by Angie Kim
“What? I don’t know. What difference does it make? We both left. All I know is, I told her to keep that stuff away from you and not send you more notes or anything else.”
Janine said something else—something about those cigarettes being left in the woods, and it making her sick, the thought of Elizabeth, an obviously mentally ill woman, coming across those cigarettes at just the right moment and using them for murder—but Matt’s mind remained fixed on the question of who last had those cigarettes. When he thought Janine had them, he’d considered the possibility of her having set the fire. But if Janine left first, if Mary was the one who last had them, was it possible that she—
“Tomorrow,” Janine was saying, “Abe wants me to give a voice sample.”
“What?”
“He wants me to record my voice so they can play it for the customer-service guy. It’s ridiculous. It was a two-minute conversation a year ago. There’s no way this guy’s going to remember a voice from a year ago, right? I mean, he doesn’t even know if it’s a man or a woman. The only thing he knows is that the person spoke normal English with no accent, whatever that means. And think of how many people could’ve swiped your phone for a minute. I don’t know why Abe’s doing this.”
Normal English with no accent. Could’ve swiped your phone for a minute. It occurred to him then—what he’d been overlooking because he’d never entertained the possibility, been blind to it until now.
Mary knew where he hid the spare key to his car. She could’ve opened his car and used his cell phone all she wanted. And she spoke perfect English. With no accent.
THE TRIAL: DAY FOUR
Thursday, August 20, 2009
JANINE
THE INTERNET ARTICLES ON POLYGRAPHS made it sound so easy: relax and control your breathing to lower your heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure, and you, too, can lie with abandon! But it didn’t matter how long she sat in a yoga pose, picturing ocean waves and taking cleansing breaths. Every time she even pictured Matt’s phone (let alone the call), her blood went from lazy brook to Class 5 white-water rapids, as if it sensed the danger it posed and needed to escape, stat, sending her heart pumping in panic mode.
It was ironic that after all her misdeeds and lies, it was the insurance call—not even the call itself, but her switching phones with Matt on the day of the call—that was about to unravel her world. And more ironic: she hadn’t needed to call. She could’ve easily searched online or, actually, just guessed—what fire policy didn’t cover arson?—but Pak had rattled her, first with his going on about cigarettes, and then his hemming and hawing, saying maybe their whole arrangement had been a mistake, so she’d called the insurer on the spur of the moment, just as a quick check. And to have that day of all days be the one when she had Matt’s phone! If he’d switched their phones on a different day or if she’d used her office phone (she’d been at her desk, right next to it!), nothing would be on that damn phone bill and everything would be fine.
She should’ve come forward with the truth two days ago, when Shannon first brought up the call. (Well, not the whole truth; just the part about the call.) She could’ve confessed to Abe and given some plausible explanation, like wanting to confirm that her parents’ investment in Miracle Submarine was fully protected. They could’ve laughed at Shannon’s overzealousness, pinning Pak as a murderer because an absentminded husband took the wrong phone one morning. But the way that lawyer went after Pak—it made Janine panic, wonder if she’d switch her focus to Janine, investigate her calls, question her motives, pore over her phone records, including, possibly, her “cell tower pings.” What would Shannon do if she knew that Janine had been on the premises just minutes before the explosion, that she’d had those Camels in her hands that night, that she’d lied about it for a year? Wouldn’t she seize on the insurance call, use it as proof of Janine’s motive for arson and maybe even murder?
It had been easy to do nothing, say nothing. And once the moment passed, she couldn’t come forward later. That was the thing about lies: they demanded commitment. Once you lied, you had to stick to your story. Last night, when Abe sat her down and laid out exactly what had happened, down to the switched phone, she’d thought, He knows. He knows everything. And yet she couldn’t admit to it, couldn’t let herself give in to the intense humiliation of being caught in a lie. At that moment, he could’ve shown her video proof of her call, something incontrovertible, and she still would’ve denied it, said something ridiculous like, I’m being framed, this tape is fake! It was a type of loyalty—to her story, to herself. The more he threw at her—they found the customer-service rep, they’d find the recording soon—she became more set: it wasn’t her.
