by Angie Kim
“Mary was in a coma for two months. I never wished for her death. Even if she is damaged, I wanted her not to die.”
Teresa wanted to yell that Mary was in the hospital, cared for by nurses. Young didn’t understand that when the months became years, it changed you, that it was different when you had to do everything yourself. She wanted to hurt Young, couldn’t resist the urge to strike her off the pedestal from which she could be so fricking sanctimonious. “You know, Young,” Teresa said, “that girl I heard, who was breaking the rules? That was Mary.”
Teresa regretted saying it before she finished, even before Young’s face scrunched into wounded confusion. Young said, “Mary? You saw her in McDonald’s?”
“No. It was actually here. In the shed.”
“The storage shed? What was she doing?”
She felt silly now. What was she doing, getting a girl in trouble for doing stupid things all teenagers did? “Nothing. She was just moving boxes around. You know how kids are, they like having secret places to hide stuff. Carlos does the same—”
“Hide? Which box?”
“I don’t know. I was outside, and I heard her tell someone on the phone she had a secret stash in some box.”
“Stash? Drugs?” Young’s eyes widened.
“No, nothing like that. It was probably just money. She said something about Pak catching her taking cards from his wallet, so—”
“Card from wallet? Pak catch?” Young’s face blanched, like a photo transforming into sepia with the click of a button. It was obvious: Pak never told Young about Mary stealing money. Despite herself, Teresa felt a tinge of satisfaction at this additional proof of imperfection in Young’s life. She felt a pinch of shame, and said, “Young, don’t worry about this. Kids do this kind of thing. Carlos takes money from my wallet all the time.”
Young looked dazed, too upset to say anything.
“Young, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you all this. It’s not a big deal. Please forget about it. Mary’s a good kid. I don’t know if she ever told you, but last summer, she was working with a Realtor to find an apartment for you guys, as a surprise, which I think is so thoughtful and—”
Young grabbed her arm tight, nails digging in. “Apartment? In Seoul?”
“What? I mean, I don’t know, but why in Seoul? I assumed it was around here.”
“But you do not know this? You did not see?”
“No, she just said apartment listings, she didn’t say where.”
Young closed her eyes. Her grip on Teresa’s arm tightened, and she seemed to sway.
“Young? Are you okay?”
“I think…” Young opened her eyes and blinked a few times. She tried to smile. “I think I am sick also. I must go home. Please, tell Abe we are sorry to be absent today.”
“Oh, no. Do you want me to drive you? I have time.”
Young shook her head. “No, Teresa. You helped me so much. You are a good friend.” Young held her hand and squeezed, and Teresa felt shame spread through her body, a desperation to do whatever she could to relieve Young’s pain.
When Young was halfway down the aisle, Teresa called out, “I almost forgot to tell you.” Young turned. “I heard earlier, Abe said whoever used Matt’s phone to make the arson call speaks English with no accent. So Pak’s in the clear.”
Young’s mouth opened and her brow crumpled into a frown. Her eyes darted side to side and she said, “No accent?” as if she didn’t know those words and she was asking the tables in front what they meant, but then her frown dissolved and eyes stilled. She closed them, and her mouth twitched as if she was about to smile or cry, Teresa couldn’t tell which.
“Young? Are you all right?” Teresa stood to go to her, but Young opened her eyes and shook her head, as if pleading with her not to come. Without saying anything, Young turned her back to Teresa and walked out the door.
ELIZABETH
SHE FOUND HERSELF in an unfamiliar room, sitting on a hard chair. Where was she? She didn’t think she’d been asleep or unconscious, but she couldn’t remember getting here, the way you feel when you’re driving home and you suddenly find yourself in your garage, unable to remember the actual drive.
She looked around. The room was tiny, its four folding chairs and TV-tray-sized table taking up half the space. Plain gray walls. Shut door. No windows, vents, or fans. Was she locked up in some holding cell? A mental-ward unit? Why was it so hot and airless? She felt dizzy, couldn’t breathe. Suddenly, a memory: Henry saying, “Henry too hot. Henry can’t breathe.” When was that? He must’ve been five, when he was still mixing up pronouns and couldn’t use “I.” This was how it had been since he died: everything she saw or heard, even things having nothing to do with Henry, exhumed some memory of him and sent her reeling.
