Miracle Creek

Matt and Janine meet with Abe and Shannon. Matt doesn’t tell Janine what he is going to say because he knew she’d tell him to keep it to himself but “he was sick of it, the hiding, scheming, enumerating facts, and on and on” (296). Matt tells them that he and Mary were the ones smoking and that the Camels and note they found were his. However, he doesn’t tell them about his assault of Mary, just that he had told her they needed to quit meeting to smoke.

Janine then confesses to meeting Mary and throwing the note and cigarettes at her. She also confesses, to Matt’s surprise, that she had invested in the Pak’s HBOT enterprise without Matt’s knowledge. She had called the insurance company because Pak, at first, “didn’t want to get insurance,” only acquiescing when Janine said she wouldn’t invest. She called because she was worried he had only purchased “some bare-bones policy to appease [her]” (301). Shannon tells Abe she will call for a mistrial based on this new information, but they are interrupted by a report that Elizabeth has left the courthouse on their own.

Elizabeth steals Shannon’s car and begins the drive to the HBOT chamber. She doesn’t go the “direct route” but via Creek Trail “a winding country road—barely two lanes of potholed asphalt lined by trees so thick they formed a protective covering high above, the trees reaching sixty, seventy feet” (306). The road had always made her nervous, with its “hairpin turn,” which Henry described as “a tree-tunnel roller coaster” (307). Elizabeth thinks of all the horrible things she’d done to Henry, not just taking out her frustrations on him, but on all the constant therapy and work.

In fact, the day of the fire, Elizabeth had decided enough was enough. She hurt Henry because she was exhausted, but she finally realized that Henry might be exhausted as well. She cancelled all his therapy, and looked forward to relaxing with him after camp. Kitt called her to tell her Ruth Weiss had made the report to CPS. Elizabeth had planned to skip the evening HBOT dive, but after the phone call, she didn’t want the protestors to think they had won.

When she got there, she asked Kitt and Matt to help Henry so that she could celebrate, privately, her decision to let Henry be himself. During the dive, she “thought how she wanted to rip that helmet off as soon as he came out, how she’d wrap her arms around him and tell him she loved him and she missed him, and she’d laugh and say yes, she knew it was silly to miss him when they were apart for just an hour, but she still did” (312). Instead, however, “she identified her son’s corpse, picked out a coffin and gravestone, was arrested for his murder […], and now she was driving a stolen car toward the town where he’d been burned alive because of her” (313).

Elizabeth had only agreed to Shannon’s defense because she thought Shannon would go after Ruth Weiss, but because Shannon refused to do so, “what was left to hope for?” (314). Instead, Elizabeth has decided to kill herself, to deliberately sail off the edge of the road at the dangerous hairpin turn. She puts the top down on Shannon’s convertible, takes off her seatbelt, and “leaned forward, and as the tires thunked onto the flattened guardrail, she saw the bright, beautiful valley below, shimmering in the sunlight, like a mirage” (315).