Miracle Creek: A Novel

by Angie Kim

  Matt looked away. “You shouldn’t smoke. How old are you, anyway?” he said.

  “Seventeen soon.” Mary took another puff. “How old are you? What, like thirty?”

  “You do this a lot? Smoking?”

  She shrugged as if to say, No big deal. “I stashed away some of my dad’s cigarettes. Tons of Camels. I’ll bring some next time.”

  “Pak smokes?”

  “He says he quit, but…” She shrugged again and closed her eyes, a crooked grin on her mouth. She pulled the cigarette to her mouth and breathed slowly, her chest rising before falling again. In, through her body, out. In, out. Matt matched his breath with hers, and something about the synchrony of their breath and the silence between them—a comfortable silence, the kind that wraps the moment in intimacy—made him want to kiss her. Or maybe it was her face, so smooth it seemed to reflect the blue of the sky. He bent down toward her face.

  “So, how’s the tr—” Mary opened her eyes when Matt’s head was above hers. She stopped talking, and her brows lifted in surprise then scrunched into a frown with a dash of annoyance (at his perversion, for trying to kiss her, or at his cowardice, for stopping?).

  Matt wanted to tell her. But how could he make her understand? That she’d looked so peaceful—no, it zoomed beyond peace to pure bliss—that he wanted, needed, to partake in it, imbibe the beautiful translucence of her skin and make it his own? “Sorry, I saw a bug, a mosquito, I mean, on your cheek and I wanted to, um, get it,” Matt said, willing the capillaries in his face not to dilate and send blood gushing to his cheeks.

  Mary raised herself up into a half-reclined position, supported by bent elbows.

  Matt took a drag. “What were you saying? How’s the what?” He tried to sound casual.

  It could’ve been the look he glimpsed as she lay back down: the secret smugness of a woman pleased by a man’s interest. Or it could’ve been what she said next: “I was saying, how’s the treatment? You know, HBOT. Is your sperm fixed now?” said matter-of-factly, lightly, with no mocking or pity, as if his infertility were not the Serious Matter of Tragedy that Janine, their doctors, and her goddamned parents treated it like it was, had convinced him it was. Whichever it was, in that moment, the failure of his sperm to do what it was supposed to do, what it was planned to do, was no longer the cause of grief and penitence, but of relief and hope. Of worry-free, future-free, goddamned fucking freedom.

  * * *

  THE MOSQUITOES were a bitch. Funny, how they’d never bothered him last summer, sitting right here with Mary, but now, without the smoke repelling them, they were swarming him, droning their feverish excitement at the arrival of warm flesh, brined in sweat all day, hot blood surging through the veins puffed up by the heat. Matt slapped at the black bodies feasting on his wrists and neck. He wished he had a cigarette.

  He stopped when he saw Mary approaching. Fuck it with the mosquitoes—it was more important to appear, to actually be, composed, and besides, his slapping wasn’t helping any. “Thanks for coming. I wasn’t sure you would,” Matt said when she stopped walking, pretty far away, just close enough to hear each other.

  “What do you want?” she said. Her voice was a monotone, lower than before the explosion, as if she’d aged twenty years.

  “I heard you might be testifying tomorrow,” he said.

  She didn’t respond. Just gave him that look—the no-fucking-way-we’re-even-discussing-this look she and Janine shared—then turned and walked away.

  “Mary, wait.” He thought he saw a pause mid-step, but he blinked and she was still walking. He ran to her. “Mary,” he said again, softer this time, and touched her arm. It was strange, seeing his fingers contacting her skin, but unable to feel its smoothness through his nerveless scars, his brain paralyzed over this sensory tug-of-war between sight and touch.

  She stopped and looked at his hand, a wince of something—disgust? pity?—flashing across her face before she pulled her arm away. Slowly, cautiously, as if his hand were a bomb about to go off.

  He wanted to reach out, touch his scar to hers, but he stepped back. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  He opened his mouth, but it was as if everything he’d wanted to apologize for—the notes, his wife, his testimony, and most of all, her birthday last summer—was racing to his vocal cords, causing a verbal traffic jam. He cleared his throat. “I need to know if you’ve told anyone.”

