One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  My howl spills over. I drop to my knees, then my side, hands clamped over my ears, howling. Shrieking, to be more accurate. Dozens of the tables and chairs—I would count how many to be exact but I cannot stop screaming—are heaped atop one another, some broken and some scratched, pushed and piled into the corner as if they were washed there by a storm at sea. I can smell them through my screaming and also in my memory, a deep gold smell. Deep gold is practically yellow.

  Mab grabs my wrists and tries to pull my hands from my ears. She is saying something to me, but I cannot hear her because I am shrieking. She is saying something to River too, but his hands are over his ears as well. She grabs me under the arms and hoists me upright, pushes me toward the stairs, and I start running, hands still in protective place, and she is running after me, and we go down down down, past the mother coming up the stairs with a tray of brown drinks and orange chips, past the checkout desk, past the father who emerges from New and Notable Releases to stare at us openmouthed with what looks like terror and fear, though I am bad at reading faces, but why he should be afraid of me, instead of the other way around, I cannot tell.

  Three

  Raining again. Darkling though it is only early afternoon. After Pastor Jeff left this morning, Nora and I had only an hour of quiet before Mab and Monday arrived home red, breathless, muter than I am. We looked up alarmed when they slammed into the kitchen, hair untamed as tigers, cheeks the same color outside as in.

  “Where have you been?” Nora toppled her chair when she stood. Mab shot us warning eyes, but Nora either didn’t see or didn’t care. “What happened?”

  Monday kept her eyes on the ground and rushed past us to her shoeboxes of homemade card catalog. She wedged herself between them and the wall, a tiny space she fits in only by mashing knees to shoulders, thighs to breasts, and started flipping through the cards, but way too fast to read.

  Mab looked tired and fed up and possibly scared. She met my eyes and shook her head. Then she went to our room and slammed the door.

  Now Nora, who has learned again and again not to push these daughters, is baking bread, baking cake, baking tarts: sugary things, sweet things, any things to keep her hands busy, muttering under her breath, earbuds in deep as sunken treasure.

  Someone paying less attention than I do, than I have to, might think Nora bakes to feed her fellow citizens. Her attempts to help run up against so many walls she’s like a mouse in a maze. She can’t keep Chris Wohl off drugs or give his wife Leandra her right side back, and she can’t give the guys she abets in the bar a reason not to drink too much, and she can’t give Bourne’s citizens fresh water or fresh history. But she can bring them all cookies. And that is also love.

  But that’s not why she bakes.

  Or you might think she bakes because it’s something she can control. She couldn’t protect her husband or her friends, her neighbors or her town or her daughters, but through precise measuring and careful assembly and attention to detail, she can make muffins that teeter at the serrated edge between sugar and butter, pillowed perfect sweetness you taste at the sides of your tongue like an afterthought, like you imagined it but imagined it vividly. If you’re careful, and she is, muffins are entirely in your control.

  But that’s not why she bakes either.

  Nora bakes because baking doesn’t involve water.

  Before a cow becomes a hamburger, it drinks a dozen gallons of water a day. Before a chicken and a bunch of onions and carrots become stock, you have to add a potful. Fish made it their home. Vegetables and fruits have to be rinsed in it before consumption, and that’s a lot of bottled water literally down the drain.

  Whereas what’s wet in a batter is probably nothing more than melted butter and whipped eggs. The water that made the wheat that made the grain that made the flour happened so far away as to be another planet. So to ensure our good health, to keep us well and strong, Nora insists we eat cake. Cake and cookies, muffins and crumbles, danish and donuts and croissants. Some Saturdays she feeds us nothing but brownies and a multivitamin. When she relents, we have dinner from a box or can.

