One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  I have looked in the scrapbooks but not a lot because the paper is old and the paste is old, so they are hard to read and delicate and crumble into powder if you touch them or even just sneeze too hard while you are looking (which you do because they are dusty). So I look carefully. There are a lot of scrapbooks, but I am not worried because I can skim the headlines to see if there is anything about an indoor pool or some other unlikely-to-exist-in-the-future winter activity.

  What I learn is there was never anything to do in Bourne, not even in the old days.

  In the winter of 1958, there was a snowman-building contest.

  In the winter of 1959, there was a sled race on Baker Hill.

  In 1961, there were record warm temperatures and therefore no snow and therefore no snowman-building contests or sled races.

  For Christmas 1962, Bourners decorated a big tree in the middle of downtown. There was a contest for best handmade ornament. The winner was a tiny model of the space capsule Friendship 7 with an even tinier John Glenn in a tiny space suit inside.

  There is no mention of an indoor pool.

  In 1963, three Santas stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and dangled fishing poles over the river. The bridge was draped in holly and pine branches. At first I think this is an activity you used to be able to do in winter but cannot do in winter anymore. No one fishes in Bourne in winter now. No one fishes in Bourne at all now, but even before what happened happened, it was too cold to fish in winter, and the kind of fish that live in our river are sleeping or frozen or dead between Thanksgiving and March. However, the caption says the Santas were only pretending to fish which you could do any time of the year.

  Then I look at the picture more closely.

  It is black and white. Or, more accurately, brown and white. Or, more accurately, brown and beige because it is both faded and dirty, and not dirty in a way you can clean, though I do try, dirty like time got on it and now you cannot get it off.

  But there is something very strange about this picture, and it is this: there is an extra river in it.

  This cannot be.

  But I check. And it cannot not be either.

  And those are opposites.

  The picture is fifty-five years old so it makes sense that some things would have changed between then and now, but you can see my library. You can see our very same church with its too-short, left-of-center door. You can see the bridge in between, arcing from one bank to the other. And if you look, you can see a river rushing below it.

  Which is very, very wrong because there is no river there. The bridge with the river rushing under it is the bridge near the plant. The bridge between the church and the library, which is the bridge covered in Santas in this picture, is the bridge over the ravine.

  I think about it for a long time, and here is what I think: Maybe there used to be many rivers in Bourne but most of them died or left or dried up, just like there used to be many people in Bourne but most of them died or left or dried up too. Maybe the river we know now is a twin of this old one, or maybe even there used to be more, triplet rivers, but the other ones did not survive. A lot of times when there is more than one baby in one womb only one of them lives long enough to be born, and even though I do not like to think about it, it is true anyway.

  But this Santa river did not die in the womb. It lived for at least a while. Because here it is, alive and well, in 1963, but now, fifty-five years later, it is nowhere to be seen.

  Three

  Nora has her calendar on her phone, her computer, and longhand in a daily planner, and she still can’t keep it straight. But it lives in my head with just about everything else. This is how I know Apple Templeton is Nora’s last patient of the day, and it is why I go so far as to aspirate applesauce over breakfast: so Nora will definitely bring me to work with her.

  I realize the odds are long that Apple will confess in therapy the nature and whereabouts of a piece of paper her father-in-law is desperate to keep us from finding because it’s incontrovertibly damning evidence Nora can give Russell who can present it to a judge who will stop the reopening of the plant and shut Belsum down forever. Not to mention anything she did disclose would be subject to doctor-patient confidentiality and therefore inadmissible in court. But it’s all we’ve got. So here I am.

  Before we get to Apple, though, I have to sit through all her other patients for the day. I considered aspirating applesauce at school, getting sent home at lunch, and thereby skipping Nora’s morning patients, but I couldn’t risk her canceling her afternoon altogether to take care of me.

