It’s a good question.
The only answer I can come up with is this: I can’t run circles around these guys, but I can talk circles around them.
I decide to start with the Kyles. Two birds and all that. At tutoring, I try begging them. “Just leave the kid alone.”
“No,” they say.
“Please,” I wheedle. “For me.”
“Still no.” Everything the Kyles say, they say together.
I try flattery.
“But you’re so much stronger than he is.”
“True,” they agree but can’t see why this isn’t an argument for beating him up rather than against.
I try an appeal to fairness.
“It’s two against one.”
“We take turns,” they assure me.
I try reason, but reason is not their strong suit.
“It wasn’t his fault. He’s our age.”
“He is?”
“Of course. He’s enrolled in high school.”
“Who cares if he’s our age?”
“Because what happened with Belsum happened before any of us were even alive.”
“That’s why you’re so vacuous,” Petra puts in from where she’s doing multiplication tables with Nellie in the corner. But the Kyles aren’t studying for the SATs so they don’t know what “vacuous” means, which, come to think of it, is probably for the best.
I summon patience. “If he wasn’t born yet, it can’t be his fault. And besides, how much control do you have over your parents’ actions?”
“Huh?” they say.
“If your dad does something stupid, is it your fault?”
“Yeah,” says one.
“Usually,” says the other one.
I resort to platitudes.
“Violence is never the answer.”
And it’s like a clearing, like a wind blows the storm clouds from their brains and suddenly you can see for miles.
“It is,” they say.
“His dad’s gonna give my dad a job, Mab,” Kyle M. says.
“Mine too,” says Kyle R.
My legs pretzel, and I fold right to the floor. They cross theirs nimbly and join me, crisscross-applesauce on the carpet like when we were in kindergarten. My brain is screaming: It’s starting. It’s started. And also, quieter, She won’t survive this.
“My dad said the whole place is a shit show,” says Kyle M., “but maybe it’ll be better this time.”
“My dad said the whole company’s corrupt, lying assholes,” says Kyle R., “but a job’s a job.”
“So we did what we had to,” they say together.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe our dads can’t stand up, but we can.” Kyle R. looks so earnest it’s like he’s still a kindergartner. That was the year he started an adopt-a-slug program at recess with the slogan “Even the slimy deserve a family.”
“Maybe our dads can’t stand up,” Kyle M.—adoptive father to the vast majority of rehomed slugs—adds, “so we have to. You know? Their way didn’t work, so now it’s our job.”
I nod. I do know. But then I shake my head. “But River’s on our side. He’s helping us.”
They look skeptical. I know how they feel. “How?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. But I can’t get him to help us if you won’t leave him alone.”
“Are you sure he’s helping?”
I’m not. “I think he’s trying.”
“He might be lying to you, Mab.”
“Maybe,” I admit.
They consider the matter between them.
“Plus, Mirabel says,” I add. My ace in the hole.
Their faces light up. They emerge from their huddle, nodding.
“We’ll stop for the moment,” says Kyle M., “if you promise to let us know when it’s time to start up again.”
“And,” adds Kyle R., “if you promise to tell Mirabel we did what she said.”
* * *
On my way home, I stop by Pooh’s to bring her a loaf of zucchini bread my mother put into the oven when it was raining but didn’t remove until after it stopped, so Monday wouldn’t eat it. Pooh, of course, doesn’t care.
“Who pooped in your piña colada?” she says when she buzzes me in and sees my face. I follow her into the kitchen where she opens her fridge, inserts the zucchini bread, and swaps it for a heap of meats and sauces she starts piling on the counter.
“Tutoring sucked,” I tell her.
“Poor baby. You need animal flesh.” She puts a plate of galbi—her mother’s recipe—in front of me, then starts setting up a steamer for dumplings.
“I don’t think that’s the problem.”
“Then what?”
“The Kyles are beating River up because his dad gave their dads jobs.”
