Miracle Creek: A Novel

by Angie Kim

  “So why don’t I stay here with you? I can go to school here, or maybe I can come after school and help you,” Mary said.

  “No, the schools in this neighborhood are terrible. And you can’t be here at nighttime at all. It’s so dangerous, so many gangs, and…” Her mother shut her mouth and shook her head. “The Kangs can bring you for short visits on weekends, but it’s so far from their house … We can’t impose on them too much.”

  “Us impose on them?” Mary said. “They’re treating you like a slave, and you’re letting them. I don’t even know why we came here. What’s so great about American schools? They’re doing math I did in fourth grade!”

  “I know it’s hard now,” her mother said, “but it’s all for your future. We need to accept that, try our best.”

  Mary wanted to rail against her mother for giving in, refusing to fight. She’d done the same thing in Korea, when her father first told them of his plans. Mary knew her mother hated the idea—she’d overheard their fights—but in the end, her mother had given in, the way she always did, the way she was doing now.

  Mary said nothing. She stepped back and squinted to see her mother more clearly, this woman with tears pooling in the creases between her fingers, clasped together as if in prayer. She turned her back and walked away.

  Mary stayed the rest of the day, while the Kangs went out to celebrate their retirement. As upset as she was with her mother, she couldn’t help but be impressed by the finesse and energy with which she ran the store. She’d been training for only two weeks, but she knew most of the customers, greeting them by name and asking after their families in English—halting and with an accent, but still, better than Mary herself could do. In many ways, she was maternal with her customers: anticipating their needs; lifting their mood with her affectionate, almost coquettish laughter; but being firm when needed, as when she reminded several customers that food stamps could not buy cigarettes. Watching her mother, it occurred to Mary: the possibility that her mother actually liked it here. Was that why they were staying? Because running a store was more fulfilling than being a mere mother to her?

  Late afternoon, two girls walked in, the younger around five and the older Mary’s age. Her mother immediately unlocked the door. “Anisha, Tosha. You both look so pretty today,” she said, and hugged them. “Meet my daughter, Mary.”

  Mary. It sounded foreign in her mother’s familiar, lilting tone, like a word she’d never heard before. Unnatural. Wrong. She stood there, silent, as the five-year-old smiled and said, “I like your mommy. She gives me Tootsie Rolls.” Her mother laughed, handed the girl a Tootsie Roll, and kissed her forehead. “So that’s why you come in every day.”

  The older girl told her mother, “Guess what? I got an A on my math test!” As her mother said, “Wow! I told you, you can do it,” the girl said to Mary, “Your mom’s been helping me with long division this whole week.”

  After they left, her mother said, “Aren’t they sweet girls? I feel so bad for them; their father died last year.”

  Mary tried to feel sad for them. She tried to feel proud that this beloved, generous woman was her mother. But all she could think was that these girls would see her, hug her every day, and she would not. “It’s dangerous opening the door like that,” Mary said. “Why have the bulletproof door if you’re just going to open it and let people inside?”

  Her mother gazed at her for a long moment. She said, “Meh-hee-yah,” and tried to put her arms around her. Mary stepped back to avoid her touch. “My name is Mary now,” she said.

  * * *

  THAT WAS THE DAY Mary started calling her “Mom” instead of “Um-ma.” Um-ma was the mother who knitted her soft sweaters, who greeted her every day after school with barley tea and played jacks with her while listening to stories about what happened that day. And those lunches—who at school hadn’t envied Um-ma’s special lunches? The standard lunchbox fare in Korea was rice and kimchi in a stainless-steel container. But Um-ma always put in extras—fluffy bits of fish with the bones plucked out, a fried egg nested perfectly in the rice mound like a snowy volcano erupting yellow yolk, ghim-bop seaweed rolls with daikon radish and carrots, and yoo-boo-bop, sweet sticky rice tucked inside doll-sized pillowcases of fried tofu.

  But that Um-ma was gone, replaced by Mom, a woman who left her alone in someone else’s house, who didn’t know about the boys who called her “stupid chink” and the girls who giggled about her in front of her, who didn’t know that her daughter was struggling to know who Mary was and where Meh-hee had gone.

