One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  But the other was this: Letting go of Russell was heartbreaking and devastating and left a hole like a canyon, but it was possible. Letting go of the case against Belsum was not.

  Actually, that’s not quite true. It was possible for Russell, who let it go like a weight sinking to the bottom of the ocean with him holding on. He released it and then floated right to the top where air and light and hope are. He watched it spiral down below, doomed, but doomed without him, his sadness eclipsed utterly by his relief. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t have enough hands anymore.

  But Nora hung on like life while the case sank toward death, down down under the waters. She fought the waves and swells by herself, though she lacked expertise and experience in law; she lacked her partner in commitment and enthusiasm; she lacked someone with whom to share the highs of discovery and the lows of what she knew goddamn well but could never prove. But that didn’t mean she stopped. She never stopped.

  There was no money for a new lawyer, one who hadn’t sought them out, wouldn’t work on contingency, would have to start from scratch. So Russell still helps. Still takes her calls. Files necessary paperwork. Keeps her apprised of developments. Does the minimum to keep the suit pending. But it’s on the back burner. Of the neighbor’s stove. Nora does the bulk of the work now—researches, reads, compiles notes, remains vigilant. She cheerleads too—stokes her neighbors’ anger, encourages when they despair, reminds when they forget. She’s kept the lawsuit alive, kept up with everyone signed on to it, kept after the elusive proof that will finally be enough. She has done it all. And she has done it mostly alone.

  In the end, this is another of the many things my mother and I share, not just unrequited but unrequitable love, stories we know from the start will not—cannot—have happy endings. An unusual thing to turn out to be hereditary. Happy is not an option for us. Nora understands this. But she imagines fair is still on the table.

  One

  Fall comes for real. The world gets a little chillier, dark a little earlier, a funny, buzzy feeling.

  “Mercurial,” Petra calls it.

  “Serotinal,” I offer.

  “Just barely.” We actually needed sweaters this morning. “Isochronous.”

  “Seasonal?” I check.

  “Or occurring at the same time. Either might show up.”

  “Variegated,” I reply.

  She high-fives me. “Good one.”

  Even though it’s an easy word unlikely to show up on the SATs, what fall in Bourne usually is is anticlimactic. The color of the leaves changes but nothing else does.

  Except this year. River’s face is healing. You can see it changing slowly like the seasons from bruised to mended, from broken open to whole. Other things are changing too—maybe also breaking open, maybe not—but they are harder to see.

  He sidles up after English one afternoon. “Wanna go somewhere?”

  “For what?”

  He peers all around—I don’t know if he’s nervous or just pretending to be nervous—and drops his voice. “I might have found something.”

  “Tell me!” My first instinct is to hug him.

  “Not here.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere we can talk.”

  “I can’t leave. I have tutoring.”

  “Why do you get tutoring?”

  It’s interesting, now that I think about it, that no one has pressed River into Track A tutoring servitude. He’s not doing football or an after-school job. So it turns out there’s this additional dispensation—you don’t have to tutor if the tutees might try to kill you.

  “I am the tutor.”

  “Oh. Who are you tutoring?”

  “Kyle M. and Kyle R.”

  “My favorites.” He rolls his eyes. “Does it help them?”

  I laugh, not because it’s funny but because it’s true, and I never thought of it before. Years of tutoring to make up, I guess, for getting more than my fair share, and does anyone even think it’s helping? I shrug. “It’s the least I can do.”

  His eyebrows snag. “Can you skip?” he says.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I open my mouth to answer him, but suddenly I can’t think of a single reason.

  * * *

  Somewhere to be alone.

  Somewhere to be alone together, which is not alone, which is the opposite of alone.

  That’s how we find ourselves at Bluebell Park. It’s pretty there, with the lake and the path that loops around it, picnic tables and gnarled trees blazed orange and yellow and red now it’s firmly fall. Leaves cover the ground and the walking trails and a multitude of sins because the grass and flowering plants never really came back here, so in spring and summer, when it should be green and bright, Bluebell Park is brown and dead-looking, sparse scrub and bleached-out ground where nothing grows. But the trees are older, more established, hardier. Autumn here looks like autumn on a greeting card.

  We follow the path around the far side of the lake until we come to the dam. River follows me as I climb out onto its concrete ridge, a spine along the top of a body of rough wood beams and rocks and cement. Like everything else in Bourne, it’s a little the worse for wear, and you can see trickles of water leaking brown tendrils down from cracks along the wall. The lake is pretty, but when we reach the middle of the dam and sit, we have to have our backs to it because it’s rained a lot and the water is high.

  Instead, looking out from up here, we can see the plant. That’s why, even though this is the prettiest spot in town, I knew it would be empty. The plant is ugly. It is also mammoth. I forget that. It’s loomed over my hometown all my life—it’s loomed over my life all my life—so I don’t really see it anymore. River won’t look directly at it. I don’t know if that’s guilt or shame or because it’s loomed over his life all his life too, even from hundreds of miles away, but he averts his eyes.