She tried to push it away, but the image came anyway: Henry in his Elmo swim trunks in a portable infrared sauna. Being inside this room—its heat, smothering austerity, sealed-in cubicle feel—was reminding her of the sauna in her basement. The first time he’d gone in, that’s when he’d said, “Henry too hot. Henry can’t breathe.” She’d tried to be patient, to explain about sweating out toxins, but when he kicked open the door—the brand-new door of the ten-thousand-dollar unit she’d spent God knows how many phone calls convincing Victor they needed—she lost it and screamed, “Goddammit! Now you’ve broken it,” even though she knew it wasn’t broken. Henry started crying, hard, and, looking at his tears mixing with snot into a mask of slime, she felt pure hatred. It was just for a moment, one she’d regret and cry over later, but right then, she hated her five-year-old son. For having autism. For making everything so hard. For making her hate him. “Stop being a crybaby. Right. Fucking. Now,” she said, and slammed the sauna door. He didn’t know what fucking meant, and she never used that word, but there was something so satisfying about saying it, the aggressive percussiveness of the f and k sounds spitting from her mouth, and combined with the slam—that was enough to release her rage and calm her. She wanted to run back and say Mommy was sorry and cradle him, but how could she face him? Better to pretend it never happened, to wait for the half-hour timer to ding, then praise him for being brave, with no mention of the crying or screaming. All the ugliness vaporized away.
She always went in with Henry after that, telling jokes and singing silly songs to distract him, but he never stopped hating it. Every day, getting in the sauna, he said, “Henry is brave. Henry is not a crybaby,” and blinked rapidly, the way he did when trying not to cry. And during the sessions, when he wiped at his tears, she swallowed and said, “Wow, you’re sweating so much, it’s even getting in your eyes!”
Thinking of that now, she wondered: Had Henry believed her? He sometimes said back to her, “Henry sweat so much!” and smiled. Was his smile genuine, from relief she wasn’t yelling at him for crying, or fake, to pretend that his tears were sweat? Was she merely a mean mom who frightened her child, or a psychotic mom who turned him into a liar? Or both?
The door opened. As Shannon walked in with Anna, an associate, she saw the familiar hallway outside the courtroom. Of course. They were in one of the attorney conference rooms.
Shannon said, “Anna found a fan, and I got some water. You look pale still. Here, drink.” She put a cup to Elizabeth’s lips and tilted it, the way you would for an invalid.
Elizabeth pushed it away. “No, I’m just hot. It’s hard to catch my breath in here.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” Shannon said. “It’s a lot smaller than our usual room, but this is the only one without any windows.”
Elizabeth was about to ask why no windows, but she remembered. The clicks and flashes of cameras, Shannon trying to shield her, reporters pelting nonstop questions at her: What did you mean there’s no cat? Did your neighbors have cats? Have you ever had cats? Do you like cats? Was Henry allergic to cats? Do you believe in declawing cats?
Cat. Scratch. Henry’s arm. His voice. His words—
Elizabeth felt faint, her senses dra
ining out and the world fading to black. She needed air. She moved her face down directly in front of the small fan clipped to the table. The lawyers didn’t seem to notice; they were checking voice mail and e-mails. She focused on the air, the blades whirring in a blur, and after a minute, blood returned to her head, a tingling around her scalp. “Is that a picture of Elizabeth’s nails?” Anna said, and Shannon said, “Shit, I bet the jury’s—” Elizabeth put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes, focused on the buzz of the fan that, if she concentrated hard enough, filtered out their voices and left only Henry’s. Take vacations around the world. I should never have been born. The cat hates me.
