Miracle Creek(84)
He touched Janine on the shoulder. “I need to go,” he mouthed, and pointed at his pager like it was some work thing. She whispered, “Okay, I’ll fill you in.”
He stood and walked out of the courtroom. As he was leaving, he saw Shannon gesturing to the now-decimated chart. “Detective,” she said, “I’d like to clarify something we discussed earlier.” Shannon wrote something on the chart and said, “This is what you wrote in your meeting with your colleagues, correct?”
Matt stopped at the door and looked. It wasn’t until after Heights said, “Yes, that’s correct,” that Shannon stepped back, unblocking Matt’s view of the poster. On top, above all the crossed-out categories of abuse, Shannon had written in fat letters and circled, NO ABUSE = NO MOTIVE.
ELIZABETH
SHE SAW THEM DURING RECESS, outside the courtroom. A sizable contingent—twenty, maybe thirty women—from her autism moms’ group. The last time she saw them was at Henry’s funeral, back when she was still the tragic mother, the focal point of their sympathy and sorrow (and maybe guilt, for secretly feeling a pinch of superiority at their own children being alive). Before the arrest and news stories that stopped the visits with dropped-off casseroles. She’d expected some to attend the trial, but she hadn’t seen anyone all week.
But now, here they were. Why today? Perhaps the latest news had piqued their curiosity to the pay-for-special-needs-babysitter-for-a-whole-day level. Or maybe today was the monthly meeting—yes, it was a Thursday—and they decided to take a field trip. Or … was it possible? Could they have heard how her treatments for Henry—the same treatments many of them were giving their own kids—were being branded “medical abuse,” and they’d come out in support?
The women were standing in a loose circle, talking and milling around like bees near a hive. As she walked toward the courtroom, getting closer to them, one woman on her phone—Elaine, the first to have tried the so-called bleach treatment, even before Elizabeth—looked up and noticed her. Elaine’s eyebrows shot up and her lips spread into a smile as if she was glad to see her. Elizabeth smiled back and veered toward the group, her heart fluttering and leaping against her chest, her whole body buoyed by hope.
Elaine’s smile fell, and she turned toward the group and whispered something. And now all the women were glancing at her the way they might at a rotting corpse—unable to contain their curiosity but disgusted, their eyes darting at her, then quickly away, their faces contorting as if they’d sniffed something putrid. Even as Elizabeth realized that of course Elaine’s raised brow and smile were from surprise and embarrassment, the women walked inward to a huddle, their backs to her, forming a circle so tight it seemed ready to collapse onto itself.
Shannon mouthed, “Come on, let’s go.” Elizabeth nodded and stepped away from them, her legs feeling simultaneously hollow and heavy, making it hard to walk. For many years, this group had been the only place where she’d felt a sense of belonging as a mother, a world where she wasn’t politely avoided and pitied as the (whispered, always whispered) “poor mom of that boy with”—pause—“autism, you know, the one who just rocks all day long.” The opposite: in the group, for the first time in her life, she’d felt something akin to power. Not that she hadn’t achieved before—she’d gotten honors in school, bonuses at work—but those were worker-bee types of success, the quiet kinds noticed only by one’s parents. In the autism moms’ world, though, Elizabeth was a rock star, a miracle worker, the leader of the in-crowd, because she was what everyone dreamed of becoming: the mother of a Recovered Child, a child who started out as a nonverbal, nonsocial, nonpresentable mess like the others, but over the years, catapulted into the realm of mainstream classes and therapy graduations. Henry had been the role model, the crystallization of the hope that one day, their own kids could undergo their own metamorphoses.
Being the object of so much envy and esteem had been intoxicating but (not being used to it) also embarrassing, and she’d tried to downplay her role in Henry’s progress. “For all I know,” she told the group, “Henry’s gains weren’t from the treatments, and the timing was coincidental. There’s no control group, so we’ll never really know.” (Not that she actually believed this, but she thought her correlation-doesn’t-equal-causation logic made her seem rational, which made nonbelievers less likely to dismiss her as one of those “antivaccine nutjobs.”)
Even with Elizabeth’s caveats, though, virtually everyone in the group joined the biomed stampede and rushed to get their kids on the same treatments. “Elizabeth’s protocol,” they called it, despite her protests that she’d merely followed others’ recommendations, with only tweaks based on Henry’s lab tests. When many of the other kids improved (although none as quickly or dramatically as Henry), that was when she became the true queen bee, the expert everyone turned to. Every one of the women standing outside the courtroom now had e-mailed her for advice or picked her brain over coffee, asked for help interpreting lab tests, and sent her muffins and gift cards to thank her.
And now here they were, these women who’d once been united in their admiration for her: their backs turned to her, united more tightly than ever in their condemnation of her. And here she was, the onetime near deity, shuffling away, now a pariah. And if the group’s reaction was any indication, mere days away from becoming a death-row inmate.