Last night, after Matt’s confession to her, his plea for honesty, she thought about telling him. But to explain why she’d lied about the call, she’d have to tell him everything—her deal with Pak, their decision to keep the arrangement secret, how she’d intercepted their bank statements to hide the payments she’d so carefully spread throughout multiple accounts over multiple months—and that, she wasn’t sure their marriage could survive.
Still, she might’ve done it, confessed everything to Matt, if his own confession about Mary had been the sordid tale she’d assumed it to be. But the fact that his story was so innocuous, bereft of any wrongdoing—that had made her feel idiotic at how she’d overreacted on the day of the explosion (an understatement if there ever was one), and she couldn’t.
So here she was, about to go to a prosecutor’s office in a murder investigation for a voice sample. That part, she wasn’t worried about. There was no way the rep would remember her voice from a two-minute call a year ago. But the lie-detector test (Abe had said it on his way out, almost casually—“If the voice sample’s inconclusive, there’s always a polygraph!”)—what would that feel like, being behind a one-way mirror, tied to a machine, answering no to question after question, knowing that her own body—her lungs, her heart, her blood—was betraying her?
She had to beat it. That was all there was to it. Here—an article about passing polygraphs by pressing down on thumbtacks in your shoe while answering the initial “control” questions, the theory being that pain causes the same physiological symptoms as lying, so they can’t differentiate between true and false answers. That made sense. It could work.
Janine closed the Web browser. She opened the Internet settings, wiped her history clean, logged off, and shut the computer down. She tiptoed into her room, careful not to wake Matt, and went into the closet to look for thumbtacks.
MATT
MARY WAS WEARING what she always wore in his dreams: the red sundress from their final meeting last summer, on her seventeenth birthday. As in all his dreams, Matt said she looked beautiful and kissed her. Soft at first, closed lips on closed lips, then harder, sucking her bottom lip, taking in the plumpness and squeezing with his own lips. He lowered the spaghetti straps and touched her breasts, feeling the softness give way to the rough hardness of the nipples. This was when the dream version of himself realized this was a dream, that only in a dream world could his fingers feel anything.
In real life, he’d pretended not to notice the dress. It was the Wednesday before the explosion, and when he went to the creek at the usual time (8:15 p.m.), she was sitting on a log, a lit cigarette in one hand and plastic cup in the other, her shoulders slumped like an old woman at the end of a long, hard day. It was infectious, her loneliness, and he wanted to take her in his arms, displace that desolation with something—anything—else. Instead, he sat down and said, “Hey there,” forcing into his voice a lightness he didn’t feel.
“Join me,” she said, handing him another cup filled with clear liquid.
“What is it?” he said, but before he even finished the sentence, he smelled it and laughed. “Peach schnapps? You’ve gotta be kidding me. I haven’t had that in ten years.” His college girlfriend had loved the stuff. “I can’t take this.” He handed it back. “You’re five years from drink
ing age.”
“Four, actually. It’s my birthday today.” She pushed the drink back.
“Wow,” he said, unsure of what to say. “Shouldn’t you be celebrating with your friends?”
“I asked some people from SAT class, but they were busy.” Maybe she saw the pity in his eyes, because she shrugged and said with a forced brightness, “But meanwhile, you’re here, and I’m here. So come on, drink up. Just this once. You can’t let me drink alone on my birthday. It’s bad luck or something.”
It was a stupid idea. And yet, the way she looked, her lips stretched into a smile so wide both rows of teeth showed, but eyes puffy and glassy like she’d been crying—it reminded him of one of those kids’ puzzles where you’re supposed to match the top half to the bottom, and the kid’s screwed up, putting the sad forehead with the happy mouth. He looked at her faux smile, the mix of hope and pleading in her raised eyebrows, and tapped his cup against hers. “Happy birthday.” He gulped.
