Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

  Pak said, “What happened is tragic, and I’d give anything to change the past. But we can’t. The only thing we can do is to move forward. In a strange way, this is a gift to our family.”

  “A gift?” Young said. “An innocent woman’s torture and death is a gift?”

  “You’re right. That’s not the right word. I only meant there’s no reason to come forward anymore. Elizabeth is gone. We can’t change that. So—”

  “So we might as well take advantage of it, consider ourselves lucky that she killed herself?”

  “No, but what would be the point of confessing now? Maybe if she had family, someone who’s affected, but there’s no one.”

  Young felt blood drain from her limbs, her muscles lose their strength. Something seemed stuck in her throat, like an invisible hand choking her. “So say nothing and pretend Elizabeth set the fire? The blame will die with her, and we’ll get insurance money and move to L.A. and Mary will go to college? That’s your new plan?”

  “There’s no chance of anyone being hurt by this. This will all end,” he said.

  “I know you believe that, but you believed that about your first plan, too. You thought putting a cigarette by the oxygen wouldn’t hurt anyone, but two people ended up dead. Your second plan, letting Elizabeth go through the trial—another death. And now you have a third plan, another plan where you know, you’re sure, everything will be okay? How many more dead bodies will it take before you learn? You can’t guarantee results. This started as an accident, but covering everything up has turned all of us into murderers.” Her throat hurt, and she realized she was shouting and Mary sobbing. For the first time she could remember, the sight of Mary’s tears didn’t make her want to ease her daughter’s pain. She wanted Mary to hurt, to think of what she’d done and feel an unbearable shame, because the alternative would mean the unthinkable, that she was a monster.

  Mary put her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands. Young pulled Mary’s hands away from her face. “Look at me,” she said to Mary. “You’ve been trying to just wish this away, like a little kid with a monster in a nightmare. But you can’t escape this.” She looked at Pak. “You think staying silent won’t harm anyone? Look at our daughter. This is killing her. She needs to face what she’s done, not run away. You think if she gets off, she’ll have a moment’s peace? That you or I will? This will stay with her and destroy her.”

  “Yuh-bo, please.” Pak wheeled to her and grabbed both her hands. “This is our daughter. Her life is just beginning. We can’t let her go to prison and ruin her life. If being silent tortures us, then we should be tortured. That’s our duty as parents, the duty we assumed when we brought a life into this world, to protect our child, to sacrifice whatever we need to. We can’t turn our own child in. I’d rather say that I did everything. I’m willing to make that sacrifice.”

  “Don’t you think I’d give my life a hundred times over to save hers?” Young said. “Don’t you think I know how painful it’ll be to see her in prison, how much I’d rather suffer myself? But we have to do the hard thing. We have to teach her how to do the hard thing.”

  “This isn’t one of your philosophy debates!” Pak slammed his hand on the table, his words spitting out in frustration. He closed his eyes for a moment, breathed in deeply, and said slowly, with forced calmness, “This is our child. We can’t send her to jail. I’m the head of this family, and I’m responsible for us. It’s my decision, and I say we say nothing.”

  “No,” Young said. She turned to Mary and gripped her hands. “You’re an adult now. Not because you had a birthday and you’re eighteen, but because of what you’ve gone through. This is your decision, not mine, not your father’s. I won’t make it easy for you; I won’t threaten to go to Abe if you don’t. You need to make the hard choice. Go to Abe or not, it’s up to you. Your responsibility, your truth to tell.”

  “So if she says nothing, you’ll do nothing? You’ll let Abe close the case?”

  “Yes,” Young said. “But if you say nothing, I won’t stay. I want nothing to do with the money. And I won’t lie. If Abe asks, I won’t say what you did, but I will say that I know with absolute certainty that Elizabeth didn’t set the fire and clear her name. She deserves that much.”

  “But he’ll ask who did. He’ll ask how you know that,” Pak said.

  “I’ll say I can’t say. I’ll refuse to answer.”

  “He’ll force you. He’ll throw you in jail.”

  “Then I’ll go to jail.”

