by Angie Kim
TJ. Fecal smearing. Kitt had talked about it once, during a dive. Elizabeth had been discussing Henry’s “new autism behavior,” perseverating about rocks, when Kitt said, “You know what I did for four hours yesterday? I cleaned up shit. Literally. TJ’s new thing is fecal smearing. He takes off his diaper and smears shit—walls, curtains, rug, everything. You have no clue what it’s like. You saying TJ and Henry both have autism, they’re the same—it’s offensive to me. You complain that Henry can’t sustain eye contact, can’t read faces, doesn’t have enough friends? You think that’s heartbreaking, and yeah, maybe it is. There’s heartbreak in parenting every day. Kids get teased, break bones, don’t get invited to parties, and when that happens to my girls, of course I feel heartbreak and cry with them. But that normal stuff, that’s nowhere near what I have to go through with TJ, not even in the same frigging galaxy.”
They did this often, spat about the comparative difficulties of their kids’ symptoms—the special-needs version of parental bragging wars—and Teresa always threw in one of her worries, like the possibility of Rosa dying from choking on saliva or sepsis from bedsores, which usually shut them up pretty quick. But listening to Kitt’s story, imagining the stench, filth, and misery of cleanup, Teresa was stumped. Fecal smearing might be the one thing for which there was no counterstory to make Kitt think, At least my life isn’t that bad.
And now Kitt was dead, her burden shifted to her husband, and he was sending TJ away. Teresa thought of Rosa in an institution, in a sterile room lined with steel beds, and she wanted to run home and kiss her dimples. She looked at her watch. 2:24. There was just enough time to call home. To tell Rosa she loved her and listen to her say “Ma,” again and again.
* * *
TERESA TRIED TO pay attention. Pak’s redirect was important; Shannon had raised disturbing questions that, based on the snippets she heard during recess, had people wavering for the first time since the trial began. But when it started, everyone turned to the empty seat next to Mary and whispered about where Young was and what her absence meant. (“Meeting with a divorce lawyer’s my bet,” a man behind her said.) Throughout Pak’s redirect—more emphatic denials about 7-Eleven and cigarettes, as well as his explanation that he got fired for moonlighting, not incompetence, and got another HBOT-center job right away—Teresa looked at Mary, sitting between the empty spaces usually occupied by her parents, alone. Seventeen, like Rosa, but her face so crinkled with worried concentration that her scar appeared to be its only smooth portion.
The first time Teresa saw Mary’s scar was right after the cafeteria coffee-spilling incident. She’d told herself she should visit to lend support to Young, but the fact was, she’d wanted to see Mary in a coma. Watching Mary through the window-blind slats, bandages on her face and tubes sticking out of her body, Teresa thought how the low-pitched woman had been wrong: there were four kids involved, not three. What would the woman say with Mary in the equation? Yes, Henry was “pretty much normal” compared with Rosa and TJ, but Mary was as perfect as you could get: pretty, good grades, bound for college. Which would be the bigger irony, the bigger tragedy, to the woman: an almost-pass-for-normal boy being burned alive, or an actually normal girl winding up in a coma, her above-average face scarred and above-average brain possibly damaged?
Teresa went in and hugged Young—tightly, for a long time, the way people do at funerals, in shared grief. Young said, “I think again and again, she was healthy just last week.”
Teresa nodded. She hated when people commiserated by telling their own stories, so she kept quiet, but she understood. When five-year-old Rosa got sick, she’d sat by her hospital bed, stroking her arm like Young was with Mary, thinking in an endless loop, But she was fine just two days ago. She’d been on a business trip when Rosa got sick. The night before the trip, when Rosa came downstairs to say good night, she’d been holding the then-squirmy toddler Carlos on her lap, clipping his fingernails, so she’d said, “Good night, sweetie. Love you,” not looking up—that was the part that killed her, that she didn’t look at her daughter during this, their last normal moment together—and tilted her head for Rosa’s kiss. The click of Carlos’s nails being cut, the bubble-gum smell of Rosa’s toothpaste, the sticky smack of lips against her cheeks, then a quick, “Night, Mommy. Night, Carlos”—this was Teresa’s last memory of pre-illness Rosa. The next time she saw her, the girl who could sing and jump and say “Night, Mommy” was gone.
