Miracle Creek(103)

Elizabeth looked at the place setting for two already on the table, the crystal glass next to the chilled wine, and slid the serving spatula under the pizza slice on Henry’s plate. For the next year, every night when she lay down for sleep or sometimes when she woke up in the morning, she’d close her eyes and visualize a parallel-world version of herself doing what she should’ve done in this moment: shake her head, scold herself not to let this stupid woman she’d never see again affect her so much, leave the pizza on the plate, and call Henry to dinner. In this alternate universe, after dinner and wine at home, she’d be curling up with Henry on the sofa marathon-watching Planet Earth when Teresa would call about the fire, and she’d cry for her friends and kiss Henry’s head and thank God she’d decided to stop—and just today!—and months later, driving back from Ruth Weiss’s murder trial, she’d shudder to think how she almost went to that last dive just to spite that woman.

But in this reality, the one she was stuck in, she didn’t leave the pizza on the plate. She kept it on the spatula and—Mistake #4, the Biggest Mistake, the irrevocable act that sealed Henry’s fate, which she’d regret and relive every day of her life, every hour of every day, every minute of every hour, over and over for as long as she lived—she lifted the pizza off the fancy plate and moved it to a paper plate for the car and called out, “Henry, put your shoes on. We’re going for one last submarine ride.” Throwing everything in the car, she felt a pang, thinking of the beautiful table settings, the lights sparkling off the crystals, and she was tempted to turn around right there and go inside, but that woman’s smug smile and stupid silver bob popped up in her mind, taunting her, and she didn’t. She swallowed, told Henry to hurry, and tried to think of tomorrow. Tomorrow, everything would change.

In the meantime, though, she tried to make up for it. She brought wine and chocolates to have by the creek—she’d be too exhausted by 9:30 when she got home for her planned celebratory drink, and she’d be damned if she let those despicable protesters ruin everything. She usually didn’t let Henry watch Barney—“junk food for your brain,” she said, and always had him sit away from the DVD-screen porthole—but as a treat, she arranged for Henry to sit by TJ and watch it. She asked Matt to help Henry, but Matt seemed annoyed and she didn’t want to impose too much, so she crawled in and set everything up, hooking up his oxygen hose to the spigot and putting on his helmet. She told Henry to be good, and she wanted to kiss his cheek and tousle his hair, but his helmet was already on, so she crawled out and walked away. That was the last time she saw Henry alive.

Ten minutes later, sitting by the creek and finally sipping wine, she thought of Henry’s reaction when she said she was sitting out this dive. He was in the helmet he hated—he gagged and said the ring around his neck choked him—and yet his whole face relaxed. He was happy. Relieved. To be free for an hour from her, the mother who was never satisfied, the mother who constantly nagged. She gulped more wine, felt the cool acidity sting then soothe her roughened throat, and she thought how she wanted to rip that helmet off as soon as he came out, how she’d wrap her arms around him and tell him she loved him and she missed him, and she’d laugh and say yes, she knew it was silly to miss him when they were apart for just an hour, but she still did.

Alcohol gushed through her arteries, infusing her pores with warmth, her fingers tingling as if thawing from the inside, and she looked up at the sky, darkening into a dusky violet. Her eyes focused on a puffy cottonball of a cloud, a perfect white like whipped frosting, and she thought how tomorrow, she could bake cupcakes for breakfast. When Henry asked what that was for, she’d laugh and say they were celebrating. She’d say she knew she didn’t show it often, maybe ever, but she treasured him, adored him, and it was that love and the accompanying worry that made her so crazy, and they’d have a new life with much less craziness. Not a perfect life, because nothing and nobody could be perfect, but that was okay because she had him and he had her. And maybe she’d take frosting in her finger and dab it on his nose to be silly, and he’d smile—that huge, little-kid smile of his with the gap in his top teeth, just a sliver of white where the new tooth was growing in—and she’d kiss his cheek, not just peck but really squish her lips into his puffy cheek and squeeze him in her arms and savor the deliciousness for as long as he’d let her.



* * *



NONE OF THAT happened, of course. No cupcake, no kisses, no new tooth. Instead, she identified her son’s corpse, picked out a coffin and gravestone, was arrested for his murder, read op-eds debating whether she belonged in a nuthouse or on death row, and now she was driving a stolen car toward the town where he’d been burned alive because of her.

That was the crazy thing, that it was she—with her pride and hatred and indecision and miserliness—who’d caused Henry’s death. Had she really thought she could claim victory over the protesters by returning for one more dive? And the no-refund hundred dollars she’d prepaid—had her son really died over a hundred bucks? And when she got there and found out the protesters weren’t there anymore, and what’s more, the sessions were delayed and there was no AC, why hadn’t she left right then? And later still, when she found the cigarettes and matches—Smoking! Near pure oxygen!—she should’ve immediately thought of fire. Was it the alcohol she’d already had, or the giddiness of triumph in discovering that the protesters were locked up? She’d warned Pak earlier how dangerous those women were, so why did she assume the most they’d do was start a fire when everyone was gone? Why did she underestimate the lengths to which they might go for their cause?