“What’s fruitcake?” I asked the first time Pooh told me about them, my ghost roommates.
“Old-fashioned holiday loaf that tastes like shit. That’s why they foisted it off on me. But it tastes like shit because it keeps forever so they’d get half a dozen at Christmas and saw off one tiny slice every time I came over. It’d last almost until summer.”
“Why’d you eat it?”
“Even bad cake is still cake when you’re little.” She shrugged. “It’s a shame you didn’t live here then. They’d have liked to know the four of you.”
“The house would have been pretty crowded at that point.”
“They’d have appreciated your mother’s baking skills. But mostly, they liked kids. Never had any of their own. I think they didn’t mind not having kids, but they hated not having grandkids. That’s why they liked me. That’s why they’d have liked you.”
“Is that why you like me?” I ventured. “Because you don’t have any kids of your own?”
Pooh snorted. “I don’t like kids. Having no kids isn’t why I like you. You’re the exception.”
“Everyone likes kids,” I said.
“No.” She looked over her glasses and down her nose at me. “Children are a pain in the ass. Look at your poor mother. No offense.”
“I’m not a pain in her ass,” I protested.
“Oh, sweetie, I love you, but of course you are. That’s the whole point of children—they keep you grounded, but another way to say that is they weigh you down. Grandchildren are probably better, but it’s not like you can start with them so you have to lie.”
“Lie?”
“To your kids. If you let them know how much they wreck your life, your kids won’t make you any grandchildren.” She stopped pulling at her fingers and pointed one at me. “You remember that now, Mab. That’s good advice I’m giving you.”
“I’m not having kids,” I said.
“Of course you are.”
“How?”
“Mab Mitchell, Bourne Memorial High School may not be Eton, but I know you don’t need me to answer that question.”
“I don’t mean how how. I just mean … I’m never going to meet anyone here I want to … you know.”
“What’s wrong with here?” She threaded her fists through the armrests of her wheelchair to plant them on her hips.
“Among other things—” I was, in contrast, lolling on her sofa, one leg long along the cushions, one stretching over my head—“there is no one here I would want to raise a child with, never mind, you know, make a child with.”
“I think there may be some lovely baby-makers in Bourne. Not now, of course. Not soon, even. But there’s no need to rule all of them out forever.”
“I’ve known everyone here too long. They’re practically related to me at this point. It’s gross to have a baby with someone you’re related to.”
“Well, inadvisable anyway,” Pooh conceded, “but don’t knock friends and neighbors who are like family. That’s the best thing about Bourne.”
“It’s a short list.”
“Maybe, but that’s a big thing. It’s why I stayed.”
“No it’s not.”
“The hell it isn’t. Why do you think I’m still here?”
I sat up to look at her. It had honestly never occurred to me that she had a choice. “I thought you…” I trailed off.
“You thought I couldn’t leave. You thought I was stuck here. Well, I’m not. I like it here. It’s small—”
“Too small,” I interrupted.
“Other places have more people,” Pooh said, “but the problem with people is lots of them suck. You limit the population, you limit the assholes too.” Then it seemed like she changed the subject. “You know what growing up Korean in America in the thirties and forties was like? Even with the name Winifred?”
Especially with the name Winifred, I thought.
“Here I got teased and picked on and called names, and Bobby Euford’s mother wouldn’t let us go to prom together, but that was pretty much it. I had cousins in Los Angeles, San Francisco—big, beautiful cities—who got beaten, who got deported, who owned houses and businesses that got destroyed. Anyone tried to deport us? They’d have had to answer to all of Bourne. We were here so we were one of them. We were part of the community. Bourne was small enough that’s what mattered to people here. Matters to people here.”
I saw her point—that life can be terrible anywhere, that there are lots of ways besides ours to get screwed and lots of ways to be evil besides Belsum’s, that sheltered has its perks too—but instead I was thinking about how much wider her life had been than mine. How much fuller and farther flung. “Maybe a small town has fewer assholes,” I said, “but it has fewer cool people too.”
“We have plenty of cool people. Neighbors you know will be there when you need them. Neighbors who get you and what you’ve been through. A sense of place. Shared history. None of that’s easy to find. Or easy to give up.”
“I guess not.”
“You’ll leave, I’m certain, and out there, you’ll have your absolute pick of fellas, but afterward, maybe you might surprise yourself. Maybe you’ll come back.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew for sure I’d be able to leave, never mind return. I wanted to ask her where I would go and what it would be like. I wanted to ask her why anyone would fall in love with me when I didn’t know anything about anything. Instead I said, “Fellas?”
“Oh yes.” Pooh rubbed her hands together like a bad guy in a cartoon. “Fellas falling all over themselves to make Mab Mitchell’s babies. Now that I’d like to see.”
Which got me thinking about how she probably never would. That’s the part Petra and I don’t talk about when we talk about the SATs. If we get into college, we’ll go. We’ll get to leave Bourne, but we’ll have to leave everyone we know. And the difference between get and have is everything.
“Why don’t you ever serve cake?” I asked Pooh at the time, around the lump in my throat.