  Timeworn wisdom prescribes food whole and unprocessed, slow and locally grown, low on sugar and light on butter. But Nora loves us, and if she boils boxed macaroni and cheese in bottled water then adds yellow beans from a can and bakes a cake, nothing involved has anything to do with our river or our soil. We all choose the terms of the desperate bargains we make with the powers that may be, which baseless beliefs and decaying wisdoms we cling to, and which we discard as superstition or sorcery or the ravings of misguided zealots. Which is to say: it may not make sense all the way, but it makes sense enough.

  Some days Nora has to tear coffee cake into tiny pieces and feed it to me like a bird. Or she sits on a bag of potato chips and places the crumbs on my tongue where they dissolve one at a time. Some days that’s all my system can manage. Some days I subsist on the smells from her oven alone.

  That is what I am doing all afternoon while my sisters stew, sitting and smelling as our mother cooks, redolence as nourishment. And then the doorbell rings.

  On the front porch, soaking and sorry, is a boy I can only presume is River Templeton.

  Mab is right that he looks exactly like his grandfather, so much so that Nora seems barely to be breathing.

  Mab is right that he is perfectly attractive and whole-looking.

  Mab is right that there is something deeply unsettling, and not unexciting, about how new River Templeton is, how odd it is to see a person you have never seen before.

  Nora can’t get her breath back.

  River can’t decide what to do with the panting, speechless adult whose pasted-on greeting smile is falling slowly past shock to scorn.

  “I’m, um, here to…” River stammers. He peers around Nora, for help presumably, for a hint as to what to do next, but sees only me, stares, looks away, stares again. Nora pants.

  “Is, um, does Mab live here?” he tries. “Or Monday?”

  It’s that “or” I think that does it. It is pity and newness and his cheeks covered in rain and his hair soaking tendrils down his face, but mostly it’s that “or.” Like either girl would do as well as the other. Like maybe Mab and Monday don’t even live together. Like maybe we three are three and not one. With that one tiny word, all at once, I am in love.

  Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, I am not usually so easily beguiled. The Kyles both wooed me for years, but I remained unenthralled, probably because their displays of affection mostly manifested as wrestling with each other, and a girl wants wit as well as charm. At least this girl does. Technically, I went to the fifth- through seventh-grade dances with Rock Ramundi, but really everyone just stood along the walls and felt shy of one another. Rock and I still text sometimes though. It’s not Abelard and Héloïse as far as passionate correspondence goes, but then she was cloistered in an abbey whereas I am only cloistered in Bourne. The point is I’m not one of those girls whose head is turned by every boy who shows up at her house, though not that many boys do show up at my house, but nor am I a total newbie to the tangles of the heart.

  But before I have a chance to process my own alarming and probably misguided emotions, I have to deal with Nora’s.

  “It’s you.” She finds her voice finally, but it’s dreamy. She sounds awed, wonderstruck, but I know it must be something else.

  “It is?” he asks.

  “Come in,” she says, still dreamy, like she can’t believe it. “Come in.”

  He wipes his feet, but it’s only a gesture because he’s dripping all over the entryway. He looks all around at everything except for me. And there’s not a whole lot else to look at. Books everywhere. A scratched kitchen table, mismatched chairs. At the moment, and most moments, the kitchen is buried beneath a mudslide of dirty mixing bowls, baking pans, wooden spoons, and measuring cups, plus the pastry knives, flour sifters, whisks, and rolling pins which mostly just stay out for there’s no place to put them away because the ca
binets are full of books. But beneath all that, somehow, you can still make out stained countertops, cheap linoleum, cabinets without handles, drawers without pulls. Through the doorway into the living room, there’s matted, worn carpet the uneven but unrelenting gray of winter skies, a faded sofa roughly the same non-color, an upturned packing crate masquerading (unconvincingly) as a coffee table, Monday’s lumpy yellow recliner, which hasn’t reclined in years, leaking stuffing onto a pile of romance novels. There’s a fat old TV on top of the plywood bureau that holds Nora’s clothes right there in the living room since it doesn’t fit upstairs. Our house smells like a bakery but looks like a thrift shop. We have none of the grandeur of the library, none of the glory or the soaring space, none of what his family must have with which to fill it either. Only the books. And here, they are out of place.

