coughing, burns all over—and I told him to wait for help, but he wouldn’t listen. He went back in for Kitt.”

  “What about Henry? What was his condition?”

  Matt had walked toward Henry quickly, had fought off the way every cell in his body screamed at him to run the fuck away. He slumped down and held Henry’s hand—unblemished, not a scratch, like the rest of his body from the neck down. His clothes unburned, socks still white.

  Matt tried not to look at Henry’s head. Even so, he could see that his helmet was gone. Pak must’ve managed to finally get it off, he thought, but he saw the blue latex around Henry’s neck and realized: the helmet’s clear plastic had melted away, leaving behind the sealed ring. The fire-retardant piece that protected everything below Henry’s neck and kept it pristine.

  He forced himself to look at Henry’s head. It was smoldering, the hair singed away, every inch of his skin charred and blistered and bloody. The damage was the worst near his right jaw, the point at which the oxygen—the fire—blew into the helmet. His skin had burned off completely there, and his bone and teeth flashed through. He saw Henry’s new tooth, the gums previously hiding it now gone. Perfect and tiny, set above the others, which you could tell were baby teeth because the grown-up teeth yet to grow in were above them, in plain sight. A gentle wind blew, and Matt got a whiff of charred flesh, of singed hair, cooked meat.

  “By the time I got to him,” Matt said to Abe, “Henry was dead.”

  YOUNG

  HER HOUSE WAS NOT EXACTLY A HOUSE. More of a shack. It could look quaint, if you looked at it a certain way. Shaped like a tiny log cabin or tree house, the kind a teenager might build with his not-so-handy father, and to which a kind mother might comment, “Very good effort. And you’ve never even had a class on woodworking!”

  The first time she saw it, Young said to Mary, “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It’ll keep us dry and safe. That’s what’s important.” It was hard to feel safe, though, in a creaky shack that drooped to one side, as if the whole structure was slowly sinking into the ground. (The lot was soft and muddy, so this seemed possible.) The door, the single “window”—clear plastic duct-taped to a hole in the wall: both were lopsided, and the plywood lay on the floor unevenly. Whoever built this hut had not been familiar with levels or the concept of right angles.

  But now, opening the crooked door and stepping onto the wobbly floor, safe was exactly how Young felt. Safe to do what she’d wanted since the judge banged the gavel to end the first day of trial: laugh out loud, both rows of teeth showing, and shout that she loved American trials, loved Abe, loved the judge, and, most of all, loved the jurors. She loved how they ignored the judge’s instructions not to discuss this case with anyone, even one another, and, as soon as he stood to leave—Young loved that most, their not even waiting until he was gone—started talking about Elizabeth, how creepy she was, and what nerve, showing her face here in front of people whose lives she’d ruined. She loved how they stood to leave and glared down at Elizabeth in unison, like a gang, the same expression of disgust on their faces—the beautiful uniformity of it, as if it had been choreographed.

  Young knew she shouldn’t feel this way, not after Matt’s horrifying testimony recalling Henry’s and Kitt’s deaths, his burns, the amputation of his fingers, the difficulty of learning to do everything with his left hand. But she’d lived the last year in perpetual sadness, remembering Pak’s screams in the hospital burn unit and imagining a future without functioning limbs, and hearing about it no longer affected her. Like those frogs that get so used to hot water, they stay in the boiling pot. She’d gotten used to tragedy, become numb to it.

  But joy and relief—those were relics, buried and forgotten, and now that they were unearthed, there was no containing them. When Matt testified about the minutes before the explosion and there was no question, not a hint, of Pak’s absence from the barn: it was as if sludge had been in her veins, cutting off her organs, and right then, a dam broke and it all rushed out. The story Pak had invented to protect them had, with time and repetition, become the truth, and the only person who could challenge it had cemented it instead.

  Young turned to help Pak inside. As she approached him, he said, “Today was a good day,” and grinned at her. He looked like a boy, his mouth crooked, one corner higher than the other, a dimple only on one cheek. “I waited until we were alone to tell you the good news,” he continued, his grin getting wider and more crooked, and Young felt a delicious conspiratorial toge
therness with her husband. “The insurance investigator was in court. We talked when you were in the bathroom. He’s filing his report as soon as the verdict’s announced. He said it’ll take only a few weeks for us to get all the money.”

  Young tilted her head back, clapped her hands, and closed her eyes to the sky, the way her mother always did to praise God for good news. Pak laughed, and she did, too. “Does Mary know?” she said.

  “No. Would you like to tell her?” he said. It surprised her, his asking her preference rather than ordering it done a particular way.

  Young nodded and smiled, feeling unsure but happy like a bride on her wedding’s eve. “You rest. I’ll go tell her.” Passing him, she put her hand on his shoulder. Instead of rolling away, Pak placed his hand on hers and smiled. Their hands together—a team, a unit.

  Young savored the giddiness that frothed through her like helium-infused bubbles, and even Mary’s sadness—apparent in the way she stood before the barn, slumped, gazing at the ruins and crying softly—couldn’t mar it. If anything, Mary’s tears buoyed Young more. Since the explosion, Mary’s personality had flipped from a hot-tempered, talkative girl to a detached, mute facsimile of her daughter. Mary’s doctors had diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, they called it—Americans had such a penchant for reducing phrases to acronyms; saving seconds was so important to them), and said her refusal to discuss that day was “classic PTSD.” She hadn’t wanted to attend the trial, but her doctors said others’ accounts might trigger her memory. And Young had to agree, today had definitely loosened something. The way Mary had focused on Matt’s testimony, intent on learning every detail about that day—the protesters, delays, power outage, all the things she’d missed because she’d been in SAT classes all day. And now, crying. An actual emotion—her first nonblank reaction since the explosion.