  Mary twirled her ponytail around her index finger. She let go, then did it again.

  Matt sucked the dense, musty air into his lungs. It almost felt like smoking. “Your parents. Do they know?”

  “Know what?”

  “You know,” he said. He was getting a cramp in his missing finger, which was unfortunate, since he couldn’t rub it.

  Mary narrowed her eyes, as if trying to read small writing on his face. “No. I haven’t told anyone.”

  He realized he’d been holding his breath. He felt dizzy, heard mosquitoes buzzing, the pitch of their drone getting higher, then lower, like sirens passing by.

  “And Janine?” Mary said. “She’s on the witness list. Is she going to say anything?”

  Matt shook his head. “She doesn’t know.”

  Mary frowned. “What do you mean she doesn’t know? What are we talking about here?”

  “Us,” Matt said. “Our notes, smoking, she doesn’t know any of that. I never told her.”

  Mary’s face contorted with bitter disbelief before she stepped forward and shoved him, hard. “You fucking liar!” Her voice rose to its pre-explosion high pitch. “You think I forgot because of my coma? I remember everything. It was the most humiliating moment of my life, having her treat me like I’m some crazy stalker who won’t leave her poor husband alone. You know, I get it if you could never face me again. But why would you send your wife?”

  Matt stumbled. It was as if Mary’s shove had set off a hundred pinballs in his chest, colliding into one another, his ribs, his spine, making it hard to stand straight. “She … she what?”

  Mary stepped back, her face still overflowing with distrust but softening at Matt’s obvious confusion. “You didn’t know? But…” She clenched her eyes shut and rubbed her face. Her scar turned bright red against her paled skin, like lava oozing crookedly down a mountain. “She said she knew. She said you told her everything the day before the explosion.”

  Blink, and he could see it: in their bedroom the night before the explosion, Janine’s arm reaching from behind, holding Mary’s latest note. I don’t know why we need to discuss it. Can’t we just forget it ever happened? Janine’s disembodied voice from behind him—“This was in the closet. What’s this about? Who’s it from?” The lie he’d told, how he’d been sure she’d bought it. Had he been wrong?

  “Well? Did you tell her or not?” Mary said.

  Matt focused on Mary’s face. “She found one of your notes, but I told her it was from an intern who made a pass at me and got embarrassed. Janine believed me, I know she did. She never mentioned it again. When did she talk to you? Where?”

  Mary took her ponytail to her lips then let go, letting it fall away. “The night of the explosion, around eight. Right around here.”

  “Eight? Here? But I talked to her. I called to tell her the dive was delayed and I’d be late. She didn’t say anything about driving here or you or—”

  “She knew about the delay? But she said…” Mary’s voice trailed off, her mouth still open but no words coming out.

  “What? What did she say?”

  Mary shook her head as if to refocus her thoughts. “I was waiting for you, here. She came up, said you told her everything. I said I didn’t know what she was talking about, and she said you were too nice to say, but I was stalking you and I’d better stop. She said you weren’t coming to meet me, that you couldn’t be bothered, and you’d already left and asked her to take care of getting me to leave you alone.”

  Matt closed his eyes. “Oh my God,” he said. Or maybe he just
thought it. It was hard to tell. His head was spinning.

  “I kept saying I had no idea what she was talking about, but she had this bag, and she…” Mary’s voice faltered. “She took out a cigarette pack and threw it at me. And matches and a note, too, yelling that it was all mine.”

  Matt wondered if this was a dream, and he’d wake up and everything would make sense again. But no, dreams felt logical when you were in them. The surreal feeling that was drowning him now came after, not during. “And then?”

  “I just said they weren’t mine and walked away.”

  Matt pictured his wife standing here, enraged, cigarettes and matches by her feet and him inside an oxygen chamber mere minutes away. Blood swooshed in his ears.

  “Do you think the cigarettes she threw are the ones Elizabeth found?”

  Matt nodded. Of course they were. The only unknown was what, if anything, Janine did with them before Elizabeth found them.

