by Angie Kim
“Is that why you couldn’t remove Henry from his home immediately?”
“Yes, that’s exactly why. In cases of obvious injury, like broken bones, it’s easier to make that call. But in cases like this, where each incident is questionable and subtle, you have to consider multiple sources and see the whole picture, which takes time. Unfortunately, before we could do that, Henry died.”
“In summary,” Abe said, “does separating abuse into categories, then finding no abuse for each category—does that demonstrate there was no abuse here?”
“Absolutely not.”
Abe crossed out the categories. “Now, this chart is pretty much destroyed, but before I put it away, let’s focus on medical abuse. Detective, was Ms. Haug correct to list only IV chelation and MMS?”
“No. Those were the riskiest therapies inflicted on Henry. But again, you can’t just look at the procedure in isolation.” She looked at the jury. “I’ll give you an example. Chemotherapy. For a child with cancer, that’s obviously not medical abuse. But inflicting chemotherapy on a child without cancer would be. It’s not just the riskiness at issue, but the appropriateness.”
“But what about a child in remission from cancer? That’s the proper analogy, isn’t it, since Henry was diagnosed with autism at one time but then wasn’t?”
“True. But giving chemo to a child in remission would be a classic case of Munchausen by proxy, the condition we’re calling ‘medical abuse.’ A typical Munchausen case is when someone with a serious illness recovers. The caregiver loses the constant contact with hospitals and doctors, and tries to regain that by manufacturing symptoms to make it appear the child’s still sick. Here, Henry was diagnosed as no longer autistic. The defendant couldn’t accept that, and kept taking him to doctors and doing risky treatments he no longer needed, just so she could continue to get attention.”
Elizabeth thought about the autism moms’ group. Kitt used to ask, “Why do you keep doing all this shit? Why are you still coming to our meetings?” The answer came to her now: she hadn’t wanted to stop because she liked being in that world—where, for the first time in her life, she’d been the best, the envy of the group. Had Henry been in HBOT last summer and been scorched alive because she’d been on an ego trip?
She felt sick. She shut her eyes and pressed her palms into her stomach to keep from throwing up, and then someone was saying something about the importance of hearing directly from the victim.
She opened her eyes. Shannon was standing, objecting, and the judge said, “Overruled. Objection is noted,” and Shannon squeezed her hand and whispered, “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. You ready?” She wanted to say no, she had no idea what was happening, she was sick and needed to get out of here, but Abe was turning on the TV next to the easel.
Heights said, “This is the video recording of Henry the day before the explosion, when we interviewed him at camp.” Abe clicked the remote.
Henry’s head appeared, filling the screen in a close-up shot. The screen was huge, and she gasped at the clarity of the life-size video of Henry’s face, how you could see the faint freckles from the summer sun dotted across his nose and cheeks. Henry’s head was down, and when the off-screen voice—Detective Heights’s—said, “Hi, Henry,” he kept his chin down and looked up, making his huge eyes seem bigger, like a kewpie doll’s.
“Hello,” Henry said in a high-pitched voice, curious but cautious. When he opened his mouth, you could see a gap in his front teeth—the shadow of the tooth he’d lost that weekend, the one she took from under his pillow and replaced with a dollar from the tooth fairy, careful not to disturb his peaceful sleeping face on the pillow.
“How old are you, Henry?” Heights’s disembodied voice asked.
“I am eight years old,” he said, mechanical and formal like a robot giving programmed responses. Henry didn’t gaze at the camera or Detective Heights, who must have been behind or beside the camera. Instead, he looked up, his eyes wandering as if he were examining in detail a fresco on the ceiling. It occurred to her now that she couldn’t remember a single conversation with him when she didn’t say at least once, “Henry, don’t be spacey; look at me, always look at the person you’re talking to,” her words spewing out like venom. Why had it mattered so much where his eyes were pointed? Why had she never just talked to him, asked him what he was thinking or told him he had the same color eyes as her own father’s? Now, seen through the veil of her tears, Henry looked like a Renaissance painting of an angel, looking up at the Madonna. How had she never noticed the innocence, the beauty?
