Miracle Creek

During the lunch break, Young, Mary, and Pak meet with the district attorney, Abe. Young wants Pak to tell the truth, but he refuses. Abe asks Young and Mary to leave the room so that he can talk to Pak in private, but Young and Mary eavesdrop. Pak repeats the lie, despite Abe’s reassurance that everyone would understand if he were confused, and Mary decides to help Pak.

She rushes back into the room, and declares that it was her the neighbor saw; she had a baseball cap on and from a distance, must have looked like her father. When Abe wonders how this is possible, as Mary had insisted that she had been with Pak “until right before the explosion” (104), Mary pretends her memories of that night have returned “in dribs and drabs, like the doctor said” (104), then when Pak sent her to the house for the batteries for the DVD player she didn’t go because she had fought with her mother that morning. Instead, she went toward the power lines, where earlier in the day the protestors had released balloons, hoping to cause a power outage. Young is appalled at how talented her daughter is at lying, and wonders if Mary would lie as easily for her. Nonetheless, she agrees with everything Mary has said.

During the lunch break, Teresa enjoys her time away from Rosa, though it makes her feel guilty. When the trial resumes, Teresa listens to the testimony of the arson investigator, who firmly believes that Elizabeth set the fire. Teresa is not so sure; she is the one who told Elizabeth that Henry was dead and, though Elizabeth reacted oddly—she laughed—Teresa knew it was not real laughter, that Elizabeth had “been in so much pain that she’d bypassed crying, straight past it to something beyond: a grief-stricken cackle that transmitted more pain than any sob or scream” (112). The arson investigator explains that at Elizabeth’s home they found evidence that she had researched fires during HBOT treatments, and a piece of paper saying “Henry = victim? How?” (114). Furthermore, Elizabeth cancelled all of Henry’s other appointments and therapies.

However, Teresa realizes that Elizabeth could have researched the fires after their morning encounter with the protestors, who told Elizabeth and Teresa that they “turned [their children] into victims of your warped desire to have textbook-perfect children” (114). This could explain the note, Teresa thinks, and perhaps Elizabeth was rethinking her desire to cure Henry’s autism. Meanwhile, Abe and the investigator mock Elizabeth’s story that during the dive she had wandered down near the creek and had found “an open pack of cigarettes and matches that night in the woods” as well as a note written on a piece of paper with the logo of a local Korean market reading, “This needs to end. We meet tonight, 8:15” (118). When Teresa hears the investigator saying they never found such a note, that “there was nothing to corroborate Elizabeth’s version of events” (119), Teresa interrupts, stating that she had seen the note herself.