Miracle Creek: A Novel

by Angie Kim

  It had been at this moment, as Matt and Mary were laughing, that Pak said, “HBOT has high rate of curing infertility, especially for people like you—low sperm motility.” Right then, at this confirmation that his wife had shared details—medical details, personal details—not only with her parents but also with these people he’d never met before, Matt felt something hot in his chest, as if a balloon filled with lava had stretched and burst in his lungs, displacing the oxygen. Matt stared into Pak’s eyes and tried to breathe normally. Strangely, it wasn’t Janine’s gaze he needed to avoid, but Mary’s. He hadn’t wanted to know how those words—infertility, low sperm motility—would change the way she looked at him. If her previously curious (possibly interested?) look would now be tinged with disgust or, worse, pity.

  Matt said to Abe, “My wife and I had problems conceiving, and HBOT was an experimental treatment for men involved in these situations, so it made sense to take advantage of this new business.” He left out that he hadn’t agreed at first, had refused to even address it for the rest of dinner. Janine said what she’d clearly practiced, how Matt’s volunteering as a patient would help launch the business, how the presence of a “regular doctor” (Janine’s words) would reassure potential clients of HBOT’s safety and effectiveness. She didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t answering, that he was keeping his eyes focused strictly on his plate. But Mary did. She noticed and came to his rescue again and again, laughing at his chopsticks technique and interjecting jokes about kimchi-garlic flavors mixing with wine.

  For days afterward, Janine had been a pain in the ass, going on about HBOT’s safety, its many uses, blah blah. When he didn’t budge, she tried to guilt him, said his refusal would cement her father’s suspicion that Matt didn’t believe in his business. “I don’t believe in it. I don’t think what he does is medicine, and you’ve known that from day one,” he’d said, which led to her most hurtful comment. “The fact is, you’re against anything Asian. You dismiss it.”

  Before he could rail against her for accusing him of racism, point out that he’d married her, for Christ’s sake (and besides, wasn’t she always going on about how racist old-time Koreans like her parents were?), Janine sighed and said in a pleading voice, “One month. If it works, no IVF. No jerking off into a cup. Isn’t that worth a try?”

  He never said yes. She just pretended his silence was acquiescence, and he let her. What she said was right, or at least not wrong. Plus, maybe it would get his father-in-law to start forgiving him for not being Korean.

  “When did you start HBOT?” Abe asked.

  “The first day it opened, August fourth. I wanted to get the forty sessions done in August—better traffic—so I signed up for two dives each day, the first at 9:00 a.m. and the last at 6:45 p.m. There were six sessions each day, and those times were reserved for us ‘double-dive’ patients.”

  “Who else was in the double-dive group?” Abe asked.

  “Three other patients: Henry, TJ, and Rosa. Plus their mothers. Aside from a few times when someone was sick or stuck in traffic or whatnot, we were all there, every day, twice a day.”

  “Tell us about them.”

  “Sure. Rosa is the oldest. Sixteen, I believe. She has cerebral palsy. She has a wheelchair and feeding tube. Her mother is Teresa Santiago.” He pointed to her. “We call her Mother Teresa because she’s extremely kind and patient.” Teresa blushed, as always when called that.

  “There’s TJ, who’s eight. He has autism. Nonverbal. And his mother, Kitt—”

  “That’s Kitt Kozlowski, who was killed last summer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you recognize this picture?” Abe placed a portrait on an easel. A posed shot with Kitt’s face in the center, like one of those Geddes baby flowers, except framed by her family’s faces instead of petals. Kitt’s husband above (standing behind her), TJ below (on her lap), two girls on the right, two on the left, all five kids with the same frizzy red curls as hers. A tableau of happiness. And now the mom was gone, leaving a sunflower with no center disk to hold up the petals.

  Matt swallowed and cleared his throat. “That’s Kitt, with her family, with TJ.”

  Abe placed another picture next to Kitt’s. Henry. Not one of those fake studio shots, but a slightly blurred picture of him laughing on a sunny day, blue sky and green leaves behind him. His blond hair mussed up a little, his head back and his blue eyes almost slits from laughing so hard. A missing tooth smack in the middle, as if he’d been showing it off.

