Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

Tragedies don’t inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn’t get sprinkled out in fair proportions; bad things get hurled at you in clumps and batches, unmanageable and messy.

Her own mother had belonged to this breed of people who used manners to cover up unfriendliness the way people used perfume to cover up body odor—the worse it was, the more they used.

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.

“When I was your age,” Young had said, “your grandmother made me practice eating rice grain by grain. She said, ‘This way, food is always in your mouth, so you are not expected to talk, but without appearing to be a pig. No man wants a wife who eats or talks too much.’”

(Funny, how it was always the moms of precocious kids who extolled the virtues of not worrying about developmental milestones, all the while flashing those smug smiles of parents congratulating themselves for having “advanced” children.)

Elizabeth knew that everyone’s let’s-pretend-nothing’s-wrong act was for her sake. Maybe she should’ve been grateful. But somehow, it made it worse, as if Henry’s behavior were so deviant that they had to cover it up. If Henry had cancer or hearing loss, everyone would’ve felt pity, sure, but not shame. They would’ve gathered around, asking questions and expressing sympathies. Autism was different. There was a stigma to it. And she’d stupidly thought she could protect her son (or was it herself?) by saying nothing and desperately hoping no one would notice.

When Henry finally stopped rocking and twisted away, his mouth scrunched in pain, his eyes looking directly into hers—the first deep, sustained eye contact he’d made with her in weeks, maybe months—she felt power coursing through her and exploding into elation, her pain and hatred shattered into tiny shards she could no longer feel.

She acted the part of a single woman—put on makeup in the car, wore her hair long, stared at vineyard workers. And for the briefest moment with the cashier guy, she actually felt like a free woman, a woman without the male-repellent combination of a disabled daughter and a surly son.

The protesters that morning. “You’re harming them,” the silver-bob-haired woman had said. “You’ve turned them into victims of your warped desire to have textbook-perfect children.”

But later, she’d thought, Is Rosa a victim of my inability to accept her? But I just want her healthy. How is that wrong?

During the day, she drove Henry to seven types of therapy—speech, occupational, physical, auditory processing (Tomatis), social skills (RDI), vision processing, neurofeedback—and, between those, roamed holistic/organic stores for peanut/gluten/casein/dairy/fish/egg-free foods.

She’d said nothing about not having sex the other three weeks, but that was how it played out. And just like that, sex became something they did for no reason except conception. Clinical and schedule-based. Somewhere around the sperm viability and motility tests, Ovulation Week became Ovulation Day, a twenty-four-hour period for having sex as many times as possible, followed by twenty-seven days of “resting up.”

Even the note-in-wok placement—it had seemed strangely appropriate to keep the proof of her husband’s relationship with a Korean girl inside a present from the woman who’d first accused him of having an “Oriental fetish.”

In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect. In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept. A bah-bo.

Like most Korean men, Pak had wanted a son, expected one. He’d tried to hide his disappointment; when his family bemoaned his misfortune in his only child being a girl, he said, “She’s as good as ten sons.” But a little too firmly, as if trying to convince them of something he didn’t quite believe.

That was the thing about being nowhere like this; there was nothing to orient you to place and time, and you could be transported to the other side of the globe, to a time long past.

Household items causing electrical accidents were popular science-fair entries in Korea—a boy had won Mary’s fifth-grade competition with an exhibit featuring Mylar balloons, hair dryers falling in tubs, and worn power cords starting fires—and she’d been surprised that most Americans seemed to have no idea. (Then again, America was low on international science-education rankings.)

perseverating

TJ’s new thing is fecal smearing. He takes off his diaper and smears shit—walls, curtains, rug, everything. You have no clue what it’s like. You saying TJ and Henry both have autism, they’re the same—it’s offensive to me. You complain that Henry can’t sustain eye contact, can’t read faces, doesn’t have enough friends? You think that’s heartbreaking, and yeah, maybe it is. There’s heartbreak in parenting every day. Kids get teased, break bones, don’t get invited to parties, and when that happens to my girls, of course I feel heartbreak and cry with them. But that normal stuff, that’s nowhere near what I have to go through with TJ, not even in the same frigging galaxy.”

And when Young said, “The doctor says there may be brain damage, she may never wake up,” Teresa gripped her hands and cried with her. But under the jolt of her pain and empathy (and she did ache for Young, she truly did), there was a part of her—the tiniest, most minute part, just one-tenth of one cell deep within her brain—that was glad, actually happy, that Mary was in a coma and might end up like Rosa.

the thing about being together and sharing so much—everything from their sons’ quarterly autism-severity scores to their teachers’ daily counts of “perseverative behaviors” (rocking for Henry, head banging for TJ)—was that it bred an intense rivalry.

the jealousy shot into overdrive in the world of autism moms, which was at once the most cooperative and the most competitive she’d seen, with stakes that mattered—not which college your kids got into, but their very survival in society: whether they’d learn to talk, if they’d ever move out of your house, and how they’d live when you died.

When the biomedical treatments started and Henry improved and TJ didn’t, that was when Elizabeth and Kitt’s relationship warped into something that resembled friendship on the outside—still carpooling and having coffee every Thursday—but felt like something else on the inside.

But autism? That was a lifelong thing. Besides, “recovery” implied a baseline of normalcy that had been lost, whereas autism was supposed to be an inborn trait, which meant, of course, there was nothing lost to recover. She’d been skeptical, but trying the treatments was the same as baptizing Henry despite her atheism: if she was right, they were just pouring water on Henry’s head (no harm), but if Victor was, they were saving him from eternal damnation in hell (big upside).

He was the Holy Grail of biomed treatments, the so-called Super Responder. One week (one!) after Elizabeth removed food dyes, Henry’s rocking went from an average of twenty-five to six episodes per day. Two weeks after starting zinc, he started making eye contact—fleeting and sporadic, but compared with none and never, a breakthrough. And the month after she added B12 shots, his MLU (mean length of utterance) doubled, from 1.6 to 3.3 words.

Not being autistic was not the same as being normal. Even the words the doctor used—“speech is virtually indistinguishable from typical peers”—made that clear: Henry wasn’t typical, but had learned to mimic it, like a lab-trained monkey. If he was careful, he could pass for normal, but it was a precarious kind of normal, one that teetered on the edge.

Forcing a smile when others congratulate you for beating the odds, while anxiety churns in your stomach as you wonder how long this reprieve will last.

He’d learned early on—fights in a marriage were like seesaws. You needed to balance blame carefully. You pile too much blame on one person, let them thunk down to the ground, they’re liable to stand and walk away, send you flying down on your ass.

indicia

(This was the quintessential skill of teenage daughters: making you think and say things you regretted even as you were thinking and saying them.)

seen. It had always been this way with them—an imbalance, even their positioning now, the three of them forming a skinny triangle with Young the lone castaway far from the others. Maybe all families with only children were this way, inequality in closeness and the resulting envy being inherent in all three-person groups.

She once read that sounds left permanent imprints; the tonal vibrations penetrated nearby objects and continued for infinity at the quantum level, like when you throw pebbles in the ocean and the ripples continue without end.

But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together—one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.

In the distance, beyond the stretch of burned, dead dirt, beyond the carcass of the submarine now slowly moving away, a patch of wildflowers in yellow and blue stood, and looking at it, she felt her despair displaced by something simultaneously heavier and lighter. Han. There was no English equivalent, no translation. It was an overwhelming sorrow and regret, a grief and yearning so deep it pervades your soul—but with a sprinkling of resilience, of hope.