Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

  “‘Fire started outside the chamber under the oxygen tubing,’” Abe repeated. “Isn’t that exactly what happened to Miracle Submarine later that very day?”

  Matt looked over to Elizabeth, his jaws tensing as if gritting his molars. “Yes,” he said, “and I know she was focused on that because she went straight up to Pak afterward and told him about their flyer. Pak said that couldn’t happen to us, he wouldn’t let any of them near the barn, but Elizabeth kept saying how dangerous they were, and she made him promise to call the police and report that they’re threatening us, to get that on the record.”

  “What about during the dive? Did she say any of this then?”

  “No, she was silent. She seemed distracted. Like she was thinking intensely about something.”

  “Like she was planning something, perhaps?” Abe said.

  “Objection,” Elizabeth’s attorney said.

  “Sustained. The jury will disregard the question,” the judge said, but in a lazy tone. A judicial version of “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Not that it mattered. Everyone was already thinking it—the flyer had given Elizabeth the idea to set the fire and blame the protesters for it.

  “Dr. Thompson, after Miracle Submarine exploded in precisely the same way as highlighted by the defendant, did she try to lay suspicion on the protesters again?”

  “Yes,” Matt said. “That night. I heard her tell the detective she was sure the protesters did it, they must’ve started the fire under the oxygen tubes outside.” Teresa had heard that, too. She’d been convinced, as had everyone, at first—the protesters had been the primary suspects for almost a week—and even after Elizabeth’s arrest, she’d still been suspicious. Just this morning, when Elizabeth’s lawyer reserved her opening statement until after the prosecution’s case, she’d been disappointed, sure that the defense would’ve painted the protesters as the real killers.

  “Dr. Thompson,” Abe said, “what else happened that morning, after the protesters?”

  “After the dive, Elizabeth and Kitt left first, and I helped Teresa get Rosa’s wheelchair through the woods. When we got to the pull-off area, Henry and TJ were already in their cars, and Elizabeth and Kitt were by the woods, on the other side from us. They were fighting.” Teresa remembered—they’d been yelling, but in the whispered shouts of people carrying on a private argument in public.

  “What were they saying?”

  “It was hard to hear, but I heard Elizabeth calling Kitt a ‘jealous bitch’ and something like, ‘I’d love to lie around and eat bonbons all day instead of taking care of Henry.’” Teresa had heard “bonbons,” but not the rest. Matt had been closer, though; as soon as they got there, he’d noticed something on his windshield and run to get it.

  “I’m sorry,” Abe said. “The defendant called Kitt a ‘jealous bitch’ and said she’d love to eat bonbons instead of taking care of her son, Henry—this just hours before Kitt and Henry were killed in the explosion. Do I have that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Abe looked over to the pictures of Kitt and Henry and shook his head. He closed his eyes briefly, as if to compose himself, then said, “Did the defendant have other fights with Kitt that you know of?”

  “Yes,” Matt said, looking straight at Elizabeth. “Once, she yelled at Kitt in front of us and pushed her.”

  “Pushed? Physically?” Abe let his mouth hang in an open O. “Tell us about that.”

  Teresa knew which story Matt was going to tell. Elizabeth and Kitt were friends, but there was an undercurrent of tension that occasionally burst into tiffs. Just bickering, nothing major, except once. It happened after a dive. As everyone was leaving, Kitt handed TJ what looked like a toothpaste tube decorated with Barney.

  “Oh my God, is that that new yogurt?” Elizabeth said.

  Kitt sighed. “Yes, it’s YoFun. And yes, I know it’s not GFCF.” Kitt said to Teresa and Matt, “GFCF is gluten-free, casein-free. It’s an autism diet.”

  Elizabeth said, “Is TJ off it?”

  “No. He’s GFCF for everything else. But this is his favorite, and it’s the only way he’ll take supplements. It’s only once a day.”

  “Once a day? But it’s made with milk,” Elizabeth said, making “milk” sound like “feces.” “The primary ingredient is casein. How can you claim to be casein-free if he’s eating casein every day? Not to mention, there’s food coloring in that. And it’s not even organic.”

