Miracle Creek(34)
Pak said, “No.”
Mary said, “No, nothing.”
Abe looked at Young. Young opened her mouth but no words came out. She realized that she’d said nothing this entire time, since Mary opened the door.
“Young? Is there something else?” Abe said.
Young thought of Mary on that night, helping Pak to keep watch over the protesters while she was alone, ransacking the house for batteries. She thought of her call with Pak, her complaining about and his defending their daughter, as always.
“Anything at all? Now’s the time,” Abe said. Pak’s and Mary’s hands squeezed hers tight, urging her to join them.
Young looked down at the faces of her husband and daughter, turned to Abe, and said, “You know everything.” Then she stood, united with her family, as Abe told them that after the next witness’s testimony, no one, absolutely no one, would have the slightest doubt that Elizabeth wanted her son dead.
TERESA
SHE COULDN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT SEX. All through lunch recess, munching her food, strolling through the shops, gazing at the vineyards: sex, sex, sex.
It started at one of the oh-so-cute cafés that peppered Main Street. The walls were lilac with hand-painted grape drawings, clearly a ladies-who-lunch place. The guy at the register, though, had been a man, right out of central casting for Hot Young Dude, his chiseled muscularity accentuated by its juxtaposition to the dainty background. Approaching him to pay for her salad, Teresa caught a whiff of something familiar, deep from her past. Something spicy—maybe Polo, her high school boyfriend’s cologne—mixed with drying sweat. The musky, pungent scent of orgasm—not the kind she was used to, by herself under the covers with only her index finger moving in small circles, but the kind she hadn’t had in eleven years, held down by the weight of a man’s body on hers, their bodies slippery with sweat.
“It’s hot out there. You sure you want this to go?” the guy said.
She said, in what she thought was a vaguely sexual tone, “I like it hot.” She gave him a half smile of the suggestive variety and sauntered out, savoring the swivel of her skirt, the graze of silk against her skin. A block later, she saw Matt, who called her Mother Teresa, and she had to fight not to laugh out loud at the combined deliciousness and ridiculousness of the moment.
It may have been the skirt. She hadn’t worn one in years. With all the bending necessary to manage Rosa’s wheelchair and tubes, skirts were not an option. Or maybe it was being alone. Remarkably, wonderfully, dizzyingly alone, with no one to take care of. Liberated from the roles of 24/7 Mom-Nurse to Rosa and Spare-Time Mom to Carlos (a.k.a “The Other Kid,” as he called himself) for the first time in eleven years.
Not that she never had free time; a few hours every week, church volunteers took turns babysitting. But those outings were rushed, filled with errands. Yesterday was the first time in a decade she’d spent an entire day away from Rosa—the first time she didn’t handle all her feedings and diaper changes, didn’t drive her to therapies in their handicap-modified van, didn’t greet her out of sleep and kiss her good night. It had been nerve-racking, and the volunteers had had to push her out the door, saying not to worry, just focus on the trial. She’d called home as soon as she got to court and twice during the first break.
During lunch recess yesterday, Teresa called home, ate the sandwich she’d packed, and looked at her watch. Fifty minutes left, with nothing she had to get done. So she walked. Aimlessly. There were no Targets or Costcos. Only jewel-toned shops designed for frivolity, flaunting their deliberate rejection of the practical. She walked into a used bookstore with a whole section on ancient maps but not one book on special-needs parenting, a clothing store with fifteen varieties of slap-on bracelets but no underwear or socks. With each passing minute of just browsing, of not being a caregiver, Teresa felt herself shedding that role, cell by cell, like a snake with its skin, unearthing what had been covered. Not Teresa the Mother or Teresa the Nurse, but simply Teresa, a woman. The world of Rosa, Carlos, wheelchairs, and tubes becoming surreal and distant. The intensity of her love and worry for them growing fainter like stars at dawn—still there, but not as visible.
After the first day of the trial, Teresa drove home in the borrowed coupe, singing to rock songs. When she got home ten minutes before Rosa’s bedtime, she drove past her house, parked in a hidden wooded spot, and, for fifteen minutes, read a book she’d bought during recess, a 99-cent Mary Higgins Clark mystery, savoring the extra stolen minutes.
It was like those Method actors, who get more into character the longer they pretend to be someone else. Today, Teresa left the house earlier than necessary. She acted the part of a single woman—put on makeup in the car, wore her hair long, stared at vineyard workers. And for the briefest moment with the cashier guy, she actually felt like a free woman, a woman without the male-repellent combination of a disabled daughter and a surly son.
She waited until the last minute to return to court. At the door, two women she’d met a few times—Miracle Submarine patients from the morning dive after hers—greeted her. One woman said, “I was just saying how hard this is, me being here. My husband’s not used to taking care of the kids,” and the other said, “Same here. I hope the trial ends soon.”
Teresa nodded and tried to shape her lips into an I-feel-the-same-way smile. She wondered if it made her a bad person, her self-indulgent delight at this hiatus from her life. Was she a bad mother if she didn’t miss Rosa’s curled lips, opening to say “Mama”? A bad friend to the volunteers if she prayed the trial would last a month? She opened her mouth to say, “I know, I feel so guilty,” when she saw their faces—not guilty, but excited, their eyes darting everywhere, caught up in the drama of the courtroom. It occurred to her then: the possibility that these women, like Teresa, were playing the part of Good Mother, trying to pretend they weren’t relishing this quasi-vacation that forced their husbands into the chaotic mundanity of their day-to-day lives. Teresa looked at them, smiled, and said, “I know exactly how you feel.”