  First up this morning is Pastor Jeff. He and Nora get together every week to take stock of their flock, to discuss who they’re worried about, who’s fallen off the wagon, who’s fallen into despair, who’s strong this week and could maybe help, who’s not and should be a recipient. They corner, between them, each Bourner’s holy trinity—Nora treats their minds, Jeff their bodies and souls—and they have decided, heart to heart, that neither the sanctity of the church nor that of the clinic is breached by their comparing notes and tag-teaming outreach. Working together is their only shot at handling their always overfull patient loads. It’s not as if either, at this late date, expects God to intervene.

  This morning Pastor Jeff settles into the orange sofa, leans forward, and says quietly, “You know who I’m worried about this week, Nora?”

  She opens her notebook to a clean page. “Who?”

  “You.”

  She closes the notebook.

  “Jeff, I’m fine.”

  “I don’t think you are.” He looks at me. “Mirabel, do you think your mother’s fine?” I teeter-totter my hand, an impressively comprehensive answer to a complex question.

  Pastor Jeff nods like this is the profound wisdom of the sages. “See? Mirabel thinks so too, and she’s more observant than anyone. You seem”—he pauses and settles on understatement—“tired.”

  She snorts. “Not sure that insight requires either a girl genius or a medical man of the cloth.”

  “Tireder,” he amends, and when she doesn’t respond adds, “Than usual,” and when that still gets nothing, “Remember those weighted mats Tom gave Mirabel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think we can learn a lot from those mats.” My mother and I look at him like he’s crazy. “It might be time to lay it down and get over it.”

  Nora’s face closes. “It’s not time.”

  “It’s not good for you, the stress and anger you’re carrying around, have been carrying around for so long.”

  “You’ve never supported the lawsuit, Jeff.”

  “That’s true.” The whole heavenly justice thing. “But I’ve always supported you.”

  “Yes. You have. So why quit now?”

  “This is how I’m supporting you. I’m inviting you to lay it down and get over it. Admit you tried as hard as you could, and it didn’t work. You didn’t win.” He shrugs. “Sometimes that happens.”

  “This lawsuit isn’t just some game it’s fine to lose. It’s not sour grapes. It’s not me being a spoilsport.”

  “No one said it was.” And when she opens her mouth to protest, he raises a hand and rephrases his point before she can leap on it. “No one here said it was.”

  “Everyone—everyone—dropped off the suit. I’ve been working on this for sixteen years. This was not meant to be my life’s work.”

  “Your life’s not actually over yet,” he points out gently. “Sixteen years is what, Nora? Twenty percent of a life?”

  “Depends.” She meets his wet eyes with her wet eyes. He nods. There is no arguing that. “We’re finally close, I think, and if I stop now, it dies. If I don’t do this, no one will.”

  “I’m not disagreeing. I’m saying maybe letting it die is okay. In case what you need is permission to quit, to stop suing and stop fighting and just lose, I’m saying it’s okay.”

  “Fine. Noted.” She rearranges her face from riled back to professional. “What about you?” />
  “What about me?”

  “How are you holding up?”

  For he is her only therapist and she his only minister. “Oh, you know, the usual. Doctoring. Pastoring. Learning to sew.”

  “You’re not getting a lot of rest either, Jeff,” my mother says gently.

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “Agreed. So what are you giving me shit for?”

  “That’s my job,” he says.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Apple does a monologue. Most of Nora’s patients like the back-and-forth. She asks a question; they answer; she asks; they answer. But Apple is doing a monologue. More accurately, Monday would insist, Apple is doing a tirade.