  Kitt looked like she might cry. “What am I supposed to do? He spits out his pills unless he swallows with YoFun. This makes him happy. Besides, I don’t think the diet really works. It never made a difference for TJ.”

  Elizabeth pressed her lips tightly together. “Maybe the diet didn’t work because you never did it properly. Free means none. I use different plates for Henry’s food; I even have a different sponge for cleaning his dishes.”

  Kitt stood up. “Well, I can’t do that. I have four other kids I have to cook and clean for. It’s hard enough just trying. Everyone says, do the best you can, and cutting out most of it’s better than nothing. I’m sorry I can’t be a hundred percent perfect like you.”

  Elizabeth shrugged her eyebrows. “It’s not me you should say sorry to. It’s TJ. Gluten and casein are neurotoxins for our kids. Even a tiny bit interferes with brain function. It’s no wonder TJ’s still not talking.” She stood up, said, “Come on, Henry,” and started to walk out.

  Kitt stepped in front of her. “Wait, you can’t just—”

  Elizabeth pushed her away. Not hard, nowhere near hard enough to hurt Kitt, but it shocked her. It shocked all of them. Elizabeth kept walking out, then turned back. “Oh, and by the way, can you please stop telling people you haven’t seen any improvements on the diet? You’re not doing the diet, and you’re discouraging people for no reason.” She slammed the door.

  After Matt finished telling the story, Abe said, “Dr. Thompson, has the defendant lost her temper like that any other time?”

  Matt nodded. “The day of the explosion, during her fight with Kitt.”

  “The one where the defendant called Kitt a ‘jealous bitch’ and said she’d love to eat bonbons all day instead of taking care of her son?”

  “Exactly. She didn’t do anything physical this time, but she ran off in a huff and slammed her car door, really hard, and she revved and backed out so fast, she almost hit my car. Kitt yelled for her to calm down and wait, but…” Matt shook his head. “I remember being worried for Henry because Elizabeth drove off so fast. The tires were squealing.”

  “What happened next?” Abe said.

  “I asked Kitt what happened, if she was okay.”

  “And?”

  “She looked really upset, like she was about to cry, and she said no, she wasn’t okay, that Elizabeth was really mad at her. Then she said she had done something and she needed to figure out how to fix it before Elizabeth found out, because if she found out…” Matt looked to Elizabeth.

  “Yes?”

  “She said, ‘If Elizabeth finds out what I did, she’s gonna kill me.’”

  PAK YOO

  THE JUDGE CALLED FOR RECESS AT NOON. Lunch, which Pak dreaded, knowing that Dr. Cho—not Janine, but her father, who went by “Dr. Cho” even though he was an acupuncturist, not a doctor—would insist on treating them. Forced charity. Not that he wasn’t tempted—they’d eaten nothing but ramen, rice, and kimchi since the hospital bills started arriving—but Dr. Cho had already given them too much: monthly loans for necessities, assumption of Pak’s mortgage, a generous sum in exchange for Mary’s car, power bill payments. Pak had no choice but to accept it all, even Dr. Cho’s latest brainstorm, a fund-raising website in English and Korean. An international proclamation of Pak Yoo as a destitute invalid begging for handouts. No. No more. Pak told Dr. Cho they had other plans and hoped he wouldn’t see them eating in their car.

  On their way to the car, he saw a dozen geese waddling around, directly in their path. Pak expected Young or Mary to shoo them away, but the
y kept walking, rolling Pak closer and closer, like a bowling ball toward the pins. And the geese—they were equally oblivious, or maybe just lazy. It wasn’t until his wheelchair was centimeters from knocking one over and he was about to yell that one honked and the whole gaggle took off for flight. Young and Mary kept walking, paces steady as if nothing had happened, and he wanted to scream at their insensitivity.

  Pak closed his eyes and breathed. In, out. He told himself he was being ridiculous—he was actually angry at his wife and daughter for not noticing geese! It would be comical if it weren’t so pathetic, this oversensitivity to geese from his four years alone.

