Miracle Creek(2)

He wasn’t crazy. His mother had explained that TJ has chronic pain from intestinal inflammation, but he can’t talk, and when it gets too much, he does the only thing he can for relief: he bangs his head, using the new, acute pain to drive out the old one. It’s like having an itch you can’t stand and scratching so hard it bleeds, how good that pain feels, except multiplied by a hundred. Once, she told me, TJ put his face through a window. It tormented me, the thought of this eight-year-old boy in so much pain that he needed to bash his head against steel.

And the sound of that pain—the pounding, again and again. The persistence, the increasing insistence. Each thud set off vibrations that reverberated and built into something corporeal, with form and mass. It traveled through me. I felt it rumble against my skin, jolting my insides and demanding my heart to match its rhythm, to beat faster, harder.

I had to make it stop. That’s my excuse. For running out of the barn and leaving six people trapped in a sealed chamber. I wanted to depressurize and open it, get TJ out of there, but I didn’t know how. Besides, when the intercom buzzed, TJ’s mother begged me (or, rather, Pak) not to stop the dive, she’d calm him down, but please, for the love of God, put in new batteries and restart the Barney DVD now! There were batteries somewhere in our house next door, only a twenty-second run away, and I had five minutes to turn off the oxygen. So I left. I covered my mouth to muffle my voice and said in a low, heavily accented voice like Pak’s, “We will replace batteries. Wait few minutes,” then I ran out.

The door to our house was ajar, and I felt a flash of wild hope that Mary was home, cleaning up like I’d told her to, and finally, something would go right today. But I stepped in, and she wasn’t there. I was alone, with no idea where the batteries were and no one to help. It was what I’d expected all along, yet that second of hope had been enough to shoot my expectations high into the sky and send them crashing down. Keep calm, I told myself, and started my search in the gray steel wardrobe we used for storage. Coats. Manuals. Cords. No batteries. When I slammed the door, the wardrobe wobbled, its flimsy metal warbling and booming like an echo of TJ’s pounding. I pictured his head hammering steel, cracking open like a ripe watermelon.

I shook my head to expel the thought. “Meh-hee-yah.” I yelled out Mary’s Korean name, which she hates. No answer. I knew there wouldn’t be, but it infuriated me just the same. I yelled “Meh-hee-yah” again, louder, elongating the syllables to let them grate my throat, needing it to hurt and drive out the phantom echoes of TJ’s pounding ringing in my ears.

I searched the rest of the house, box by box. With each passing second of not finding the batteries, my frustration grew, and I thought about our fight this morning, my telling her she should do more to help—she was seventeen!—and her walking out without a word. I thought about Pak siding with her, as always. (“We didn’t give up everything and come to America so she could cook and clean,” he always says. “No, that’s my job,” I want to say. But I never do.) I thought of Mary’s eye-rolls, her headphones on her ears, pretending not to hear me. Anything to keep my anger activated, to occupy my mind and keep out the pounding. My ire at my daughter was familiar and comfortable, like an old blanket. It soothed my panic into a dull anxiety.

When I got to the box in Mary’s sleeping corner, I forced the crisscrossed top flaps open and dumped everything out. Teenage junk: torn tickets to movies I’d never seen, pictures of friends I’d never met, a stack of notes, the top one in a hurried scrawl—I waited for you. Maybe tomorrow?

I wanted to scream. Where were the batteries? (And in the back of my mind: Who’d written the note? A boy? Waited to do what?) Just then, my phone rang—Pak again—and I saw 8:22 on the screen and remembered. The alarm. The oxygen.

When I answered, I meant to explain how I hadn’t turned off the oxygen but would soon, and that was no big deal, he sometimes ran the oxygen over an hour, right? But my words came out differently. Like vomit—outpouring in one stream, uncontrollable. “Mary is nowhere,” I said. “We’re doing all this for her, and she’s never here, and I need her, I need her help to find new DVD batteries before TJ busts his head open.”

“You always think the worst of her, but she’s here, helping me,” he said. “And the batteries are under the house kitchen sink, but don’t leave the patients. I’ll send Mary to grab them. Mary, go, right now. Take four D batteries to the barn. I’ll come in one min—”

I hung up. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.

I ran to the kitchen sink. The batteries were there like he said, in a bag I’d assumed was trash, under work gloves covered in dirt and soot. They were clean just yesterday. What had Pak been doing?

I shook my head. The batteries. I had to hurry back to TJ.

When I ran outside, an unfamiliar scent—like charred wet wood—permeated the air and stung my nose. It was getting dark, harder to see, but I saw Pak in the distance, running toward the barn.

Mary was ahead of him, sprinting. I called out, “Mary, slow down. I found the batteries,” but she kept running, not toward the house, but to the barn. “Mary, stop,” I said, but she didn’t. She ran past the barn door, to the back side. I didn’t know why, but it scared me, her being there, and I called again, her Korean name this time, softer. “Meh-hee-yah,” I said, and ran to her. She turned. Something about her face stopped me. It seemed to glow somehow. An orange light coated her skin and shimmered as if she were standing directly in front of the setting sun. I wanted to touch her face and tell her, “You are beautiful.”