  And then Nora finds her real voice, her sense, her purpose at last. “River, is it?”

  He nods, dripping sheepishly.

  “Tell me this, River,” and I brace myself, but instead she says, “Are you hungry?”

  * * *

  The promise of cake lures Monday out of her corner, the promise of drama Mab from our room. I am parked at the head of the table like a queen. The middle is piled with rainy-day baked goods: zucchini muffins, crème de menthe brownies, and a red velvet cake dyed green instead. There’s coffee, and Nora’s poured some for everyone then opened another bottle of water to make more when she sees River blanch.

  “Oh, sorry,” Nora says when she takes in his face. “Do you not drink coffee?”

  “I’m sixteen,” he says.

  “Can I pour you a glass of milk,” she offers solicitously, “or make you some cocoa?”

  Mab smirks at him over the rim of her mug, but I can see her considering whether she’s cool and he’s childish, or if it turns out sixteen-year-olds who drink black drip are yet another Bourne anomaly and she just never knew.

  I sip mine through a straw from a cup gripped by a snaking hose clamped onto the side of my chair.

  River tries not to stare at me.

  I try not to stare at River. But not that hard.

  “So, River, what brings you here?” Nora is not used to guests, but somehow she knows what to say anyway.

  “She left screaming”—River points at Monday—“so I thought I should check if she was okay.”

  “Thought you should, huh?” says Nora.

  He nods and looks at his plate of baked goods, says nothing.

  “She’s fine,” Nora says lightly, as if worry over someone who had to be bodily removed shrieking from his home makes him something of a fussbudget. “She’s just—”

  “How did you find us?” Mab interrupts.

  “I asked at the laundromat. It was the only place open.”

  “Lots of downtown’s closed these days,” Nora muses, as if idly.

  “I asked the guy at the counter—”

  “Rich,” Nora puts in helpfully.

  “—if he knew where two sisters named Mab and Monday lived.” He looks pleased with himself for this bit of sleuthing. It seems not to have occurred to him that I must be a sister as well. “I felt bad because my parents can be kind of … off-putting.”

  “You don’t say.” Nora is expending so much energy on her nonchalance, I expect her to collapse from the strain.

  “And I don’t know anyone here, so…”

  He trails off, and I wish he wouldn’t. I want to know what he intended to say. So I’m settling for the two of you? So I’m really invested in our quarter-hour of friendship so far? So even though we’ve barely met, running through the rain as if at the climax of the kind of TV movies that air Sunday afternoons seemed the way to go?

  “Plus you were on your bikes, and”—he waves at the window—“it’s raining again.”

  Mab and Monday are dry as deserts. River is wet as his namesake, a puddle formed on the floor beneath his chair.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Nora says.

  Mab squeezes her eyes shut. River looks lost. Meandering.

  “Pardon?”

  “Not what brings you here to our home this afternoon. What brings you to town. To Bourne.”

  Ahh.

  “Oh.” He smiles, relieved. Here’s a reasonable question it’s reasonable to expect a reasonable adult to ask. “My dad got transferred.”

  “Really.” A statement from Nora, not a question.

  “His company sent him here.”

  “What company is that?”

  “Belsum Basics?” River’s voice sounds like a question.

  “Belsum Basics?” Nora has stood up.

  “It used to be called Belsum Chemical?”

  “I remember.” Her voice is rising.

  “But they changed the name.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why?” She’s stopped being reasonable.

  “I…” He looks lost again. And slightly alarmed. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Mama,” Mab interrupts, and waits for Nora to look at her. “He doesn’t know.”

  Nora blinks. She blinks again. She sits. This is true, of course. He doesn’t know. He’s just a boy. He doesn’t know.

  But then he says, “Maybe something about the reopening?”

  No one moves. No one even breathes.

  “The reopening?” Nora says.

