Miracle Creek(92)

“What? No. I’m glad you told me.” Elizabeth touched her arm. “I wish more moms would talk like this. We need to tell each other the ugly stuff, the stuff we’re ashamed of.”

Teresa shook her head. “I can’t imagine what my CP support group would do if they heard this. Kick me out, probably. Other moms just don’t think things like this.”

“Are you kidding?” Elizabeth looked at her. “Come here.” She scooted all the way next to the hatch and intercom, as far away from the kids as possible. She said in a hushed voice, “Remember what Kitt said about TJ and fever?”

Teresa nodded. Kitt had been talking about the phenomenon of some kids’ autism symptoms lessening with high fever, and how TJ stops head banging and even says one-syllable words when he gets sick and how heartbreaking it is when his fever breaks and he reverts. (“It’s wonderful and terrible, seeing this glimpse of who he could be for just a day.”)

Elizabeth continued. “Henry’s the opposite. When he’s sick, he gets completely spacey. Last time, he couldn’t get his words out, even started rocking, which he hadn’t done in a year. I was so scared it was permanent. I freaked out and yelled at him, thinking maybe I could snap him out of it. I even…” Elizabeth looked down and shook her head, as if telling herself no. “Anyway, I had this moment where I thought, why did I have him? If he hadn’t been born, my life would be so much better. I’d be a partner by now, and Victor and I’d still be married, taking vacations around the world. I stopped researching regressions and started looking up islands in Fiji.”

Teresa said, “That’s nothing. It’s like fantasizing about an actor.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Since then, when I’m really frustrated, sometimes I wish he didn’t exist. I once even fantasized about him dying. In some painless way, maybe in his sleep. What would life be like? Would it really be that bad?”

“Mom,” Henry called out. “The DVD’s done. Can you put in another one?”

“Sure, sweetie.” She buzzed Pak, asked for the next DVD, and waited for it to start before whispering to Teresa, “Anyway, my point is, we all have our moments. But they’re just moments, and they pass. At the end of the day, you love Rosa, I love Henry, and we’ve both sacrificed everything and we’d do anything for them. So if a tiny part of us has these thoughts a tiny part of the time, thoughts we shut out as soon as they creep in, is that so bad? Isn’t that just human?”

Teresa looked at Elizabeth, her kind smile that made her wonder if she’d made up the whole story to make Teresa feel better, less alone. She thought of how life might’ve played out: Rosa’s body, long ago pillaged by maggots, now a pile of bones six feet under. She looked over at Henry and Rosa, sitting together in their fish-tank oxygen helmets, their faces bathed in the glow of the screen. She thought how Rosa would never be like Mary, who by now was probably drinking and stewing over her friend with David and God knows what else. Maybe it was okay that Rosa was sitting here instead, gurgling and laughing at the sounds of dinosaurs.



* * *



BACK ON THAT DAY, and many times since (especially right after Mary awoke from her coma with no brain damage), she’d imagined telling Young about Mary’s misdeeds, the satisfaction she’d feel as Young realized that her flaunted daughter was not the flawless specimen of parental satisfaction she’d portrayed. And now, finally, was the perfect opportunity to tell her, not out of sheer pettiness, but to give context to the I-want-my-child-dead conversation. But she couldn’t do it. She looked at Young’s face, so tired and confused, and she replaced Mary’s name with “a teenager at McDonald’s.”

After Teresa’s story, Young said, “Pak was right. Elizabeth said she wanted Henry to die. How can any mother say this?”

Teresa had told the whole story with no emotion, but now a lump was rising in her throat. She swallowed. “I said it, too, about Rosa. I said it first.”

Young shook her head. “No, you … your situation is very different.”

Different how? she wanted to ask. But she didn’t have to. She knew. What Young thought, what everyone thought: Rosa was better off dead. Not like Henry, whose life was valuable, whose mother shouldn’t be wishing for his death. It was what Detective Heights had said in the cafeteria. Teresa said, “It’s hard when you have a disabled child, of any kind. I don’t think you can understand if you’ve never experienced that.”

“Mary was in a coma for two months. I never wished for her death. Even if she is damaged, I wanted her not to die.”

Teresa wanted to yell that Mary was in the hospital, cared for by nurses. Young didn’t understand that when the months became years, it changed you, that it was different when you had to do everything yourself. She wanted to hurt Young, couldn’t resist the urge to strike her off the pedestal from which she could be so fricking sanctimonious. “You know, Young,” Teresa said, “that girl I heard, who was breaking the rules? That was Mary.”

Teresa regretted saying it before she finished, even before Young’s face scrunched into wounded confusion. Young said, “Mary? You saw her in McDonald’s?”

“No. It was actually here. In the shed.”

“The storage shed? What was she doing?”