  After a minute, Mary said, “Were you planning to meet me that night?”

  Matt opened his eyes and nodded again. His head felt hollow, and the motion seemed to knock his brain against his skull. “Yeah,” he forced himself to say out loud, his voice hoarse as if he hadn’t used it in days. “I figured we’d meet later, after the dive.”

  Mary looked at him, didn’t say anything, and he tried to figure out what he saw on her face. Was it longing? Regret?

  Mary shook her head. “I have to go. It’s getting late.” She walked away. After a few steps, she stopped and turned to him. “Do you ever feel guilty? Like maybe we should tell everything we know, and let whatever might happen just happen?”

  Matt felt his arteries constrict, sending his organs into panic mode, his heart forced to pump harder, blood to rush faster, lungs to inflate bigger. Yes, he’d worried about his shenanigans with a teenager coming out. But that was laughable, child’s play, compared with what the jury would think—and let’s be honest, what he himself was thinking—if they found out that Janine was here before the explosion and lied about it.

  “I’ve thought about it.” Matt forced his words to sound slow and calm, as if he were considering an interesting side point in a lecture. “But I don’t think we have anything relevant to offer. What you, Janine, and I were doing has nothing to do with the fire. The note, the cigarettes—sure, it’s interesting to speculate where they came from, but at the end of the day, that has nothing to do with who actually set the fire. I’m worried we’ll just confuse the issue. You’ve seen how these lawyers twist everyone’s words.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. Good night.”

  “Mary.” He stepped toward her. “If you say anything, I mean anything, our families, all our futures—”

  Mary put up her palm like a stop sign and looked into his eyes for a long moment. Slowly, she put her hand back down, turned, and walked away.

  When she went around a bend and he could no longer see her, Matt breathed slowly. His arteries seemed to dilate, sending blood rushing to his organs, which were tingling as they unclenched one by one. Matt felt something itch. He looked down. A mosquito sat on the crook of his arm, leisurely sucking on his blood. He slapped at it, fast and hard, and removed his hand. The mosquito lay crushed in his palm, a black smudge stuck in the splatter of the crimson blood it had sucked up in the moments before its death.

  MARY

  SHE WALKED TO HER FAVORITE SPOT in the woods. A secluded hideaway where Miracle Creek meandered through a dense grove of weeping willows. This was where she came to think whenever she was upset, where she’d come last year after that horrifying birthday night with Matt and again right before the explosion, after Janine threw cigarettes at her. Sitting here on the flat, smooth rock, the gurgling water nearby and green curtain of willows separating her from the world—she felt safe and serene, at one with the woods, as if her skin were molting into the air and the air burrowing into her skin, the cell-by-cell exchange of skin and air making her blurry at the edges like an impressionist painting, her insides seeping out through her pores and dissipating into the sky, leaving her lighter, less substantial.

  Mary crouched and put her hands in the water. The current was strong here, the rushing water swirling pebbles, tickling her fingers. She scooped up a handful and scrubbed her arm where Matt touched her. Her stomach calmed, but her brain was still stuck in that bizarre state of hyperspeed paralysis, the thoughts coming so fast, she couldn’t think. She stood and breathed, matching the sway of the willow branches nearby, the veil of green undulating side to side in the wind like the grass skirt of a hula dancer. She needed to untangle her thoughts, think things through rationally, one strand at a time.

  The cigarette and matches that started the fire were the same ones Janine threw at her. That seemed certain. The only question was the matter of who: Who took them from the woods to the barn, built a mound of sticks, lit the cigarette, placed it on top, and walked away? Janine or Elizabeth? Maybe even the protesters?

  Janine had been Mary’s original suspect. After waking from the coma, lying in the hospital while doctors prodded and jabbed her, she’d remembered Janine’s fury and guessed that she’d done it in an uncontrollable burst of anger, to destroy anything having to do with Mary.