So yes, Teresa could understand the utter incomprehension Young was surely feeling. And when Young said, “The doctor says there may be brain damage, she may never wake up,” Teresa gripped her hands and cried with her. But under the jolt of her pain and empathy (and she did ache for Young, she truly did), there was a part of her—the tiniest, most minute part, just one-tenth of one cell deep within her brain—that was glad, actually happy, that Mary was in a coma and might end up like Rosa.
It was undeniable: Teresa was a bad person. She didn’t understand people saying, “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy”; no matter how much she told herself she wouldn’t, shouldn’t, wish her life on anyone, there were moments when she wanted every parent alive to go through what she did. Disgusted by her thoughts, she tried to justify it; if Rosa’s brain-robbing virus became an epidemic, surely billions of dollars would be spent on a cure, and all children would be restored in short order. But she knew—it wasn’t for Rosa’s benefit that she wished for contagion of her tragedy. It was envy, pure and simple. She resented being targeted for misery alone, begrudged her friends who came by with casseroles to cry with her for an hour before rushing their kids to soccer and ballet, and if she couldn’t return to her normal life, then by God, she wanted to slap everyone off their pedestal of normalcy, so they could share her burden and make her feel less alone.
She tried not to think this with Young. For the two months of Mary’s coma, she visited every week. Sometimes she brought Rosa to sit with Mary while she talked to Young. It was strange, seeing the two girls together—Mary bandaged, lying with her eyes closed, and Rosa in a wheelchair, above her—for the first time as equals, almost like friends.
The day Mary came out of the coma, Teresa had been alone. When she opened Mary’s door, she saw doctors surrounding her bed and, through the bodies, Mary, sitting up, eyes open. Young tackled her, the force of her hug pushing Teresa against the wall, and said, “She woke up! She is fine. Her brain is okay.” Teresa tried to return her hug, to tell Young how wonderful this was, a miracle, but it was as if invisible ropes were binding her arms, forming a noose around her neck, choking her and sending tingles up her throat to her sinuses, bringing tears to her eyes.
Young didn’t notice. Before rushing back to Mary, she said, “Thank you, Teresa. You are here for me all of the time. You are a good friend.” Teresa nodded and slowly backed out of the room. She went into the bathroom, walked into a stall, and locked it. She thought of Young’s words—“good friend,” she’d called her. She put her hand on her stomach, tried to swallow back the envy and fury and hatred she felt for the woman who’d hugged her so tightly it had hurt. She tried to remember that this was what she’d prayed for. Then she took off her jacket, balled it up, and screamed and cried into it, flushing over and over again so that no one could hear.
* * *
YOUNG ENTERED the courtroom just as Detective Morgan Heights started testifying. Young looked sick. Her normally peach skin looked coated in a dull film of ash, like a longtime hospital patient’s, and as Young shuffled down the aisle, her eyes so tired her lids drooped, Teresa felt a pang of guilt. She never went back to visit after Mary woke up from her coma. This had coincided with the start of Rosa’s cord-blood therapy, so Teresa had an excuse, but still, she knew the sudden drop-off had bewildered Young, and she felt a deep shame at having abandoned a friend because her child got healthy. Was that why she’d turned her support to Elizabeth, when Young needed her most—to punish her for Mary’s return to health?
A buzz of whispers erupted in the ga
llery. Shannon was standing, saying, “I renew my objection to this entire line of questioning, Your Honor. It’s hearsay, irrelevant, and highly prejudicial.” The judge said, “Noted and overruled. Detective, you may answer.”
Detective Heights said, “The week before the explosion, a woman called the Child Protective Services hotline on August 20, 2008, at 9:33 p.m., to report that a woman named Elizabeth was subjecting her son, Henry, to illegal, dangerous medical treatments, including one called IV chelation, which had recently killed several children. The caller stated that Elizabeth was starting a treatment involving drinking bleach, which worried her greatly. She did not know their last name, nor their address. I’m a licensed psychologist and our office’s investigative liaison to CPS, so I was assigned to investigate.”
“Who was the caller?” Abe said.
“The call was anonymous, but we’ve since learned that the caller was Ruth Weiss, one of the protesters.” Ruth. The one with the silver bob. Teresa looked at her, sitting in the back with her face flushed, and wanted to slap her. What a coward. Anonymous accusations, with no repercussions, no responsibility. Again, she thought of them lurking behind the barn, waiting until the perfect time to set the fire when they expected the oxygen to be off. She needed to tell Shannon her theory, how they knew the exact HBOT schedule.
