Miracle Creek(60)

They did this often, spat about the comparative difficulties of their kids’ symptoms—the special-needs version of parental bragging wars—and Teresa always threw in one of her worries, like the possibility of Rosa dying from choking on saliva or sepsis from bedsores, which usually shut them up pretty quick. But listening to Kitt’s story, imagining the stench, filth, and misery of cleanup, Teresa was stumped. Fecal smearing might be the one thing for which there was no counterstory to make Kitt think, At least my life isn’t that bad.

And now Kitt was dead, her burden shifted to her husband, and he was sending TJ away. Teresa thought of Rosa in an institution, in a sterile room lined with steel beds, and she wanted to run home and kiss her dimples. She looked at her watch. 2:24. There was just enough time to call home. To tell Rosa she loved her and listen to her say “Ma,” again and again.



* * *



TERESA TRIED TO pay attention. Pak’s redirect was important; Shannon had raised disturbing questions that, based on the snippets she heard during recess, had people wavering for the first time since the trial began. But when it started, everyone turned to the empty seat next to Mary and whispered about where Young was and what her absence meant. (“Meeting with a divorce lawyer’s my bet,” a man behind her said.) Throughout Pak’s redirect—more emphatic denials about 7-Eleven and cigarettes, as well as his explanation that he got fired for moonlighting, not incompetence, and got another HBOT-center job right away—Teresa looked at Mary, sitting between the empty spaces usually occupied by her parents, alone. Seventeen, like Rosa, but her face so crinkled with worried concentration that her scar appeared to be its only smooth portion.

The first time Teresa saw Mary’s scar was right after the cafeteria coffee-spilling incident. She’d told herself she should visit to lend support to Young, but the fact was, she’d wanted to see Mary in a coma. Watching Mary through the window-blind slats, bandages on her face and tubes sticking out of her body, Teresa thought how the low-pitched woman had been wrong: there were four kids involved, not three. What would the woman say with Mary in the equation? Yes, Henry was “pretty much normal” compared with Rosa and TJ, but Mary was as perfect as you could get: pretty, good grades, bound for college. Which would be the bigger irony, the bigger tragedy, to the woman: an almost-pass-for-normal boy being burned alive, or an actually normal girl winding up in a coma, her above-average face scarred and above-average brain possibly damaged?

Teresa went in and hugged Young—tightly, for a long time, the way people do at funerals, in shared grief. Young said, “I think again and again, she was healthy just last week.”

Teresa nodded. She hated when people commiserated by telling their own stories, so she kept quiet, but she understood. When five-year-old Rosa got sick, she’d sat by her hospital bed, stroking her arm like Young was with Mary, thinking in an endless loop, But she was fine just two days ago. She’d been on a business trip when Rosa got sick. The night before the trip, when Rosa came downstairs to say good night, she’d been holding the then-squirmy toddler Carlos on her lap, clipping his fingernails, so she’d said, “Good night, sweetie. Love you,” not looking up—that was the part that killed her, that she didn’t look at her daughter during this, their last normal moment together—and tilted her head for Rosa’s kiss. The click of Carlos’s nails being cut, the bubble-gum smell of Rosa’s toothpaste, the sticky smack of lips against her cheeks, then a quick, “Night, Mommy. Night, Carlos”—this was Teresa’s last memory of pre-illness Rosa. The next time she saw her, the girl who could sing and jump and say “Night, Mommy” was gone.

So yes, Teresa could understand the utter incomprehension Young was surely feeling. And when Young said, “The doctor says there may be brain damage, she may never wake up,” Teresa gripped her hands and cried with her. But under the jolt of her pain and empathy (and she did ache for Young, she truly did), there was a part of her—the tiniest, most minute part, just one-tenth of one cell deep within her brain—that was glad, actually happy, that Mary was in a coma and might end up like Rosa.

It was undeniable: Teresa was a bad person. She didn’t understand people saying, “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy”; no matter how much she told herself she wouldn’t, shouldn’t, wish her life on anyone, there were moments when she wanted every parent alive to go through what she did. Disgusted by her thoughts, she tried to justify it; if Rosa’s brain-robbing virus became an epidemic, surely billions of dollars would be spent on a cure, and all children would be restored in short order. But she knew—it wasn’t for Rosa’s benefit that she wished for contagion of her tragedy. It was envy, pure and simple. She resented being targeted for misery alone, begrudged her friends who came by with casseroles to cry with her for an hour before rushing their kids to soccer and ballet, and if she couldn’t return to her normal life, then by God, she wanted to slap everyone off their pedestal of normalcy, so they could share her burden and make her feel less alone.

She tried not to think this with Young. For the two months of Mary’s coma, she visited every week. Sometimes she brought Rosa to sit with Mary while she talked to Young. It was strange, seeing the two girls together—Mary bandaged, lying with her eyes closed, and Rosa in a wheelchair, above her—for the first time as equals, almost like friends.