  But as she’d been agonizing about what to tell the police—did she have enough courage to tell them everything? Would she have to reveal the humiliating details of her birthday night with Matt?—her mother had told her about Elizabeth, about her smoking, child abuse, computer searches, and on and on, and Mary had been convinced. Everything fit: Elizabeth must have found the cigarettes where Janine threw them, and used them to set up the fire in the way most likely to kill her son and incriminate the protesters. The horrifying efficiency of it all. That, plus Abe’s “beyond one hundred percent” certainty of Elizabeth’s guilt—those were what Mary clung to when her conscience struck, when she longed to break her silence about that night.

  But today had changed all that. Not only the cross-examinations (Abe’s case against Elizabeth was far from the slam dunk he’d promised), but also the revelations from Matt just now. According to Matt, he’d never talked to Janine about Mary or asked her to confront Mary for him. But what did that mean? Had Janine’s lies and secrets been part of some arson-murder plot? Had she been even more furious than Mary had guessed—had she somehow found out about the birthday night?—and had she placed the cigarette by the barn, knowing her husband was inside, to try to kill him?

  No. That wasn’t possible. Only a monster would put a lit cigarette by flowing oxygen, knowing that helpless children and their mothers were inside. And Janine—a doctor, who was dedicated to saving people’s lives, who’d worked hard to help build Miracle Submarine—was not a monster. Was she?

  On top of all that, something strange had come out today about the protesters. Detective Pierson said he’d ruled them out because they’d gone straight to D.C. after leaving the police station that night. But that wasn’t true; her father had seen them driving around their property only ten minutes before the explosion. So why were the protesters lying? What had they done that needed covering up?

  Mary walked to the nearest willow tree and touched the branches that draped almost to the ground. She ran her fingers through, separating them, the way her mother combed her fingers through her hair. She stepped into the veil of willows, feeling the feathery strands gently stroke her face, making the area around her scar feel tingly and tickly.

  Her scar. Her father’s useless legs, in a wheelchair. Death of a woman and a boy. The boy’s mother on trial for murder, which, if she had nothing to do with the fire, was putting her unjustly through hell. And now, Mary’s father being accused of murder. So much pain and destruction, her silence enabling it all. Given everything she now knew, given her suspicions about Janine and the protesters, her rising doubts about Elizabeth’s role in the fire, didn’t Mary have a duty to come forward, no matter what the consequences?

  Abe said she might testify soon. Maybe that was ex
actly what she needed. A chance—no, a mandate—to tell the truth. She’d wait one more day. Abe said he’d be presenting the most shocking, incontrovertible proof of Elizabeth’s guilt tomorrow. She’d wait to see what that was. And if any doubt remained, if there was the slightest chance that Elizabeth wasn’t to blame, she’d stand up in court and tell everything that happened last summer.

  JANINE CHO

  SHE WENT STRAIGHT TO THE KITCHEN CABINET where she kept the wok. It had been a bridal-shower present from one of Matt’s cousins, who’d said, “I know this isn’t on your registry, but it seemed so appropriate…” She hadn’t explained how it seemed “appropriate,” but Janine knew it was because she was Asian. Woks are a Chinese thing, not a Korean thing, she’d wanted to say, but she’d bitten that back and thanked her for such a thoughtful gift. She’d meant to donate or regift it, but she’d kept it, stored away behind all the other junk they never used.

  She opened the box with the wok—only the second time ever—and grabbed the instructions/recipes booklet. She flipped through until she found it: the infamous H-Mart note, which she’d hidden away and tried to forget about for the last year.

  Today in court was the first time she’d realized that anyone other than Matt, Mary, and she herself even knew about it, much less that its existence was a point of contention. And to think, she’d almost missed when it came up in court today. After Pierson said the protesters were innocent, she’d been preoccupied with thoughts of that night—how she’d seen the protesters driving by Miracle Submarine, what time that was (8:10? 8:15?) and how reliable these “cell tower pings” could be if they corroborated their lies, and, oh God, was there a record of her own cell tower pings somewhere?—when Teresa stood and yelled out, “I saw the H-Mart note.” Janine’s heart had pounded her rib cage and she’d had to rearrange her hair to hide her burning cheeks.