When Heights said, “Henry, that scratch on your arm. How did you get that?” Henry shook his head and said, “It is from a cat. My neighbor’s cat scratched me.”
Elizabeth shut her eyes tight. Something bitter and salty rushed down her throat as she heard her own lies emerge from those tiny lips. The fact was, the scratches on his arm were not from a cat. They were from her own nails, made on a day when they’d already been twelve minutes late to OT which, at $120 per hour, amounted to $24 in wasted money. They were about to be late to Speech, so she told Henry to hustle to the car, but he just stood there, looking up, his eyes vacant and head rolling. She grabbed his arms and said, “Did you hear me? Get in the damn car, right now!” and when he twisted his arm away, she didn’t let go. Her nails scraped his skin, a thin strip ripping away like an orange peel.
On the video, Heights asked, “A cat did that? What cat? Where?”
Henry repeated, “It is from a cat. My neighbor’s cat scratched me.”
“Henry, I think maybe someone told you to say that, but it’s not what happened. I know it’s hard, but you need to tell me the truth.”
Henry looked up at the ceiling again, showing the red blood vessels across the whites of his eyes. “The scratch is from a cat,” he said. “The cat is a mean cat. The cat is a black cat. The cat has white ears and long nails. The cat’s name is Blackie.”
The thing was, she never actually told Henry to lie. She just pretended. After the fury of the moment released and calm returned, she told Henry an alternate version. Not “I’m sorry I hurt you. Does that hurt?” or even “Why don’t you listen so I don’t have to punish you?” but “Oh, sweetie, look at that scratch! Have you been playing with that cat again? You need to be more careful.”
The magical thing was that if she presented this reinvented version in a matter-of-fact way, she could trick him into questioning his own memory. She could see doubt in the way he looked up, his eyes darting back and forth as if alternating between two stages in the sky, trying to decide which play was the more believable. And even more magical: if she repeated it enough, consistently and without drama, it distorted his memory, created a revised version with details he added himself. This—the generic cat of her invention becoming a real one in his manipulated mind, one with a name and color and markings—convinced her, even more than the physical pain she inflicted on him: she was a gaslighting manipulator, a bad mother who broke her son.
In the video, Heights said, “Did your mom tell you to say that?”
Henry said, “My mommy loves me, but I’m annoying, and I make everything hard. My mommy’s life would be better without me. My mommy and daddy would still be married and take vacations around the world. I should never have been born.”
Oh God. Had he really thought that? Had she made him think that? She’d had moments of dark thoughts (didn’t every mother?), but she’d always immediately regretted them. She’d certainly never said any of that to him. So where did he get that?
Heights said, “Did your mom tell you that, Henry? Did she scratch you?”
He looked straight into the camera, his eyes so wide that his irises looked like blue balls floating in a milky pool. He shook his head no. “The scratch is from a cat. My neighbor’s cat scratched me. The cat is a mean cat. The cat hates me.”
She wanted to grab the remote and make it stop. Unplug the TV or shove it down and break it, anything to stop the lies co
ming out of Henry’s mouth, so much more awful and unbearable than the scratching itself. Elizabeth opened her mouth and yelled out, “Stop it. Stop,” elongating the word, feeling it rebound and recoil all around the courtroom. She saw the judge’s mouth open in shock at her outburst, heard the bang of the gavel as he said, “Quiet, quiet in the courtroom,” but she didn’t stop. She stood and shut her eyes tight and put her hands over her ears and said, “There is no cat. There is no cat,” again and again, louder and louder, until the words grated against her throat and it hurt, until she could no longer hear Henry’s voice.
MATT
HE SAT IN HIS CAR, trying to figure out how to get Mary alone. Young wasn’t here, that much he knew; when he got here, he spied Mary helping Pak into their house, but their car was gone. He pulled over to a hidden spot, and he’d been sitting here for thirty minutes, waiting for something to happen—for Mary to come outside alone, for Pak to leave by himself, for some combination of courage and impatience to kick in and force his ass out of his car.