  Matt swallowed again. “That’s Henry. Henry Ward. Elizabeth’s son.”

  Abe said, “Did the defendant accompany Henry for the dives, like the other mothers?”

  “Yes,” Matt said. “She always came in with Henry, except for the last dive.”

  “Every single dive, and the only time she sat out just happened to be when everyone inside was hurt or killed?”

  “Yes. The only time.” Matt looked at Abe, tried hard not to look at Elizabeth, but he could see her in the periphery. She was staring at the pictures, sucking her lips into her mouth to gnaw on them, the pink lipstick gone. It looked wrong, her face with makeup lining her blue eyes, color on her cheeks, shadow accentuating her nose, then nothing under the nose—just white. Like a clown who’s forgotten to draw in lips.

  Abe placed a poster on a second easel. “Dr. Thompson, would this be helpful in explaining Miracle Submarine’s physical setup?”

  “Yes, very,” Matt said. “This is my crude drawing of the lot. It’s in the town of Miracle Creek, ten miles west of here. Miracle Creek is an actual creek—it runs through the town; thus the name. Anyway, the creek runs through the woods next to the treatment barn.”

  “Sorry, did you say ‘treatment barn’?” Abe looked puzzled, as if he hadn’t seen the barn four thousand times.

  “Yes. There’s a wooden barn in the middle of the lot, and the HBOT chamber is inside. When you walk in, to the left is the control panel where Pak sat. Plus cubbies for us to leave anything not allowed in the chamber, like jewelry, electronics, paper, synthetic clothing, anything that could set off a spark—Pak had very strict safety rules.”

  “And what’s outside the barn?”

  “In the front, there’s a gravelly parking spot big enough for four cars. To the right, the woods and the creek. To the left, a little house where Pak’s family lives, and to the back, a storage shed and the power lines.”

  “Thank you,” Abe said. “Now take us through a typical dive. What happened?”

  “We’d crawl into the chamber through the hatch. I usually went last and sat closest to the exit. That’s where the intercom headset was, for communicating with Pak.” That sounded like a plausible enough reason, but the truth was, Matt preferred being on the margins of the group. The moms liked to talk, trading experimental treatment protocols, telling life stories. That was fine for them, but he was different. He was a doctor, for one, who didn’t believe in alternative therapies. Plus, he wasn’t a parent at all, much less the parent of a special-needs kid. He wished he could’ve brought in a magazine or paperwork, some shield against their constant questions. It was ironic, how he was in there to try to have kids, but everywhere he turned, he felt like, God, do I really want kids? So much can go wrong.

  “So then,” Matt said, “the pressurization. It simulates how a real dive feels.”

  “What’s that like? For those of us who haven’t experienced submarine rides,” Abe said, eliciting appreciative smiles from several jurors.

  “It’s like a plane landing. Your ears feel heavy, and they can pop. Pak pressurized slowly to minimize the discomfort, so it took about five minutes. Once we were at 1.5 ATA—that’s like seventeen feet below sea level—we put on oxygen helmets.”

  One of Abe’s minions handed Abe a clear plastic helmet. “Like this?”

  Matt took the helmet. “Yes.”

  “How does this work?”

  Matt turned toward the jury and pointed to the blue latex ring at the bottom. “
This here fits around your neck, and your whole head goes inside.” He stretched the opening like a turtleneck and put it on, the clear bubble encasing his head.

  “Next, the tubing,” Matt said, and Abe handed him a clear plastic coil. It slithered out and seemed to go on forever, like one of those tiny snakes that become ten feet when they unfurl.

  “What does that do, Doctor?”

  Matt inserted the tube into an opening in the helmet by his jaw. “It connects the helmet to the oxygen spigot inside the chamber. There are oxygen tanks behind the barn, and tubing connects them to the spigots. When Pak turned on the oxygen, it would travel through the tubes into our helmets. The oxygen would expand and make the helmet puffy, like inflating a ball.”

