Miracle Creek(14)

“TJ needs this to be calm. You know that,” Kitt said. “Henry’s fine; an hour of Barney won’t kill him.”

“An hour without Barney won’t kill TJ, either.”

Kitt stared into Elizabeth’s eyes for a long time. She seemed to smile. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.” She threw the Barney DVD into her cubby.

That session had been a disaster. TJ screamed when the documentary started. “Look, TJ, it’s about dinosaurs, just like Barney,” Elizabeth tried to say over TJ’s howls, but all hell broke loose when TJ yanked off his helmet and started banging his head against the wall. Henry cried that his ears hurt, and Matt screamed for Pak to put in the Barney DVD, ASAP.

After summarizing the incident, Matt said, “After that day, Pak always put in Barney, and Elizabeth always sat Henry away from the DVD screen. She said Barney was junk, and she didn’t want him near it. So for her to suddenly change her mind and have Henry sit by the DVD—that was beyond strange. Kitt even asked if she was sure, and Elizabeth said it was a special treat for Henry.”

“Dr. Thompson,” Abe said, “did the defendant’s seating change affect anything else?”

“Yes. It changed which oxygen tank everyone was connected to.”

“Sorry, I don’t quite understand,” Abe said.

Matt looked to the jurors. “Before, I explained that you connect your helmet to an oxygen spigot inside the chamber. There are two spigots, one front and one back, each connected to a separate oxygen tank outside. Two people hook up to one spigot and share an oxygen tank.” The jurors nodded. “Because of the way Elizabeth changed the seating, Henry connected his oxygen tube to the back spigot instead of the front one like always.”

“So the defendant made sure Henry would be connected to the back oxygen tank?”

“Yes. And she told me to make sure to hook up mine to the front and Henry’s to the back. I said, okay, but what difference does it make?”

“And?”

“She said I’m closer to the front and Henry to the back, and if we got our tubes crossed, Henry’s OCD—obsessive-compulsive disorder—might flare up.”

“Had Henry exhibited signs of this OCD ‘flare-up’”—Abe drew quotes in the air—“in any of the thirty-plus dives you’d done together?”

“No.”

“And then?”

“I said okay, I’ll make sure we don’t cross our tubes, but she wasn’t satisfied. She crawled in and hooked up Henry’s tube to the back spigot herself.”

Abe walked over, directly in front of Matt. “Dr. Thompson,” he said, and as if on cue, the air conditioner near Matt sputtered. “Which oxygen tank exploded?”

Matt fixed his eyes on Elizabeth’s and spoke without blinking. Slowly. Deliberately. Each syllable punctuated, coated with venom, and targeted to hit her and make her bleed. “The back tank blew up. The one connected to the back spigot. The one which that woman”—Matt paused, and Pak was sure he’d raise his arm and point his finger at her, but instead he blinked and looked away—“made sure was connected to her son’s head.”

“And after the defendant set everything up the way she wanted, what then?” Abe said.

“She said to Henry, ‘I love you so, so much, sweetie.’”

“I love you so, so much, sweetie,” Abe repeated as he turned to Henry’s picture, and Pak saw the jurors frown at Elizabeth, some shaking their heads. “And then?”

“She left,” Matt said, his voice quiet. “She smiled and waved, like we were going on a roller-coaster ride, and she walked away.”





MATT





“SO THE DEFENDANT LEAVES and the evening dive starts. What happened next, Dr. Thompson?” Abe said.

He’d known the dive was seriously fucked up the moment the hatch closed. The air had been unnaturally still, which, combined with the baked stench of body odor and Lysol that permeated the chamber, made it a bitch to breathe. Kitt asked Pak to take the pressurization extra slow for TJ, who was recovering from an ear infection, so that took ten minutes instead of the usual five. With the pressurization, the air got denser and hotter, if that was possible. The portable DVD wasn’t hooked up to the sound system, and the filtered sound of Barney singing What’ll we see at the zoo-zee-zoo? through the thick glass porthole made the dive feel surreal, like really being underwater.

“It was hot with no AC, but otherwise, things were normal,” Matt said, which wasn’t really true. He’d expected the women to spend the dive deconstructing Elizabeth’s unexpected chumminess and obviously faked illness, but they’d both remained silent. Maybe it was the awkwardness of talking with Matt between them, or maybe the heat. In any case, he was glad for the chance to sit and think; he needed to figure out what to say to Mary.

“What was the first sign of trouble?” Abe said.

“The DVD went dead, right in the middle of a song.” The silence of that moment was absolute. No hum of the AC, no Barney, no chattering. After a second, TJ knocked on the porthole, as if the DVD player were a sleeping animal he could wake up. “It’s okay, TJ; I bet it’s just the batteries,” Kitt said with the kind of forced evenness you used when you happened upon a sleeping bear.