She nods. This makes sense to her, a strange kind of warped Bourne logic, whack-a-mole revenge. “And you want to save him.” She’s grinning at the bossam she’s wrapping in cabbage leaves. “That’s very sweet.”
“Not me. Mirabel.”
“Bullshit. You love him.”
“You wish.” Everyone could do with a little excitement around here. “I’m telling you it’s Mirabel. She pled his case. She begged me to help him.”
“Why?”
“She’s nicer than I am.”
“Well, that’s certainly true. Whereas you, you think you’ll let the kid keep getting the shit beat out of him?” She’s half teasing, half making a point, though I don’t know what point.
Until I say it out loud, I don’t even know it’s in my head. “He thinks we’re so fucked up.”
“I bet. Who cares what he thinks?”
I do. “He thinks we’re this tiny backwards, backwoods, backwater town, stupid and pathetic and hopeless. Crazy. South of crazy. Beggarly. Lugubrious.”
“You and Petra might have studied enough now.”
“He feels sorry for us.” I sound bitter as orange rind.
“Not sorry enough,” she says.
“It’s not his fault.” I keep saying that.
“Not yours either.”
“Sure, but no one’s blaming me.”
“You inherited his father’s father’s mess,” Pooh says, “and so did he. It should be his burden at least as much as yours, don’t you think? He needs to see what we are. He needs to know it in his bones. Maybe the Kyles’ll knock some sense into him.”
“The Kyles don’t have enough sense to knock between them,” I say, and she nods, and she’s quiet, and then she says, “But you know what else?”
“What?”
“He needs to see how we’re broken maybe. But you? You need the opposite. You need to see how we’re whole.”
“A hole?”
Pooh has been in Bourne as long as anyone. She needs a wheelchair just because she’s old. You forget, living here, that some of us falter before it’s time, but if we’re lucky and live long enough, we’ll all wind up there in the end. What’s different about Pooh is she’s so old that even though she’s been here forever, she hasn’t been here forever. There was a time before. Pooh has lived in two different countries and four different states. She’s visited family in Korea, California, and Hawaii. She went to college and drove cross-country once with her roommate. She knows about the world out there. She’s the only one I know who does. Except River.
“Bourne’s on the small end of town-sized and a bit too powder-keg-y at the moment for my taste, but there’s a lot that’s really nice about this town. We’re not especially wonderful maybe, but we’re not especially miserable either. How it is here is how it is everywhere.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. “It’s really not.”
“Yup, it is. It was just the same for him in Boston, I promise you.”
“What are you talking about, Pooh? Boston has museums, historic stuff, parks, baseball, millions of people, nontoxic bodies of water—”
I’m just getting started when she interrupts. “He was sick of all
the kids he’d known since grade school, the ones he never liked but his parents made him hang out with, the ones who were there when he accidentally called the kindergarten teacher Mommy and remember when he got hit in the face with a volleyball in sixth grade and cried so hard they had to send him home. He wants a million things he doesn’t have. He wants everything. He thought there was no one new to meet and no one he wasn’t bored to death of and nothing to do on Saturday nights and nowhere left to go. He felt trapped there like he’d never get out. And then suddenly? He got to come here. He doesn’t think Bourne’s lame. He thinks it’s exciting.”
“No way.” I’m laughing now, shaking my head.
“Maybe not Bourne itself, but all the new people, new school, new possibilities.”
“They’re beating him up,” I remind her.
“Exciting!” She shrugs. “Roils the blood. Muddies the waters. I bet he loves it.”
“He doesn’t. He’s terrified.”
“Because you know what else it does?” It’s like she hasn’t even heard me. “It makes pretty girls feel protective of you. It makes pretty girls stand up for you in front of everyone.”
“You’re crazy, Pooh.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you. Here’s not so different from anywhere. You can’t see that now but you will. When you leave, you’ll see. And River Templeton? He’s not so different either. Teenage boys are teenage boys. I bet you anything he’s over the goddamn moon to be here.”