  It’s a hard thing though to ignore. (Petra would say “elide.”) Except for those giant rusted letters on top, it’s aggressively gray, not a spot of color on its whole enormous hull, like it’s sucking up the light and life all around and trapping it away. There are hardly any windows, so the walls soar on and on, all the way up, all the way over, sprawling, smothering. This massiveness must be purposeful. It could be to make you feel walled off, enclosed within, protected from what’s outside, like a fortress whose members-only club you’re desperate to join. Or it could be to make you feel despairing, like you’ve joined already, and now it’s too late and there’s no escape. It works either way. It takes up the whole sky, like the clouds you see when you look up must be part of the plant too. Or maybe the clouds are just the half of it because the plant has the feel of taking up the whole world, earth and sky and everything else, and in many ways, it did, it does. It looks exactly like it always has except the ground’s been all torn up, muddy, tiretracked. There are a couple dump trucks and a dirt-caked bulldozer out front. No one’s there, but someone has been. And it’s clear someone’s coming back.

  Beside me, River nods over his shoulder with his chin. “Can you swim here? In the summer I mean.”

  “You’re allowed.” It’s such a Boston question. There’s no rule you can’t swim in Bluebell Lake, but there doesn’t have to be. No one in this town would ever think to swim in its water.

  “I bungee jumped off a dam once.” He’s bouncing the backs of his heels off the wall of ours, his right then his left, his right then his left, so it sounds like when Mirabel taps Monday’s name. “In Switzerland. You ever done that?”

  I don’t know if he means have I ever bungeed? Or have I ever jumped off a dam? Or have I ever been to Switzerland? I shake my head no.

  “They strap this elastic cord to your feet and you just dive into thin air, headfirst, arms wide. It’s like flying. That’s what they say, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “That falling is the same as flying.”

  “Falling seems like the opposite of
flying.”

  “No, you know like things in orbit. Satellites or whatever. How it seems like they’re flying in space but really they’re just falling and falling around the earth.”

  “How big is this dam?” I ask.

  “It’s like seven hundred feet high.”

  “Oh.” I start to see how what I’m picturing is different than what he’s talking about. I start to see where our perspectives diverge. “So if it’s high enough, falling is like flying?”

  “Well, it’s not like you’re going to crash into the bottom. You’ve got the wind in your face and the view all spread before you and nothing keeping you on the earth.”

  “Except the cord.”

  “Right, except the cord. But not while you’re falling. It doesn’t kick in until the end when it yanks you back up.”

  I’d have said that the difference between falling and flying is everything. Like the difference between a home and a library. Like the difference between broken and whole. Like the difference between a seven-hundred-foot dam you can fly off and this one. His legs are longer, but from where we’re sitting on the top, even mine dangle nearly a quarter of the way down, the silver tassels on Pooh’s mules glinting in the sun. It’s not seven hundred feet high. More like ten maybe. You could jump down without a bungee cord or anything else and you’d be fine, but it would be nothing like flying.

  “Sorry I made you skip tutoring.” He’s got a magic coin in his hand which looks solid but flips open to reveal a secret hollow inside. He’s practicing clicking this open and closed with one hand, open and closed, clear blue sky above, fall trees getting naked all around us.

  “You didn’t make me.” I want him to tell me what he has to tell me, but I don’t want to seem overly eager or overly selfish or overly anything.

  “It’s nice of you to do that. Tutor.”

  I snort.

  “It is,” he insists.

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Everyone keeps saying that. They’ve been saying it my whole life.”

  The coin clicks open, shut.

  “Because you’re normal?” he asks.

  “What’s normal?” I say. “Besides, it’s a Track A requirement for pretty much everyone but you. But yeah. Because I’m normal.”

  “That doesn’t mean you owe everybody.”

  “That’s not why I owe everybody.”

  “Why then?”

  Click.

  “Because I’m going to leave them.” It’s out of my mouth before I’ve decided whether I’ll try to explain this—to him or even to myself.

  In third grade, Petra and I started planning to go to college together and share a dorm room, and then get jobs together and share an apartment, and then marry brothers and share a giant house with a swimming pool. We were eight-year-olds when we concocted this plan, and, of course, it’s nuanced over the years, but we still plan to go, together and far away—we talk about it, study and prep for it, all the time—and how did I imagine that was going to happen while I stayed here with my sisters and my mother? I didn’t. I couldn’t have. But somehow, my brain disconnected that from leaving, not like I thought there was a way for me to be elsewhere and still here, like I thought there was a way for me to be elsewhere and still with them, a way for me to leave without leaving my family.

  I glance over to see if River is appalled because it is appalling.

  “Sure.” He is the opposite of appalled. “I mean, it’s not like you can go to college here.”

  “Or maybe anywhere.”

  “Anywhere?” Like he never knew anyone who didn’t go to college. “You might not go at all?” Like I said maybe after high school I’d still have earlobes but maybe not.

  “It’s abstruse.”

  “Abstruse?”