  Pak sighed, a heavy breath of exasperation. “There’s no need for that. If you’d—”

  “Stop,” Young said. “I’m done playing tug-of-war.” She turned to Mary. “Meh-hee-yah, this isn’t your father versus me. You’re not choosing sides. This is your own battle, and you need to think for yourself what is right and make your own choice. You taught me that. You remember? In Korea, you were twelve, just a child, and you said you knew I didn’t want to move to America and you asked how I could blindly follow someone else’s decision about my life. I scolded you and told you to just obey your father, but I was ashamed. And so proud of you. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. If only I’d spoken up back then…” Young looked down and shook her head.

  She raked Mary’s hair with her fingers, letting it drape across her face. “I have faith in you. You know what it’s like to live in silence. You know the relief you felt when you finally told us the truth. A few days ago, when I was talking about insurance money and moving away for college, you asked me how I could think about that when Henry and Kitt were dead. Think about that. Think about Elizabeth. Draw strength from that.”

  Pak said, “Nothing we do can bring them back. You’re asking Mary to destroy her life for nothing.”

  “Not nothing. Doing the right thing is not nothing.” Young stood up and turned away from them, her husband and daughter, and she stepped toward the door. One foot, then the other, waiting for Mary to stop her, for her to yell out, Wait, I’m coming with you. But no one said anything, did anything.

  It was bright outside, the sun hitting her eyes so fiercely she had to squint. The air was dense and humid, the way it always got in late afternoons in August. The sky was clear, with no sign yet of the thunderstorm that would hit in a few hours. The pressure and heat from the full sun, building and building until the sky cracked into a ten-minute storm, enough to relieve the pressure and start the night’s cooldown. Then tomorrow, the cycle would begin again.

  Inside, she could hear muffled voices. She walked away, not wanting to hear what Pak must be saying, his ordering Mary to be patient and wait for Young to come to her senses. She walked to a nearby tree, a giant oak with gnarled knots all over its trunk, like scar tissue covering old wounds.

  Behind her, the door creaked open and footsteps approached, but she kept facing the tree, afraid of what she’d see on her daughter’s face. The footsteps stopped. A hand pressed on her shoulder, a gentle pressure. “I’m scared,” Mary said.

  Tears stung Young’s eyes, and she turned. “I am, too.”

  Mary nodded and bit her lip. “Ap-bah said if I confess, he’ll say he did everything on purpose, for the money, and my story’s a lie I made up to make it seem more like an accident. He said if he tells Abe that, he’ll probably end up getting the death penalty.”

  Young closed her eyes. Pak was clever. Threatening their daughter with yet another death, his own. She opened her eyes and grabbed Mary’s hands. “We won’t let that happen. We’ll tell Abe everything, including your father’s threat. He’ll believe you. He’ll have to.”

  Mary blinked, and Young expected her to cry, but instead, she stretched her lips into a pained smile. Suddenly, a memory: Mary throwing a tantrum as a little girl, maybe five or six, and after Young gently said she was disappointed in her behavior, Mary getting a handkerchief from their dresser, wiping away her tears, stretching her lips into a smile, and saying, “Look, Um-ma, I’m not crying anymore,” looking dignified, just as
she was now. Young hugged her daughter tight.

  After a moment, her head still on Young’s shoulder, Mary spoke, in Korean for the first time all day. “Will you come with me? You don’t have to say anything, but will you just stand with me?”

  Tears blocked Young’s words, and she couldn’t do anything but keep holding her daughter close, stroking her hair and nodding over and over again. Soon, she would gently push her daughter away, just a little, help her stand upright on her own, and say she loved her and she’d be proud to come and stand with her as she told the truth, however painful it was. She would say she was sorry for having failed her, for leaving her alone all those years in Baltimore and not standing up for her, and if she could, she’d never leave her again. She would ask the questions that remained and tell the stories still untold. She would do all this, eventually—in a minute, or an hour, or a day. But standing still right here, feeling the weight of her daughter’s body leaning against hers, her warm breath on her neck—for now, that was all she needed.

