Miracle Creek(9)

Matt took the helmet. “Yes.”

“How does this work?”

Matt turned toward the jury and pointed to the blue latex ring at the bottom. “This here fits around your neck, and your whole head goes inside.” He stretched the opening like a turtleneck and put it on, the clear bubble encasing his head.

“Next, the tubing,” Matt said, and Abe handed him a clear plastic coil. It slithered out and seemed to go on forever, like one of those tiny snakes that become ten feet when they unfurl.

“What does that do, Doctor?”

Matt inserted the tube into an opening in the helmet by his jaw. “It connects the helmet to the oxygen spigot inside the chamber. There are oxygen tanks behind the barn, and tubing connects them to the spigots. When Pak turned on the oxygen, it would travel through the tubes into our helmets. The oxygen would expand and make the helmet puffy, like inflating a ball.”

Abe smiled. “Then you look like you’re wearing a fishbowl on your head.” The jurors laughed. Matt could tell they liked Abe, this plainspoken guy who told it like it was, didn’t act like he was too smart for them. “Then what?”

“Pretty simple. The four of us would breathe normally, and be breathing in one hundred percent oxygen, for sixty minutes. At the end of the hour, Pak would turn off the oxygen, we’d remove the helmets, then depressurization, and exit,” Matt said, and removed the helmet.

“Thank you, Dr. Thompson. It’s helpful to get this overview. Now, I’d like to get to why we’re here, what happened on August 26 last year. Do you remember that day?”

Matt nodded.

“I’m sorry. You have to answer verbally. For the court reporter.”

“Yes.” Matt cleared his throat. “Yes.”

Abe’s eyes squinted a bit, then widened, as if he was unsure whether he should be apologetic or excited about what was to come. “Tell us, in your words, what happened that day.”

The courtroom shifted then, almost imperceptibly, all the bodies in the jury box and gallery moving forward a tenth of an inch. This was what the people had come for. Not just the gore, though there was that—the blow-up photos and the charred remains of the equipment—but the drama of tragedy. Matt saw it every day in the hospital: broken bones, car accidents, cancer scares. People cried about it, sure—the pain, the unfairness, the inconvenience of it all—but there were always one or two in every family who got energized by being at the periphery of suffering, every cell in their bodies vibrating at a slightly higher frequency, woken from the mundane dormancy of their everyday lives.

Matt looked down at his ruined hand, thumb, fourth finger, and pinkie sticking out of a red blob. He cleared his throat again. He’d told this story many times. To the police, to the doctors, to the insurance investigators, to Abe. One last time, he told himself. Just once more through the explosion, the scorch of the fire, the obliteration of little Henry’s head. Then he’d never have to talk about it again.





TERESA SANTIAGO





IT HAD BEEN A HOT DAY. The kind that made you sweat at 7:00 a.m. Full sun after a three-day downpour—the air dense and heavy, like being in a dryer full of wet clothes. She’d actually looked forward to that morning’s dive; it’d be a relief to be sealed up in an air-conditioned chamber.

Teresa nearly hit someone pulling into the lot. A group of six women were holding signs and walking in an oval, like a picket line. Teresa was slowing down, trying to read the signs, when someone walked into her path. She braked hard, barely missing the woman. “My God!” Teresa said, stepping out of her van. The woman kept walking. No yell, no finger, no glance. “Excuse me, but what’s happening here? We need to get inside,” Teresa said to them. All women. Holding signs saying I’M A CHILD, NOT A LAB RAT!; LOVE ME, ACCEPT ME, DON’T POISON ME; and QUACK MEDICINE = CHILD ABUSE—all scrawled in block letters in primary colors.

A tall woman with a silver bob came over. “This strip here’s public property. We have a right to be here, to stop you. HBOT is dangerous, it doesn’t work, and you’re just teaching your kids you don’t love them the way they are.”

A car honked behind her. Kitt. “We’re down here. Ignore the crazy bitches,” she said, and motioned down the road. Teresa shut her van door and followed. Kitt didn’t go far. Just to the next pull-off area, a clearing in the woods. Through the thick foliage, she glimpsed the post-storm Miracle Creek, brown and swollen and lazy.

Matt and Elizabeth were already there. “Who the hell are those people?” Matt said.

Kitt said to Elizabeth, “I know they’ve been saying awful things about you and making crazy threats, but I never thought they’d actually act on them.”

“You know them?” Teresa said.

“Only from online stuff,” Elizabeth said. “They’re fanatics. Their kids all have autism, and they go around saying how it’s the way they’re meant to be, and all treatments are evil and sham and kill kids.”

“But HBOT’s nothing like that,” Teresa said. “Matt, you can tell them.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “There’s no reasoning with them. We can’t let them affect us. Come on, we’re going to be late.”

They went through the woods to avoid the protesters, but it didn’t matter. The protesters spotted them and ran over, blocking them. The silver-bob-haired woman held up a flyer of an HBOT chamber surrounded by flames and 43! on top. “Fact: there have been forty-three HBOT fires, even some explosions,” the woman said. “Why would you put your children in something so dangerous? For what? So they’ll make more eye contact? Flap their hands less? Accept them the way they are. It’s the way God made them, the way they were born, and—”