by Angie Kim
Mary knelt next to Pak and rested her head on his shoulder. Pak patted her head, as if to say it was okay, all was forgiven, and Mary held out her hand to Young, inviting her to join her and Pak. Even after she went to them, one hand in Mary’s, the other in Pak’s, forming a circle, Young felt a sense of being an outsider, of being excluded from the bond between her husband and daughter. Pak had forgiven Mary for disobeying his plan; would he have been so understanding of Young? And Mary—she’d broken through her months-long silence for Pak; would she have done that for Young?
Abe said, “Don’t worry, we’ll work it out. Pak, I’ll have you explain tomorrow during your testimony. Mary, I may have to put you on the stand.” Abe stood up. “But I can’t help unless you’re straight with me, and I don’t want another day like today. So let me ask you: Is there anything, anything, you haven’t told me?”
Pak said, “No.”
Mary said, “No, nothing.”
Abe looked at Young. Young opened her mouth but no words came out. She realized that she’d said nothing this entire time, since Mary opened the door.
“Young? Is there something else?” Abe said.
Young thought of Mary on that night, helping Pak to keep watch over the protesters while she was alone, ransacking the house for batteries. She thought of her call with Pak, her complaining about and his defending their daughter, as always.
“Anything at all? Now’s the time,” Abe said. Pak’s and Mary’s hands squeezed hers tight, urging her to join them.
Young looked down at the faces of her husband and daughter, turned to Abe, and said, “You know everything.” Then she stood, united with her family, as Abe told them that after the next witness’s testimony, no one, absolutely no one, would have the slightest doubt that Elizabeth wanted her son dead.
TERESA
SHE COULDN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT SEX. All through lunch recess, munching her food, strolling through the shops, gazing at the vineyards: sex, sex, sex.
It started at one of the oh-so-cute cafés that peppered Main Street. The walls were lilac with hand-painted grape drawings, clearly a ladies-who-lunch place. The guy at the register, though, had been a man, right out of central casting for Hot Young Dude, his chiseled muscularity accentuated by its juxtaposition to the dainty background. Approaching him to pay for her salad, Teresa caught a whiff of something familiar, deep from her past. Something spicy—maybe Polo, her high school boyfriend’s cologne—mixed with drying sweat. The musky, pungent scent of orgasm—not the kind she was used to, by herself under the covers with only her index finger moving in small circles, but the kind she hadn’t had in eleven years, held down by the weight of a man’s body on hers, their bodies slippery with sweat.
“It’s hot out there. You sure you want this to go?” the guy said.
She said, in what she thought was a vaguely sexual tone, “I like it hot.” She gave him a half smile of the suggestive variety and sauntered out, savoring the swivel of her skirt, the graze of silk against her skin. A block later, she saw Matt, who called her Mother Teresa, and she had to fight not to laugh out loud at the combined deliciousness and ridiculousness of the moment.
It may have been the skirt. She hadn’t worn one in years. With all the bending necessary to manage Rosa’s wheelchair and tubes, skirts were not an option. Or maybe it was being alone. Remarkably, wonderfully, dizzyingly alone, with no one to take care of. Liberated from the roles of 24/7 Mom-Nurse to Rosa and Spare-Time Mom to Carlos (a.k.a “The Other Kid,” as he called himself) for the first time in eleven years.
Not that she never had free time; a few hours every week, church volunteers took turns babysitting. But those outings were rushed, filled with errands. Yesterday was the first time in a decade she’d spent an entire day away from Rosa—the first time she didn’t handle all her feedings and diaper changes, didn’t drive her to therapies in their handicap-modified van, didn’t greet her out of sleep and kiss her good night. It had been nerve-racking, and the volunteers had had to push her out the door, saying not to worry, just focus on the trial. She’d called home as soon as she got to court and twice during the first break.
During lunch recess yesterday, Teresa called home, ate the sandwich she’d packed, and looked at her watch. Fifty minutes left, with nothing she had to get done. So she walked. Aimlessly. There were no Targets or Costcos. Only jewel-toned shops designed for frivolity, flaunting their deliberate rejection of the practical. She walked into a used bookstore with a whole section on ancient maps but not one book on special-needs parenting, a clothing store with fifteen varieties of slap-on bracelets but no underwear or socks. With each passing minute of just browsing, of not being a caregiver, Teresa felt herself shedding that role, cell by cell, like a snake with its skin, unearthing what had been covered. Not Teresa the Mother or Teresa the Nurse, but simply Teresa, a woman. The world of Rosa, Carlos, wheelchairs, and tubes becoming surreal and distant. The intensity of her love and worry for them growing fainter like stars at dawn—still there, but not as visible.
