Monday wore green to school today, but the rain keeps switching over to snow flurries then sleet then back to rain again, none of it lasting long enough to accumulate but relentless, sopping, and deep-in-the-bones cold. They say voter turnout is lower when the weather’s bad and the issues local, especially for whoever’s ahead in the polls, but in our case, there are no polls, and however near, the stakes could not range wider. The voting booth is a wooden box with a slit in the lid into which you insert a red poker chip if you want to rebuild the dam and reopen the plant and a green poker chip if you want Belsum to leave and never return. The jars of chips are helpfully labeled in case you’re color-blind or confused. It is extraordinarily appropriate that in Bourne voting literally feels like gambling.
Pastor Jeff, who as a man of God is what passes around here for trustworthy and unbiased, serves as election chair, but it’s a weekday so he must also serve as Dr. Lilly. The voting box, therefore, sits in the clinic waiting room. As do I. People with appointments today come in and vote and then sit and wait their turn to be seen. People without appointments come in and vote and then sit and chitchat with the waiting patients. Some people come in and vote and then wait for nothing in particular except for the rain to abate. It is not a festive atmosphere exactly, but it is communal, all in, everyone here, at least for a little while. I would bet that counting uncomfortable glances at me and/or my mother’s shut door would be an effective exit poll. If so, at lunchtime, we are neck and neck. My mood, however, mirrors the weather.
Because win or lose, I am at every turn betrayed.
Not just by River, who told what he shouldn’t have, who chose his family over ours—which might maybe be understandable except he also chose wrong over right, cowardice over integrity, fear over fair, and, worst of all, reversion to form instead of change, growth, and becoming the person I had faith he was, or at least could be. His apology was heartfelt I’m sure, but also empty—too easy—and also too late.
I am betrayed by my eldest sister who also told what she shouldn’t have, who also chose someone else over our family, though at least in her case it was because of love, at least some of it was. But mostly it is this: We have shared a room, a life, a heart all these weeks and months and all the years before these weeks and months, and she has fallen in love without ever once noticing that I have fallen in love as well. Worse than not ever once noticing. Not ever once imagining. We communicate, Mab and I, without language, without motion, without space, passage, sense, or sometimes even purpose. We are so much the same—for two people who navigate the world so differently—it is appalling that she could love another and not realize that I would—of course I would—do the same.
I am betrayed by the adults whose job it is to look out for me because if you asked us, we who are coming slowly of age, we would vote Belsum out—without pause or pang or division—no matter what wonders they dangled before our innocent eyes. I am betrayed by my town, my neighbors and friends, these people with whom I have strived and struggled and suffered, the only people I have ever known, my entire world, roughly half of whom have come before me today to vote that it’s okay with them, or okay enough, what was done to all of us. And what was done to me.
Then the door to Nora’s office opens, her last patient of the day shuffles out, and my mother stands in her doorway regarding me through red, weary eyes.
“You okay?” She is tired but smiling, hopeful, willfully optimistic.
I nod and point to her.
“Oh yeah, me too, better than okay actually. It’ll be close, but I think it’s going to go our way finally.”
She glances at my face to see if I know something she doesn’t yet. I don’t. An hour ago, Pastor Jeff came out of his office, told me to cross my fingers, and left with the box of poker chips tucked inside his raincoat.
“Cheer up, Mir-Mir.” Nora’s bouncing a little. “Everything’s great. This time, I know it, I feel it, everything’s going to be just great.”
And it is the stress of the day maybe, of the damp quicksilver chill of the weather, of watching every single member of this entangled town trickle in to vote, or perhaps it is just one betrayal too many, but it is too much for me.
“It is not great.” I turn the volume on my Voice all the way up to shout at my mother. “And it is not going to be great.”
She is alert at once in case I’ve been withholding information about the vote. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” my Voice says. “Ever.”
“Mirabel, you scared me.”
“You should be scared.”
She is. I can see it in her face. And I feel bad, but not bad enough to stop. She waits while I type.
“No matter how the vote goes, I already lost.”
Mab thinks it’s not fair this town is so boring. Monday thinks it’s not fair that sometimes it’s raining in the morning but sunny in the afternoon and she didn’t bring a change of clothes to school. But what’s not fair is what’s not fair, the ways they feel they’ve been wronged by fate versus the ways I have.
“You have to look on the bright side, love,” my mother tells me. “It’s the only way.”
“No,” my Voice says, and she waits while I type. “You have to let me be on the dark side.”
“Never,” she says.
“Aaaaaaaahh!” I scream, I cry, I roar, and then I close my eyes to gather the energy necessary to type. “Even if everyone votes the right way, I will still be this way.”
“I love you this way,” Nora says.
“That is not enough,” my Voice says, and we are both stopped by it, for it is heartbreaking and it is worse than heartbreaking. And it is true. It is not enough to be loved by your mother. It is a good start, and you wouldn’t want to do without, and it helps, but it is not enough. You need also the love of your community, the love of friends and admirers, the love of strangers who don’t know you but still wish you well, the love that comes from passion and from commitment and from someone who will never, never betray you and not just because they’re related to you. You need more love. We all need more love. And here—in this town, in this body—love is abundant but it is not sufficient. It is not enough.
She crosses the room and takes my head in both her hands, makes me look into her eyes when she says, “You are wonderful exactly as you are, and I wouldn’t have you any other way.”
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.