Tears snail down my cheeks which make tears snail down hers, and we sit there looking at each other through our mollusky eyes. I know that she means what she says. And I know there are ways she does not mean what she says.
Because why wouldn’t she want me different than I am? Why wouldn’t she wish it for me? Anyone would want a child whole and limitless. Anyone would wish it for themselves as a parent, and anyone would wish it for their child, for any child.
“I mean it.” She can see me doubting her. “You are so strong. You do a whole body’s worth of work with one hand and one amazing brain. You are so gentle. You are so smart. I know there are things you can’t do, but it’s a package deal. And it’s such a lovely package I think it’s worth the trade-off.”
She is still holding my face so I can’t see my tablet to raise my Voice. If I could, I would say I don’t want a trade-off. I want both.
“I know it sucks,” she says. “I know it’s not fair. I would trade places with you if I could. You know I would.”
I acknowledge the truth of this statement with my eyebrows.
She smiles, but a sad smile. “But if your body didn’t limit you, if it didn’t make you sit still and watch and listen and process, if you didn’t have so much time to think, you wouldn’t be you. And I love you.” I roll my eyes, but there’s more. “You wouldn’t be so wise or so observant or the smartest person I know.”
For she is my mother. Of course she thinks the part of me that works best is beautiful.
And this is Nora’s permanent, impossible bind.
If her children are perfect just as they are, then why is she so angry at Belsum?
If they’ve caused such damage, where is her proof?
And if the proof is us, doesn’t that mean we are broken indeed?
She sees my skepticism, or maybe it’s my scorn. “It’s possible to want two things at once, you know.”
I do, of course.
“Even opposite things. Even things that contradict and contraindicate. We don’t talk about that enough.”
I don’t talk about anything enough.
“Not we,” she clarifies. “They. In the world. Out there.” She waves at it, a world beyond Bourne. Sometimes it seems so close I think I’d be able to see it if only I could get up a little higher, like from the roof of the school maybe or the crest of the cemetery. Sometimes it seems so far I don’t even believe it exists. Opposites. This is her point. She means she is angry at what was done to her—what was done to hers—but she still loves us as we are. She means she can live in the past and still drag it along with her into the future. She means—or maybe she doesn’t but it’s still true—that this lawsuit is killing her and this vote is killing her and this battle is killing her. But she would not survive without it. So it’s hard to argue Nora can’t fight while she’s moving on just because those things are opposites.
“It is because of you I do this,” she allows, “but not the way you think. I want you to know you can fight. I want you to know you should fight. You will be treated carelessly and cruelly, unfairly and maliciously, shortsightedly and selfishly in this world, and when you are, I want you to know you do not have to take it like you deserve nothing better and you’re powerless to protest. I want you to know you can win.”
Another impossible paradox: how to show your children they can keep getting up when all they ever see is the part where you fall.
She lets me go. I turn back to my Voice. “I am angry and sad I cannot have what I should have.”
“Me too,” she says. Maybe she means she is also angry and sad I cannot have what I should have. Or maybe she means she is angry and sad she cannot have what she should have. Both probably.
“It is okay we are angry and sad,” I type. “You have to be okay.”
Nora wants to comfort me, wants to praise me, cheer me, bolster me, applaud me. But not as much as she wants to hear me.
“Okay,” she says.
What else can I ask of her?
* * *
The bar is closed on account of the vote as if it’s a polling place. Truth be told, voting at the bar makes a lot more sense than voting at the medical clinic, but that’s not how it is and it’s not why Frank closed. He wants to go back to being neutral territory. He wants the bar to be a place of succor and comfort not hostility and rancor. He doesn’t want to spend all night looking at everyone looking at each other like they’ve all been betrayed. So Nora and I bundle up and head for home. She makes dinner. Mab cleans up—by herself and without complaint. Monday sits and squirms like she sat on a crab.
At last, the phone rings.
It’s Omar.
And it’s official.
The truth is, it wasn’t a vote. Not really. You can’t ask people to vote if they can’t make a choice. The question was not was Belsum culpable all those years ago. It was not are they repentant and reformed now. It was not do we believe improvements were made and operations are safe going forward. It was one thing. Are we more angry or more desperate? Which is a measure of our souls. It may be a question, but it isn’t a choice.
Still, we were asked. They were asked. And the voters of Bourne—not all of them but enough of them—voted to repair the dam and take their chances and their jobs and the rest of us down with them. It is not okay. Not remotely. But Belsum wins anyway.
One
The next night there’s a knock on the door after a dinner no one ate anyway.
River.
I exchange looks with my sisters. Petra would call them inscrutable.
We didn’t go to school today. None of us went to school today. Maybe school was canceled, for all I know. Maybe we all—my whole sick and sorry generation—boycotted en masse without discussion. But apparently even burning the place down wouldn’t have been enough to keep avoiding this conversation.
We go for a walk.