  Ghee-ruh-ghee ap-bah. Wild-goose father. What Koreans called a man who remained in Korea to work while his wife and children moved abroad for better education, and flew (or “migrated”) annually to see them. (Last year, when alcoholism and suicide reached alarming levels among Seoul’s 100,000 goose fathers, people started calling men like Pak—men who couldn’t afford any visits, so never flew—penguin fathers, but by then, his identification with geese was fixed, and penguins never bothered him the way geese did.) Pak hadn’t set out to become a goose father; they’d planned to move to America together. But while waiting for a family visa, Pak heard about a host family in Baltimore willing to sponsor a child and one parent to live with them for free, arranging for the child to attend a nearby school, in exchange for the parent working at their grocery store. Pak sent Young and Mary off to Baltimore, promising he’d join them soon.

  In the end, it had taken four more years for the family visa. Four years of being a father without a family. Four years of living alone in a closet-studio in a sad, disheveled “villa” full of sad, disheveled goose fathers. Four years of working two jobs, seven days a week, of skimping and saving. All that sacrifice for Mary’s education, for her future, and now, here she was, scarred and unanchored, no college on the horizon, attending murder trials and therapies instead of seminars and parties.

  “Mary,” Young was saying in Korean, “you have to eat.” Mary shook her head and looked out the car window, but Young put the bowl of rice on Mary’s lap. “A few bites.”

  Mary bit her lip and picked up the chopsticks—tentatively, as if scared to try some exotic food. She picked up one grain of rice and put it just inside her lips. Pak remembered Young showing Mary this way of eating back in Korea. “When I was your age,” Young had said, “your grandmother made me practice eating rice grain by grain. She said, ‘This way, food is always in your mouth, so you are not expected to talk, but without appearing to be a pig. No man wants a wife who eats or talks too much.’” Mary, laughing, had said to Pak, “Ap-bah, did Um-ma eat like that when you were dating?” Pak had said, “Definitely not. Good thing I like pigs,” and they’d all laughed and eaten the rest of the dinner as sloppily and noisily as possible, taking turns making pig grunts. Had that really been so long ago?

  Pak looked at his daughter, chewing one grain of rice after another, and his wife, studying their child, worry lines framing her eyes. He picked up kimchi to force himself to eat, but the stink of fermented garlic swirling in the sweltering heat formed a mask over his face, overpowering him. He cranked the window open and stuck his head out. In the sky, the geese were flying away, the majestic symmetry of their V-formation visible in the distance, and he thought how unfair it was, calling men like him “goose fathers.” Real male geese mated for life; real goose families stayed together, foraged, nested, and migrated together.

  Suddenly, a vision: a cartoon of male geese in a courtroom, suing Korean newspapers for defamation and demanding retractions of all goose-father references. Pak chuckled, and Young and Mary looked at him with confusion and concern. He thought about explaining, but what could he say? So these geese file a class-action lawsuit … “I thought of something funny,” he said. They didn’t ask what. Mary went back to eating rice, Young back to looking at Mary, and Pak back to looking out the window, watching the wedge of geese fly farther and farther away.

  * * *

  AFTER LUNCH, entering the courtroom, Pak recognized a silver-haired woman in the back. A protester, the one who’d threatened him that morning, saying she wouldn’t rest until he was exposed as a fraud and his business shut down for good. “If you don’t stop right now,” she’d said, “you will regret it. I promise you.” And now that her promise had come to fruition, here she was, surveying the room like a proud director on opening night. He imagined facing her, threatening to expose her lies about that night, to tell the police everything he saw. How satisfying it would be, watching the smugness drain from her eyes, replaced by fear. But no. No one could know he was outside that night. He had to maintain his silence, no matter the cost.

  Abe stood up and something fell to the floor: the flyer, with 43! in a red, fiery font. Pak stared at it, this piece of paper that had started everything. If only Elizabeth hadn’t seen it and gotten fixated on the idea of sabotage, of fire being set under the oxygen tube, he’d be driving Mary to college right now. A surge of heat coursed through him, sending his muscles quivering, and he wanted to grab that flyer, tear and ball it up, and hurl it at Elizabeth and the protester, these women who’d wrecked his life.

  “Dr. Thompson,” Abe said, “let’s pick up where we left off. Tell us about the last dive, during which the explosion occurred.”