“Child, your mother bakes three a week. You don’t need me for cake. When you come to me, you get protein.” Bulgogi is an unusual after-school snack, but Pooh is an unusual friend.
Now Pooh lives in an apartment so she doesn’t have to negotiate steps, and there’s no one in the house next door to us. Most of our block sits empty, in fact. River turns to head back the way he came in, but I reach out and tug his sweatshirt sleeve, careful not to actually touch him, and pull him the other way.
It’s wet in the woods, but from below rather than above—the ground is sodden and muddy, but the leaf cover is thick enough that I lower my hood. River does the same, seems surprised it’s not raining in here, as if we’ve passed into some parallel dimension, and then looks at me, full on, like for the first time.
He puts out a hand—also to my sleeve, also not touching me—and says, “Wait.”
I do. I stop. I don’t say a word. Just look at him. And wait.
River is panting lightly, like we’ve been running. His color is high, red cheeks, bright eyes. He seems to be buzzhumming underneath where you can quite hear like the overhead lights at school.
What he says is “Your sister.”
“Yeah,” I say.
He shakes his head. Then he adds. “Is this whole town…?”
He trails off.
“Yeah,” I answer anyway.
“Whyyy?” He draws the word out. Not an idle why. A what-the-fuck why. A how-on-earth why. The why-God-why kind of why. Like he actually doesn’t know.
“Do you actually not know?”
“Know what?” he says.
How could they not tell him?
How could they tell him?
How can I tell him myself?
Seventeen years ago, your family built a chemical plant, killed a lot of people, ruined my whole generation, destroyed our town, mumbled a half-assed non-apology, packed up their shit, and left. And now, apparently, you’ve come back to reopen the plant and do i
t all over again.
“What’s … wrong with them?” he manages and then blushes. “I mean, sorry, it’s probably not cool to say it like that. What do you say? From what do they suffer?”
“If you’re in Elizabethan England.”
“What ails them?”
“You talk very strangely,” I can’t stop myself saying.
“So I’ve been told.” And then he tries again, more simply. More gently. “Are they okay?”
“Who?” He needs to narrow his question down.
“Everyone. Your sister.”
“Which one?”
He looks more stunned, takes this in, can’t think quite how to proceed.
“Mirabel developed brain damage in utero,” I begin. “She has lesions on her brain. Some days are better than others. But she’ll never walk. She’ll never talk so that many people besides us understand her. She’ll never be able to live on her own.” A swallow swoops low overhead. We must be too near her nest.
“God.” He pauses, forgets I’m there, takes this in too. “Is that what they all have? All those kids at school?”
“No. Some of them do. Some of them have other stuff.”
“Other stuff?”
“Cerebral palsy, spina bifida, hearing loss, blindness, microcephaly, heart defects. Missing limbs. Pastor Jeff’s not big on labels, official diagnoses, that kind of thing, but we’ve got it all.”
“Pastor Jeff?”
“Town doctor,” I supply, and because that stuns him into further silence, “Have you noticed all the buildings in town have ramps? Have you noticed most of the parking is wheelchair parking?”
“Why?” Bewildered again, full of appalled wonderment.
“There’s a lot of people who use wheelchairs.”
“No, why?” he explains.
“Or it’s intellectual disabilities,” I continue without answering. “Or learning or emotional ones. Or low birth weight, cognitive impairments, disrupted endocrine system, central nervous system toxicity, thyroid disease, high blood pressure, a whole lot of really nasty cancers. Not that there are any especially pleasant ones.”
“I don’t…” He has stopped looking horrified and started looking scared. “Mab, I don’t understand.”
He doesn’t. This is obvious. So our eyes look at each other, but our heads are both flooding with too many impossible details. He has no idea what’s going on here, how he’s landed in a town of people like this, how a town like this can even exist. He must be thinking of all the science fiction movies he’s ever seen, all the fantasy he read as a little kid. Maybe he fell asleep and woke to a new reality. Maybe he wandered through an invisible veil between worlds. Maybe he fell through a portal to another universe where everyone seems normal at first until you look more closely and realize something is very, very wrong.
And me? I can’t believe his parents brought him here without a warning about what we’re like, how we got this way, and their family’s role in making it happen. Even if they dispute the facts, even if they want to spin it differently for their kid, sending him into a den of wolves as if we’re only poodles seems mean. And shortsighted.
Plus now I have to tell him. Maybe that was their plan all along. Make someone else break all this to their son. Make someone else lay out the facts and the cause and effect. And then when he brings home the wild accusations, they get to deny and laugh them off and say, “Oh, of course not, don’t be silly,” and say, “Does that sound like something we’d do?” and say, “These people have too much imagination and too little sense.”
But I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to keep talking without telling him. And besides, he needs to know. Of course he needs to know. For his own safety. For his own comprehension. If he’s going to be lonely, shunned, and tortured—and he is—he should at least understand why.
And never mind all that, it’s his birthright.