It’s cold, even though I’ve bundled up, even though we’re moving, even though he holds my hand and I let him, even though it’s not that cold. The leaves are gone now, all of them, so you can see straight into the woods, moonlit, which should be romantic but instead makes me feel naked too, exposed. It is very quiet out. There is no noise—no wind, no cars, no one talking, no streetlight buzz even—nothing but us. I can see our breath, which feels somehow like a step backward, relationship-wise, like his breath used to be only mine to share but now it’s out there for any raccoon or owl or other nocturnal creature with good eyes to see.
As far as steps backward relationship-wise go, that’s probably the least of them.
“What you told me and made me promise not to tell…” He starts and trails off. Maddeningly.
I hold my breath. But what he says next knocks the wind out of me anyway.
“I already knew,” he says.
He can read minds. He can tell the future. He really is magic. “How?”
“Mirabel told me.”
I drop his hand. I stop walking. I understand suddenly what it means to be struck dumb. You think it means “struck” like it happens all at once, but no, it means “struck” like you’ve been slapped. You think it means “dumb” like you can’t talk, but no, it means “dumb” like stupid, like all sense has all at once been removed from my brain.
My fingers and toes get very cold. My face gets very hot. Like a bad line of dialogue, I want to say “Mirabel who?” because there is no way Mirabel told him.
“After school one day. After the last bell. You were at tutoring,” he explains. Like that explains anything.
“Why?” I say.
“Why what?”
“Why did she tell you?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Why did you?”
A pause, our breath all around us like evidence.
Instead of answering, I ask my own question. “Why did you tell your father?”
Mirabel has already told us how he apologized for this when he met her at the bar. I thought he went to her because I was avoiding him. But that turns out no
t to be why. And who knows how much Mirabel’s told me that wasn’t actually true?
“I don’t know,” he says again. He doesn’t know anything. “He’s my father? If Belsum fails, what will we do? I was scared?” It’s like he’s asking me. “I got impatient?” We couldn’t wait anymore, any of us. “I’m sorry,” he says.
But that doesn’t make it better. I start walking again.
“I told him I’d been helping you,” he offers.
I’m getting colder. Shouldn’t I be aflame by now?
“And I told him I thought he was being a jerk. But he’s not a jerk, you know? He’s an okay guy really. So I thought it was worth a shot. Talking to him.”
“Did it work?”
“I asked him how Belsum could do this to you again after what happened last time. I told him I thought he had a responsibility to make it right and then leave you the hell alone.”
I keep walking, one foot in front of another, careful, matching my steps to my breathing, knowing both will falter if I take my mind off them even for a moment. “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Do you want to become poor?’”
“And?”
“I don’t.”
“No one does,” I agree, and when he doesn’t say anything, I add, though it seems obvious, “We don’t.”
“I know. I said that. But he said—” River stops, which is how I know, though it doesn’t seem possible, that what he says next is going to be even worse than what he’s said already.
“What?”
“He said you can’t become poor because you already are poor.”
“So?”
“You always were.”
“What do you mean ‘always’?”
“He said you were poor before we—before Belsum—even got here. You would have gotten rich if the plant had been successful. That was the plan before, and that’s the new plan too now that we won the election, and that would have been—will be—great.”
He stops again and seems to be waiting for me to—what?—express excitement? Gratitude?
“That’s not what happened,” I say. Again, this seems both obvious and somehow necessary to say anyway.
“No,” he agrees, sadly, “last time it didn’t work out, but my dad’s point is now you’re right where you always were. You didn’t make any money, but you really didn’t lose any either. Why should we?”
“Why should you what?”
“Lose money,” he explains. “He says Belsum took the risk. Why should we be punished?”
“Why should we?” I ask.
“You’re not being punished,” he says. “You just didn’t … get better.”
I take enough deep breaths to be able to say without my voice shaking, “You destroyed us.”
“My father says that wasn’t us.”
“Who was it?”
“Someone before us. My mom says Bourne wasn’t that great to begin with.” His shoulders rise, fall. A shrug or a sigh. Resignation or regret or defeat. I don’t know. “Plus my dad says sometimes bad things happen. It’s no one’s fault. It’s nothing anyone can control. Anywhere you go, some kids are born okay and some kids are born with problems, some people are rich and some people are poor. That’s just how it is.”
“What do you say?” My teeth are chattering.
“Me?”
“Yeah. You said what your dad said, and you said what your mom said. What do you say?”
“It never matters what I say.”
“It matters to me.” Mattered, I think.
“I guess I’m just trying to keep everyone happy.”
“Not everyone.”
He winces but has nothing to say to that, and though I would like to walk away with some dignity, I would rather walk away with some answers.
“I can’t believe you did this.”
“I just had a conversation with my father.”
“I can’t believe you did this to me,” I clarify. “You promised. And we—” I stop. “And you promised.”
“Not you.”
“What?”
“I didn’t do this to you. Please, Mab. I didn’t break my promise to you because I already knew. It was Mirabel. Mirabel told me.”