  “We started late,” Matt said. “The dive before us is usually done by 6:15, but they were running late. I didn’t know, so I got there on time, and the front lot was full. All us double-divers had to park in the alternate spot down the street, like that morning. We didn’t start until 7:10.”

  “Why the delay? Were the protesters still there?”

  “No. The police took them away earlier. They apparently tried to stop the dives by releasing Mylar balloons into utility lines, which caused a power outage,” Matt said. Pak almost laughed at the succinctness, the efficiency, of Matt’s description. Six hours of chaos—the protesters upsetting the patients; the police saying they were powerless to stop “peaceful protests”; the AC and lights going dead during an afternoon dive, scaring the patients; the police finally arriving; the protesters’ shrieks of “What power lines?” and “What on earth do balloons have to do with outages?” All that, reduced to a ten-second summary.

  “How could the dives continue with an outage?” Abe said.

  “There’s a generator, a safety requirement. Pressurization, oxygen, communications—all that still worked. Just secondary things like AC, lights, and the DVD didn’t work.”

  “DVD? Air-conditioning, I understand, but why DVD?”

  “For the kids, to help them sit still. Pak attached a screen outside a porthole and put in a speaker system. The kids loved it, and I can tell you the adults appreciated it as well.”

  Abe chuckled. “Yes, in my house, anyway, kids tend to be significantly quieter in front of a TV.”

  “Exactly.” Matt smiled. “Anyway, Pak managed to hook up a portable DVD player outside the rear porthole. He said dealing with all this caused delays. Not to mention, some of the earlier patients got scared by the protesters and canceled their dives, which took more time.”

  “What about the lights? You said they were out?”

  “Yes, in the barn. We started after 7:00, so it was starting to get dark, but it being summer, there was still enough sunlight to see.”

  “So the power’s out, and the dive’s delayed. Anything else odd about that evening?”

  Matt nodded. “Yes. Elizabeth.”

  Abe raised his eyebrows. “What about her?”

  “You have to remember,” Matt said, “earlier that day, I saw her stomp off after a fight with Kitt, so I expected her to still be mad. But when she came in, she was in a really good mood. Unusually friendly, even to Kitt.”

  Abe said, “Perhaps they’d talked and worked it out?”

  Matt shook his head. “No. Before Elizabeth arrived, Kitt said she tried to talk to her, but she was still mad. In any case, the really strange part was that E
lizabeth said she felt sick. I remember thinking it was odd, how upbeat she was when she was supposedly coming down with something.” Matt swallowed. “Anyway, she said she wanted to sit out, just stay in her car and rest during the dive. And then…” Matt’s eyes darted to Elizabeth, his face scrunched up like he was hurt, betrayed, and disappointed all at once, the way a kid looks at his mother when he finds out there’s no Santa.

  “And then?” Abe touched Matt’s arm as if comforting him.

  “She asked Kitt to sit next to Henry and watch over him during the dive, and maybe I could sit on the other side and help, too.”

  “So the defendant arranged for Henry to sit between Kitt and you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any other seating-related suggestions from the defendant?” Abe said, emphasizing the word suggestions so it sounded ominous.

  “Yes.” Matt peered at Elizabeth with that hurt-disappointed-betrayed-kid look again. “Teresa started going in first, like always. But Elizabeth stopped her. She said since the DVD screen was in the back and Rosa didn’t watch shows, TJ and Henry should sit back there.”

  “That seems reasonable, no?” Abe said.

  “No, not at all,” Matt said. “Elizabeth was very particular about the DVDs Henry watched.” Matt’s face tightened, and Pak knew he was thinking about the DVD-selection fight. Elizabeth had wanted something educational, a history or science documentary. Kitt had wanted Barney, TJ’s favorite. Elizabeth gave in, but after a few days, Elizabeth said, “TJ is eight. Don’t you think you should introduce something more appropriate for his age?”

  “TJ needs this to be calm. You know that,” Kitt said. “Henry’s fine; an hour of Barney won’t kill him.”

  “An hour without Barney won’t kill TJ, either.”

  Kitt stared into Elizabeth’s eyes for a long time. She seemed to smile. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.” She threw the Barney DVD into her cubby.