Miracle Creek(107)
As if she could see into his mind, Young said, “You lit it but you put it out. You wanted the police to find it just like that—make it look like the protesters tried to start a fire but the cigarette went out too early and it failed. You didn’t start the fire. You never intended to.”
He felt fear—so hot it felt cold—unfurl across his body in strands, overtaking it. “That makes no sense. Why would I confess to doing something I didn’t do?”
“As a decoy,” she said. “To keep my focus away from where you’re afraid it might go if I keep digging.”
He breathed. Swallowed.
“I know the truth,” she said. So quietly he strained to hear. “Have the decency to be honest with me. Don’t make me say it.”
“What do you know?” he said. “What do you think you know?”
Young blinked and turned toward Mary. Her composure broke then, her face grimaced in pain. He hadn’t been sure until that moment. But the way she looked at their daughter—so tenderly, with all the sadness of the world—he knew. She’d figured everything out.
Before he could do anything, before he could tell her to stop, don’t say anything, don’t say those devastating words and make them real, Young reached out to Mary’s face and brushed away her tears. Gently, delicately, like she was ironing silk.
“I know it was you,” his wife said to their daughter. “I know you set the fire.”
MARY
AT 8:07 P.M. ON AUGUST 26, 2008, eighteen minutes before the explosion, Mary was leaning against a weeping willow after having run for a minute straight through the woods. After Janine threw cigarettes, matches, and a crumpled note at her, Mary had said in the calmest tone she could manage, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” pivoted away from her, and walked in the opposite direction. One foot, then the other, focusing on keeping her pace steady, fighting her instinct to run and scream—forcing her nails into her palms and pressing her tongue between her teeth, applying more and more pressure until just to that point of breaking through and drawing blood. After fifty steps (she’d counted), she could no longer stand it and started running, the fastest she could—muscles burning in her calves, tears blurring her vision—until she felt dizzy and her legs went rubbery, and she crumpled against the tree and cried.
Whore, Janine had called her. Stalking slut. “You can bat your eyes and twirl your hair and act like some innocent girl, but let’s be honest, we both know what you were doing,” she’d said. Sitting here, away from Janine—the role model her father had invoked as who she should aspire to be, why he’d wanted her educated in America—it was so easy to think of everything she could, should, have said. It was Matt who brought cigarettes and got them smoking. Matt who started writing notes to meet up. And yes, she’d been lonely here and grateful for his company, but seduce? Steal? This man who’d pretended to be a caring friend before exposing his true motives, who held her down and pushed his tongue into her mouth as she tried to scream out, who got on top of her and forced her hand inside his pants, wrapping it around himself so hard it hurt, using it like an object to pump up and down, up and down?
But she didn’t say anything. Just stood there, listening to Janine’s ugly words, letting them penetrate her skin and burrow into her brain, spreading their tendrils and taking root. And now, even as she told herself that Janine was wrong, that Matt was the one at fault here and she the victim, a voice inside her whispered, hadn’t she liked the attention? Hadn’t she noticed him staring from time to time and felt the satisfaction of knowing she was desirable, perhaps even more so than Janine? And on her birthday, hadn’t she worn a sexy outfit, asked him to drink with her, and when he started kissing her—softly, romantically, exactly how she’d imagined her first real kiss should be—hadn’t she kissed him back, and for a moment, before the night’s dark turn, hadn’t she imagined a fairy-tale ending with flashes of I love you, peering into eyes, and other cringe-inducing clichés she couldn’t bear to think about now?
She’d thought the humiliation of her birthday night had killed that pathetically na?ve hope, but Matt’s weeklong campaign of writing multiple daily notes and following her to SAT class had somehow revived it. She’d agreed to meet him, and after sneaking in chugs of her father’s rice grain alcohol for courage and walking to the creek, there had been a microsecond when a part of her—the tiniest speck in a nauseatingly Disney-fied subsection of her brain—had pictured Matt standing by the creek, waiting to declare love, to confess his desperate inability to live without her, to explain his behavior on her birthday night as a never-to-be-repeated moment of insanity driven by inebriation mixed with passion. Right then, with the soju sloshing in her stomach, her heart thumping in anticipation—that’s when she’d seen Janine. The shock of that moment, the mortifying realization that everything had been a setup for his wife to tell her off for him! Thinking about it now, pressing her forehead against the willow tree bark to stop the pain behind her eyes from spreading, shame frothed through her, filling and threatening to burst every organ, and she wished she could disappear, just run away and never face Matt or Janine again.
She heard a noise then. A distant knocking noise from the direction of her house. Janine. It had to be Janine knocking for her parents, to complain about their slutty daughter seducing and stalking her virtuous husband. She imagined them at the door, horror overtaking their faces as Janine showed them her notes and the cigarettes, depicting her as a pathetic girl sexually obsessed with her husband. Shame and fear flashed through her again at this thought, but something else, too. Anger. Anger at Matt, the man who’d taken her loneliness and twisted it into something sick, then lied to his wife about it. Anger at Janine, the woman who’d been so quick to assume her husband’s innocence without even stopping for Mary’s side of the story. Anger at her parents, who’d ripped her away from her home, her friends, and put her in this situation. Most of all, anger at herself that she’d let all this happen without fighting back. No. No more. She stood and marched toward her house. She would not let them judge her without hearing everything Matt had done.