  So as she left the store that day, Mary said “Farewell” in Korean—she deliberately chose the formal phrase that implied distance, meant for strangers—then, looking straight into her eyes, said “Mom” instead of “Um-ma.” Seeing the jolt of hurt on her mother’s face—her cheeks blanching and mouth opening, as if to protest, but closing after a second, in resignation—Mary expected to feel better, but she didn’t. The room seemed to tilt. She wanted to cry.

  The next day, her mother started managing the store by herself and sleeping there more often than not. Mary had understood, at least intellectually: the drive home was thirty minutes, time better spent on sleep instead, especially since Mary wouldn’t be awake. But that first night, lying in bed, Mary thought how she hadn’t seen or talked to her mother all day for the first time in her life, and she hated her. For being her mother. For bringing her to a place that made her hate her own mother.

  That was her summer of silence. The Kangs went on a two-month trip to California to visit their son’s family, leaving Mary alone, with no school, no camp, no friends, no family. Mary tried to relish the freedom, told herself she was living a twelve-year-old girl’s fantasy—never bothered by parents or siblings, left alone all day to do, eat, and watch whatever she wanted. Besides, it wasn’t as if she’d seen much of the Kangs even before the trip—they were quiet and unobtrusive, doing their own activities and never bothering her. So she didn’t see how being on her own would be too different.

  There’s something, though, about the sounds that other people make. Not talking, necessarily. Just their sounds of living—creaking upstairs, humming a tune, watching TV, clanging dishes—that blot away your loneliness. You miss them when they’re gone. Their absence—the total silence—becomes palpable.

  And so it was with her. Mary went days without seeing another human being. Her mother made sure to come home every night, but not until one a.m., and she was gone before dawn. She never saw her.

  She did hear her, though. Her mother always came into her room when she returned home, stepping over Mary’s piles of dirty clothes to pull the blanket up, kiss her good night, and, some nights, just to sit on her bed, combing Mary’s hair with her fingers over and over, the way she used to in Korea. Mary was usually still awake, consumed by images of her mother caught in gunfire stepping out of the bulletproof vault in the middle of the night—a real possibility, the main reason for her mother’s refusal to bring Mary to the store. When she heard her mother tiptoeing in the hallway, a mix of relief and anger coursed through her. She thought it best not to speak, so she pretended to be asleep. Kept her eyes shut and her body still, willing her heartbeat to slow and calm, wanting the moment to continue, wanting to relish the reliving of her mother as Um-ma and savor the old affection.

  That was five years ago, before the Kangs returned and her mother started sleeping at the store again, before Mary became fluent in English and the bullies moved on, before her father came to America and moved them to a place where, once again, she felt like a foreigner, where people asked where she was from, and when she said Baltimore, said, “No, I mean, where are you really from?” Before cigarettes and Matt. Before the explosion.

  But here they were again. Her mother, combing her fingers through Mary’s hair, and Mary, pretending to be asleep. Lying here in the haze of half sleep, Mary felt transported back to Baltimore and wondered if her mother knew she’d been awake all those nights, how she’d waited for Um-ma�
��s return.

  “Yuh-bo, dinner’s getting cold,” Mary’s father’s voice sounded, breaking the moment. Her mother said, “Okay, coming,” shook her gently, and said, “Mary, dinner’s ready. Come out soon, okay?”

  Mary blinked and mumbled, as if just starting to rouse. She waited for her mother to leave and close the curtain before slowly sitting up, reorienting herself, forcing her mind to take in her surroundings. Miracle Creek, not Baltimore, not Seoul. Matt. The fire. The trial. Henry and Kitt, dead.

  At once, images of Henry’s charred head and Kitt’s chest on fire rushed back to her thoughts, and hot tears stung her eyes again. All year, Mary had tried hard not to think about them, about that night, but today, hearing about their last moments, imagining their pain—it was as if the images were needles surgically implanted throughout her brain, and every time she moved the tiniest bit, they poked her, sending white-hot flashes bursting behind her eyeballs and making her want to relieve the pressure, just open her mouth and scream.

  Next to her mat, she saw a newspaper she’d picked up in the courthouse. This morning’s, with the headline “Mommy Dearest” Murder Trial Begins Today. A picture showed Elizabeth gazing at Henry with a dazed smile, her head tilted, as if she couldn’t believe how much she adored her son, the same way she’d looked at HBOT: always pulling Henry close, smoothing his hair, reading with him. It had reminded Mary of Um-ma in Korea, and she’d felt a pang, seeing this mother’s singular devotion to her child.

