One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  If you type much with only one hand—or too fast or thinking of other things—you may have noticed, as I have, as Duke Templeton should have, that there is only one tiny transposition, the merest trip of the fingertips, between “destroy” and “destory.” I have long thought of ours as a town destroyed, but it occurs to me now it’s not that bad. Bourne is not destroyed, just destoried—stripped of our past, our memories, our lessons, our sense of shared history and how we came to be. Our destory is not our story, which is what would have been had Belsum never entered our pages, but it does not mean that we have no future. We do. We just don’t know what it is yet.

  But I do know this: part of our destory is who’s telling it. My mother, she’s telling Bourne’s old story, its should-be story. It’s our turn now, and we must tell the destory, what happened instead, what happens next. Revenge, recrimination, restitution—where you prove it and you sue and you win and that’s why they leave and that’s how you move on—all of that is the old story, and we left that one somewhere along the path, forking off to where we are now, on our secret way in the night. It’s not our mother—our mothers, the last generation—who can fix this. They can’t. It is up to us now, the daughters, to move our town forward, to save us all, to tell a different story. Her way was lawyers and injunctions and lawsuits and the bounds of the system. Ours will be something else because here is a thing we know which Nora does not: sometimes you have to destroy—or destory—something in order to save it.

  Appealing as the symbolism would be, Bluebell Lake is not large enough to flood all of Bourne. A catastrophic swell of water will not drown our town and everyone in it, sleeping in their beds unawares, many of them utterly unable to run away in the event of an emergency or really anything else. The dam itself is so small that even if we somehow destroyed the whole thing, it wouldn’t mean an exploding wall of stone and steel and cement flattening Bourne back to earth. All it will do is move a river. Less than that, even. All it will do is return the river whence it came. But without the river right where it is now, the plant can’t operate. The dam is such an insignificant thing, not as tall as our house and not much wider, that it’s hard to believe it’s caused so much trouble. It’s even harder to believe its removal will end, and then begin, so much else. But that’s what we’re counting on anyway.

  We traverse the quiet streets of our sleeping town, a parade, a cavalcade, the triumphant march of battle-worn just-barely survivors, midnight riders, three against the world. To me it feels like floating, but that’s easy for me to say since all I have to do is sit here and hard for me to say since all I get to do is sit here. As we near the plant and push up and over the bridge, I am thinking about what we’ll say to Hobart when we show up in the dead of night without River to vouch for us. My first plan is to get Mab to show him the key. If she’s been given a key to the place, surely she’s allowed inside, and we’re her sisters, after all. My second plan, though, if he balks at the first, is to admit what we intend. Job or no job, whose side is he going to be on, Belsum’s or ours?

  But it turns out not to matter. The plant has security during the day; if you come at midnight, apparently all you need is the key. Mab fits it into the lock and opens the door like we’re coming home.

  Then we are racing down corridors. The fluorescent lighting after the cold darkness of the walk, the sudden warmth of being indoors again, our nearness, finally, after being so far away for so long, the hurtling speed of us—it makes every part of me tingle. I think Slow down. I think Be careful. I think we have only one shot at this, less than one, the smallest fraction of a shot, and it is now, and it’s been coming, and it is now. I think she will have forgotten what’s where. I think we will get caught before we find what we’re looking for. I think You are Mab, queen of the fairies, deliverer of dreams. I think Remember, remember everything.

  And she does. She remembers which hallway, which door, which garage even, and she opens it with her magic master key. And there they all are, machines to demolish, which we will use to build instead, some dirt-spattered and mud-stained and ill-used, some spotless, unridden, and begging to go.

  But Mab says, “Shit.”

  “What?” Monday is dancing a little on her toes.

  Mab is red-faced, openmouthed, panting. She is shaking her head. Under her breath, almost too soft to hear, she says, “We don’t know how to drive a backhoe.”