“The cat hates me,” she said, under her breath. Was he elaborating on the imaginary cat, or was he talking about her, who scratched him and became the “cat” in his story? Did he really think she hated him? And the reference to vacations—she’d said that to Teresa, once. She’d moved far from Henry, who was watching DVDs, and whispered to make sure he wouldn’t hear. But he’d heard. Her whispered confession that she sometimes wished him dead—those words had bounced and echoed against the steel walls and somehow reached his ears.
She once read that sounds left permanent imprints; the tonal vibrations penetrated nearby objects and continued for infinity at the quantum level, like when you throw pebbles in the ocean and the ripples continue without end. Did her words, their ugliness, penetrate the walls’ atoms—the same way Henry’s pain at hearing them permeated his brain—and that last dive, when Henry was sitting in that same spot within those walls, the ugliness and the pain collided into a blast, blowing apart his neurons and torching him from the inside?
The door opened, and another associate, Andrew, walked in. “Ruth Weiss said yes!”
“Really? That’s great,” said Shannon.
Elizabeth looked up. “The protester?”
Shannon nodded. “I asked her to testify about Pak threatening her. It supports our—”
“But she did it. She set the fire and killed Henry. You know that,” Elizabeth said.
“No, I don’t know that,” Shannon said. “I know you think that, but we’ve been over this. They went straight from the police station to D.C. Cell tower pings place them in D.C. proper at 9:00, so there’s no way—”
“They could’ve planned it,” Elizabeth said. “One person could’ve stayed behind to set the fire, but they took all the phones to establish alibis. Or they could’ve driven really fast, made the drive in fifty minutes, or—”
“There’s no evidence of any of that, whereas there’s a ton of evidence against Pak. We’re in court. We need evidence, not speculation.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “That’s what the police did to me. It didn’t matter whether I really did it, just that I’m the easiest to prosecute. You’re doing the same thing. I’ve told you all along, you need to go after the protesters, but you’re giving up on them because it’s too hard to get proof.”
“Damn right,” Shannon said. “It’s not my job to go after the real perpetrators. My job is to defend you. And I don’t care how much you hate them. If they can help the jury to see Pak as a viable alternative and return a not-guilty verdict, they’re your best friends right now. And you need some, because after your outburst today, you’ve lost any support you had. The rumor mill is that Teresa went back to Abe’s side.”
“It’s true,” Andrew said. “I saw it, passing by a little while ago. She was alone in the courtroom, and she got up and switched seats, to the prosecution’s side.”
Teresa, her last and only friend. The cat-scratch thing had repelled her, of course it had.
“Shit,” Shannon said. “I don’t know why she has to be so dramatic about it, all this walking-across-the-aisle nonsense. No wonder Abe was so smug just now.”
Anna said, “We just saw him, and he said he’s calling Teresa next, and he tried to rattle us. ‘She’s heard some very interesting things that will fascinate the jury,’” Anna said in a Southern-twang imitation. “He’s such an asshole.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Shannon said. “He said Teresa’s testifying about things she’s heard, which means it has to be a hearsay exception, which means—”
“An admission?” Anna said.
“That’s my guess.” Shannon turned to Elizabeth. “Have you said anything to Teresa that could make you look bad? The way he was acting, it must be something pretty incriminating.”
It could only be one thing. Their conversation in the chamber. The shameful, secret words they’d whispered to each other alone, meant to be shared with no one, never to be repeated. The words she couldn’t bear to even think about, Teresa was planning to repeat in open court, and they’d soon be spread to the world through websites and newspapers.
She felt a pang of betrayal. She wanted to find Teresa and demand to know how she could turn against her when she herself said those same words, thought those same thoughts. She wanted to tell Shannon how Teresa said she wanted Rosa dead. How satisfying it would be, watching Shannon tear her apart in court. To have the all-caring Mother Teresa be cast in the role of Bad Mother for once.
But Teresa wasn’t a bad mother. Teresa didn’t scratch her child. Teresa didn’t force her child into painful treatments that made her sob and throw up. And no matter what she may have thought or said, Teresa never made her child think she hated her. Teresa had good reason to abandon her now: she finally realized how despicable Elizabeth was, and she wanted justice for Henry against the mother who’d failed him.