After the first day of the trial, Teresa drove home in the borrowed coupe, singing to rock songs. When she got home ten minutes before Rosa’s bedtime, she drove past her house, parked in a hidden wooded spot, and, for fifteen minutes, read a book she’d bought during recess, a 99-cent Mary Higgins Clark mystery, savoring the extra stolen minutes.
It was like those Method actors, who get more into character the longer they pretend to be someone else. Today, Teresa left the house earlier than necessary. She acted the part of a single woman—put on makeup in the car, wore her hair long, stared at vineyard workers. And for the briefest moment with the cashier guy, she actually felt like a free woman, a woman without the male-repellent combination of a disabled daughter and a surly son.
She waited until the last minute to return to court. At the door, two women she’d met a few times—Miracle Submarine patients from the morning dive after hers—greeted her. One woman said, “I was just saying how hard this is, me being here. My husband’s not used to taking care of the kids,” and the other said, “Same here. I hope the trial ends soon.”
Teresa nodded and tried to shape her lips into an I-feel-the-same-way smile. She wondered if it made her a bad person, her self-indulgent delight at this hiatus from her life. Was she a bad mother if she didn’t miss Rosa’s curled lips, opening to say “Mama”? A bad friend to the volunteers if she prayed the trial would last a month? She opened her mouth to say, “I know, I feel so guilty,” when she saw their faces—not guilty, but excited, their eyes darting everywhere, caught up in the drama of the courtroom. It occurred to her then: the possibility that these women, like Teresa, were playing the part of Good Mother, trying to pretend they weren’t relishing this quasi-vacation that forced their husbands into the chaotic mundanity of their day-to-day lives. Teresa looked at them, smiled, and said, “I know exactly how you feel.”
* * *
IT WAS MUGGY in the courtroom. She’d expected relief from the heat—over a hundred, someone said—but the air was just as dense inside. Maybe from everyone who’d walked in the hot sun, soaking up the humidity like a sponge, now stepping in and releasing the dank heat. The air conditioners were on, but they sounded feeble, sputtering once in a while as if exhausted. The air dribbling out, not cooling the room so much as ushering sweat particles around it.
Abe announced his next witness: Steve Pierson, an arson specialist and lead investigator. As he walked up, his bald head slimy and pink with sweat, Teresa could almost see steam rise from it. Teresa was barely five feet tall, so most people seemed big to her, but Detective Pierson was a giant, even taller than Abe. The witness stand squeaked as he stepped up, and the wooden chair looked like a toy next to his bulk. When he sat, the streaming sun hit his hairless head-bulb like a spotlight, casting a halo around his face. It reminded Teresa of the first time she saw him, the night of the explosion: him standing against the backdrop of the fire, with twitching flames reflecting off the gloss of his scalp.
It had been a nightmare scene. Sirens in varying pitches from fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars blaring above the steady crackle of the fire eating through the barn. The emergency vehicles’ flashing lights against the darkening sky creating a psychedelic nightclub vibe, with foam-water lines from hoses crisscrossing in midair like streamers. And stretchers. Stretchers with their bright white sheets, everywhere.
Both Teresa and Rosa were fine, miraculously, just smoke inhalation for which they were given—an irony—pure oxygen. As she breathed in, she saw Matt fighting off EMTs holding him down. “Let me go! She doesn’t know yet. I need to tell her.”
Teresa stopped breathing. Elizabeth. She didn’t know her son was dead.
That’s when Steve Pierson had come into view, with his freakishly wide shoulders and hairless head like a caricature of a movie villain. “Sir, we’ll find the deceased boy’s mother,” he said in a high, nasal squeak, all the more alien because it contrasted with the booming bass she expected from such a big body. It seemed wrong, as if his real voice had been dubbed by a recording from a prepubescent boy. “We’ll deliver the news.”
