Winter is hard for me. Cold makes my muscles stiffer, less flexible, less predictable than usual. Snow makes even Bourne’s ultra-accessible sidewalks and streets impassable or—worse—not quite impassable. You think you can make it. You are making it! Sidewalks have been cleared and salted. Snow has been shoveled and removed and not just a tiny strip down the middle but edge to edge. Your power chair is powerful indeed … until suddenly a tree branch laden with ice and snow snaps and falls across your path, or you swerve right to avoid black ice and wind up stuck in a snowbank.
Saturday morning is not cold enough to snow. The temperature will hit sixty by noon. But chilly mornings remind me my precious solo outings are numbered, at least until spring, and at the bar last night, Tom promised he had wonders in store if I stopped by the depot. So first thing this morning, that is what I do.
When I get there, he’s all the way under a huge touring van with “The Dendrites” airbrushed on the side. He says band vans are the easiest to convert into wheelchair vans—it’s all the extra room they left inside for drum kits and visits from groupies—and he can get them cheap because there’s always a surplus. Engines may not last forever, but they last longer than rock bands and are easier to fix. I tap Tom’s foot gently with my front right wheel, and he rolls out from under.
“Mirabel! Excellent.” He stands and shoves out of the way the ambulance stretcher he repurposed as a mechanic’s creeper. “Come on. Your pile’s over here.”
I follow him through the converted old garage, past what look like stacks of junk but are really citizen-specific solutions Tom’s collected, built, and repaired. There’s a stack that’s five deflated inner tubes, a coil of wire, and one of those orange hazard cones. There’s a stack that’s clothesline, a box of extra-large binder clips, and a heap of dog tags. There’s a stack that’s nothing but two balls of twine and fourteen two-liter soda bottles with their ends cut off.
My pile is a solar panel, four black mats, four wooden boards. I smile at him, hold my hand to my heart. It’s gratitude plus a Christmas-morning sort of excitement. My items aren’t wrapped, but they might as well be. They’re gifts. And their purpose—at least for the moment—remains a mystery.
“The boards are for the ramp into the house,” Tom explains. “Replacements. You’ve got rot. I know your mom likes the wood, but there are so many more durable materials out there for a wheelchair ramp.”
“Natural materials are healthier materials,” my Voice mocks my mother. It can’t do impressions, but Tom’s heard this from Nora enough times it doesn’t have to.
“As I keep telling her”—he laughs—“that’s only true if you’re licking them. If you’re just rolling over them, wood is not ideal.”
“What else is new?” Sarcasm is also hard for the Voice, but in Bourne, ideal is too high a bar.
“I also rigged up a portable solar charger, just in case of power outages or, I don’t know, a zombie apocalypse. It won’t work when it’s rainy. Or at night. But on sunny days, you can attach it to the back of the chair, and it’ll collect energy as you go.”
“Enough to outpace zombies?” my Voice asks.
“Well, they’re slow,” Tom says. “But don’t go too far, and make sure you save power to get home. You don’t want to get stranded when the sun sets.”
Always good advice for an apocalypse.
“I also found some weighted rubber mats to help you navigate cords when you do have power. I’m giving you a few because they’ll work for anything. You can just lay them down over whatever’s in your way and get right over.”
If only.
“Thank you,” my Voice says.
“My pleasure.”
“Thank you,” my Voice repeats in the exact same tone, no change of inflection to mean the difference between polite appreciation and the ocean-deep gratitude I owe Tom for making my life a life. But he gets it anyway. After all, my Voice is largely his work as well.
He starts to load what will fit into the giant sack he attached years ago to the back of my chair like a luggage rack but finds it already full. Nora’s sent him three dozen pumpkin cupcakes. He makes the swap, and we fist-bump. When I turn for home, I’m giddy with my prizes.
And as if all that weren’t miracle enough, just outside Tom’s door, I all but run over River Templeton.
