Miracle Creek(86)

“In your expert opinion, do these NOs”—Abe pointed to the chart— “indicate no abuse?”

“Absolutely not.”

Abe took the red marker again and crossed out all the column headings on top. “What about the rows?” he said. “Ms. Haug separated out different types of abuse and crossed them off, one by one. Is that a valid way to analyze child abuse cases?”

“No. You can’t look at each charge in isolation. One incident, by itself, may be disturbing, but not enough to constitute abuse. For example, a parent saying a child’s annoying and people hate him. By itself, not abuse. Scratching a child’s arm, that again may not be abuse by itself. And on and on, with the forced drinking of MMS and IV chelation. But when you consider everything together, a pattern emerges, and things that may seem innocuous in isolation may not, in fact, be so harmless.”

“Is that why you couldn’t remove Henry from his home immediately?”

“Yes, that’s exactly why. In cases of obvious injury, like broken bones, it’s easier to make that call. But in cases like this, where each incident is questionable and subtle, you have to consider multiple sources and see the whole picture, which takes time. Unfortunately, before we could do that, Henry died.”

“In summary,” Abe said, “does separating abuse into categories, then finding no abuse for each category—does that demonstrate there was no abuse here?”

“Absolutely not.”

Abe crossed out the categories. “Now, this chart is pretty much destroyed, but before I put it away, let’s focus on medical abuse. Detective, was Ms. Haug correct to list only IV chelation and MMS?”

“No. Those were the riskiest therapies inflicted on Henry. But again, you can’t just look at the procedure in isolation.” She looked at the jury. “I’ll give you an example. Chemotherapy. For a child with cancer, that’s obviously not medical abuse. But inflicting chemotherapy on a child without cancer would be. It’s not just the riskiness at issue, but the appropriateness.”

“But what about a child in remission from cancer? That’s the proper analogy, isn’t it, since Henry was diagnosed with autism at one time but then wasn’t?”

“True. But giving chemo to a child in remission would be a classic case of Munchausen by proxy, the condition we’re calling ‘medical abuse.’ A typical Munchausen case is when someone with a serious illness recovers. The caregiver loses the constant contact with hospitals and doctors, and tries to regain that by manufacturing symptoms to make it appear the child’s still sick. Here, Henry was diagnosed as no longer autistic. The defendant couldn’t accept that, and kept taking him to doctors and doing risky treatments he no longer needed, just so she could continue to get attention.”

Elizabeth thought about the autism moms’ group. Kitt used to ask, “Why do you keep doing all this shit? Why are you still coming to our meetings?” The answer came to her now: she hadn’t wanted to stop because she liked being in that world—where, for the first time in her life, she’d been the best, the envy of the group. Had Henry been in HBOT last summer and been scorched alive because she’d been on an ego trip?

She felt sick. She shut her eyes and pressed her palms into her stomach to keep from throwing up, and then someone was saying something about the importance of hearing directly from the victim.

She opened her eyes. Shannon was standing, objecting, and the judge said, “Overruled. Objection is noted,” and Shannon squeezed her hand and whispered, “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. You ready?” She wanted to say no, she had no idea what was happening, she was sick and needed to get out of here, but Abe was turning on the TV next to the easel.

Heights said, “This is the video recording of Henry the day before the explosion, when we interviewed him at camp.” Abe clicked the remote.

Henry’s head appeared, filling the screen in a close-up shot. The screen was huge, and she gasped at the clarity of the life-size video of Henry’s face, how you could see the faint freckles from the summer sun dotted across his nose and cheeks. Henry’s head was down, and when the off-screen voice—Detective Heights’s—said, “Hi, Henry,” he kept his chin down and looked up, making his huge eyes seem bigger, like a kewpie doll’s.

“Hello,” Henry said in a high-pitched voice, curious but cautious. When he opened his mouth, you could see a gap in his front teeth—the shadow of the tooth he’d lost that weekend, the one she took from under his pillow and replaced with a dollar from the tooth fairy, careful not to disturb his peaceful sleeping face on the pillow.

“How old are you, Henry?” Heights’s disembodied voice asked.

“I am eight years old,” he said, mechanical and formal like a robot giving programmed responses. Henry didn’t gaze at the camera or Detective Heights, who must have been behind or beside the camera. Instead, he looked up, his eyes wandering as if he were examining in detail a fresco on the ceiling. It occurred to her now that she couldn’t remember a single conversation with him when she didn’t say at least once, “Henry, don’t be spacey; look at me, always look at the person you’re talking to,” her words spewing out like venom. Why had it mattered so much where his eyes were pointed? Why had she never just talked to him, asked him what he was thinking or told him he had the same color eyes as her own father’s? Now, seen through the veil of her tears, Henry looked like a Renaissance painting of an angel, looking up at the Madonna. How had she never noticed the innocence, the beauty?