The heat was what drove him out. Not just the discomfort of marinating in sweat, but his hands. His palms didn’t sweat. They turned crimson and burned, as if his scars’ plastic-smooth lining were sealing in the heat, searing the underside of his skin. He told himself the pain wasn’t real, those nerves were dead, but it got worse and he couldn’t stand it. He got out. The backs of his thighs stuck to the leather seat, but he didn’t care, just stood up fast, letting the skin rip away and sting, grateful for the relocation of pain.
He interlaced his fingers and stretched them overhead, imagining the boiling blood draining out of his hands. He stood there for another ten minutes, pacing, trying to think of something other than waiting—maybe he should throw rocks to signal Mary?—when he smelled smoke. Just his mind playing tricks again, he told himself. Being so close to the site of the fire was sending his heart quivering and blood sputtering, awakening his memory of that night’s smell. He forced himself to look at the barn in the distance—the skeletal remains of its walls, the blackened submarine listing inside, bits of its previous blue peeking through the soot—and willed his brain to get it: there was no fire. No smoke.
He turned to the thick cluster of pine trees behind him and breathed in deep. Fresh and clean, green woods—that’s what he expected, told his brain it should register, but the smoky smell was still there. And something else. A faint hiss in the distance. A crackle. He looked around and saw it: smoke, billowing up in a barely noticeable column before fanning out into wisps in the bright blue sky.
He felt a flicker of relief—he wasn’t hallucinating, wasn’t losing his mind—before panic set in. Fire. The Yoos’ house? Trees were in the way, and it was hard to tell. Turn the fuck around, run straight to the car, and drive away, a voice in his head said. He thought of his phone in the car, how the smart thing would be to grab it and call 911.
But he didn’t. He ran. Toward the smoke, through the cluster of trees. Once he got closer, the smoke seemed to be coming from the front of the house, so he ran around the side. The fire’s crackle was getting louder, but there was another sound. Voices. Pak’s and Mary’s. Not shouting in fear or calling for help, but calmly discussing something.
Matt tried to stop running, but too late. They looked up as he rounded the corner. Pak gasped. Mary squealed and jumped back.
The fire was inside a rusted metal container in front of them. The container—a trash can?—was the same height as Pak’s wheelchair, so the flames shooting out were level with Pak’s face, coating it in a flickering orange glow. Pak said, “Matt, why are you here?”
He knew he should say something, but he couldn’t think, couldn’t move. What were they burning? Cigarettes? Were they destroying evidence? Why now?
He looked at Pak’s face, eclipsed by the translucent curtain of fire, the flames appearing to lick at his chin. He thought of Henry’s facefire and wanted to throw up, and it was making him wonder: How could Pak get so close to the fire—so close that the flames were reflecting off his skin, the heat penetrating into his nerves—without freaking out into a puddle of fear? Through the flames, the sharp angles of Pak’s cheekbones looked eerily sinister, and Matt could picture him striking a match under the oxygen tube. It seemed real. Believable.
“Matt, why are you here?” Pak said again, and pressed his hands down on the wheelchair, as if to stand up, and he remembered Young saying the doctors couldn’t figure out why Pak was still paralyzed since his nerves appeared intact. At once, he knew: Pak had faked his paralysis, and was about to get up and attack him right now.
“Matt?” Pak repeated, pressing down again. Every muscle in Matt’s body tightened, and he stepped back, ready to sprint, but then Pak—still sitting—rolled his wheelchair out from behind the trash can. With Pak’s body fully visible, Matt could see: Pak was pressing down to force his wheelchair through gravel.
Matt cleared his throat. “I was heading back from court, and I thought I’d check on you since you weren’t there. Is everything okay?”
“Yes, we are fine.” Pak’s eyes flicked to the trash can, and he said, “That is for Mary’s birthday. Eighteen. In Korea, it is tradition to burn childhood items. It is symbolism for becoming adult.”
“Wow,” Matt said. He’d never heard that, and he’d gone to a dozen Korean eighteenth-birthday parties.
As if Pak could read his thoughts, he said, “It is maybe only in my village. Young did not know this tradition. Have you heard of it?”