They sat like that for an hour, then two, drinking and talking, talking and drinking. Mary told him how even though she always spoke English now, she still dreamed in Korean. Matt told her how this creek reminded him of his childhood dog, how he’d buried her by a creek just like this when she died. They debated whether tonight’s sky was more orange-red (Mary) or purple-red (Matt), and which was better. Mary told him how she used to hate Seoul’s overcrowding—classrooms, buses, streets—but now she missed it, how living here didn’t make her feel peaceful but merely lonely and sometimes lost. She told him how much she dreaded starting school here, how she said hi to some teenagers her age in town and no one said hi back, just stared with these go-the-fuck-back-where-you-came-from looks, and later, she overheard them bashing her family’s business as “ching-chong voodoo.” Matt told her about Janine’s refusal to even consider adoption, how he’d been planning his days off so they conflicted with Janine’s, to avoid being alone with her in the house.
Around ten, when the vestiges of the sunset faded and darkness finally set in, Mary stood up, saying she was dizzy and needed water. He stood up, too, and was saying he should get going anyway, when she stumbled over a rock and fell against him. He tried to steady her, but he also stumbled, and they both ended up on the ground, laughing, her on top of him.
They tried to get up, but as drunk as they were, they ended up entangled, her thighs pressing and shifting against his groin, and he got hard. He tried not to, told himself he was thirty-three and she was seventeen and this was probably a felony, for God’s sake. But the thing was, he didn’t feel over thirty, and not just in the everyday, I-don’t-feel-as-old-as-my-age way he felt around those teenage hospital volunteers, wondering how he’d gotten to be someone they called “Sir.” It may have been the peach schnapps. Not the alcohol (though there was that) but the way it burned going down and settled hot in his stomach, sweet tanginess lingering in his mouth and nose. It was an instant time machine to those high school days of getting drunk with some girl and making out for hours and jerking off after, and sitting here now, drinking far too much of that shit, having one of those talk-about-everything-and-nothing conversations he hadn’t had since college—he felt young. Besides, Mary sure as hell didn’t look like an innocent girl in that dress, a trapping of seduction if he ever saw one.
So he kissed her. Or maybe she kissed him. His head was sludge; it was hard to think. Later, he’d hyperanalyze every frame of his memory of this moment for any clue that she wasn’t the enthusiastic participant he’d assumed her to be—had she squirmed to get away? had she mumbled no, however faintly?—but the truth was, he’d been oblivious to everything except the parts of her body in contact with his, and her reactions, her sounds and movements—those hadn’t been a factor at all. He’d closed his eyes and focused every neuron on the sensation of the kiss, the newness of her lips and tongue and teeth adding to the surreal feeling of being transported back to his teens. He didn’t want this moment, the pure physicality of it, to stop, so he wrapped his arms around her, one around her head to keep her mouth against his, and the other around her hips, steering her pelvis against his like teenagers grinding. He felt a deep welling of pressure stemming from his scrotum, building and building. He needed release. Right now. Eyes still closed, he unzipped his pants, grabbed her hand, and pushed it inside his underwear. He cupped his hand over her fingers, wrapping and holding them tight around his penis, and guided them into an up-down rhythm, its masturbatory familiarity combining with the unfamiliar smoothness of her lips and palms to drive him into a fevered frenzy.
Quickly, much too quickly, he came, the throbs of the contractions so intense, they were deliciously painful, sending tingles of electricity down his legs to his toes. The loud buzz of alcohol clogged his ears and white flashes burned behind his eyelids. He felt weak, and he released his grasp on Mary’s head and hand.
As he lay back, let the world go around in circles, he felt something press against his chest—but weakly, almost tentatively—and recoil. He opened his eyes. His head wobbled and the world spun, but he saw a small hand, above his chest—her hand, Mary’s hand. Shaking. And right above it, the oval of her open mouth, and her eyes, so wide they protruded, staring at her sticky hand, then turning to look at him, at his still-erect penis. Fear. Shock. But most of all, confusion, as if she didn’t understand any of this, didn’t know what that was coating her fingers, didn’t know what that thing was, poking out of his otherwise-on pants, like a child. A girl.
