Miracle Creek(74)
Last night, after Matt’s confession to her, his plea for honesty, she thought about telling him. But to explain why she’d lied about the call, she’d have to tell him everything—her deal with Pak, their decision to keep the arrangement secret, how she’d intercepted their bank statements to hide the payments she’d so carefully spread throughout multiple accounts over multiple months—and that, she wasn’t sure their marriage could survive.
Still, she might’ve done it, confessed everything to Matt, if his own confession about Mary had been the sordid tale she’d assumed it to be. But the fact that his story was so innocuous, bereft of any wrongdoing—that had made her feel idiotic at how she’d overreacted on the day of the explosion (an understatement if there ever was one), and she couldn’t.
So here she was, about to go to a prosecutor’s office in a murder investigation for a voice sample. That part, she wasn’t worried about. There was no way the rep would remember her voice from a two-minute call a year ago. But the lie-detector test (Abe had said it on his way out, almost casually—“If the voice sample’s inconclusive, there’s always a polygraph!”)—what would that feel like, being behind a one-way mirror, tied to a machine, answering no to question after question, knowing that her own body—her lungs, her heart, her blood—was betraying her?
She had to beat it. That was all there was to it. Here—an article about passing polygraphs by pressing down on thumbtacks in your shoe while answering the initial “control” questions, the theory being that pain causes the same physiological symptoms as lying, so they can’t differentiate between true and false answers. That made sense. It could work.
Janine closed the Web browser. She opened the Internet settings, wiped her history clean, logged off, and shut the computer down. She tiptoed into her room, careful not to wake Matt, and went into the closet to look for thumbtacks.
MATT
MARY WAS WEARING what she always wore in his dreams: the red sundress from their final meeting last summer, on her seventeenth birthday. As in all his dreams, Matt said she looked beautiful and kissed her. Soft at first, closed lips on closed lips, then harder, sucking her bottom lip, taking in the plumpness and squeezing with his own lips. He lowered the spaghetti straps and touched her breasts, feeling the softness give way to the rough hardness of the nipples. This was when the dream version of himself realized this was a dream, that only in a dream world could his fingers feel anything.
In real life, he’d pretended not to notice the dress. It was the Wednesday before the explosion, and when he went to the creek at the usual time (8:15 p.m.), she was sitting on a log, a lit cigarette in one hand and plastic cup in the other, her shoulders slumped like an old woman at the end of a long, hard day. It was infectious, her loneliness, and he wanted to take her in his arms, displace that desolation with something—anything—else. Instead, he sat down and said, “Hey there,” forcing into his voice a lightness he didn’t feel.
“Join me,” she said, handing him another cup filled with clear liquid.
“What is it?” he said, but before he even finished the sentence, he smelled it and laughed. “Peach schnapps? You’ve gotta be kidding me. I haven’t had that in ten years.” His college girlfriend had loved the stuff. “I can’t take this.” He handed it back. “You’re five years from drinking age.”
“Four, actually. It’s my birthday today.” She pushed the drink back.
“Wow,” he said, unsure of what to say. “Shouldn’t you be celebrating with your friends?”
“I asked some people from SAT class, but they were busy.” Maybe she saw the pity in his eyes, because she shrugged and said with a forced brightness, “But meanwhile, you’re here, and I’m here. So come on, drink up. Just this once. You can’t let me drink alone on my birthday. It’s bad luck or something.”
It was a stupid idea. And yet, the way she looked, her lips stretched into a smile so wide both rows of teeth showed, but eyes puffy and glassy like she’d been crying—it reminded him of one of those kids’ puzzles where you’re supposed to match the top half to the bottom, and the kid’s screwed up, putting the sad forehead with the happy mouth. He looked at her faux smile, the mix of hope and pleading in her raised eyebrows, and tapped his cup against hers. “Happy birthday.” He gulped.
They sat like that for an hour, then two, drinking and talking, talking and drinking. Mary told him how even though she always spoke English now, she still dreamed in Korean. Matt told her how this creek reminded him of his childhood dog, how he’d buried her by a creek just like this when she died. They debated whether tonight’s sky was more orange-red (Mary) or purple-red (Matt), and which was better. Mary told him how she used to hate Seoul’s overcrowding—classrooms, buses, streets—but now she missed it, how living here didn’t make her feel peaceful but merely lonely and sometimes lost. She told him how much she dreaded starting school here, how she said hi to some teenagers her age in town and no one said hi back, just stared with these go-the-fuck-back-where-you-came-from looks, and later, she overheard them bashing her family’s business as “ching-chong voodoo.” Matt told her about Janine’s refusal to even consider adoption, how he’d been planning his days off so they conflicted with Janine’s, to avoid being alone with her in the house.