Miracle Creek(114)
Mary blinked, and Young expected her to cry, but instead, she stretched her lips into a pained smile. Suddenly, a memory: Mary throwing a tantrum as a little girl, maybe five or six, and after Young gently said she was disappointed in her behavior, Mary getting a handkerchief from their dresser, wiping away her tears, stretching her lips into a smile, and saying, “Look, Um-ma, I’m not crying anymore,” looking dignified, just as she was now. Young hugged her daughter tight.
After a moment, her head still on Young’s shoulder, Mary spoke, in Korean for the first time all day. “Will you come with me? You don’t have to say anything, but will you just stand with me?”
Tears blocked Young’s words, and she couldn’t do anything but keep holding her daughter close, stroking her hair and nodding over and over again. Soon, she would gently push her daughter away, just a little, help her stand upright on her own, and say she loved her and she’d be proud to come and stand with her as she told the truth, however painful it was. She would say she was sorry for having failed her, for leaving her alone all those years in Baltimore and not standing up for her, and if she could, she’d never leave her again. She would ask the questions that remained and tell the stories still untold. She would do all this, eventually—in a minute, or an hour, or a day. But standing still right here, feeling the weight of her daughter’s body leaning against hers, her warm breath on her neck—for now, that was all she needed.
AFTER
November 2009
YOUNG
SHE SAT ON A TREE STUMP outside the barn. Rather, where the barn used to be until yesterday, when the new owners demolished its remains and took them away, piece by piece. All that was left was the submarine, lying on the dirt, waiting to be taken to a junkyard somewhere, the juxtaposition of its steel and wires against the grass and trees looking like a tableau out of some science-fiction film.
This was Young’s favorite part of the day. Early in the morning, so early that night blended with day. Moonlight shone, but not a full moon. Just a sliver, casting the faintest light on the submarine. She couldn’t see it, exactly, not the charring or the paint blisters or the jagged teeth of the portholes’ broken glass. She could see only its outline, and in this light (or rather, lack of light), it looked the same as last year when it was freshly painted and gleaming.
At 6:35, the chamber was still a shadowy black oval, but in the distance, the sky was brightening. She looked up at the clouds, the hint of peach in the grayness, and remembered the disorientation she’d felt looking at the clouds on the Seoul–New York flight, her first time on an airplane. She’d gazed out the porthole to watch her homeland fade away as the plane ascended into a thick layer of clouds. When they emerged above, she marveled at the beauty of the clouds’ constancy—the uniformity of their variations, the patterns in their randomness—as they stretched to the horizon. She looked at the metal-smooth wing, fluttering slightly as it grazed the clouds’ diffuse edges before slicing the cottony blooms in perfect precision, and she had a flickering sense of wrongness, that she didn’t belong in the sky. It felt like hubris. Rejecting your natural place in the world and using an alien machine to defy gravity and dislocate yourself to another continent.
At 6:44, the sky turned a soft mauve, the black of the night fighting against the sun and losing. The chamber’s charred spots were becoming visible, but still, it was dark enough that they looked like shadows, or maybe moss growing over the metal and making the machine a part of the landscape.
At 6:52, the sky was a delicate blue, the color of newborn nurseries. The submarine’s aquamarine paint, once so glossy it looked wet, now looked pockmarked.
At 6:59, bright beams of sunlight penetrated the thick foliage and hit the submarine at once, as if all the stage lights had switched on to spotlight the show’s star. For a second, the light was so bright that a halo encircled the submarine, hiding its imperfections. But Young stared straight on, forcing her pupils to adjust and constrict, and she saw the proof of the crime: black charring everywhere; the porthole glass melted as if the submarine were crying; the whole tank tilted like an old man with a cane.
She closed her eyes and breathed. In, out. Though it had been over a year, the smell of ash and burned flesh still clung to the tank’s carcass, mixing with the morning dew to form a charcoal stench. Or maybe that was her imagination. Her conscience, telling her tiny particles were infiltrating her lungs and she might, at this moment, be breathing in the cells of the people incinerated in that chamber.
She looked toward the creek. She couldn’t see the water, hidden behind the thicket of leaves stained in bright yellows and reds, no pattern to the colors as if toddlers had run around with paint cans, spraying trees at random. She imagined Mary sitting behind those trees, her feet centimeters from the water, smoking and laughing with Matt Thompson and, one night, being held down by him, assaulted; then, on a different night, being screamed at by his wife, told she was a stalker. A whore.
It was funny, how before Mary’s full confession—rather, confessions, as she’d had to repeat it multiple times, to Abe, the public defender, and the sentencing judge in the course of pleading guilty to felony murder and arson—she’d believed that Mary needed to accept whatever punishment she received. But now that Mary and Pak were in prison, she wondered if it was truly fair that Mary faced years in prison—ten minimum—when many others who’d contributed to the causal chain that night got nothing. Yes, Mary set the fire. But she wouldn’t have if Janine hadn’t lied that the dive was over and Matt had left. She couldn’t have if Pak hadn’t left the cigarette and matches where he had. And Matt—he was the causal root of everything: without him, without his actions and lies to Mary and Janine, they wouldn’t have done what they’d done the night of the explosion. Even the cigarette Pak placed under the oxygen tube was Matt’s, from his trash pile in the hollow tree stump. And yet, the law considered Janine a mere bystander, assigning no blame to her. And Pak and Matt got nothing for their roles in causing the fire itself; Pak received fourteen months in jail and Matt a suspended sentence with probation, but both for perjury and obstruction of justice. She heard that Matt and Janine were getting a divorce, which comforted her somewhat; as much as she tried, Matt’s treatment of her daughter was the one unpunished act in all this that she could not forgive.