He ran away. He had no memory of how—he couldn’t remember standing, let alone how he managed to drive home with that much alcohol in his system. When he woke up the next morning, his hangover mauling his body, he had a moment of desperate hope of the incident being an alcohol-induced hallucination of some sort. But the semen-stain residue on his pants, the mud caked on his shoes—those confirmed the reality of what he remembered, and shame engulfed him, bringing back the buzz in his ears, the white flashes in his eyes.
He didn’t talk to Mary after that night. He tried to—to explain and apologize (and, if he was being honest, to see if she’d told anyone), but she went out of her way to avoid him. He managed to leave her a few notes—he had to go to her SAT class and find her car—but she wrote back, I don’t know why we need to discuss it. Can’t we just forget it ever happened? But he couldn’t forget it, couldn’t let her let him off that easy. Which was why he left her that now-famous H-Mart note, which his wife ended up throwing in her face, accusing her of stalking him!
It had been a year since that ordeal, but the shame and guilt and humiliation of that night—those never went away. Most of the time, they lay inert in a tightly knotted coil in his gut. But whenever he thought of Mary, and sometimes when he didn’t, when he was eating or driving or watching TV, that knot of shame erupted.
That night was the last time he’d had an orgasm. It wasn’t just Mary, but that plus the explosion and the amputation right after—the one-two-three punch of it—knocked out whatever sexual desire remained in him. Not that he never tried sex again. But the first time, when he started their usual foreplay—circling Janine’s nipples with his thumbs—he realized: he couldn’t feel anything. He had no idea if his touch was too hard or too soft, couldn’t gauge her readiness by feeling her wetness. His therapists had taught him how to type, eat, even wipe his ass with what felt like baseball mitts over his hands. But there’d been no How to Get Your Wife Off session, no alternative fondling techniques. It made him want to scream, this discovery of yet another element of his life the explosion had fucked over, and he couldn’t get hard.
Janine tried a blow job, and that worked for a minute, but he made the mistake of opening his eyes. The fuzzy film of moonlight made visible the long curtains of Janine’s hair, swinging as her head bobbed up and down. It made him think of Mary, the way her hair had swung about her face as she pushed herself up from his body. He went soft immediately.
That had been the beginning of Matt’s impotence. Janine, bless her, kept trying, resorti
ng to things she’d once scoffed at as denigrating to women—slitted negligees, dildos, porn—but none of that compensated for his feeling clumsy and inadequate in bed, let alone his shame about Mary, and he couldn’t make anything happen, even by himself. The one time he’d tried (in the bathroom after a failed Janine session, out of panic he’d lost it forever), his hand felt unfamiliar, the scars’ simultaneous slickness and bumpiness enhancing every rub, not at all like masturbation. Being able to see but not feel his hand holding his penis added to the trippy feel, the sensation that it was not him touching himself, but rather a stranger, and he felt that thrill of newness. But then, the thought: Was he actually turned on by the thought of a male stranger’s hand jerking him off?
A few times, he’d come close to nocturnal emissions, which Matt used to think was almost worse than none at all (with the evanescent millisecond of gratification not worth the pathetic reversion to puberty) but which he’d started praying for, if only to reassure himself that his orgasm wasn’t dead, merely dormant. The problem was, Mary always invaded his dream, and some deep-seated pedophilic/rape guilt sensor woke him up. Until tonight.
Tonight, he kept going. Took off her panties. Let her take off his pants and underwear. As he got on top and spread her legs, he held up his mutilated hands and said, “You wrecked me.” She said, “Because you wrecked me first,” then raised her hips to push him into her, tighter, wetter, and more real-feeling than he’d felt in years, maybe ever. When he came, the dream-Mary screamed and shattered into a million glass particles, the tiny beads of glass-her exploding into him in slow motion, pushing through his skin and into his body, sending tingles of warmth and pure joy out toward his limbs.
