Miracle Creek

Matt dreams about Mary and, in his dream, she wears “the red sundress from their final meeting last summer, on her seventeenth birthday” (230). In the dream, Matt and Mary have sex; at the end “the dream-Mary screamed and shattered into a million glass particles, the tiny beads of glass-her exploding into him in slow motion, pushing through his skin and into his body, sending tingles of warmth and pure joy out toward his limbs” (235).

In reality, Matt did spend time with Mary on the night of her birthday. When he goes down to the creek to have a cigarette, Mary is there celebrating her birthday by herself, drinking peach schnapps, and Matt drinks with her. They have a long, intense conversation: Mary reveals her loneliness and Matt, his frustration with Janine’s obsession with having children. As they begin to leave, Mary stumbles and falls into Matt and he falls on the ground with her on top of him. He kisses her, and then shoves her hand down his pants, and he orgasms. However, he realizes that Mary did not want him to do this, seeing on her face “[f]ear. Shock. But most of all, confusion, as if she didn’t understand any of this” staring at him “like a child. A girl” (233). Matt is mortified and runs away.

He tries to talk to Mary later, to apologize, but she avoids him. It was his note to Mary that Janine found, but he and Mary never got a chance to talk because of the explosion. After the explosion, his memory of assaulting Mary, combined with the damage to his hands, have left Matt essentially impotent, although he reaches orgasm in his dream, something he tries desperately to hide from his wife.

Young overhears a conversation between Mary and Pak: Mary is weeping, and Pak confesses that he set the fire, but it was just supposed to be a small fire, one that would burn slowly, enough to get the protestors in trouble, but not enough for anyone to get hurt: “That was why he used a cigarette, to let it burn down slowly before the fire caught, and why he wanted to stay outside while [Young] turned off the oxygen, to make sure that the flames didn’t get too big […] while the oxygen was still on” (242). He tells Mary that he did it for her, so that they could move back to Korea as Mary wanted.

Young is devastated by the news that Pak was responsible for the fire, but equally devastated by the loss of intimacy with her daughter: “Young felt pain in her chest, like tiny birds pecking at her heart, imagining Mary confiding in Pak last summer, crying to him about her desperation to return to their homeland. Why hadn’t Mary come to her, her mother?” (242). Pak claims that he will confess if Elizabeth is convicted, but insists that Elizabeth did want Henry dead. Young stumbles outside and they realize she has heard everything.

Shannon’s cross examination of the detective reveals many things that Matt didn’t know. For example, he had always believed that Henry wasn’t sick or even autistic, that Elizabeth was a bad mother, one who just wanted a perfect child. However, Shannon reveals that Henry was formally diagnosed by reputable doctors, and that all the treatments that Elizabeth had tried had been vetted by doctors. All of Abe’s insinuations about Elizabeth’s willingness to try dangerous treatment methods seem to be incorrect, and Shannon gets the detective to admit that they didn’t remove Henry from Elizabeth’s care before the fire because there was no evidence of abuse. Furthermore, the detective was aware that other parents in the area had also used these alternative methods, including the chelation and so-called bleach therapy, and were not under suspicion of child abuse.

Matt realizes that he has been completely wrong about Elizabeth, and decides he must tell the truth: “he had to tell Abe, and probably Shannon, too. Maybe not everything, but at least about Mary and the insurance call, the H-Mart note” (257). He leaves the courtroom to find Mary, and warn her that he is going to tell the truth about what happened that night.