  I have thought of that, of course, but imagined there might be a manual attached in one of those plastic sheaths, or maybe that it might be self-explanatory. But now, faced with it, I realize that is not, in fact, what I imagined. What I imagined was that operating a backhoe would be hard if you wanted to do a good job, if you cared what the finished project looked like, if you needed to keep any surrounding structures intact. I thought it would be hard if you wanted to make something work, but we want to do the opposite, render something useless. I thought driving a backhoe would be hard if the paramount stipulation were operator survival. If you were willing to sacrifice that for other goals, I had imagined it would be easy, at least something we could figure out as we went along. Now I have that sinking horrible feeling of having come so far and not nearly far enough.

  Then Monday says, simply, “I know how to drive a backhoe.”

  “You do not.” Mab doesn’t even look at her. Mab can’t take her eyes off these machines.

  “Do so.”

  “How could you possibly know how to drive a backhoe?”

  “I have read Operating Techniques for Construction and Demolition Equipment, Eighth Edition,” Monday says. “I have also read The Model TF14 5VC 1985 and Later Owners’ Manual: Tractor, Loader, Backhoe, and Attachments. I have also read Site Safety and User Techniques: The Complete Guide to Backhoes, Bulldozers, and Excavators.”

  Mab knows there is no way Monday could be joking, but she cannot imagine that Monday is not joking. “Whyyy?”

  “They are in my library,” Monday says. “And they are yellow.”

  Never before has it occurred to me how odd it is that most heavy machinery is yellow, and never before has that fact seemed miraculous grace, but the covers of these books picture yellow equipment, and therefore—despite the fact that as far as things like plot and character go, these stories must be pretty boring—Monday has read them all.

  It turns out the ones Nathan has ready and waiting are yellow as well.

  It turns out there are keys in the ignitions and fuel in the tanks, which makes sense since half these machines are brand-new from the factory, since there’s a gas pump in the corner, and since no one expects us to be anywhere near here.

  It turns out sometimes, once every few decades or so, you get lucky.

  Mab presses the button on the wall, and the door of the garage glides open at once with a quiet murmur. We choose the backhoe closest to outside, the one with the fewest barriers to navigate around, the one with what Monday helpfully identifies as a hydraulic hammer attachment on the back. She clambers aboard.

  And Mab stops suddenly and looks at me, and I stop and look at her.

  The sensible thing, the sane thing, would be to leave me here. The backhoe’s cab is tiny—however yellow it is, Monday’s going to have a hard enough time driving it without being squished against both sisters. Even if it were large enough, its seat is not built to hold my head still or my airway open or my body upright. And besides, if we get caught, if we’ve triggered a silent alarm or security’s night shift is about to report, if someone shows up here screaming and raging and demanding to know what the hell is going on, I am an excellent diversionary tactic, the slowest of stalls.

  Plus, you know how one of the cabinet secretaries always sits out the State of the Union, and the guys who know the recipe for Coke are never all in the same room together, and some parents fly home from vacation on separate airplanes just in case? If two of us are plunging heedless into this night, one of us should stay behind. Someone has to take care of Nora.

  I don’t have to lay out these a
rguments. Mab knows them as well as I do. But I don’t have to refute them either. I will not let my eyes leave hers to find my Voice, but if I did I would refuse, come what may, to wait here all alone. I don’t need to, though. She knows that too. And mad though it is, she does not protest—not with words, not with her eyes, not even in her heart of hearts (for I can see there too). She holds my gaze and nods. They will not leave me behind.

  It is an insane risk and an unnecessary one and a shattering act of faith and loyalty and stupidity and love.

  But my chair has to stay. My Voice too. And without them, I am stood down, immobilized, silenced, at once firmly anchored and frantically unmoored. It is, simply and terribly, leaving a part of myself behind.

  But we have no other option. I drive right up to the beast. I grasp upward with my hand and pull. Monday pulls. Mab pushes. There’s a good bit of grunting, wrestling, and elbows in places elbows should not go. It is good that we are sisters. But finally, I am in the driver’s seat, the only seat. Mab straps me in. And it is time.