  Abe smiled. “Then you look like you’re wearing a fishbowl on your head.” The jurors laughed. Matt could tell they liked Abe, this plainspoken guy who told it like it was, didn’t act like he was too smart for them. “Then what?”

  “Pretty simple. The four of us would breathe normally, and be breathing in one hundred percent oxygen, for sixty minutes. At the end of the hour, Pak would turn off the oxygen, we’d remove the helmets, then depressurization, and exit,” Matt said, and removed the helmet.

  “Thank you, Dr. Thompson. It’s helpful to get this overview. Now, I’d like to get to why we’re here, what happened on August 26 last year. Do you remember that day?”

  Matt nodded.

  “I’m sorry. You have to answer verbally. For the court reporter.”

  “Yes.” Matt cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  Abe’s eyes squinted a bit, then widened, as if he was unsure whether he should be apologetic or excited about what was to come. “Tell us, in your words, what happened that day.”

  The courtroom shifted then, almost imperceptibly, all the bodies in the jury box and gallery moving forward a tenth of an inch. This was what the people had come for. Not just the gore, though there was that—the blow-up photos and the charred remains of the equipment—but the drama of tragedy. Matt saw it every day in the hospital: broken bones, car accidents, cancer scares. People cried about it, sure—the pain, the unfairness, the inconvenience of it all—but there were always one or two in every family who got energized by being at the periphery of suffering, every cell in their bodies vibrating at a slightly higher frequency, woken from the mundane dormancy of their everyday lives.

  Matt looked down at his ruined hand, thumb, fourth finger, and pinkie sticking out of a red blob. He cleared his throat again. He’d told this story many times. To the police, to the doctors, to the insurance investigators, to Abe. One last time, he told himself. Just once more through the explosion, the scorch of the fire, the obliteration of little Henry’s head. Then he’d never have to talk about it again.

  TERESA SANTIAGO

  IT HAD BEEN A HOT DAY. The kind that made you sweat at 7:00 a.m. Full sun after a three-day downpour—the air dense and heavy, like being in a dryer full of wet clothes. She’d actually looked forward to that morning’s dive; it’d be a relief to be sealed up in an air-conditioned chamber.

  Teresa nearly hit someone pulling into the lot. A group of six women were holding signs and walking in an oval, like a picket line. Teresa was slowing down, trying to read the signs, when someone walked into her path. She braked hard, barely missing the woman. “My God!” Teresa said, stepping out of her van. The woman kept walking. No yell, no finger, no glance. “Excuse me, but what’s happening here? We need to get inside,” Teresa said to them. All women. Holding signs saying I’M A CHILD, NOT A LAB RAT!; LOVE ME, ACCEPT ME, DON’T POISON ME; and QUACK MEDICINE = CHILD ABUSE—all scrawled in block letters in primary colors.

  A tall woman with a silver bob came over. “This strip here’s public property. We have a right to be here, to stop you. HBOT is dangerous, it doesn’t work, and you’re just teaching your kids you don’t love them the way they are.”

  A car honked behind her. Kitt. “We’re down here. Ignore the crazy bitches,” she said, and motioned down the road. Teresa shut her van door and followed. Kitt didn’t go far. Just to the next pull-off area, a clearing in the woods. Through the thick foliage, she glimpsed the post-storm Miracle Creek, brown and swollen and lazy.

  Matt and Elizabeth were already there. “Who the hell are those people?” Matt said.

  Kitt said to Elizabeth, “I know they’ve been saying awful things about you and making crazy threats, but I never thought they’d actually act on them.”

  “You know them?” Teresa said.

  “Only from online stuff,” Elizabeth said. “They’re fanatics. Their kids all have autism, and they go around saying how it’s the way they’re meant to be, and all treatments are evil and sham and kill kids.”

  “But HBOT’s nothing like that,” Teresa said. “Matt, you can tell them.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “There’s no reasoning with them. We can’t let them affect us. Come on, we’re going to be late.”