“Mirabel!” A flash of panic as he leaps out of my way but then, undeniably, delight to see me.
“Sorry!” my Voice says.
“No, no, I’m sorry,” he says.
“Sorry!” I tap again. It’s the first time he’s been alone with my Voice, and I wonder if he’ll think it’s strange—I’m strange—to have a conversation with.
“No, it was definitely my fault.” He does not seem to think it’s strange. I remember when he came to the house and couldn’t stop staring. The novelty of me has worn off, I guess. Other girls would be unhappy about this development, of course, but I am not other girls. “I was distracted.”
I type, quickly but there’s still a lag. “By what?”
“The limitations of your hardware store.” He indicates it with his chin as if there might be more than one hardware store in town. There is not. “My mom wants an extra key for the side door, but your hardware store doesn’t have a key-copying machine.”
“Church,” I tap.
“Huh?” he says.
So he has to wait while I type. “The key-copying machine is in the church.”
He waits for me to amend that statement, like maybe it’s autocorrect’s fault. It’s not. Then he waits for me to explain, but it’d take me till winter to type in a thorough gloss of Pastor Jeff’s fundraising schemes.
“Weird,” he says eventually.
I don’t disagree.
“I was also looking for spoons to practice bending with my mind,” he adds, speaking of weird, “but your hardware store doesn’t carry spoons either.”
“Do they in Boston?” my Voice wonders.
“Well no, but there’s a separate store for everything in Boston. Whereas your store seems more … general. It had this”—he opens a brown paper bag to show me his purchase: a cookbook thick as a thigh—“which is also an odd thing to have in a hardware store, so I thought maybe there was some kind of culinary section.”
“You cook?”
“No.” He grins. “That’s why I bought a cookbook. But I figure cooking’s like magic. You follow the directions, stir a bunch of stuff together, and presto! Poof! Dinner! Plus if your brain could stir the spoon for you, think how much time you would save.”
I consider what a difference telekinesis would make in my life. So that’s another thing River and I have in common.
“Can I walk with you?” he says, and I nod and push my joystick forward, and he falls into pace beside me, and we take in the perfect October morning, that lovely-all-over feeling of being outside and neither sweating nor shivering, though I am shivering, just a little, the smell of leaves drying or dying or whatever that smell is that comes when the trees turn and the seasons change and the whole world shifts toward what comes next.
But then he says, “Oh, Mirabel,” and blushes hard. “I shouldn’t have said ‘walk with you.’ I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean … I just meant…”
“I know what you meant,” my Voice assures him. I did, but that’s not what’s remarkable. What’s remarkable is that he even noticed. And having noticed, he could have just pretended he never said it. He could have just ignored it. Instead, he was brave. Awkward and brave.
“Thanks,” he says, which is sweet, thanking me. “I need to expand my vocabulary. I should study with your sister, come up with some other words besides ‘walk’ to mean, you know, wander around next to you. Traipse? Ramble? Take the air?”
I laugh.
“She’s great at the whole synonym thing,” he says, then scoffs, “And she says she’s worried about getting into college.”
I nod, agreeing that this is silly, not her worry but that worry. She’ll have no trouble getting in.
“Seems like smart runs in your family,” which is a nice thing to say but nothing compared to what he says next. “Do you think you three will go together?”
We three?
I stop to look at him. So he stops and looks at me. He reads the confusion on my face. “You know, to college?”
I type. “I will not go to college.”
He laughs. “That’s what your sister said too. You’re both crazy.”
This is not as miraculous as telekinesis, but it’s close.
When even my Voice is speechless, he says, “Maybe it’s like the hardware store.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Different in Boston.”
Isn’t everything?
“At my old school, everyone goes to college. Everyone wants to get out of town, and our town’s a lot more … you know, than yours.”
I try to nod.