  In front of me, I’m relieved to find a steering wheel. A steering wheel, pedals on the floor, buttons with icons of lights and windshield wiper fluid, a radio, cup holders. Just like a car. Not that any of us have ever driven one of those either, but I think we could. Well, I think they could. That most of the controls and indeed the tools are behind me rather than out front is a problem we’ll have to address soon. But not immediately.

  By raising the armrests, by being a teenage girl rather than the person for whom this cab was designed, by pressing her leg and side against mine, however unwillingly, Monday wedges in alongside me so she can drive, her butt half in the seat, half in thin air. Mab opens the side window and straddles it, one foot inside, one on the wheel cover, hands reaching in and gripping my shoulders to keep us both upright. She blinks at me, and I can feel her shaking. I can feel Monday shaking. I can feel them both feeling me shaking. I know if we flip this thing, if we drive off the riverbank, if we crash into a tree, we’ll be dead before Mab even has a chance to scream at Monday.

  But in fact, this is a brand-new, state-of-the-art vehicle. Monday turns the ignition switch, and the backhoe purrs to life like a Maserati. She turns the headlights on and illuminates the night before us, black streaked through with her yellow, the river aglow in our light, bright white and alive, the only thing moving in the dark silence. She releases the parking brake, puts the backhoe in gear, presses the gas pedal, and slips out of the garage and into the night. The cab shudders a bit, jagged as our breath, as she gives it too much gas then panics and pulls her foot away, too much, then not enough, too much, then not enough, but she’s going so slowly she hasn’t needed to use the brake at all. And as I am always saying, slow is good. At the moment, if not for very many more, we have time.

  We crawl away from the plant, our pristine tires biting into the earth, steady, not slipping, down to the bridge over the diverted river, and then up over its sleeping crest. Below, the water is rushing beneath us, the clearest note in a quiet night, rushing on, rushing away, loud from over top and fast and cold, the spray spitting in fits to reach us, calling to us, shouting, a threat and a welcome. It has been flowing as long as we’ve been alive, which is not forever, but which feels like forever. It prattles away, and it is somehow surprising to hear its babble so late as if they should have turned it off after dark, as if it wouldn’t speak were there no one to listen. Day or night, light or dark, witnessed or alone, polluted or clean, this river runs on. And we, we three, we’re going to stop its song. If it knew, would this river be angry or grateful to return to its path, its rightful way forward, free from diversion, unencumbered by the violent service into which it has been pressed all these lonely years? It got its share of the vitriol, but the river was never to blame. Now it gets to return to the place where it is natural and appreciated and belongs. Now it gets to go back home.

  But homecomings are often fraught, sometimes violent even. Things get broken along the way. Nothing’s ever quite as you left it. They say you can’t go home again, but it’s not true. You can. But only if you’re the river.

  On the other side of the bridge, we leave the river behind and make our bumpy way toward the lake, over the frozen field, over the brambles and weeds, over the old orchard land, over the nothing between the river and the park, knowing what’s behind was the easy part, knowing that bridge was built to bear us but the dam was not. As the lights in Bluebell Park come into view, Monday brakes hard and cuts the engine, and the backhoe comes to a shuddering stop. We sit there, breathing hard, like we’ve run here. If only. The water in Bluebell Lake is so black and still it seems made of different stuff entirely than the river, but it is just as breathtaking. Both have been here all our lives, seem as part of our town as Bourne High or the Do Not Shop, seem as part of the land as the trees and the fields, seem as movable as mountains, but we know—well, hope—that very soon they will be gone.

  “Now what?” Mab asks Monday.

  “We drive out onto the dam,” she says. “The hammer must be positioned at a ninety-degree angle to the material you want to break through.”

  “Can we do that?” says Mab. “Drive out onto the dam?”

  “Small to medium backhoes such as this one are the ideal machines for maneuvering in tight spaces,” Monday says.

  “What if the dam’s already too weak to support us?”