I have the speech ready. I have heard it often enough from my mother. I can recite it like other people’s children can recite Scripture. It starts like the Bible, in fact. In the beginning. Felled innocence, followed hard by retribution and terrible fury. “Twenty years ago, Belsum scientists invented a chemical called GL606.”
But I realize, hearing myself incant it, that that makes it sound inevitable, handed down remotely and anonymously, no one to blame, too long ago to have anything to do with us here right now, and since none of that’s true, and since its not being true is the most important point really, I give up on the speech. We find a log and sit on it, and I try to figure out where to start if not at the beginning.
“You know at first it was great, I guess.” I’m not looking at him, but I can feel that he’s not looking at me either. “You—Belsum—brought a lot of jobs, a lot of business to town. You had big plans. GL606 was something to make something else better or cheaper. I never totally understood how or what. Before you even started production, though, you had dozens of companies signed up to buy it to put it in whatever they made. It was one of those things, between one thing and another thing, you know?”
“Not really.” He’s not touching me, but he is sitting a little closer than seems normal.
“You weren’t making a thing or selling a thing. You were making and selling a thing—this chemical—for other people to put in other things they were making and selling.”
“Oh.” He looks confused. I’ve never had to explain this to anyone before, and the dark spots in the story my mother’s told again and again reveal themselves slowly to be holes.
“That was nice,” he adds, “to make something for others.”
I am telling this wrong.
“My mother says the smell came first.” There’s no reason to tell him fast. We’re not in a rush. We have nothing else to do. There’s no reason not to tell it all except it’s overwhelming. It’s hard to explain something that’s completely foreign to the person you’re explaining it to but has always been true for you, like when you try to describe color to someone who’s blind or if you had to teach a frog to use its lungs when it had spent its whole life underwater using its gills. Or a toad. Whichever one is the amphibian. “When you ask my mother what it smelled like, she says chemicals. When you ask her what the chemicals smelled like, she says death. Sometimes she says it’s not what it smelled like, it’s what it stopped smelling like—wisteria and honeysuckle because everything stopped blooming all at once that spring, and then fresh-cut grass because people couldn’t be outside long enough to mow due to the reek, and eventually snow because sometimes it fell but never enough to freeze over the stench. And she also remembers how they had to cancel Fourth of July that year because the stink stank too much for anyone to go out and grill or roast marshmallows or watch fireworks. She remembers everyone kept their windows shut tight and just sat around sweating in their houses because the air was too foul to let inside. She remembers when it was over ninety degrees every day for three and a half weeks, but they wouldn’t open the pool because this yellow dust fell out of the sky and settled over the water half an inch thick.”
“Gross,” says River. “What was it?”
“No one knew”—I am playing tic-tac-toe with myself with a stick in the mud—“but then the smell stopped being just outside and came inside because the water smelled bad coming out of the tap, and it looked bad too—brown or oily or murky, like maybe there was something in it—and then you could taste it. People filled bottles and jars and took them down to the plant. At first, they just wanted to raise the alarm or whatever, like of course no one realized what was happening, and if they knew they’d do something immediately. And when that didn’t work, people stopped complaining and started, you know, panicking.”
“Why?”
I stop playing tic-tac-toe and turn to look at him. I make sure I’m looking at his eyes. “You—Belsum—didn’t stop. You kept doing what you were doing. You just kept saying the water was fine. It was fine for water to smell like that and taste like that and be that color. Perfect
ly safe.”
“Maybe it was,” River says hopefully.
I press my sneakers into the game I’ve drawn and pull them up again, watch water seep into the pattern the treads have left behind.
“My parents had a dog. Sparkle. Stupid name for a dog. This was before we were born. Sparkle was like a practice kid for them. He was a rescue dog, and he was like the son they’d never have. Not that they knew that yet. He got a lump one day.” I have one in my throat telling River this. When Mama gets to this part of the story, Mirabel always cries. When we were little, you’d think Mirabel wasn’t even listening, maybe not even hearing, and then Mama would come to this part of the story and tears would start to fall right out of Mirabel’s eyes without her making a sound. “Sparkle got a lump one day and then lots of lumps in the days after that, but Mama couldn’t get an appointment at the vet because suddenly the vet was full.”
I stop because probably he gets it, and what happens next is terrible and better left unsaid.
But he doesn’t get it. “Was one of the vets away? We had a cat for a while in Boston, and there were only two vets in the office, so it took forever to get an appointment in the summer because one or the other was always on vacation.”
“Doc Dexter wasn’t on vacation. It was hard to get an appointment because so many people’s pets were having seizures or bleeding from their mouths or growing tumors. Sparkle just lay in the kitchen with his tongue out on the tile all day long, trying to cool off in the closed-up-tight house.”
“And then what happened?”
“And then he died.”
“Holy shit!” He keeps looking at me, at my face, I think because he expects it to crack into a smile any moment now. Like I’m going to punch him in the arm and laugh and say, I’m just messin’ with you, or, Kidding! Gotcha!
But all I say is “Yeah. I know.” I do. It’s hard to hear. I get that. I would like to stop. I would like not to tell him the rest. I would like there not to be a rest.
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