Miracle Creek(59)
It wasn’t until Young checked all the books that she realized she’d been holding her breath. She closed her eyes and breathed out, relieved by the expulsion of stale air from her lungs, the tingling of her fingers that meant oxygen was resaturating her body. She’d expected to find something else, been sure of it to the point of dread. But really, what had she found? Evidence that Pak hadn’t quit smoking and had pilfered (if you could call it that) fifty dollars’ worth of cigarettes? So what? Yes, he kept secrets from time to time. What husband didn’t? He smoked, and after the explosion, he decided to hide his smoking out of fear of being unfairly judged. Was that so wrong?
She checked her watch. 2:19. Time to return to court. She’d take the tin case and find a quiet time to confront Pak about it. No, not confront—that was too harsh a word. Ask. Discuss. Yes, she’d show it to him and see what he’d say.
Reaching for the tin case, her hands shook slightly, and she had to chuckle at herself, the level of panic she’d worked herself up to, so sure she’d uncover incontrovertible evidence of her husband as a liar. No, it was more than that. Now that the moment was over, she could admit it; she’d actually expected to find proof that her husband, the gentle man who loved her and their daughter, the man who jumped into fire for his patients, was a murderer. “Sahr-een. Bang-hwa,” Young said, out loud. Murder. Arson. She felt small for having thought it, having allowed it to enter even her unconscious. A bad wife.
She grabbed the case and picked up the paper bag it came in. She opened the bag to put the case back inside it when she noticed something. She reached in. It was a pamphlet in Korean, Requirements for Reentry to South Korea, paper-clipped to the business card of a Realtor in Annandale and a handwritten note in Korean: How exciting that you’re moving back. I hope the pamphlet is helpful. Enclosed are some listings meeting your requirements. Please call anytime.
A stapled document was behind the pamphlet. Listings of apartments in Seoul, all for units with immediate availability. She turned back to the first page. Next to Search date was 08/08/19. The Korean date format for August 19, 2008.
Exactly a week before the explosion, Pak had been planning to move them back to Korea.
TERESA
TWO DAYS AFTER THE EXPLOSION, she overheard people discussing “The Tragedy,” as they called it in those initial days. She’d been in the hospital cafeteria, drinking coffee—or rather, stirring and pretending to drink it.
“It’s a miracle two of those kids survived,” said a woman’s voice—low-pitched and raspy, which Teresa was sure was deliberate, a woman trying to sound either sexy or like a man.
“Yup, sure is,” a man’s voice responded.
“Makes you think, though—God sure has a strange sense of humor.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the kid who’s pretty much normal is the one who ends up dead, while the autistic kid’s injured but lives, and the kid with severe brain damage is totally fine. It’s ironic.”
Teresa focused on her stirring, circling the spoon faster and faster, the white bits of congealed cream swept up in its torrents. She could almost hear the liquid rush down the spiral; a buzzing whirl filled her ears, overtaking the cafeteria noise. She stirred faster, harder, ignoring the coffee splashing over the rim and wetting her hands, willing the coffee cyclone to reach the bottom of the mug.
Something knocked the spoon out of her grip. She blinked and, somehow, the mug was on its side, the coffee everywhere. The buzzing ended, and in the silence she heard an echo of a clang, like an auditory afterimage. She looked up. Everyone was looking at her, no one and nothing moving except for the spilled coffee creeping outward toward the table’s edge.
“Here, ma’am. You okay?” the low-pitched woman said, slapping down napkins to form a dam between the coffee and the edge. The woman handed her one, and Teresa said, “Sorry. I mean, thanks.” The woman said, “It’s nothing.” She put her hand on Teresa’s and said again, “It was nothing, really,” her eyes sliding downward and a flush blooming on her cheeks, and Teresa knew she recognized her as the mom of the ironically fine girl.
The low-pitched woman turned out to be Detective Morgan Heights, and Teresa saw her now, walking to court after lunch. For some reason she couldn’t understand, Teresa felt a hot flush of shame every time she remembered the detective’s words in the cafeteria, what everyone probably thought: that Rosa, by virtue of being the most disabled, should’ve been the one who died. How fair that would’ve been. How logical. Clean. Get rid of the defective kid with the ravaged brain, the one who can’t talk or walk, the one who might as well be dead anyway.
Teresa positioned her umbrella to hide herself from Detective Heights. Standing in line to enter the courthouse, she heard someone say, “They might institutionalize him. He says the fecal smearing’s gotten worse. And the school’s having to use a straitjacket, his head banging’s gotten so bad.” Another voice said, “Poor thing. He’s lost his mother. No wonder he’s acting out, but—” Three teenagers got in line, drowning out the voices with their loud chatter.
TJ. Fecal smearing. Kitt had talked about it once, during a dive. Elizabeth had been discussing Henry’s “new autism behavior,” perseverating about rocks, when Kitt said, “You know what I did for four hours yesterday? I cleaned up shit. Literally. TJ’s new thing is fecal smearing. He takes off his diaper and smears shit—walls, curtains, rug, everything. You have no clue what it’s like. You saying TJ and Henry both have autism, they’re the same—it’s offensive to me. You complain that Henry can’t sustain eye contact, can’t read faces, doesn’t have enough friends? You think that’s heartbreaking, and yeah, maybe it is. There’s heartbreak in parenting every day. Kids get teased, break bones, don’t get invited to parties, and when that happens to my girls, of course I feel heartbreak and cry with them. But that normal stuff, that’s nowhere near what I have to go through with TJ, not even in the same frigging galaxy.”