“How could that possibly, possibly be the case?”
“Easy,” Pooh says. “You’re here.”
Two
Mab kicks over a stack of checkout cards, and I know she did not mean to, but she should be more careful because the checkout cards go everywhere, and that is a whole afternoon of work wasted. If you think it is ridiculous that I am using cards and pencils to track library books in this day and age, you are correct. If you think I am too stupid to know how to use a computer instead, you are incorrect. When Mrs. Watson gave me the books, she did not give me the scanner you use to catalog, lend, and track the books. I asked, but she said it got sold. Leave it to humanity to think the book scanner is more valuable than the books.
Mab says she is sorry about my cards, but she does not look sorry about my cards.
“Come downstairs,” she says.
“What is downstairs?”
“Mirabel.”
“Mirabel is always downstairs.”
“Exactly. We need to talk. All of us.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Three heads are better than one.”
“Like Cerberus?” There are two books about Greek mythology inside the microwave.
“Yes,” Mab says. “Exactly like Cerberus.” But she is being sarcastic enough that even I can tell.
Downstairs, she is all red and talking with a lot of extra breath. “I did it.”
Mirabel high-fives her.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“What you wanted me to.”
“You picked up all my checkout cards and put them back in the right order and placed them neatly in a neat pile with something heavy on top so they will not go everywhere if someone kicks them accidentally?” That is what I wanted her to do, but I do not see when she could have done it since it just happened.
“The other thing,” she says.
But I cannot think of another thing.
So she rolls her eyes and says she talked to River, and she talked to the Kyles, and she told the Kyles to stop and to spread the word and tell everyone else to stop too.
“Thank you,” Mirabel’s Voice says, and her eyes might have tears in them, and her face might show happy or it might show relieved.
“Why do you look red and panty then?” I wonder to Mab.
“We need a plan,” Mab says, “and a sister pact.”
“I vow to always eat your creamed spinach,” I say immediately. Neither of my sisters likes creamed spinach. “As long as it is raining.”
“Not that kind, Monday,” Mirabel’s Voice says at once so she must have it saved, but I do not know why she would. Then she adds, “Thank you,” which is polite. Then she adds, “Stop.”
“Stop what?” I say.
But Mab says, “Exactly. You’re right.”
“Right about what?” I say.
“We have to stop them. Don’t say who, Monday, I’m getting to that. We have to stop Belsum.”
I wait, but neither of them says anything else, so I ask, “Stop them from what?”
“Opening the plant,” says Mab. “Reopening the plant.”
“How can we?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” says Mab.
“We do not have a lawyer,” I inform them. “We do not have any money. We are just kids no one listens to.”
“So we won’t sue them, buy them, or convince them,” says Mab. “We’ll do it a different way.”
“What way?”
“Our way.”
“Oh. What is our way?”
“I don’t know,” Mab says again.
“If Mama cannot,” I say, “we cannot too.”
I put my hands over my ears, but I can still hear Mirabel tapping at her screen. Then her Voice says, “She is one. We are three.”
“And plus, we have River,” says Mab.
“We do?”
“Now that we’ve saved him, he owes us,” she says. “Mama and Russell and the lawsuit have never had that.”
“Had what?”
“A man on the inside.”
“River is not a man,” I inform her.
“You know what I mean.”
“Lie.”
“I’m saying River might have access to all sorts of things Mama and Russell don’t even know to look for.”
“He could sabotage his father from inside the house!” This is an exciting good idea, but Mab and Mirabel both laugh like I am making a joke. So I explain, “He could hide all his father’s shoes so he could not go to his meetings, or if he did go to his meetings he would be barefoot so no one would listen to him. He could hide the giant scissor because his father cannot reopen the plant without a ceremony and he cannot have a reopening ceremony without a giant scissor. If his grandfather comes to visit, River could hide a minor poison in his food so Duke Templeton could see how he likes it, and he would not like it and change his mind.”
