Miracle Creek(39)

ELIZABETH





THE WEEK BEFORE THE TRIAL STARTED, Shannon told Elizabeth they needed as many people as possible to sit behind her in court. Hand her tissues, glare at Abe’s witnesses, that type of thing. Family was out—Elizabeth was an only child and her parents died in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake—so that left friends. The problem: she had none. “We’re not talking womb-to-tomb bosom buddies here. Just anyone willing to sit by you. Sit—that’s it. Hairdresser, dental hygienist, the Whole Foods checkout girl. Anyone,” Shannon said. Elizabeth said, “Why don’t we hire some actors?”

It wasn’t that she’d never had friends. True, she’d always been on the shy side, but she’d had close friends in college and at the accounting firm; she’d had three bridesmaids and been one twice. But since Henry’s autism diagnosis six years ago, she’d been too busy for anything not Henry-centric. During the day, she drove Henry to seven types of therapy—speech, occupational, physical, auditory processing (Tomatis), social skills (RDI), vision processing, neurofeedback—and, between those, roamed holistic/organic stores for peanut/gluten/casein/dairy/fish/egg-free foods. At night, she prepared Henry’s food and supplements and went on autism-treatment boards such as HBOTKids and AutismDoctorMoms. After a few years of no contact, her friends stopped reaching out. What could she do now? Call and say, Hi! Long time no talk! I was wondering if you’d be interested in coming to my murder trial, hang out a bit before I get executed. Oh, by the way, sorry for not returning your calls for six years, but I was busy with my son—you know, the one I was indicted for murdering?

So yes, Elizabeth knew no one would be coming to support her (other than Shannon, who didn’t count, since she had to pay her $600 per hour). But when she walked in yesterday and saw the empty row behind her—the only empty seats in the entire courtroom—she felt a punching gut pain, as if an invisible boxer were pummeling her. For two days, the row behind Elizabeth remained empty, broadcasting to the world the total lack of support for her, flaunting her aloneness.

When Teresa blurted out that she saw the H-Mart note, the judge tried to undo it. He banged the gavel and told Teresa she couldn’t shout stuff out and instructed the jury to disregard it. Teresa apologized, but when he told her to sit—this was the part Elizabeth would replay again and again, lying in bed—Teresa stepped over the Yoos, crossed the aisle, walked into the empty row, and sat directly behind Elizabeth. Some in the jury gasped. They seemed to regard Elizabeth like a leper—not contagious, maybe, but something you stay away from all the same.

Elizabeth turned to look at Teresa. Having someone stand up for her, declare herself on her side, sit by her without shame—those were things she’d written off, things she’d told herself she didn’t care about now that nothing seemed worth living for. But it had hurt, the double divers she’d spent hours with every day, not bothering to come see her or ask for themselves if she did it. The automatic assumption of her guilt.

But now, here was one of them, willing to be a friend. Gratefulness expanded inside her like water in a balloon, threatening to burst and gush out in torrents of thank-yous she couldn’t voice. She gazed at Teresa, tried to convey her gratitude with her eyes.

Just then, she glimpsed a shock of silver in the crowd. The leader of the protesters, the woman with the sanctimonious username ProudAutismMom. She’d expected Shannon to expose that woman’s so-called alibi as a sham at trial and bring her down, but the arson call changed Shannon’s focus to Pak, enabling that woman to sit comfortably, spectating the trial as if she were an innocent bystander. Elizabeth felt bile worm up her throat, the familiar punch of fury and hatred and blame. If it weren’t for that woman, her son would be alive right now. He’d be nine, about to start fourth grade. Ruth Weiss, with her menacing threats and attempts to destroy Elizabeth’s life, all of which she discovered during that fateful call with Kitt she wished to God she’d never had. That call had sent Elizabeth reeling, stripping away her rationality and leading her to the moment she’d regret for as long as she lived. The series of idiotic, incomprehensible acts that had come to define her life—and Henry’s, too, as it turned out.

Elizabeth turned back to Teresa and thought of her trapped in the horror of the fire while she was drinking wine, toasting the end of HBOT, and marveling at the cigarette between her fingers. She wondered what Teresa would think if she knew everything about that day, if she knew that Elizabeth—her hatred for Ruth Weiss—was to blame for Henry’s death.



* * *



SHANNON HATED DETECTIVE PIERSON. “What a condescending, smug son of a bitch,” she’d said after their first meeting and again after his direct testimony. “I can’t stand that squeaky voice of his. I literally have hives.”

Elizabeth thought it’d be painful to see him—the man who’d led her to Henry’s corpse, her son as an inanimate object. But she didn’t remember him. Not his face, not even his hideously incongruous voice. She didn’t remember any of the things he was saying, and instead of pinpointing inaccuracies like Shannon wanted, she took it in like a passive TV viewer.

When the judge told Shannon to begin her cross-examination, Shannon said to Elizabeth, “You sit back and enjoy; I’m going to rip him apart.” But when she stood up, Shannon looked at Pierson out of the corners of her eyes (could it be? Was Shannon pretending to be seductive?) and smiled, both dimples showing. She said, “Good afternoon, Detective,” in an artificially low voice (trying to be sexy or to accentuate his high voice, she couldn’t tell), and walked to him in small steps, her hips moving back and forth in what she guessed was supposed to be a sashay.