  “It’s all my mother’s fault I married Nathan Templeton. Isn’t that the point of therapy? Tracing your neuroses backward until you can blame it on your parents? Then good news: I’m cured. My appalling marriage is entirely my mother’s fault. She did warn me. This I admit. I’d like to say I had no idea what I was getting into, but it isn’t true. This is the problem with old-world wealth. It comes off as stuffy and priggish when you’re nineteen. First, she brought in my grandmother to talk to me. Grandma said, ‘You’re too good for him,’ but I thought she just meant she loved me so much no one would be good enough for me. Grandma said, ‘He’s got more dollars than sense,’ but she always did love a pun, obviously. But Grandma was—I don’t know—bohemian, I guess. What rich people call a free spirit. She never wore shoes. She was always packing picnics. Clearly she had a thing for trees. She was an artist, back when women—especially rich women from good families—weren’t artists, or anything else really. She was the one who designed the window in your library, you know.”

  What?

  “You’re kidding,” Nora says. “How on earth did that happen?”

  A great question—I’m thrilled she’s asked it—but Apple moves right on.

  “Who knows?” Apple gives a dismissive wave with nails as red and shiny as her namesake. “Anyway, when the whole wisdom-of-the-elders approach didn’t work, my mother went the direct route instead. ‘He’s after our money.’ And ‘We’re better than that.’ We are. Like she was marrying him too, not that she would. That was her point. That, and I was a silly girl who had her head turned around because he was handsome and exciting and in love with me. It sounds mean, right? It sounds like we should be talking about what a bitch my mother was. And she was. However, she was also right. So I blame her because if she could have told me that nicely, if she could have told me in a way that didn’t make her seem like a wealthy, privileged bitch, maybe I would have listened. But she didn’t so I didn’t, and now look where I am.”

  She pauses for breath. My mother takes the opportunity to interject, “Where are you, Apple?”

  “Right? Exactly!” Apple looks like my mother has just proved her point. “Where am I? Stuck in this shithole. No offense. Raising my kid in a goddamn haunted house.”

  Haunted?

  “Married to the man she warned me against—no longer handsome, no longer exciting, no longer in love with me, though don’t feel bad: I assure you the feeling is mutual.”

  “How did you and Nathan meet?” Nora asks, to remind Apple of a time when her feelings were fresher, fonder.

  “Oh, I met Nate before I can remember.” Another dismissive wave. Apple must do her nails herself because Bourne doesn’t have a manicurist. “I met Nate before I was even born. Our families go way back, as they say. Boston society is a small world. So, you know, similar circles: same parties, same dances at the club, same charity benefits. At one of them—I honestly couldn’t tell you which one—we were seated next to each other, got to flirting, got to drinking. But I wasn’t very much older than she is.” With a shiny wave in my direction. “He was older and gorgeous and made my mother furious. There was no way I wasn’t going to fall for him. But now I’m paying for it. Suddenly I have to be worried about leaks and cracks and repairmen who won’t work over the winter. I mean it’s just such a mess down there. Dangerous probably. Who knows how broken really. This should not be my problem. This is not what I signed on for.”

  “Why is it?” Nora asks. “Why aren’t these Nathan’s problems rather than yours?”

  “Family.” Apple does a little shrug. “Legacy. You know?”

  “That’s what you said last week. Family. But…” Nora trails off to ask without asking Why do you care so much about your husband when you care so little about your husband?

  “I owe them.”

  “Them?” Nora looks as lost as I feel. “Who?”

  “My family. Or maybe not all of them but him at least.”

  Nora begins, “Your loyalty to your husband is—” Strange? Inconsistent? Misguided? Who knows how she might have finished that sentence.

  But Apple laughs. “Not my husband. God, no. My father.”

  “Your father?”

  “I guess probably it makes sense. Just, you know, grief.”

  But it doesn’t make sense. Apple’s father has nothing to do with us. And I am starting to realize we need another plan. Of course Apple isn’t going to start giving out hints in therapy, in the first place because she probably doesn’t know anything but mostly, worse, because she doesn’t care. Whatever she’s upset about, it isn’t what her husband is doing to us.

  “What are you grieving?” Nora asks gently.

  Apple’s eyebrows go up like she’s surprised. “My father died.” She says this simply, like it should be obvious, like it is something everyone must know, and when she looks back up from the ground at Nora, it is with a melting of her painted face.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nora says. “When did he die?”

