Miracle Creek(87)

When Heights said, “Henry, that scratch on your arm. How did you get that?” Henry shook his head and said, “It is from a cat. My neighbor’s cat scratched me.”

Elizabeth shut her eyes tight. Something bitter and salty rushed down her throat as she heard her own lies emerge from those tiny lips. The fact was, the scratches on his arm were not from a cat. They were from her own nails, made on a day when they’d already been twelve minutes late to OT which, at $120 per hour, amounted to $24 in wasted money. They were about to be late to Speech, so she told Henry to hustle to the car, but he just stood there, looking up, his eyes vacant and head rolling. She grabbed his arms and said, “Did you hear me? Get in the damn car, right now!” and when he twisted his arm away, she didn’t let go. Her nails scraped his skin, a thin strip ripping away like an orange peel.

On the video, Heights asked, “A cat did that? What cat? Where?”

Henry repeated, “It is from a cat. My neighbor’s cat scratched me.”

“Henry, I think maybe someone told you to say that, but it’s not what happened. I know it’s hard, but you need to tell me the truth.”

Henry looked up at the ceiling again, showing the red blood vessels across the whites of his eyes. “The scratch is from a cat,” he said. “The cat is a mean cat. The cat is a black cat. The cat has white ears and long nails. The cat’s name is Blackie.”

The thing was, she never actually told Henry to lie. She just pretended. After the fury of the moment released and calm returned, she told Henry an alternate version. Not “I’m sorry I hurt you. Does that hurt?” or even “Why don’t you listen so I don’t have to punish you?” but “Oh, sweetie, look at that scratch! Have you been playing with that cat again? You need to be more careful.”

The magical thing was that if she presented this reinvented version in a matter-of-fact way, she could trick him into questioning his own memory. She could see doubt in the way he looked up, his eyes darting back and forth as if alternating between two stages in the sky, trying to decide which play was the more believable. And even more magical: if she repeated it enough, consistently and without drama, it distorted his memory, created a revised version with details he added himself. This—the generic cat of her invention becoming a real one in his manipulated mind, one with a name and color and markings—convinced her, even more than the physical pain she inflicted on him: she was a gaslighting manipulator, a bad mother who broke her son.

In the video, Heights said, “Did your mom tell you to say that?”

Henry said, “My mommy loves me, but I’m annoying, and I make everything hard. My mommy’s life would be better without me. My mommy and daddy would still be married and take vacations around the world. I should never have been born.”

Oh God. Had he really thought that? Had she made him think that? She’d had moments of dark thoughts (didn’t every mother?), but she’d always immediately regretted them. She’d certainly never said any of that to him. So where did he get that?

Heights said, “Did your mom tell you that, Henry? Did she scratch you?”

He looked straight into the camera, his eyes so wide that his irises looked like blue balls floating in a milky pool. He shook his head no. “The scratch is from a cat. My neighbor’s cat scratched me. The cat is a mean cat. The cat hates me.”

She wanted to grab the remote and make it stop. Unplug the TV or shove it down and break it, anything to stop the lies coming out of Henry’s mouth, so much more awful and unbearable than the scratching itself. Elizabeth opened her mouth and yelled out, “Stop it. Stop,” elongating the word, feeling it rebound and recoil all around the courtroom. She saw the judge’s mouth open in shock at her outburst, heard the bang of the gavel as he said, “Quiet, quiet in the courtroom,” but she didn’t stop. She stood and shut her eyes tight and put her hands over her ears and said, “There is no cat. There is no cat,” again and again, louder and louder, until the words grated against her throat and it hurt, until she could no longer hear Henry’s voice.





MATT





HE SAT IN HIS CAR, trying to figure out how to get Mary alone. Young wasn’t here, that much he knew; when he got here, he spied Mary helping Pak into their house, but their car was gone. He pulled over to a hidden spot, and he’d been sitting here for thirty minutes, waiting for something to happen—for Mary to come outside alone, for Pak to leave by himself, for some combination of courage and impatience to kick in and force his ass out of his car.

The heat was what drove him out. Not just the discomfort of marinating in sweat, but his hands. His palms didn’t sweat. They turned crimson and burned, as if his scars’ plastic-smooth lining were sealing in the heat, searing the underside of his skin. He told himself the pain wasn’t real, those nerves were dead, but it got worse and he couldn’t stand it. He got out. The backs of his thighs stuck to the leather seat, but he didn’t care, just stood up fast, letting the skin rip away and sting, grateful for the relocation of pain.

He interlaced his fingers and stretched them overhead, imagining the boiling blood draining out of his hands. He stood there for another ten minutes, pacing, trying to think of something other than waiting—maybe he should throw rocks to signal Mary?—when he smelled smoke. Just his mind playing tricks again, he told himself. Being so close to the site of the fire was sending his heart quivering and blood sputtering, awakening his memory of that night’s smell. He forced himself to look at the barn in the distance—the skeletal remains of its walls, the blackened submarine listing inside, bits of its previous blue peeking through the soot—and willed his brain to get it: there was no fire. No smoke.