  It had all been a ruse, of course. It had to be. The way Elizabeth had sat through Matt’s testimony about Henry being burned alive—without flinching, without crying, without screaming and running out. No mother with an ounce of love for her child could’ve done that.

  Mary looked at the picture again, this woman who’d spent last summer pretending to love her child while secretly planning his murder, this sociopath who’d placed a cigarette inches from an oxygen tube, knowing that the oxygen was on and her son inside. Her poor son, Henry, this beautiful boy, his wispy hair, baby teeth, all engulfed in …

  No. She shut her eyes tight and shook her head, side to side—hard, harder—until her neck hurt and the room spun and the world zigzagged sideways and upside down. When nothing remained in her head and she could no longer sit, she fell on the mat and buried her face in her pillow. She let the cotton soak up all her tears.

  ELIZABETH WARD

  THE FIRST TIME SHE HURT HER SON on purpose was six years ago, when Henry was three. They’d just moved into their new house outside D.C. A cookie-cutter McMansion—nice enough in isolation, but downright silly when clumped, as it was, with identical McMansions built too close on tiny lots separated by strips of grass. Elizabeth was not a fan of suburbia, but her then-husband, Victor, vetoed urban (“Too noisy!”) and rural (“Too far!”) choices and declared this house (close to two airports and three “feeder” preschools) a no-brainer.

  Their first week, their neighbor Sheryl threw a cul-de-sac party. When Elizabeth walked in with Henry, the kids—pretend-riding horse brooms, Thomas trains, and Cars cars—were ricocheting around the cavernous basement and squealing (in joy, fear, or pain, she couldn’t tell). The parents were cramped into a corner bar separated from the kids by childproof gates, looking like caged animals in a zoo exhibit, all gripping wineglasses and leaning in to talk over the racket.

  A few steps in, Henry held his palms to his ears and screamed, a high-pitched yell that sliced through the pandemonium. All eyes turned, converging at first on Henry, then rushing to her, the mom.

  Elizabeth turned to hug him tight, burying his face in her chest and muffling his scream. “Shhhh,” she said, over and over, patting his hair, until he stopped. She turned to the others. “I’m sorry. He’s very sensitive to noise. And moving and unpacking—he’s really overwhelmed.”

  The adults smiled and muttered platitudes: “Of course” and “No worries” and “We’ve all been there.” One man said to Henry, “I’ve been wanting to scream like that for an hour, so thanks for doing it for me, bud,” and chuckled so good-naturedly, so cheerfully, that Elizabeth wanted to hug him for defusing the tension. Sheryl opened the childproof gate to let the adults out and said in singsong, “Hey, kids, we have a new friend. Let’s all introduce ourselves.”

  One by one, the kids—all toddlers and preschoolers—answered Sheryl’s prompts for their names and ages, even the youngest, Beth, who pronounced her name as “Best” and held up her tiny index finger for her age. Sheryl turned to Henry. “And you, handsome knight,” she said, making the kids giggle, “what’s your name?”

  Elizabeth willed Henry to say, “Henry. I’m three,” or at least hide his face in her skirt so she could credibly say, “Henry’s shy around strangers,” which would prompt choruses of “Oh, how sweet!” from the moms. But that didn’t happen. Henry’s face remained blank. He stared off into space, eyes rolled up and mouth ajar, looking like a shell of a boy—no personality, no intelligence, no emotion.

  Elizabeth cleared her throat and said, “His name is Henry. He’s three,” managing to sound casual, with none of the thickness of embarrassment that was threatening to gag her. When little Beth toddled up and said, “Hi, Hen-wee,” the adults said some variant of “Awwww, isn’t that adorable?” and went back to their corner, chatting and offering drinks to Elizabeth, leaving her to wonder if she alone had registered the intense awkwardness. Was that possible?