“No, but I like it. Janine’s niece is turning eighteen soon. I’ll tell her,” Matt said, thinking how his in-laws did this, too—invoked some “ancient tradition” bullshit to cover a lie. He looked over Pak’s shoulder at Mary. “Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.” She looked at the trash can, then back at him, shaking her head no. “Janine”—she paused—“is she … with you?” She shook her head again and frowned, her eyes widening—in a plea or threat, he couldn’t tell. Either way, her message was clear: Don’t tell Janine about us burning things. Whether it was a Please or an Or else, he didn’t care.
“Yes, she’s waiting in the car,” he said, realizing even as he told this lie how nervous he was about getting out of this situation safely. “I should go, or she’ll start worrying. Anyway, I’m glad you’re okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned to go. “Happy birthday again, Mary.”
He could feel their stares on his back as he walked away, but he didn’t look back. He just kept walking, past the house, through the cluster of trees, past the ruins of the barn, and into the car. He locked it, cranked it on, put it in drive, pressed the accelerator, and got the hell out of there.
TERESA
SHE WAS THE ONLY PERSON in the courtroom. After the chaos of the last ten minutes—Elizabeth shouting about a cat, Shannon’s minions dragging her out, the judge pounding the gavel and ordering a lunch recess, everyone rushing out, trying not to get trampled by the reporters running and talking on their phones—Teresa craved stillness. Silence. Most of all, aloneness. She didn’t want to go outside and face the women who were (she was sure) flitting from café to café, scavenging for gossip. Of course, they’d be careful to coat their tattle with feigned concern to make it seem like a quest for justice for Henry (“abused for so long!”) and Kitt (“five kids!—a saint, really”) rather than what it actually was: the glee and excitement of being a voyeur to someone else’s pain.
No, she didn’t want to leave the tranquility of this empty courtroom. Except for the temperature. When court was in session, it was hot, the old ACs too weak to fight off the steam emanating from the sweaty crowd, so she’d worn a short-sleeved dress without pantyhose. Cleared of the bodies, though, the room was downright cold. Or maybe what she felt was the chill of seeing Henry’s face—his skin soft and perfect in that little-kid way, unmarred by pimples, wrinkles, and other flaws life would eventually have brought—as he said “the cat” hated him and scratched him, then witnessing Elizabeth fall apart and confess there was no
cat, which meant … what? That she was “the cat”? Teresa shivered and rubbed her hands against her arms. Her hands were clammy, made her shiver more.
A wide beam of sunlight was coming through the right front window. She crossed the aisle to the sunny spot, right behind the prosecutor’s table where she used to sit. She placed herself in the sun’s path and sat, closed her eyes, and lifted her face into the warmth. A blinding whiteness penetrated her closed lids, sending phantom red dots flashing and whirling before her. The buzz of the AC units seemed to get louder. Like waves in a shell, the white noise swirled and bounced around her ear canals to form an ethereal whisper, an auditory ghost of Elizabeth’s voice. There is no cat. There is no cat.
“Teresa?” a voice called from behind her. Young, peeking through a half-opened door like a child afraid of entering without permission.
“Oh, hi,” Teresa said. “I didn’t think you were here today.”
Young didn’t say anything, just bit her lower lip. She was wearing what looked like an undershirt and elastic pants, not her usual blouse and skirt. Her hair was in a bun, as always, but it was disheveled, strands falling as if she’d slept in it.
“Young, are you all right? Would you like to come in?” Teresa felt ridiculous inviting her in. Presumptuous, as if this were her home, but she had to do something to dispel Young’s discomfort.
Young nodded and walked down the aisle, but tentatively, as if she were breaking some rule. Under the fluorescent lights, her skin looked sallow. The elastic around her waist drooped, and she kept tugging her pants up every few steps. When she got closer, Young glanced left, then back to her, looking confused, and Teresa realized: Young was wondering why she’d changed seats. Of course. Anyone who saw her now would assume she’d returned to the prosecutor’s side to make some point. Shit. This was how rumors got started. She wouldn’t be surprised if some website already had a breaking news report about it (“Mommy Murderer’s Fickle Friend Switches Sides. Again.”).