  No one speaks the answer to this out loud, but we all hear it just the same. If the dam collapses under our weight, we’ll go into the lake and we will not come out.

  Monday starts the machine again, and we drive forward at a pace that makes our ride so far feel fast in comparison. At the lip of the lake, the edge of the dam, we pause to try for calm, for deep breaths, for a small prayer, to say goodbye to the solid world, just in case, ready to all go down together if it comes to that, though, truthfully, it also feels like life might be about to get better, and we’d just as soon stick around for it if we could. We move forward, an inch an hour it seems like, a slow creep over grass and onto the cement top of the dam which feels like solid ground—not as much give beneath us—but of course is less so, the concrete holding but the timbers beneath shrieking as they bow, but holding too, making our slow way as we leave the part built over ground and cross onto the part holding back water. The spine of the dam is wider than we are. But it is not a lot wider than we are.

  To our right, upstream, the lake is still, quiet but deep. Mab and Monday can swim, but I cannot, and unstrapping me from a sinking backhoe and pulling me to shore through frigid waters is probably more than any of us would survive. To our left, below us, is the ravine, what we’ve always thought of as the ravine, which is actually a ghost river, a once and future river, a dry gully ready to be filled again. It is not so far down. It is not so full of thorns. But it is far and full enough if we should fall.

  Out over the middle of the dam, as much behind us as ahead, water above and brambles below, Monday shifts into neutral and puts on the parking brake. She lowers the stabilizer legs down on either side, though I don’t know how much stability they’ll provide since they’re only just wider than we are. And only just fit. We all try very hard not to breathe.

  “We have to turn around,” Monday whispers.

  I am about to shout incoherent protest, but Mab gets there first. “We’ve come this far. We can’t go back now.”

  “I am not saying go back, One. The hammer is behind us.” They both turn and look. “The hydraulic attachments go on the stick which is on the boom which is on the back. We have to turn around.”

  Monday reaches down and releases something under our seat, turns us in a slow circle, and suddenly we’re facing the other way. Out our new front windshield, the hammer looks like a giant metal finger at the end of a giant metal arm, elbow pointed at the sky, finger pointing to the ground, more twisted than I am, also waiting. We can still make out the plant on the shore we came from, in front of us once again.

  “How do we wor
k that thing?” Mab breathes.

  “Joysticks.” Monday points to them. There is one apiece on little pillars on either side of us.

  “Do you know how?” Mab’s voice climbs, and I will her to lower it. I do not know how delicate our balance is. I do know shouting will not help Monday.

  “The books say all it takes is training, practice, and a careful touch,” Monday says confidently.

  “You have no training! You have no practice!” Mab’s voice goes the wrong direction. “Your touch is not careful!”

  “They are yellow!” Monday yells back.

  “It takes more than being yellow!” Mab is shaking, rattling the entire cab, rattling me where she grasps my chest and shoulders.

  “I am an expert in all yellow things!” Monday is indignant. She needs to get out and run laps around the backhoe, but it is as possible for her to do so at the moment as it is for me.

  I am tapping One One One on Mab’s arm as hard as I can, but she is numbed by cold and terror and cannot feel it. So I muster all my energy and concentration and shout into the frozen night, “Maaa!”

  Not Mab. Not Monday. Me. I have had sixteen years of practice. My touch is fine as cobwebs. I am Miracle Mirabel, a maestro on the joystick. Even in the dark, I can see their faces light with comprehension, then giddy, dizzy relief.

  “Hah,” I say. Tell me how.

  “The left joystick swings us side to side,” says Monday. “You have to position the hammer between the front wheels.”

  The left joystick is on the left side, which makes sense, but it might as well be on the moon for as much as I can reach it with my left hand. Monday swivels the seat around so I can reach it with my right, but then I am looking out the side of the cab. Mab squeezes into the space behind me and braces me upright and still and breathing. I stare out over black Bluebell Lake, take the joystick in hand, and gently move the stick to the right while Mab calls, “More, more, little more, back a little. Stop. Okay. Good. Now what, Monday?”