“And you’re smart, you and your sister. Your sisters. So, you know…”
He trails off, but honestly, I don’t know. Not whether or not I’m smart—I know that, obviously. What I don’t know is why he thinks smart has anything to do with leaving town. What I don’t know is why he’s not smart enough to realize that the options open to him and his Boston classmates and even Mab and even Monday are not open to me.
“Anyway”—he keeps talking because I’ve stopped—“what are you doing all weekend?”
“Don’t know.” My Voice finally finds its voice. “You?”
“Same. Maybe I’ll make something from my cookbook. Maybe I’ll practice bending something else with my mind.”
“Start easy,” my Voice advises.
“Like what?”
“Noodles.”
He laughs. “Even I don’t need a cookbook to make noodles.”
“To bend,” my Voice explains. “Just add boiling water.”
He stops in the middle of the sidewalk again, looks a little stunned. “Forget what I said about college. You don’t need it.” He grins at me. “You’re a genius already. That’s the best idea I ever heard.”
I take the long way home and try to decide whether the fact that River thinks I’m as likely to leave home as my sisters puts him on the side of the angels (big-hearted, faith-filled, and not just faith in general but faith in me) or the demons (completely oblivious). It was only a few years ago it occurred even to me to wonder how—literally how—I will someday live when Nora does not. Maybe I’ll go on her heels, like a brokenhearted lover, from grief but also lack of care. I need a lot of help to be me. It’s not that I couldn’t hire people. I could, of course. It’s that no one on earth could ever do it as thoroughly and thoughtfully and devotedly as Nora. Mother love is a powerful force. She is so essentially a part of me—like a limb, an organ—that maybe without her, I will simply cease to be.
But it’s bigger than that. Maybe we’ll all find Bourne was only ever for a little while, and as our beleaguered parents age away, the next generation will peter into nothing. We’ll leave if we can, stay if we can’t, but many of us won’t survive, won’t live without our platoon of parental carers, won’t have children of our own, and Bourne will shed its citizens softly like trees do their October leaves, green fading to gold fading to brown, then quickly, quietly, returned to dust. The remaining shops and suppliers will go, the post office and Tom’s depot. Some of us will die almost at once without meds, filled G-tubes, emptied catheter bags. Some of us will go up in flames when there’s no one to help with the stove or herd us away from steep stairs or run baths with no more than four inches of not-too-hot water. Others will go more slowly as our wheelchairs shudder to still without anyone to repair, push, or recharge, as our implants stop whispering, our joints no longer bend, our Voices fall silent. And then, sooner than we imagine, when there’s no one left, the plant will finally close again forever. Our homes will crumble back to dirt, our buildings rot to stone and soil. The library will overgrow with trees who remember when all those pages used to be theirs. Our streets will bristle with weeds. Maybe the flowers will come back. And the river will flow on, as rivers do, as rivers must, and if its waters eventually run clean again, it will not matter anyway because there will be no one left to drink.
It sounds dark, I know, but it will happen to you too, to you and your family and your town. It sounds dark, but that’s apt for somewhere that’s had its day in the sun. These places, they don’t last long. They don’t stay. But while they’re here, they’re safe and whole, like cocoons, like eggs, on the way to somewhere else, yes, but for the moment, a world entire.
Of course River doesn’t see this. Of course my soul is older than his. Think of the world he’s grown up in versus the one I have. Think of the body he’s grown up in versus the one I have. So you see why he imagines that, like him, like Mab, like anyone, I will head toward unbound horizons with no fear of darkness brought by storm clouds or by night nor any need to save my power to get back home. His assumption is not naivete. It’s not unheedful. It’s not disregard. At least, it’s not only those things. It’s also him seeing me, how smart I am, yes, but also how capable. Sure, it’s a little oblivious and myopic, but it’s also empathetic and generous and kind. And, mostly, unexpected. That I’m seen and treated as normal by everyone else here is only because I am normal to everyone else here. That River sees me that way too is miraculous and magical. Like if he really could bend spoons with his mind.