  “The reopening of the plant?” Earnest, trying to be helpful. “A new start and everything? I mean, I’m just guessing. No one tells me anything. But, you know, the sign on the roof?”

  The plant is topped with rusted, wind-racked metal letters taller than our house that spell out B-E-L-S-U-M. Kind of like the “Hollywood” sign.

  “What about it?” Nora has bright red spots on paling cheeks.

  “Well, it just spells ‘Belsum,’ so I guess they could change the second half of the name without costing anything or inconveniencing anyone, you know?” He shrugs and goes right on, sparing us all Nora’s answer to that question. “A whole bunch of stuff got messed up when they decided to reopen the plant, so I guess they wanted to leave whatever they could the same.”

  “What got messed up?” Nora keeps her voice low, steady, but she’s got her hands balled into fists so tight they look permanent.

  “Well, my whole life for one thing.” He laughs. “Not that they care. You know?”

  “Yes, indeed I do.” Nora starts laughing too, but hers is more of a cackle really. “Welcome to the club.”

  Mab’s eyes meet mine then flick back. We want the same thing, she and I, for River Templeton not to be here to watch while our mother loses her mind.

  “It’s totally not fair,” River is saying. “I had to change schools, leave all my friends. Boston’s a lot … bigger than Bourne.” I notice that pause, take it to heart, the adjective he went with politely rather than the ones that must have presented themselves first. He’s not thoughtless, just oblivious. He doesn’t know. He can’t possibly. He’s just trying for banal conversation with a slightly weird adult.

  A slightly weird adult who’s turning colors.

  Monday’s confusion is about to spill over into questions it’s not polite to ask in front of guests. Especially when they concern the guest. River is talking about how unjust it is that there’s no marimba elective at Bourne Memorial High nor even one available for him to continue his practice on as an independent study.

  He needs to leave now. But how to effect this graciously? Or how to tell Mab without him overhearing? My Voice is about as inconspicuous as I am.

  I tap my finger once, and my sister’s eyes shift instantly from River to me as if I’ve poked her with it.

  My finger points at Mab. It points at River. It points at the door. Mab, River, the door. She nods once.

  “River,” she says, and he turns to her, but her eyes are still holding mine. “Let’s take a walk.”

  One

  We are the last house before the woods. That’s why m
y parents bought it. My mother thought it was too small, even though they were only two at the time, because they planned probably to have a baby someday and maybe even another one after that. Who could see that many years in the future? “We’ll build an extension,” my father promised. “There’s so much room here.” She thought the house was too dark, but my father said he’d cut holes in the walls and fill them with glass. When she told me this story when I was little, I pictured smashed windshields and wineglasses swept up and piled into big gaps punched in the walls. At some point, years later, I realized he’d meant windows, and it blew my mind—that a window was nothing more than a hole cut in a wall and filled with glass, that even something as stable and permanent as a wall was no more solid or nonnegotiable than anything else.

  In the cramped kitchen she wasn’t sold, but he turned her around by the shoulders and pointed her toward the woods. Think of wind blowing through summer branches, he said. Think of our kids jumping in piles of school-bus-colored leaves. Think of the forts they’ll build and the exploring they’ll do and the trees they’ll climb and the make-believe they’ll make believe out there. There’s no place better to be a kid than the woods. No place safer.

  I have played in his woods, but I have mostly played alone. If Monday did not fear the dirt, the disorder, the potential to get lost. If Mirabel’s chair could more comfortably cover ground stippled with roots, branches, puddles, mud. If Mama hadn’t come to see danger lurking everywhere. If he had himself survived. But that’s a lot of ifs. And besides, there was no place safe here after all.

  Pooh used to be our next-door neighbor, back before we lived here, years and years before I was born. It’s maddening that I missed this merely by arriving six decades too late. When she was a little girl, she lived in the house next door to ours, and the people who lived in our house were an older couple called the Perrys who used to invite her over after school for fruitcake.