“I was thinking more like next time River listened in on a conversation he could record it on his phone,” Mab says.
“My ideas are better.” It is not polite to brag, but it is objectively true that my ideas are better.
“Fine,” Mab says which means the opposite. “Let’s just say we need to consider all the ways we can use River and what we want him to do for us.”
“Why?” I am always asking why.
Mirabel types. “It’s our turn.”
I open my mouth to ask our turn to what, but Mab has guessed this already. “Our turn to fight, Monday. Look, Duke Templeton said they should be worried we’ll find it, and they have to do whatever they have to do before anyone realizes it.”
“But we do not know what ‘it’ it is,” I say.
“Lie,” Mirabel’s Voice says.
“We do know what ‘it’ it is,” Mab explains. “It is what Mama and Russell and all the people signed on to the suit have been looking for all these years. Proof. A smoking gun.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Because otherwise why is Duke Templeton so desperate to keep it out of our hands?”
“I do not know,” I say because I do not. “How will we get it?”
“We don’t know,” Mab says, “but we know it exists. That’s the important thing. Now all we have to do is find it.”
“That sounds hard,” I say.
“Truth,” says my sister’s Voice.
“Truth,” says my other sister’s voice. “Hard but not impossible.”
Three
Russell E. Russo, Esquire, knocked on lots of doors before Nora’
s. Some people did not answer on principle; they did not open their doors to strangers wearing neckties. Some quietly or not-so-quietly closed the door in his face when he introduced himself. Some let him in and heard him out and deposited his card in the wastebasket before he’d finished backing out of their driveways. By the time Russell showed up, people in Bourne had a deep distrust of outsiders. But to be honest, people in Bourne were probably never going to be much for lawyers anyway. He kept saying he was here to help them, but why would he? If anyone were going to care, they’d have cared already. If strangers came when people were in need, they’d have come long ago. Since the answers were never honest, no one in Bourne was fool enough to ask the questions anymore.
Except for Nora.
When Nora opened her door, her hair a cloud of tangles encrusted variously with vomit, snot, and milk, wearing a robe liberally splattered with some previous night’s dinner, holding two screaming two-month-olds while a third howled from a laundry basket lined with towels and deposited in the middle of the kitchen floor, Mr. Russo introduced himself and inquired without irony whether she had any complaints regarding the recently shuttered Belsum Chemical plant. She handed him one of the babies—me—not in answer to his question, but because she imagined that with one hand free, she could put on coffee, and while that wouldn’t solve the problem, it would at least help matters. And matters needed helping.
He came in. He sat down. He took all three babies into his lap. It is true we were very small, and he was—is—a large man with big arms and a lot of real estate on his lap when he sits, but we still have trouble picturing all four of us piled together. Though Monday has many times pressed Nora for specifics as to how he managed it, our mother is vague on the details. She was sleep deprived and also breathtaken. Here her knight in shining armor had shown up at her door. Had she been limitlessly granted her most wondrous, most extravagant, most dearly held dream, there was nothing she would have wished to open her door to more than the offer to join a class action lawsuit against Belsum Chemical, especially one with an extra set of hands who wasn’t put off by a house full of screaming babies.
Russell Russo was gentle and kind and surprisingly good with children. He talked so quickly Nora’s ears ached trying to keep up. He informed her, deadly serious, that Belsum Chemical had wronged the citizens of Bourne. He broke this to her as if she didn’t know already, as if she wouldn’t believe it unless he explained it to her like a child or someone not from Bourne, someone unBourne, but she didn’t feel talked down to. She felt broken open with gratitude that it was just that simple, just that clear, and to someone from out there in the rest of the world. It wasn’t just in Nora’s head, the crimes done unto her, the crying-out sense that justice should be done, at least some, at least trying. He made it so she could put down the burden of being the only one who knew.
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