Matt wanted to run up and grab her shoulders and shake her. He wanted to shove his face into hers and scream that he still had nightmares about Henry in that moment, looking like some alien in a kid’s drawing—a bubblehead of flames, the rest of his body perfectly intact, his clothes untouched, but his legs thrashing in a silent scream. He wanted to zap that image into her head, transfer it or mind-meld it or whatever it took to pop that fucking composure off her and heave it way the hell away where she could never find it again.
“No,” Matt said to Abe, no longer tired, no longer in need of the break he’d prayed for. The sooner he got this sociopath hauled off to death row, the better. “I’d like to continue.”
Abe nodded. “Tell us what happened to Kitt after the explosion outside.”
“The fire was isolated to the back oxygen spigot. TJ’s helmet was also connected to that, but TJ had taken it off and Kitt was holding it. The flames shot out of the opening, onto Kitt’s lap, and she caught on fire.”
“What then?”
“I tried to get Henry’s helmet off, but…” Matt looked down at his hands. The scar tissue over the amputated stumps looked glossy and new, like melted plastic.
“Dr. Thompson? Were you able to?” Abe said.
Matt looked up. “I’m sorry. No.” Matt forced his voice to be louder, his words to come faster. “The plastic started to melt, and it was too hot; I couldn’t keep my hands on it.” It had been like grabbing a red-hot poker and trying to hold on. His hands refused what his mind willed them to do. Or maybe that was a lie; maybe he’d wanted to do just enough to tell himself he’d tried his best. That he hadn’t let a boy die because he didn’t want to damage his precious hands. “I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my hands to try again, but Henry’s helmet started disintegrating and my hands caught fire.”
“What about the others?”
“Kitt was screaming, smoke was everywhere. Teresa was trying to get TJ to crawl up, away from the flames. We were all screaming for Pak to open up.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. Pak opened the hatch and pulled us out. Rosa and Teresa first, then he crawled in and pushed TJ and me out.”
“And then?”
“The barn was on fire. The smoke so thick, we couldn’t breathe. I don’t remember how … somehow, Pak got Teresa, Rosa, TJ, and me out of the barn, then he ran back in. He was gone awhile. Eventually, he came out carrying Henry and laid him down on the ground. Pak was hurt—coughing, burns all over—and I told him to wait for help, but he wouldn’t listen. He went back in for Kitt.”
“What about Henry? What was his condition?”
Matt had walked toward Henry quickly, had fought off the way every cell in his body screamed at him to run the fuck away. He slumped down and held Henry’s hand—unblemished, not a scratch, like the rest of his body from the neck down. His clothes unburned, socks still white.
Matt tried not to look at Henry’s head. Even so, he could see that his helmet was gone. Pak must’ve managed to finally get it off, he thought, but he saw the blue latex around Henry’s neck and realized: the helmet’s clear plastic had melted away, leaving behind the sealed ring. The fire-retardant piece that protected everything below Henry’s neck and kept it pristine.
He forced himself to look at Henry’s head. It was smoldering, the hair singed away, every inch of his skin charred and blistered and bloody. The damage was the worst near his right jaw, the point at which the oxygen—the fire—blew into the helmet. His skin had burned off completely there, and his bone and teeth flashed through. He saw Henry’s new tooth, the gums previously hiding it now gone. Perfect and tiny, set above the others, which you could tell were baby teeth because the grown-up teeth yet to grow in were above them, in plain sight. A gentle wind blew, and Matt got a whiff of charred flesh, of singed hair, cooked meat.
“By the time I got to him,” Matt said to Abe, “Henry was dead.”
YOUNG
HER HOUSE WAS NOT EXACTLY A HOUSE. More of a shack. It could look quaint, if you looked at it a certain way. Shaped like a tiny log cabin or tree house, the kind a teenager might build with his not-so-handy father, and to which a kind mother might comment, “Very good effort. And you’ve never even had a class on woodworking!”
The first time she saw it, Young said to Mary, “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It’ll keep us dry and safe. That’s what’s important.” It was hard to feel safe, though, in a creaky shack that drooped to one side, as if the whole structure was slowly sinking into the ground. (The lot was soft and muddy, so this seemed possible.) The door, the single “window”—clear plastic duct-taped to a hole in the wall: both were lopsided, and the plywood lay on the floor unevenly. Whoever built this hut had not been familiar with levels or the concept of right angles.
But now, opening the crooked door and stepping onto the wobbly floor, safe was exactly how Young felt. Safe to do what she’d wanted since the judge banged the gavel to end the first day of trial: laugh out loud, both rows of teeth showing, and shout that she loved American trials, loved Abe, loved the judge, and, most of all, loved the jurors. She loved how they ignored the judge’s instructions not to discuss this case with anyone, even one another, and, as soon as he stood to leave—Young loved that most, their not even waiting until he was gone—started talking about Elizabeth, how creepy she was, and what nerve, showing her face here in front of people whose lives she’d ruined. She loved how they stood to leave and glared down at Elizabeth in unison, like a gang, the same expression of disgust on their faces—the beautiful uniformity of it, as if it had been choreographed.
Young knew she shouldn’t feel this way, not after Matt’s horrifying testimony recalling Henry’s and Kitt’s deaths, his burns, the amputation of his fingers, the difficulty of learning to do everything with his left hand. But she’d lived the last year in perpetual sadness, remembering Pak’s screams in the hospital burn unit and imagining a future without functioning limbs, and hearing about it no longer affected her. Like those frogs that get so used to hot water, they stay in the boiling pot. She’d gotten used to tragedy, become numb to it.
But joy and relief—those were relics, buried and forgotten, and now that they were unearthed, there was no containing them. When Matt testified about the minutes before the explosion and there was no question, not a hint, of Pak’s absence from the barn: it was as if sludge had been in her veins, cutting off her organs, and right then, a dam broke and it all rushed out. The story Pak had invented to protect them had, with time and repetition, become the truth, and the only person who could challenge it had cemented it instead.
Young turned to help Pak inside. As she approached him, he said, “Today was a good day,” and grinned at her. He looked like a boy, his mouth crooked, one corner higher than the other, a dimple only on one cheek. “I waited until we were alone to tell you the good news,” he continued, his grin getting wider and more crooked, and Young felt a delicious conspiratorial togetherness with her husband. “The insurance investigator was in court. We talked when you were in the bathroom. He’s filing his report as soon as the verdict’s announced. He said it’ll take only a few weeks for us to get all the money.”