Deliver the news. Ma’am, I have news, Teresa imagined this man saying, as if Henry’s death were an interesting CNN foreign-correspondence report. Your son is deceased.
No. She would not let some stranger who looked like a Scandinavian sumo wrestler and spoke like Alvin the Chipmunk tell Elizabeth, would not let him infect that moment she’d relive again and again. Teresa herself had lived that, an oh-so-busy-and-important doctor telling her, “I’m calling to inform you that your daughter is in a coma,” then cutting off her shocked “What? Is this a joke?” with “I’d suggest getting here as soon as possible. She likely won’t survive much longer.” Teresa wanted a friend to tell Elizabeth gently, to cry with and hug her the way she wished her ex-husband had instead of delegating to a stranger.
Teresa left Rosa with the EMTs and went to find Elizabeth. It was 8:45, so the dive was supposed to have ended a while ago. Where was she? Not in her car. Maybe she’d gone for a walk? Matt had said once that there was a nice trail by the creek.
It took her five minutes to find her, lying on a blanket by the creek. “Elizabeth?” Teresa said, but she didn’t answer. Walking closer, she saw white buds in her ears. Tinny echoes of blaring music leaked out of them, mixing with the gurgling creek and chirping crickets.
The darkening sky cast a purplish shadow on Elizabeth’s face. Her eyes were closed, a slight smile on her face. Serene. A pack of cigarettes and matches lay on the blanket, next to a cigarette butt, crumpled paper, and a thermos bottle.
“Elizabeth,” Teresa said again. Nothing. Teresa bent down and snatched the earbuds away. Elizabeth startled, her body jerking awake. The thermos fell over and a pale straw liquid gurgled out. Wine?
“Oh my God, I can’t believe I fell asleep. What time is it?” Elizabeth said.
“Elizabeth,” Teresa said, and cupped her hands. Flashing lights from the ambulance brightened the sky in spurts, like distant fireworks. “Something awful has happened. There was a fire, an explosion. It happened so quickly.” She gripped Elizabeth’s hands. “I’m afraid that Henry was … involved, and he … he’s…”
Elizabeth didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask He’s what?, didn’t gasp, didn’t scream. She just blinked at Teresa in even beats, as if counting down the seconds until Teresa could utter the last word in her sentence. Five, four, three, two, one. Hurt, Teresa yearned to say. Near death, even. Anything with just a shard of hope.
“Henry died,” Teresa finally said. “I’m so sorry, I can’t tell you—”
Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut and held up her hand as if to say, Stop. She swayed slightly, back and forth, like a shirt on a hanger in the summer breeze, and as Teresa leaned in to steady her, she opened her mouth in a silent howl. She snapped her head back, and Teresa realized: Elizabeth was laughing. Out loud, in a high-pitched, maniacal cackle, as she repeated like a mantra, “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!”
* * *
TERESA LISTENED to Detective Pierson’s testimony about the rest of that night. How Elizabeth had scanned the scene with an eerie calmness. How he’d led her to Henry’s stretcher and, before he could stop her, she’d pulled back the white sheet covering his face. How she hadn’t screamed or cried or clung to the body like other grieving parents, and he told himself it must be numbness from shock, but boy, it sure was creepy.
All through the recitation of these facts she’d known, lived through, Teresa looked down, smoothing the wrinkles on her hands, and thought about Elizabeth shouting “He’s dead!” Her guffaw in that moment—that was what told her Elizabeth didn’t kill Henry, or if she did, it wasn’t on purpose, wasn’t murder. When she was eight, Teresa had fallen through ice, on a pond. The water had been so cold, it felt boiling hot. Elizabeth’s laugh had felt like that, like she’d been in so much pain that she’d bypassed crying, straight past it to something beyond: a grief-stricken cackle that transmitted more pain than any sob or scream. But how could she put that into words, explain that Elizabeth’s laugh had not been a laugh? Her drinking and smoking—unmotherly things—were bad enough. Laughing when told of her son’s death would make her seem at best crazy, and at worst psychopathic. So she’d never told anyone.