Abe said, “How did you find Elizabeth and Henry?”
“The caller knew where Henry went to summer camp from online chats. I went there at dismissal the next day, but Elizabeth wasn’t there. A friend was picking up Henry. I explained why I was there, and asked if she knew about these medical treatments.”
“What did this friend say?”
“She wouldn’t say anything at first, but I pressed, and she admitted to being concerned that Elizabeth seemed obsessed—that was her word, obsessed—with treatments Henry didn’t need. She said Henry was a ‘quirky kid’—again, her words—and he had issues before but he was fine now, and yet Elizabeth kept trying every autism treatment that popped up. The friend said she had majored in psychology, and she wondered if Elizabeth had Munchausen by proxy.”
“What’s Munchausen by proxy?”
“It’s a psychological disorder sometimes referred to as ‘medical abuse.’ It involves a caretaker exaggerating, fabricating, or even causing medical symptoms in a child to get attention.”
“Was that the extent of this friend’s worries?”
“No. When I pressed for more, she said—again, very reluctantly—that the camp teacher said the cat scratches on Henry’s arms were hurting him, so they applied ointment and bandages. The friend was confused because Henry doesn’t have cats, but she didn’t say anything.”
Teresa remembered seeing scratches, too. On Henry’s upper left arm, dotted lines of red where the blood vessels had burst in spots. Elizabeth had noticed Teresa noticing and said Henry got some sort of bug bite and couldn’t stop scratching. There was nothing about cats.
“The friend was also worried about Henry’s self-esteem,” Heights continued. “She said she complimented him once, and he said, ‘But I’m annoying. Everybody hates me.’ She asked why he thought that, and he said, ‘My mommy told me.’”
Teresa swallowed. I’m annoying. Everybody hates me. She remembered Elizabeth telling him to stop talking nonstop about rocks. She’d crouched so her face was next to his, nose to nose, and whispered, “I know you’re excited, but you’re talking and talking, out loud to yourself. That’s extremely annoying to most people, and if you keep doing that, I’m worried that everyone will hate you. So you need to try really hard to stop. Okay?”
Abe said, “What happened at this point?”
“The friend declined to give her own name, but she did provide Henry’s last name and address. That was on Thursday, August 21. The following Monday, we interviewed Henry at camp. The Code of Virginia allows us to interview a child without parental notification or consent, outside their presence. We chose to do that here, to minimize parental coaching.”
“Did the defendant ever find out about the child abuse investigation?”
“Yes, on the evening of Monday, August 25, the day before the explosion. I went to their residence and informed her of the allegations.” Teresa thought of the police knocking on her door, barging in with abuse charges. No wonder Elizabeth had been so distant the day of the explosion. What would that feel like, to be told that someone—someone you know, maybe even a friend—had accused you of child abuse?
Abe said, “Did the defendant deny the allegations?”
“No. She only said she wanted to know who filed the complaint, and I informed her it was anonymous. I didn’t know myself. But the next morning, I got a call from the friend, the one picking up from camp.”
“Really? What did she say?”
“She was upset because she’d just had a big fight with the defendant.”
Abe stepped closer. “This is the morning of the explosion?”
“Yes. She said Elizabeth accused her of filing the CPS complaint and was furious with her. She asked me to please tell Elizabeth who did file it, so she’d know it wasn’t her.”
“How did you respond?”
“I told her I couldn’t, it was anonymous,” Heights said. “She became more upset and said she was sure it was the protesters. She said again how angry Elizabeth was, and she should never have talked to me. She said, quote, ‘She’s so mad, she’s ready to kill me.’”
“Detective Heights,” Abe said, “have you since then discovered the identity of this friend, the one who called on the morning of the explosion and said the defendant was, quote, ‘so mad, she’s ready to kill me’?”
“Yes. I recognized her from the morgue pictures.”
“Who was it?”
Detective Heights looked at Elizabeth and said, “Kitt Kozlowski.”
