For days afterward, Janine had been a pain in the ass, going on about HBOT’s safety, its many uses, blah blah. When he didn’t budge, she tried to guilt him, said his refusal would cement her father’s suspicion that Matt didn’t believe in his business. “I don’t believe in it. I don’t think what he does is medicine, and you’ve known that from day one,” he’d said, which led to her most hurtful comment. “The fact is, you’re against anything Asian. You dismiss it.”
Before he could rail against her for accusing him of racism, point out that he’d married her, for Christ’s sake (and besides, wasn’t she always going on about how racist old-time Koreans like her parents were?), Janine sighed and said in a pleading voice, “One month. If it works, no IVF. No jerking off into a cup. Isn’t that worth a try?”
He never said yes. She just pretended his silence was acquiescence, and he let her. What she said was right, or at least not wrong. Plus, maybe it would get his father-in-law to start forgiving him for not being Korean.
“When did you start HBOT?” Abe asked.
“The first day it opened, August fourth. I wanted to get the forty sessions done in August—better traffic—so I signed up for two dives each day, the first at 9:00 a.m. and the last at 6:45 p.m. There were six sessions each day, and those times were reserved for us ‘double-dive’ patients.”
“Who else was in the double-dive group?” Abe asked.
“Three other patients: Henry, TJ, and Rosa. Plus their mothers. Aside from a few times when someone was sick or stuck in traffic or whatnot, we were all there, every day, twice a day.”
“Tell us about them.”
“Sure. Rosa is the oldest. Sixteen, I believe. She has cerebral palsy. She has a wheelchair and feeding tube. Her mother is Teresa Santiago.” He pointed to her. “We call her Mother Teresa because she’s extremely kind and patient.” Teresa blushed, as always when called that.
“There’s TJ, who’s eight. He has autism. Nonverbal. And his mother, Kitt—”
“That’s Kitt Kozlowski, who was killed last summer?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recognize this picture?” Abe placed a portrait on an easel. A posed shot with Kitt’s face in the center, like one of those Geddes baby flowers, except framed by her family’s faces instead of petals. Kitt’s husband above (standing behind her), TJ below (on her lap), two girls on the right, two on the left, all five kids with the same frizzy red curls as hers. A tableau of happiness. And now the mom was gone, leaving a sunflower with no center disk to hold up the petals.
Matt swallowed and cleared his throat. “That’s Kitt, with her family, with TJ.”
Abe placed another picture next to Kitt’s. Henry. Not one of those fake studio shots, but a slightly blurred picture of him laughing on a sunny day, blue sky and green leaves behind him. His blond hair mussed up a little, his head back and his blue eyes almost slits from laughing so hard. A missing tooth smack in the middle, as if he’d been showing it off.
Matt swallowed again. “That’s Henry. Henry Ward. Elizabeth’s son.”
Abe said, “Did the defendant accompany Henry for the dives, like the other mothers?”
“Yes,” Matt said. “She always came in with Henry, except for the last dive.”
“Every single dive, and the only time she sat out just happened to be when everyone inside was hurt or killed?”
“Yes. The only time.” Matt looked at Abe, tried hard not to look at Elizabeth, but he could see her in the periphery. She was staring at the pictures, sucking her lips into her mouth to gnaw on them, the pink lipstick gone. It looked wrong, her face with makeup lining her blue eyes, color on her cheeks, shadow accentuating her nose, then nothing under the nose—just white. Like a clown who’s forgotten to draw in lips.
Abe placed a poster on a second easel. “Dr. Thompson, would this be helpful in explaining Miracle Submarine’s physical setup?”
“Yes, very,” Matt said. “This is my crude drawing of the lot. It’s in the town of Miracle Creek, ten miles west of here. Miracle Creek is an actual creek—it runs through the town; thus the name. Anyway, the creek runs through the woods next to the treatment barn.”
“Sorry, did you say ‘treatment barn’?” Abe looked puzzled, as if he hadn’t seen the barn four thousand times.
“Yes. There’s a wooden barn in the middle of the lot, and the HBOT chamber is inside. When you walk in, to the left is the control panel where Pak sat. Plus cubbies for us to leave anything not allowed in the chamber, like jewelry, electronics, paper, synthetic clothing, anything that could set off a spark—Pak had very strict safety rules.”
“And what’s outside the barn?”
“In the front, there’s a gravelly parking spot big enough for four cars. To the right, the woods and the creek. To the left, a little house where Pak’s family lives, and to the back, a storage shed and the power lines.”
“Thank you,” Abe said. “Now take us through a typical dive. What happened?”
“We’d crawl into the chamber through the hatch. I usually went last and sat closest to the exit. That’s where the intercom headset was, for communicating with Pak.” That sounded like a plausible enough reason, but the truth was, Matt preferred being on the margins of the group. The moms liked to talk, trading experimental treatment protocols, telling life stories. That was fine for them, but he was different. He was a doctor, for one, who didn’t believe in alternative therapies. Plus, he wasn’t a parent at all, much less the parent of a special-needs kid. He wished he could’ve brought in a magazine or paperwork, some shield against their constant questions. It was ironic, how he was in there to try to have kids, but everywhere he turned, he felt like, God, do I really want kids? So much can go wrong.
“So then,” Matt said, “the pressurization. It simulates how a real dive feels.”
“What’s that like? For those of us who haven’t experienced submarine rides,” Abe said, eliciting appreciative smiles from several jurors.
“It’s like a plane landing. Your ears feel heavy, and they can pop. Pak pressurized slowly to minimize the discomfort, so it took about five minutes. Once we were at 1.5 ATA—that’s like seventeen feet below sea level—we put on oxygen helmets.”
One of Abe’s minions handed Abe a clear plastic helmet. “Like this?”
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.”