  “Hard to understand. Complicated.”

  “Oh.” Then, “Don’t worry, there’s financial aid.” He opens his fingers to reveal the coin sitting on his palm. Like all you have to do is turn your hand over to find it full of money. Maybe that’s true for him. “Or you could get a scholarship. You’re really smart.”

  I turn not just my eyes, not just my face, but my whole body toward him. “I am?”

  He laughs, closes his fingers over his coin again, jostles his shoulder into mine like we’re joking together. “I guess maybe not that smart if you don’t know it.”

  I do realize that this is embarrassing and also that we’re getting off topic, but he’s an opportunity I can’t pass up. I’ve been told I’m smart all my life, but it’s closer to accusation, recrimination, than compliment. I’m not smart like Mirabel. And I may not be smart for the rest of the world. I may only be smart for Bourne.

  “How do you mean?” I fish.

  He shrugs. Can’t quantify how. “You know, smart. You’d get into college no problem.”

  “And flunk out?” Because I could probably get in somewhere. Petra and I still had a few baby teeth when we started studying, and my grades are good. But an A at Bourne High is what at a normal school? If I got in, would I be able to do the work once I got there? Up against kids whose brains were fed by blood cleaner than mine?

  “You’d be fine. I bet you’d love it after, you know…” After living here, he means.

  “What about you?” The wealth of options open to him takes my breath away. “Where are you going to go?”

  “Who knows? My dad’s all about the ‘Family Legacy.’” He deepens his voice and scratches the air with two fingers as if family legacy is a strange and complicated concept I might not be familiar with. There are a lot of things in this conversation I’m not familiar with, but family legacy isn’t one of them. “He wants me to go where he went and his father went. My parents are both Ivy Leaguers so of course they have these expectations…” Jesus. Ivy League. “I have the same problem you do, I guess. Not sure I can cut it. Not even sure I want to.”

  “Yeah,” I breathe. It’s all I can do. To have all he has and be just the same as me. But though I do not know the cause of his doubt, I am certain it is nothing like mine. “I don’t know if I can leave them.” I don’t even know why I’m telling him this.

  “Of course you can. You have to.” Then he adds, “Who?”

  “My sisters. My mom. This town.”

  “You’ll visit. You’re not leaving forever. But you can’t spend your whole life here, Mab.” He doesn’t even say this convincingly, persuasively, just throws it off like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Nothing more or less than true. “You know they want what’s best for you.”

  Like there is a best thing for me. Like there’s no question what that thing is. Like that thing can’t possibly be family and sticking by them and putting their needs first. Like when you’re stuck in Mirabel’s body—or stuck caring for Mirabel’s body—there’s enough room left to consider what’s best for anyone.

  Like when Bourne runs through you, there’s any way to leave it behind.

  “Anyway”—he clicks the magic coin open again—“thanks for bringing me out here. It’s pretty.”

  “And quiet,” I add so he remembers he has a secret and the reason we’re here is so he can tell me without being overheard.

  When we sat down, we were not touching. Now, somehow, we are, just a little. I can feel his leg through my jeans, through his jeans, like he’s giving off heat. Or I am.

  “It’s good to have a tour guide,” he says. “You’re like my Virgil.”

  “Virgil?”

  “You know, Virgil? Dante’s guide through hell? In Dante’s Inferno? You guys didn’t have to read that in tenth grade?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. We did. It’s pretty good.”

  Wait a minute. “Does that make Bourne hell?”

  “Well, kinda.” He laughs. “I mean, there’s nothing to do. I got beat up a lot. The water might be poisoned, and you and your sisters are my only friends. Plus the pizza’s lousy.”

  He’s trying to make
me laugh, I think, and it’s probably not fair to be offended about something you yourself believe. Bourne is hell in lots of ways, but with at least one important difference.

  “But people go to hell because they sinned,” I point out, “and we’re not here because of sinning. At least, not our sinning.”

  “No, I get that.”

  “Your sinning,” I add, in case he actually doesn’t.

  “Well, my family’s, yeah.”

  Also, he thinks we’re his friends, and I don’t know if we want to be his friends.

  But before I can decide, he takes a deep breath. “Okay, so.” He lets it out, doesn’t say anything else for a while and then finally does. “I have to tell you something.”

  And at last, this is it. I wait and try to slow my own breathing.

  And he says, “My father’s only pretending to be drinking.”

  I think of Mirabel’s report from the bar when he tried to buy a round, when Tom said beer was the best thing on the menu, when Nathan started to share a pint with the guys before my mother kicked him out. “Why would someone pretend to drink?”

  But that’s not what he’s talking about. “My dad wants anyone who comes by the house to see him drinking water straight from the tap.” And I remember that from when we were there, how shocked Monday and I were. “But he’s faking it. It’s bottled. He gets Hobart Blake to make a run into Greenborough once a week. He brings back a bunch of those giant five-gallon jugs and hooks them up under all our sinks. My dad doesn’t drink the water. He doesn’t even shower in it.”