Abe was putting something on the easel. A blowup of notepad paper, phrases scrawled everywhere. Mostly to-do lists: phone numbers, URLs, grocery items. Five phrases, scattered around the page, were highlighted in yellow: I can’t do this anymore; I need my life back; It needs to end TODAY!!; Henry = victim? How?; and NO MORE HBOT, this last phrase circled a dozen times in one stroke, like a child’s drawing of a tornado. Uneven lines crisscrossed the paper; it had been torn and put back together like a puzzle.
Abe said, “Detective Pierson, tell us what this is.”
“It’s an enlarged and highlighted copy of a note found in the defendant’s kitchen. It had been torn into nine pieces and discarded in the trash can. Handwriting analysis confirmed the writing as the defendant’s.”
“So the defendant wrote, tore, and threw this away. Why’s it significant?”
“It seems to be a planning document of sorts. The defendant had enough of caring for her special-needs child. She planned to ‘end’ it all that night.” He drew air quotes. “‘No more HBOT,’ she wrote. By matching the URLs and numbers here with the defendant’s Internet history and phone records, we determined that she wrote this on the day of the explosion. So hours after she writes this, the HBOT blows up, killing her son. And as that’s happening, she’s celebrating by drinking wine and smoking, which one might view as the ultimate symbol of freedom from parental responsibilities.” Pierson frowned at Elizabeth as if he’d bitten down on spoiled food, and Teresa wondered if he’d give her the same look if he’d seen her last night, hiding out in her car for a few more minutes of freedom from her disabled child.
“Perhaps the defendant was writing about being tired and planning to quit HBOT. Isn’t that possible, Detective?”
Pierson shook his head. “She sent e-mails that very day canceling Henry’s therapy—speech, OT, physical, social—all except HBOT. Why not quit HBOT, too, if ‘No more HBOT’ meant she wanted to quit, unless of course there’s no need because she knew it’d be destroyed?”
“Hmmm, very peculiar.” Abe put on his I-can’t-figure-this-out look.
“Yes, quite a coincidence, the defendant deciding to quit HBOT on the very day that it happens to explode and everything she wrote down comes true, and conveniently, Henry no longer needs the services she just canceled.”
“But coincidences do happen,” Abe said, voice animated, clearly putting on a good cop, bad cop show for the jurors.
“True, but if she decided to quit, why go to the next dive? Why make the long drive then lie that she’s sick? Why do that after spending the afternoon researching HBOT fires, as confirmed by our forensic analysis of her computer?”
Abe said, “Detective
Pierson, as an expert in arson investigations, what conclusion did you draw from the defendant’s computer searches and notes?”
“Her searches focused on the mechanics of HBOT fires—where they start, how they spread—which indicate a person planning arson, figuring out how best to set fire to ensure the death of people inside an HBOT chamber. Her note, ‘Henry = victim? How?’ demonstrates her focus on how to ensure that Henry is, in fact, the victim, the one who’s killed. Her later orchestrating Henry’s seating to ensure his placement in the most dangerous spot confirms that.”
“Objection.” Elizabeth’s lawyer asked for a sidebar. While the lawyers conferred with the judge, Teresa looked at the poster. Every scrawl was something Teresa herself might have written. How many times had she thought, I can’t do this anymore. I need my life back? Hell, it was part of her nightly prayers: “Dear God, please help Rosa, please bring us a new cure or drug or something, God, because I need my life back. Carlos needs his life back. Rosa, most of all, needs her life back. Please, God.” And last summer, making the long drive twice a day, hadn’t she counted down the days, said to Rosa, “Nine more days, my girl, then NO MORE HBOT!”?
And the Henry = victim? How? note. Pierson’s explanation made sense logically, intellectually, but something about that phrase triggered something. Henry equals victim, how. Henry is a victim, Henry as a victim? How? she repeated, losing herself in the rhythm that felt so familiar, like a long-ago lullaby.
It came to her suddenly. The protesters that morning. “You’re harming them,” the silver-bob-haired woman had said. “You’ve turned them into victims of your warped desire to have textbook-perfect children.” This had gotten to Elizabeth—her face had blanched even though it had been sauna-hot—and Teresa had said, “Come on, Henry a victim? That’s ridiculous. You buy Henry organic underwear, for God’s sake.” But later, she’d thought, Is Rosa a victim of my inability to accept her? But I just want her healthy. How is that wrong? If she’d had paper, she might have doodled Rosa = victim? How?