Miracle Creek(65)

“Did Kitt say which aspect of this treatment worried her?”

“Yes. She said Elizabeth was planning to combine this with an even more extreme treatment called MMS.”

Abe held up a ziplock bag containing a book and two plastic bottles. “Do you recognize this, Detective?”

“Yes, it’s what I found under the defendant’s kitchen sink. The book is MMS: The Miracle Mineral Solution, a how-to guide for the latest autism fad where you mix sodium chlorite and citric acid, these two bottles here, which forms chlorine dioxide.” She looked to the jury. “That’s bleach. You’re supposed to administer this solution orally—make him drink bleach, in other words—eight times a day.”

Abe put on an outraged expression. “The defendant did this to her son?”

“Yes, a week before his death. She recorded in a chart in the book that he cried, had stomach pain and a 103-degree fever, and vomited four times.”

“The defendant recorded these details, like she was conducting experiments on a rat?” Shannon objected, and the judge sustained, telling Abe to keep to the facts, but she saw it in the jurors’ faces: disgust and horror, the image of sadistic Nazi doctors torturing prisoners in their minds, nothing at all like her memory: holding Henry tight, telling him he’d be okay, how hard it was to read the thermometer with her hands shaking and eyes blurred with tears.

Heights said, “This dovetailed with Kitt’s account. Apparently, Elizabeth said she needed to stop MMS because it was making Henry too sick and she didn’t want him missing camp, but she’d resume it, combined with chelation, when camp was over. That way, he could get really sick, and it wouldn’t matter.”

“‘Really sick, and it wouldn’t matter,’” Abe repeated, his eyes glazed and fixed as if picturing Henry’s suffering, then shaking his head. Kitt had done the same thing—repeated Elizabeth’s phrase and shaken her head, except in a tone of outrage. “Really sick, and it won’t matter? Listen to yourself. He’s doing great. Why do you keep doing this shit?” Kitt said before making her usual bonbons comment—the words that made Elizabeth crazy and led to the huge fight ten hours before Kitt’s death.

The first time Kitt said it was at the autism moms’ meeting after Georgetown’s neurologist retested Henry and pronounced him as “no longer falling within the autism spectrum.” There was champagne in party cups with rainbow-lettered Wow!s, and the moms were toasting, some even crying—though not necessarily from happiness; based on her own uncontrollable crying whenever she read those “my kid miraculously recovered from autism” memoirs, she knew the tears came from an oscillation between despair (“Someone else’s kid got better, while mine didn’t”) and hope (“Someone else’s kid got better, so mine could, too”).

Someone said something about good-bye, how they’d miss her at meetings. When Elizabeth said no, she planned to continue everything—meetings, biomed treatments, speech therapy, et cetera—that’s when Kitt did it. Shook her head at Elizabeth like she was crazy and said with a chuckle, “If I had a kid like yours, I’d lie around on my couch and eat bonbons all day.”

Elizabeth felt a jolt, like a prick, but she tried to smile. Tried to overlook the forced lightness in Kitt’s voice and the contemptuousness in her chuckle, the tonal equivalent of a teenager’s eye-roll at an overbearing mother. She told herself that Kitt was brash and sarcastic, a no-filters type, and the bonbons comment was her way—trying to be funny, with no idea how acidic her words were—of congratulating Elizabeth for finishing the marathon they’d started together and telling her she’d earned the right to relax. To enjoy life.

The problem was, Elizabeth wasn’t convinced that she (or Henry, rather) actually had reached the finish line. Not being autistic was not the same as being normal. Even the words the doctor used—“speech is virtually indistinguishable from typical peers”—made that clear: Henry wasn’t typical, but had learned to mimic it, like a lab-trained monkey. If he was careful, he could pass for normal, but it was a precarious kind of normal, one that teetered on the edge.

In that way, having a child recovered from autism was like having one in remission from cancer or recovered from alcoholism. Constantly being on guard for signs of anything abnormal, anything that may mean he’s slipping back, while trying not to slip into paranoia. Forcing a smile when others congratulate you for beating the odds, while anxiety churns in your stomach as you wonder how long this reprieve will last.

But she couldn’t say this to Kitt, to any autism mom. It would be like someone in remission crying about the possibility of eventually dying from recurrence to someone actually dying of cancer right now—not sufficiently appreciative of how lucky you have it, how your own troubles pale in comparison. So when Kitt said the bonbons thing, she didn’t argue that Henry might regress. She didn’t say how worried she still was—that Henry had no friends in his new class, that whenever he was sick or nervous, he reverted to his old ways of looking up and perseverating on the same phrase in a robotic monotone. No, whenever Kitt said it (which she seemed to think got funnier each time), Elizabeth just laughed along.

Except that last day. The morning of the explosion, walking to their cars, she was talking about MMS when Kitt said, “Why do you keep doing this shit? I think the protesters might have a point with you. Like I always say”—and she said her usual bonbons thing. Except this time, without laughing.