“Elizabeth, can you think of anything?” Shannon repeated.
She shook her head. “No, nothing.”
“Well, keep thinking. I’d like to know what’s coming. Otherwise, I’ll have to cross her blind.” Shannon turned to her associates.
Cross. She could hear it now: “What happened right before Elizabeth said this? I mean, you weren’t just saying, Oh, I got a haircut, and she blurted out, I wish Henry would die, right? I’m curious—have you said anything like this? Ever think it?” It nauseated her, thinking of strangers passing judgment on Teresa’s most intimate thoughts, the private words she’d said only at Elizabeth’s coaxing. She needed to save Teresa from having to tell that story, from the pain to her and Rosa and Carlos from the broadcasting of those words. But how?
Shannon turned to her. “Can you list everyone who spent time alone with Henry last summer? Therapists, babysitters … and didn’t Victor come visit one weekend?”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s just, you can interpret what you said in different ways, and we’re brainstorming what ‘There is no cat,’ could mean, why a person might say that.”
“A person?” Elizabeth said. “I’m the person. I’m the one who said it, and I’m right here. Why don’t you just ask me?”
No one said anything. They didn’t have to. They didn’t ask her because they didn’t need to. It was obvious, they knew the answer, but they didn’t want to be constrained by the truth in their “brainstorming” on how to spin this.
“I see,” Elizabeth said. “Well, I’ll tell you anyway. What I meant by—”
Shannon put up her hand. “Stop. You don’t need to…” She sighed. “Look, it doesn’t matter what you meant. What you said is not evidence. The judge told the jurors to disregard it, and in a perfect world, that would be the end of it. But this is real life. They’re human, and there’s no way it won’t affect them. So I need to neutralize it by giving them alternatives to you being a child abuser.”
Elizabeth swallowed. “But how … What’s the alternative?”
“Someone else could’ve hurt him,” Shannon said. “Someone Henry wanted to protect, someone you maybe had suspicions about, and it upset you so much hearing Henry covering up for that person, you had a breakdown in court.”
“What? You want to take some innocent person and accuse them of child abuse? A teacher or therapist or Victor? Victor’s wife? My God, Shannon!” Elizabeth said.
“Not accuse,” Shannon
said. “Merely hypothesize. Distract the jury from stuff they’re thinking about you, which they’re not supposed to be thinking in the first place. All we’ll do is point out some theoretical reasons why you could have said that.”
“No. That’s crazy. You know that’s not true. You think I scratched him. I know you do.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what evidence I can present and what arguments I can make. And I’m not going to back away from something just because it’s not very nice. You understand?”
“No.” Elizabeth stood up. Blood rushed out of her head and the room seemed to shrink. “You can’t do that. You need to stick to just saying this has nothing to do with who set the fire. You can convince the jury of that.”
“No, I can’t,” Shannon said, her words finally losing that veneer of forced calmness. “I can argue it till I’m blue in the face, but if the jury thinks you hurt Henry, they won’t want to side with you, no matter who they think really set the fire. They’ll want to punish you.”
“Then let them. I deserve it, anyway. I won’t let you bring innocent people into this.”
“But they—”
“Stop,” Elizabeth said. “I want this over. I want to plead guilty.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, I really am, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t go back in there for one more second.”
“All right, all right,” Shannon said. “Let’s calm down here. If it bothers you that much, we won’t do it. I’ll just focus on the point that the scratch is not relevant to the ultimate—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Elizabeth said. “It’s not just this. It’s everything. The scratch, Pak, the protesters, Teresa, the video, I need it all to stop. I want to plead guilty. Today.”
Shannon didn’t say anything, just took deep breaths through her nose, mouth clamped shut, as if trying hard not to lose it. When she finally spoke, her words were overly slow, like those of a mother reasoning with a tantruming toddler. “A lot’s happened today. I think you need a break, we all do. I’ll ask the judge to adjourn for the day, and we can all sleep on it.”