  AFTER

  November 2009

  YOUNG

  SHE SAT ON A TREE STUMP outside the barn. Rather, where the barn used to be until yesterday, when the new owners demolished its remains and took them away, piece by piece. All that was left was the submarine, lying on the dirt, waiting to be taken to a junkyard somewhere, the juxtaposition of its steel and wires against the grass and trees looking like a tableau out of some science-fiction film.

  This was Young’s favorite part of the day. Early in the morning, so early that night blended with day. Moonlight shone, but not a full moon. Just a sliver, casting the faintest light on the submarine. She couldn’t see it, exactly, not the charring or the paint blisters or the jagged teeth of the portholes’ broken glass. She could see only its outline, and in this light (or rather, lack of light), it looked the same as last year when it was freshly painted and gleaming.

  At 6:35, the chamber was still a shadowy black oval, but in the distance, the sky was brightening. She looked up at the clouds, the hint of peach in the grayness, and remembered the disorientation she’d felt looking at the clouds on the Seoul–New York flight, her first time on an airplane. She’d gazed out the porthole to watch her homeland fade away as the plane ascended into a thick layer of clouds. When they emerged above, she marveled at the beauty of the clouds’ constancy—the uniformity of their variations, the patterns in their randomness—as they stretched to the horizon. She looked at the metal-smooth wing, fluttering slightly as it grazed the clouds’ diffuse edges before slicing the cottony blooms in perfect precision, and she had a flickering sense of wrongness, that she didn’t belong in the sky. It felt like hubris. Rejecting your natural place in the world and using an alien machine to defy gravity and dislocate yourself to another continent.

  At 6:44, the sky turned a soft mauve, the black of the night fighting against the sun and losing. The chamber’s charred spots were becoming visible, but still, it was dark enough that they looked like shadows, or maybe moss growing over the metal and making the machine a part of the landscape.

  At 6:52, the sky was a delicate blue, the color of newborn nurseries. The submarine’s aquamarine paint, once so glossy it looked wet, now looked pockmarked.

  At 6:59, bright beams of sunlight penetrated the thick foliage and hit the submarine at once, as if all the stage lights had switched on to spotlight the show’s star. For a second, the light was so bright that a halo encircled the submarine, hiding its imperfections. But Young stared straight on, forcing her pupils to adjust and constrict, and she saw the proof of the crime: black charring everywhere; the porthole glass melted as if the submarine were crying; the whole tank tilted like an old man with a cane.

  She closed her eyes and breathed. In, out. Though it had been over a year, the smell of ash and burned flesh still clung to the tank’s carcass, mixing with the morning dew to form a charcoal stench. Or maybe that was her imagination. Her conscience, telling her tiny particles were infiltrating her lungs and she might, at this moment, be breathing in the cells of the people incinerated in that chamber.

  She looked toward the creek. She couldn’t see the water, hidden behind the thicket of leaves stained in bright yellows and reds, no pattern to the colors as if toddlers had run around with paint cans, spraying trees at random. She imagined Mary sitting behind those trees, her feet centimeters from the water, smoking and laughing with Matt Thompson and, one night, being held down by him, assaulted; then, on a different night, being screamed at by his wife, told she was a stalker. A whore.

  It was funny, how before Mary’s full confession—rather, confessions, as she’d had to repeat it multiple times, to Abe, the public defender, and the sentencing judge in the course of pleading guilty to felony murder and arson—she’d believed that Mary needed to accept whatever punishment she received. But now that Mary and Pak were in prison, she wondered if it was truly fair that Mary faced years in prison—ten minimum—when many others who’d contributed to the causal chain that night got nothing. Yes, Mary set the fire. But she wouldn’t have if Janine hadn’t lied that the dive was over and Matt had left. She couldn’t have if Pak hadn’t left the cigarette and matches where he had. And Matt—he was the causal root of everything: without him, without his actions and lies to Mary and Janine, they wouldn’t have done what they’d done the night of the explosion. Even the cigarette Pak placed under the oxygen tube was Matt’s, from his trash pile in the hollow tree stump. And yet, the law considered Janine a mere bystander, assigning no blame to her. And Pak and Matt got nothing for their roles in causing the fire itself; Pak received fourteen months in jail and Matt a suspended sentence with probation, but both for perjury and obstruction of justice. She heard that Matt and Janine were getting a divorce, which comforted her somewhat; as much as she tried, Matt’s treatment of her daughter was the one unpunished act in all this that she could not forgive.

