Miracle Creek(78)

A pause, then Pak’s voice: “I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. The cigarette, the matches. It was my doing.” He was talking about the tin case, had to be. Except it had no matches.

Mary’s voice, in English: “But how did it end up here? I mean, out of our whole property, how did it wind up in exactly the most dangerous spot?” It occurred to Young then, where their voices were coming from: behind the barn, where the oxygen tanks used to be.

A sigh. Not long, but heavy—infused with dread, a desperate longing to keep silent—and Young wished the sigh could last forever, that he would not open his mouth for the next words.

“I put it here,” Pak said. “I picked the spot, right under the oxygen tube. I gathered twigs and dried leaves. I put the matches in, and the cigarette.”

“No,” Mary said.

“Yes, it was all me,” Pak said. “I did it.”



* * *



I DID IT.

At those words, Young put her head on Mary’s pillow, her cheeks against the wetness of Mary’s tears. She closed her eyes and felt her body spin. Or maybe it was the chamber spinning, faster and faster, getting smaller and collapsing into a pinpoint, squashing her.

I did it. It was all me.

Incomprehensible words that meant the world was ending, so how could he say them so matter-of-factly? How could he so coldly admit to setting the fire that killed two people and remain breathing, talking?

The sound of Mary’s sobs, hysterical now, broke through, and it came to Young, what she’d overlooked in her fog: Mary just discovered that her father had committed murder. Mary was suffering shock, the same shock she herself was reeling from. Young’s eyes snapped open, and she ached to run out, to take Mary into her arms and cry together over the grief of learning something so horrifying about their beloved. Young heard shh-shh, the sound of a parent comforting a child in pain, and she wanted to yell at Pak to get away from Mary, to leave them both alone and stop tainting them with his sins, when Mary said, “But why that spot? If you’d picked anywhere else—”

“The protesters,” Pak said. “Elizabeth showed me their flyer, and she kept saying they might set a fire to sabotage us, and it gave me the idea—if the police found a cigarette in the same spot as the flyer, they’d get in trouble.” Of course. How convenient: set the fire, blame the protesters, collect the insurance. A classic frame-up job against the people who’d enraged him.

“But the police took them away for the balloons,” Mary said. “Why did you need to do anything else?”

“The protesters called me. They said the police just gave them a warning, and there was nothing to stop them from coming back every day, until they drove all the patients away. I had to do something more drastic, to get them in real trouble and keep them away for good. I never imagined you’d go anywhere near there, let alone…” His voice faltered, and the image flooded her mind: Mary running to the barn and turning, then blink, her face bathed in the orange glow of the fire and her body thrown in the air, caught in the blast.

Mary also seemed haunted by that moment; she said, “I keep thinking, there was no fan sound from the HBOT. It was so quiet.” Young remembered that, too—hearing the distant croaking of frogs without the usual AC fan noise masking it. The smothering purity of the silence before the boom.

“That was all my doing,” Pak said. “I caused the power outage to frame the protesters. That set everything in motion—the delays, everything that went wrong that night. I never dreamed so many things could go wrong. I never dreamed anyone would get hurt.”

Young wanted to scream, demand to know how he could possibly think that, setting a fire under a stream of oxygen. And yet she believed him, knew he had some plan to get everyone out in time. That was why he used a cigarette, to let it burn down slowly before the fire caught, and why he wanted to stay outside while she turned off the oxygen, to make sure that the flames didn’t get too big before 8:20, while the oxygen was still on. He’d come up with the perfect plan to set a slow-burning fire that would scare but not hurt anyone. Problem was, the plan didn’t go like it was supposed to. Plans never did.

After a long silence, in a quivering voice so quiet she strained to hear, Mary said in English, “I keep thinking of Henry and Kitt.”

“It was an accident,” Pak said. “You have to remember that.”

“But it’s my fault, all because I was selfish and I wanted to go back to Korea. You told me things would get better, but I kept being stubborn and complaining, and finally…” Mary broke into sobs, but Young knew: finally, Pak decided to give their daughter what she wanted and did the only thing he could think of to make that happen.

Young felt something collapse, as if someone had punched her lungs. The thing grating at her, telling her none of this made sense, was the question of why. Yes, Pak hated the protesters. Yes, he wanted them gone. But why a fire? Their business had been thriving, and there was no reason to destroy it. Except there was. Mary had come to him, begging him to move back to Korea. Arson wasn’t a spontaneous idea, born out of his anger at the protesters. He’d planned it. Everything made sense now, fit into place. The arson call, the Seoul listings—all in furtherance of his plot. And when the protesters came along, he seized on the perfect decoys.

Young felt pain in her chest, like tiny birds pecking at her heart, imagining Mary confiding in Pak last summer, crying to him about her desperation to return to their homeland. Why hadn’t Mary come to her, her mother? In Korea, every afternoon, they’d played Korean jacks while she told her about the boys who teased her and the books she secretly read during class. Where had that closeness gone? Had it evaporated, no longer retrievable, or had it simply burrowed deep to hibernate through the teenage years? She knew Mary didn’t like America and wanted to return, but only through snips and snide asides, not the soul-baring confidence Mary apparently reserved for Pak. And Pak, not coming to her, but carrying out a dangerous plan to give Mary what she wanted—making this decision by himself, with no input from her, his wife of twenty years. It felt like betrayal. Betrayal by her daughter and husband. Betrayal by the two people she loved and trusted most.