Miracle Creek(115)
And herself, most of all. So many things she should and could have done differently at so many points along the way. If she’d stayed in the barn and turned off the oxygen in time. If she hadn’t lied to Abe for a year. But more than anything, if only she’d confessed everything to Elizabeth that last day. She’d told all this to Abe and pleaded that she, too, needed jail, but he’d called everything she’d done “tangential” and refused to file charges.
At 7:00, her watch beeped. Time to go in and pack the rest of her things. It had been just about this time when the protesters arrived that morning, starting the entire chain of events. She didn’t blame them, exactly. But if they hadn’t come, Henry, Kitt, and Elizabeth would all be alive now. Pak wouldn’t have caused the power outage, the dives wouldn’t have been delayed, and the oxygen would’ve been off and everyone gone by the time Mary set the fire, which she wouldn’t have done anyway because Pak wouldn’t have left any cigarette anywhere.
That was both the best and worst part, that all that happened was the unintended consequence of a good person’s mistakes. Teresa once said that what really got her, what kept her up at night and drove her to keep looking for a cure, was that Rosa wasn’t supposed to be this way. If she’d been born with a genetic defect, Teresa could live with that. But she’d been healthy, and she had gotten this way because of something that shouldn’t have happened—an illness not treated in time. It was unnatural, avoidable. In the same way, Young almost wished Mary had done this intentionally. Not really, because of course she didn’t want Mary to be evil, but in a way, it was worse knowing that her daughter was a good person who made one mistake. It was almost as if the fates conspired to manipulate that day’s events in just such a way as to lead Mary to light that match. So many pieces had to fit: the power outage, the dive delays, Matt’s note, Janine’s confrontation, Pak’s cigarette. If just one of those things hadn’t happened, at this moment, Elizabeth and Kitt would be driving Henry and TJ to school. Mary would be in college. Miracle Submarine would still be running, and she and Pak would be getting ready for a full day of dives ahead.
But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together—one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.
Young walked to a tree with red leaves and picked up the three brightest leaves she could find on the ground. Red for luck. She wondered how these woods would look in ten years, when Mary was out of prison. She’d be in her late twenties. She could still go to college, fall in love, have children. That was something to hope for. In the meantime, Young would continue to visit her every week—if any good came out of the last months, it had to be the revival and deepening of her relationship with her daughter. She brought Mary her favorite philosophy college texts, and they discussed them during their visits, like a two-person book club, with Young speaking in Korean and Mary in English, eliciting puzzled looks from the other inmates.
It had been harder with Pak, especially at first, when she’d been so angry with his stubbornness, but Young forced herself to visit regularly, and with each visit, she felt a thawing from him, a deepening repentance and acceptance of responsibility not only for the fire and Elizabeth’s death, but for his attempt to control them into silence. Maybe, over time, it would get easier to see him, talk to him. Forgive him.
Teresa arrived and parked by the construction equipment—a loader crane, the workers said. She was alone. “Is Rosa with your church friends?” Young said as they hugged hello.
Teresa nodded. “Yup. We have a lot to do today,” she said, which was true. They’d already moved most of Young’s things into Teresa’s guest room (“Stop calling it a guest room; it’s your room now,” Teresa kept saying), but they still had a dozen errands on Shannon’s checklist for the building-dedication ceremony at noon. Since the Washington Post article last week, the number of attendees had tripled, and now included the D.C.-area autism moms’ group, many former Miracle Submarine families, Abe and his staff, all the detectives and their staff, and—a last-minute surprise—Victor. Of course, Victor was the one who’d made the entire endeavor possible, when he (in a bizarre twist) inherited Elizabeth’s money and told Shannon he didn’t want it, that he thought Elizabeth would want it used for something good, maybe autism-related, and would Shannon take care of that? Shannon had consulted Teresa, and together, with Young’s help, they were creating Henry’s House, a nonresidential “home base” for special-needs children providing on-site therapy as well as day care and weekend camps.
“I got something.” Teresa handed Young a bag.
It held three portraits in matching wooden frames, plain but stained a deep, rich brown. Elizabeth, Henry, and Kitt, with their names and dates of birth and death inscribed on the bottom. “I thought we could put them in the lobby, under the dedication plaque,” Teresa said.
A lump formed in Young’s throat. “It is beautiful. Very appropriate.”
In front of them, the men were getting ready to take the chamber away. Watching them fasten a cable around it, she remembered last year, when other men had delivered it to this spot and untied the binding. Pak had planned to call the business “Miracle Creek Wellness Center,” but seeing the chamber, the way it resembled a miniature submarine, she’d said, “Miracle Submarine.” She’d turned to Pak and said it again. “Miracle Submarine—that’s what we should call it.” He’d smiled and said that was a good name, a better name, and she’d felt a thrill, thinking of children climbing inside and breathing in pure oxygen, their bodies healing.