  And herself, most of all. So many things she should and could have done differently at so many points along the way. If she’d stayed in the barn and turned off the oxygen in time. If she hadn’t lied to Abe for a year. But more than anything, if only she’d confessed everything to Elizabeth that last day. She’d told all this to Abe and pleaded that she, too, needed jail, but he’d called everything she’d done “tangential” and refused to file charges.

  At 7:00, her watch beeped. Time to go in and pack the rest of her things. It had been just about this time when the protesters arrived that morning, starting the entire chain of events. She didn’t blame them, exactly. But if they hadn’t come, Henry, Kitt, and Elizabeth would all be alive now. Pak wouldn’t have caused the power outage, the dives wouldn’t have been delayed, and the oxygen would’ve been off and everyone gone by the time Mary set the fire, which she wouldn’t have done anyway because Pak wouldn’t have left any cigarette anywhere.

  That was both the best and worst part, that all that happened was the unintended consequence of a good person’s mistakes. Teresa once said that what really got her, what kept her up at night and drove her to keep looking for a cure, was that Rosa wasn’t supposed to be this way. If she’d been born with a genetic defect, Teresa could live with that. But she’d been healthy, and she had gotten this way because of something that shouldn’t have happened—an illness not treated in time. It was unnatural, avoidable. In the same way, Young almost wished Mary had done this intentionally. Not really, because of course she didn’t want Mary to be evil, but in a way, it was worse knowing that her daughter was a good person who made one mistake. It was almost as if the fates conspired to manipulate that day’s events in just such a way as to lead Mary to light that match. So many pieces had to fit: the power outage, the dive delays, Matt’s note, Janine’s confrontation, Pak’s cigarette. If just one of those things hadn’t happened, at this moment, Elizabeth and Kitt would be driving Henry and TJ to school. Mary would be in college. Miracle Submarine would still be running, and she and Pak would be getting ready for a full day of dives ahead.

&nbs
p; But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together—one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.

  Young walked to a tree with red leaves and picked up the three brightest leaves she could find on the ground. Red for luck. She wondered how these woods would look in ten years, when Mary was out of prison. She’d be in her late twenties. She could still go to college, fall in love, have children. That was something to hope for. In the meantime, Young would continue to visit her every week—if any good came out of the last months, it had to be the revival and deepening of her relationship with her daughter. She brought Mary her favorite philosophy college texts, and they discussed them during their visits, like a two-person book club, with Young speaking in Korean and Mary in English, eliciting puzzled looks from the other inmates.

  It had been harder with Pak, especially at first, when she’d been so angry with his stubbornness, but Young forced herself to visit regularly, and with each visit, she felt a thawing from him, a deepening repentance and acceptance of responsibility not only for the fire and Elizabeth’s death, but for his attempt to control them into silence. Maybe, over time, it would get easier to see him, talk to him. Forgive him.

  Teresa arrived and parked by the construction equipment—a loader crane, the workers said. She was alone. “Is Rosa with your church friends?” Young said as they hugged hello.

  Teresa nodded. “Yup. We have a lot to do today,” she said, which was true. They’d already moved most of Young’s things into Teresa’s guest room (“Stop calling it a guest room; it’s your room now,” Teresa kept saying), but they still had a dozen errands on Shannon’s checklist for the building-dedication ceremony at noon. Since the Washington Post article last week, the number of attendees had tripled, and now included the D.C.-area autism moms’ group, many former Miracle Submarine families, Abe and his staff, all the detectives and their staff, and—a last-minute surprise—Victor. Of course, Victor was the one who’d made the entire endeavor possible, when he (in a bizarre twist) inherited Elizabeth’s money and told Shannon he didn’t want it, that he thought Elizabeth would want it used for something good, maybe autism-related, and would Shannon take care of that? Shannon had consulted Teresa, and together, with Young’s help, they were creating Henry’s House, a nonresidential “home base” for special-needs children providing on-site therapy as well as day care and weekend camps.