  “Just before we came. That’s why I agreed. I could give a shit about Nathan’s PR stunt. He can drown alone down here for all I care. But some of Daddy’s letters are still here.”

  Still here?

  “Letters?” Nora says.

  “Daddy was a letter writer. Handwriting, stationery, nice pens. He did all his business longhand. He thought email was ruining the art of correspondence and the heart of negotiation. He was pretty out of it the last few years so he was spared the smartphone, but if he hadn’t been dying already, the text message would have finished the job. I know they say you can never really erase an email, but you have to be some kind of tech geek to recover one once you delete it. But letters? Well, you post them, and then they’re out of your hands, in both senses. You send them somewhere, and then you can’t just get rid of them with a keystroke. They’ll remain forever right where the recipient leaves them. I think that’s why they call it hard copy.”

  “I’m not sure I follow, Apple,” Nora says.

  “I can’t let his name get dragged into … well, any of this. That’s the kind of thing that mattered to him, his name. And now he’s not around to protect it anymore, it has to be my job. That’s why I’m so desperate to find—I don’t know—whatever there is to find. That’s why I’m here. Not for my husband, and not for his father certainly—I couldn’t care less about Duke—for mine. Nathan’s here to reopen. Myself, I’m here to re-close, here to make sure anything well lost stays that way.”

  “Well lost?”

  “Sometimes it’s important to remember things the way someone worked really hard for you to remember them,” Apple says, “rather than the way they actually were.”

  * * *

  At the bar later, Nora’s in something of a trance, eyes and mind both unfocused and elsewhere.

  On the one hand, the guys are relieved she’s not yelling.

  On the other, “Did we break her?” Tom asks me the third time he’s asked for another and she hasn’t heard.

  “Weird day,” my Voice says.

  “At the clinic?” Frank, who’s working his ass off since Nora is not, is ready to entirely forgive this fact if she will even incrementally forgive everything else.

  “You know she can’t say.” I have that one saved. Frank and I have had this c
onversation before.

  “Yeah, yeah, doctor-patient blah-blah-blah.”

  “Nora’s not a doctor,” Hobart says, a point he makes often because it annoys her.

  “You’d think a shrink would be saner,” Zach adds, same reason.

  “They’re the craziest ones,” says Tom.

  They’re baiting her. Usually they tease her because it’s all in good fun because they know she knows they adore her. Tonight it’s an apology, a peace offering, a plea that they might all return to normal, that she forgive them.

  This wouldn’t work except that her mind is so far elsewhere it’s shed even her fury. She’s not angry with them at the moment because she’s not really here with them. They’re relieved—me too—but also confused, worried, waiting.

  Then, out of nowhere and to no one in particular, she says, “Do you guys remember when the stained glass was put in the library window?”

  “What, all the people reading books?” says Zach.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hasn’t that always been there?”

  “No, no, remember it used to be a house?” says Tom.

  “What kind of house?”

  “For rich people.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Remember when there used to be money in Bourne?”

  “No.”

  They’re a chorus of memory, talking too fast for me to keep track from the corner of who’s saying what, overlapping and talking on top of one another, remembering together, misremembering together, correcting, hole plugging, tall-tale-ing. It’s not often these guys get to remember Bourne before. It’s not often they get to revel in recollection: of their childhoods, growing up, being teenagers then young adults, full of promise and in love and having children of their own, their whole lives in front of them, hope and dreams and all that. It’s another cruelty you never think of, almost incidental it’s so far down the list, but the bad memories paper over the good until the good ones are gone or so buried they’re forgotten. Today’s Bourne is less upsetting if you don’t remember the idyllic Bourne that used to be. I imagine once you’re an adult your childhood seems remote no matter where you live, but when your life and that of everyone you know blows apart, everything before isn’t remote. It’s gone.