  They went through the woods to avoid the protesters, but it didn’t matter. The protesters spotted them and ran over, blocking them. The silver-bob-haired woman held up a flyer of an HBOT chamber surrounded by flames and 43! on top. “Fact: there have been forty-three HBOT fires, even some explosions,” the woman said. “Why would you put your children in something so dangerous? For what? So they’ll make more eye contact? Flap their hands less? Accept them the way they are. It’s the way God made them, the way they were born, and—”

  “Rosa wasn’t,” Teresa said, stepping forward. “She wasn’t born with cerebral palsy. She was healthy. She walked, she talked, she loved the monkey bars. But she got sick, and we didn’t take her to the hospital quickly enough.” She felt a hand squeeze her shoulder—Kitt. “She’s not supposed to be in a wheelchair. And you’re criticizing me, condemning me, for trying to heal her?”

  The silver-bobbed woman said, “I’m sorry for that. But our goal is to reach parents with autistic children, which is different—”

  “Why’s it different?” Teresa said. “Because they’re born with it? What about kids born with tumors, cleft palates? God clearly meant for that, but does that mean their parents shouldn’t pursue surgery, radiation, whatever it takes to get them healthy and whole?”

  “Our kids are already healthy and whole,” the woman said. “Autism isn’t a defect, just a different way of being, and any so-called treatment for it is quack nonsense.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Kitt said, stepping up next to Teresa. “I used to think that, then I read that many autistic kids have digestive issues, and that’s why they walk on tiptoes—the muscle-stretching helps with the pain. TJ’s always toe-walked, so I got him tested. It turned out he had severe inflammation, and he couldn’t tell us.”

  “The same with her.” Teresa pointed to Elizabeth. “She’s been trying tons of treatments, and her son’s improved so much that the doctors say he’s not autistic anymore.”

  “Yeah, we know all about her treatments. Her son’s very lucky that he’s survived them all. Not all kids do.” The woman held the flyer on HBOT fires right up to Elizabeth’s face.

  Elizabeth scoffed and shook her head at the woman, pulling Henry close to her and walking away. The woman grabbed Elizabeth’s arm and yanked, hard. Elizabeth yelped, tried to get away, but the woman tightened her grip, wouldn’t let go. “I’m done letting you ignore me,” the woman said. “If you don’t stop, something terrible will happen. I guarantee it.”

  “Hey, back off,” Teresa said, stepping between them and slapping the woman’s hand away. The woman turned her way, her hands closing into a fist as if to punch her, and Teresa felt a cold tingle in her shoulders crawl down her back. She told herself not to be silly, this was just a mom with strong opinions, nothing to be scared of, and said, “Let us through. Now.” After a moment, the protesters backed away. Then they raised their signs and quietly resumed walking in a crooked oval.

  * * *

  IT WAS STRANGE, sitting in court and listening to Matt recou
nt those same events from the morning of the explosion. Teresa hadn’t expected an exact match between his memories and hers—she watched Law & Order; she wasn’t that naïve—but still, the extent of the difference was unnerving. Matt reduced the encounter with the protesters to one phrase—“a debate about the efficacy and safety of experimental autism treatments”—with no mention of Teresa’s points about other diseases, the substance of the argument lost on him, or maybe just irrelevant. The hierarchy of disabilities—to Teresa, that was central, something she agonized over, and to Matt, it was nothing. If he had a disabled child, it’d be different, of course. Having a special-needs child didn’t just change you; it transmuted you, transported you to a parallel world with an altered gravitational axis.

  “During all this,” Abe was saying, “what was the defendant doing?”

  “Elizabeth didn’t get involved at all,” Matt said, “which struck me as odd, because she’s usually very vocal about autism treatments. She just kept staring at the flyer. There was text on the bottom, and she kept squinting, like she was trying to make out what it said.”

  Abe handed Matt a document. “Is this the flyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please read the bottom text.”

  “‘Avoiding sparks in the chamber is not enough. In one case, a fire started outside the chamber under the oxygen tubing led to an explosion with fatalities.’”