“We are the same, Mirabel and I.” I am shaking so hard he looks wavy before me. Or maybe he’s trembling too. “We are the same person. We are exactly the same.”
We have turned and headed back toward my house. I am almost home. There is so much left to say. There is nothing left to say.
But it turns out I’m wrong about that.
“We’re leaving.” His eyes dart to mine, then away again as soon as they meet. “I came to say goodbye.”
I stop walking. I stop breathing. “But you won.”
“Exactly, so my mom says we don’t have to be here anymore. She says my dad can run the plant remotely now. Our actually being here was mostly a publicity thing, a gesture of goodwill.” He shrugs again. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I guess not.” The list of things that apparently don’t matter anymore is long and winding as a river, long and winding as history. Literally.
At the front door, I don’t know what to do. Something violent? Something tender? Do I kiss him goodbye? Promise never to forget him? Tell him I’ll write? I stand and look at River, really look at him, and force myself to know: I will never see him again. He can’t look back at me, can’t say goodbye, can’t walk away, can’t bring himself to touch me. Or maybe it’s that I won’t let him.
“I really liked you, Mab.” The past tense. The past tense might fell me.
But I say anyway, “Me too,” because it’s true, and it’s important that it’s true. I don’t want him to think—I don’t want to think—I did all I did on a whim or for fun or just to see what would happen. I was in love, I’d plead before the court, if we ever got to go to court. I’d plead before my sisters. It wasn’t my fault. I was in love.
“I wish I didn’t have to go.”
“Really?” I am genuinely asking.
He blushes. So he is lying. “I wish I didn’t have to … leave you,” he amends. “I get great reception in Boston. We can keep in touch.”
Why? I think, but I just nod at my shoes.
“I have something for you,” he says. I look up. He reaches into his not-a-backpack and hands it to me carefully, ceremonially even, without taking his eyes off mine. And I receive it. But when I tear my eyes from his to look, it’s just a college catalog, one of those glossy brochures that fill the mailbox as soon as you sign up for the SATs. I don’t know what I was expecting. Or would have wished for. Something sentimental maybe, anything really, but this is nothing.
“For your escape,” he says, “and all your future endeavors.”
My stomach clenches like I’ve eaten something off, rotten, like I’ve stuffed his stupid catalog into my mouth page by page and swallowed it.
“This is where my father went to school,” he offers.
I know this from when we called the library in search of his dissertation research, but I can’t tell River that.
“And where his father went to school. So it’s where I might go too. Maybe we could go together. Take a look.”
When I still don’t say anything, he pulls his wand out of his back pocket. Waves it around half-heartedly. Offers it to me. “Want to say the magic words?”
I cannot even shake my head no. I cannot say a word. Magic or otherwise, there are none left to say. So I do the only thing left to do: Turn away. Turn away and back to my worn front door and my worn life. My body is Mirabel’s. It can listen, but it can’t not listen, and it can’t reply. It is sapped of strength, control, and agency. I have my one hand. I can turn the doorknob and let myself inside and close the door behind me. That is all.
* * *
In bed, I can hear Mirabel typing, but her Voice is silent. I can hear her and Monday listening to me cry, waiting for me to be done. Mirabel must know I know what she did now. What we both did. Monday c
an’t have any idea why I’m so upset, but in some ways it doesn’t matter to her. She’s upset I’m upset. And that’s enough.
Still, I can feel her itching to ask—she doesn’t like to not understand—and itching to comfort me too. They both have so much they want to say. But instead of tears it feels like words are leaking out of my eyes, and soon I won’t be able to tell them anything at all. And I have a question I need answered before I surrender forever the power of speech with no magic Voice to replace it. I wipe my face off and roll over.
“You told him,” I say into the darkness. A question. An accusation. But more than anything, a plea. Please let there be some kind of explanation to make me stop feeling like this.
“Who told who what?” Monday sounds relieved to hear my voice, any voice.
“Yes,” says Mirabel’s.
“Why?” I beg because if she has an answer it will halve the number of people who’ve betrayed me.
She types. “You said,” she says.
“And you said he was too young. You said he wasn’t trustworthy. You said we had to keep the secret from everyone, even him. You said especially him.”
She types. “You convinced me.”
“But,” I say, and then I don’t say anything else. I turn on the light. We squint at each other as our eyes adjust. I look at my sister, and she looks at me. What I want to say is: If someone was going to tell him, it was my place not yours. What I want to say is: Did I convince you it was okay to tell, or did you convince me it wasn’t so you could? What I want to say is: At least I can speak. Or I could before this. What I want to say is: Why and how could you?
But I know how she could: Slowly. Deliberately. And—dawning, incredulous—I also know why. The fact that I haven’t known before, that it hasn’t even crossed my mind until now, is maybe the biggest betrayal of all.
Monday is just getting her head around what happened. She stands up on her bed. “Three! You told?”
“So did I.” I am so angry at Mirabel and so hurt by Mirabel I don’t know which of those I am more. But that instinct to protect her—and share her burden whenever possible—runs deeper still.
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