ELIZABETH
KITT AND ELIZABETH WERE more like sisters than friends. Not in the we’re-closer-than-friends-could-ever-be! way, but in the I-wouldn’t-have-chosen-you-as-a-friend-but-we’re-stuck-together-so-let’s-try-to-get-along way. They met because their sons were diagnosed with autism on the same day at the same place, six years ago at Georgetown Hospital. Elizabeth had been waiting for Henry’s evaluation results when a woman said, “This is like waiting for the guillotine, isn’t it?” Elizabeth didn’t answer, but the woman went on, saying, “I don’t understand how men can focus on work at a time like this,” looking at Victor and another man—her husband, presumably—both working on laptops. Elizabeth gave the tersest smile she could and grabbed a magazine. The woman, though, kept blathering on about her son—almost four, his birthday was coming up, she was making a Barney cake, he adored Barney, was positively obsessed—and how he didn’t talk (could it be because he couldn’t get an effing word in edgewise?) but it was probably because he was the youngest, she had four other kids, all girls who talked nonstop (apparently a genetic trait), you know how girls can be, et cetera, et cetera. The woman—Kitt, like Kit-Kat, with two t’s, she introduced herself mid-monologue—was not making conversation so much as spitting out words in one long strand, oblivious to Elizabeth’s nonresponse. She didn’t stop until the nurse called for Henry Ward’s parents.
The doctor said, “Let’s see … Ah, yes, Henry. I know you’re anxious, so let’s cut to the chase. Henry was found to be autistic.” He said this casually, between sips of coffee, as if it were a normal thing, an everyday thing, to announce to parents that their child was autistic. Of course, for him, a neurologist at an autism clinic, it was an everyday thing, probably an every-hour thing. But for her, the parent, this was a moment—the moment—that would divide her world into Before and After, the life-defining scene she’d replay over and over, so was the oh-so-nonchalant drinking of the venti Frappuccino really effing necessary? And his choice of words: “Henry was found to be,” as if he didn’t do the finding himself but discovered Henry lying somewhere, stamped AUTISTIC by some mysterious force of nature; and autistic—was that even a word? It offended her
, him turning a disorder into an adjective, the net effect of which was to declare autism to be Henry’s defining characteristic, the sum total of his identity.
These semantic issues—why people were “diabetic” but not “canceristic,” for instance, and the difference between “moderately severe” (Henry’s autism-spectrum placement) and “severely moderate”—were occupying her when she passed Kitt. Elizabeth wasn’t crying, hadn’t cried at all, in fact, but her face must have screamed out her devastation, because Kitt stopped and hugged her, a tight, never-ending hug reserved for the most intimate of friends. She had no idea why this inappropriate hug from this inappropriate stranger should feel anything other than awkward, but it felt comforting, like family, and she hugged her back and cried.
Elizabeth never expected to see her again, didn’t exchange numbers, e-mails or even last names. A week later, though, they ran into each other, first at the county autism preschool orientation, then at a speech therapist’s, and again at an applied behavior analysis info session—not surprising given that Georgetown had recommended them all, but still, it had a kismet feel, a little too coincidental to be coincidence. They started doing everything together when Henry and TJ ended up in the same class at the same school. “Autism boot camp,” they’d called it. They carpooled to school and therapies, attended lectures on coping with the grief of an autism diagnosis, and joined the local autism moms’ group. In that way, they fell into closeness, as if by accident. Not because they particularly enjoyed each other’s company, but out of habit, because they were thrust together daily, like it or not. The repeated proximity grew into intimacy; once, after Victor dropped the bombshell about his newfound love in California, they even went on a drunken girls’ night out.
Elizabeth was an only child, so she’d never experienced this, but the thing about being together and sharing so much—everything from their sons’ quarterly autism-severity scores to their teachers’ daily counts of “perseverative behaviors” (rocking for Henry, head banging for TJ)—was that it bred an intense rivalry. It infected everything they did, crept into the nooks and crannies of their relationship and turned it slightly sour. Elizabeth knew competition was rampant in the “typical” kids’ moms’ world, had heard women comparing their kids’ all-star and gifted-program-admission statuses in line at Trader Joe’s. But like everything else, the jealousy shot into overdrive in the world of autism moms, which was at once the most cooperative and the most competitive she’d seen, with stakes that mattered—not which college your kids got into, but their very survival in society: whether they’d learn to talk, if they’d ever move out of your house, and how they’d live when you died. Unlike in the “typical” world, when someone else’s child’s success meant your own was falling short, the sharing, helping, and celebrating of others’ successes was far more intense and complex because another child improving meant hope for your own, but also put more pressure on you to come through for your own. In the case of Henry and TJ, all these factors were magnified because they were the same age, in the same class, impossible not to compare and contrast.