  For the next five minutes, while Elizabeth mingled, Henry stood quietly in one spot. He didn’t play with the kids, didn’t look to be having fun, but at least he wasn’t calling attention to himself, which was the important thing. Elizabeth gulped her wine, its cool acidity soothing her throat and warming her stomach. An invisible dome seemed to veil her, making the kids look distant and unreal, like a movie, and muting their cacophony into a pleasant buzz.

  The moment broke when Sheryl said, “Poor Henry. He’s not playing with anyone.” Later that night, waiting for Victor’s call (conference in L.A.—the third that month), she’d imagine the different ways of handling that moment. She could’ve said, “He’s tired. He needs a nap,” and left, or she could’ve given Henry one of those music baby toys he fixated on so that he’d appear to be playing near, if not exactly with, the other kids. For sure, when Sheryl started a game to include Henry, she should’ve stepped in.

  In the days to come, Elizabeth would blame her inaction on the fog of wine, the way it tricked her into a fizzy state of numbness. She kept drinking as Sheryl and her husband sat five feet apart and held up their arms to form a gate. No one explained the rules, but it seemed simple enough: whenever they said bee-beep and raised their arms, kids ran, trying to make it through before their arms came down. She wasn’t sure why this was funny, but everyone guffawed, even the parents.

  After a few gate-opening-closing cycles, Sheryl said, “Henry, you want to play? It’s really fu-un.” One of the boys—a three-year-old, like Henry—held out his hand. “Come on, let’s run together.”

  Henry stood, not reacting, as if he were blind to the boy’s hand and deaf to his voice, nothing registering in his senses. Henry looked up at the ceiling, so intently that half the others looked up to see what was so interesting, then he turned his back to everyone, sat down, and started rocking.

  Everyone stopped and stared. Not for long—three seconds, five at most—but something about the moment, the absolute silence and stillness apart from Henry’s rocking, stretched time. She’d never understood the concept of time freezing during accidents, the preposterous notion of your whole life flashing before your eyes in one second, but that was exactly what happened: as Elizabeth stared at Henry’s rocking, snippets of her life played like a spliced movie in her mind. Newborn Henry refusing her breast, rock hard with milk. Three-month-old Henry crying for four hours nonstop; Victor coming home from a late-night client dinner to find her lying on the kitchen floor, sobbing. Fifteen-month-old Henry, the only one not crawling or walking at their playgroup, the mom of the girl who wa
s already running and speaking in short sentences saying, “It doesn’t matter. Babies develop at their own pace.” (Funny, how it was always the moms of precocious kids who extolled the virtues of not worrying about developmental milestones, all the while flashing those smug smiles of parents congratulating themselves for having “advanced” children.) Two-year-old Henry still not talking, Victor’s mom running around his birthday party saying, “Einstein didn’t talk until he was five!” Henry just last week at his three-year checkup, not making eye contact, his pediatrician saying the dreaded a-word (“Now, I’m not saying it’s autism, but testing can’t hurt”). Yesterday, the Georgetown scheduler saying the autism-test wait list is eight months, Elizabeth furious at herself for not calling a year ago—hell, two years ago—when, let’s face it, she knew there was something wrong, of course she did, but she wasted all that time just hoping and denying and talking about effing Einstein. And now, here he was, rocking—rocking!—in front of their new neighbors.

  Sheryl broke the silence. “I don’t think Henry feels like playing right now. Come on, who’s next?” There was a noticeably forced casualness to her voice, a fake joviality, and Elizabeth realized: Sheryl was embarrassed for Henry.

  Everyone turned back and resumed their game-playing and wine-sipping and small-talk-making, but cautiously, anxiously, at half the volume and energy level as before. The adults were trying hard to avoid looking Henry’s way, and when little Beth said, “What’s Hen-wee doing?” her mother whispered, “Shhh, not now,” and turned and said to Elizabeth, “Isn’t this dip great? It’s from Costco!” Elizabeth knew that everyone’s let’s-pretend-nothing’s-wrong act was for her sake. Maybe she should’ve been grateful. But somehow, it made it worse, as if Henry’s behavior were so deviant that they had to cover it up. If Henry had cancer or hearing loss, everyone would’ve felt pity, sure, but not shame. They would’ve gathered around, asking questions and expressing sympathies. Autism was different. There was a stigma to it. And she’d stupidly thought she could protect her son (or was it herself?) by saying nothing and desperately hoping no one would notice.