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 not 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 can’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.
Monday’s head whips to me. “I am not stupid. I figured that out. But I do not understand why.”
“We don’t know,” I answer for both of us. And then, “I can’t believe you would do that to me.” I sound pathetic, but they’ve both heard me sound worse.
“You mean you cannot believe River would do that to you,” says Monday. “Betray you. Tell his father.”
“I don’t mean River,” I say. “I mean Mirabel. Why?” I want to hear her say it.
“I do not know why,” says Monday.
But there’s only one reason, isn’t there? Mirabel must have told for the same reason I did.
“You love him?” I ask.
“I love who?” Monday says.
“Yes,” says Mirabel’s Voice.
“But that’s”—my brain rolodexes through every vocabulary word it’s memorized in the past five years and lands on—“impossible.”
“No,” says Mirabel’s Voice. There’s more there, sentences and paragraphs and tomes waiting to spill, but we don’t have time right now for her to tell them.
“How can that be?” This is crudely—cruelly—put because of course it’s not impossible. It’s exactly as possible for Mirabel to fall in love as for me or River or anyone. Mirabel-champion is my most important job, not just telling her she can do it, whatever it is, not just helping her do it, but believing she can. She’s brilliant and funny and strong and, yes, lovable, and I’d fight anyone who said otherwise, but there are some things she just can’t do. So why does she have to do them with River, who, in addition to being the scion of her enemy, is mine? I feel terrible for asking these questions, even in my head, but mostly I just feel terrible.
“I don’t know,” her Voice answers.
“For how long?”
She types. “All along.”
“I do not know what that means,” Monday says.
Me neither.
“That’s no excuse,” I say.
“No,” she agrees.
“Just because I told too—” I stop. “I was wrong but only once and understandably. You were wrong twice—”
“Because you told when you said not to tell and because you betrayed your very own sister!” Monday cannot help but put in. Enthusiastically.
“And not understandably,” I finish.
“Yes,” Mirabel’s Voice insists. I hope she means yes, she was wrong, twice. But she could as well mean, yes, it was understandable. And the fact that I don’t know might be the greatest loss of all. I wait, but she doesn’t clarify.
Finally I admit, “He gave me this,” because I have to sometime, and it might as well be now. It’s mortifying really, but they are my sisters, so I hand over the brochure.
“He wants to help you go to college.” Monday is puzzled but trying. “That is nice.”
“It’s condescending,” I spit. “It’s pity. It’s tossing me his scraps. It’s rubbing in my face that he’s leaving and I never will. And even if it weren’t all that, it’s just mean because he knows damn well I can’t afford it.”
No one says anything for a moment.
Then Monday reaches over. “I will take it. For the library.”
On top I am furious, raging at River, raging at Mirabel. And underneath that I am destroyed, betrayed by both of them, in pain from everywhere at once. And underneath that I am bereft. He is leaving, and how will it be here now without him? It will be the same as it was before, and I think I would rather go anywhere—anywhere—than back.
I feel what it feels like to know I will never be happy again.
I feel what it feels like to know not only do I have to feel this, I have to feel it alone because I’ve lost my sister, both of them probably (for we do not come in ones), and the only people who could help me find my way through are as lost in the woods as I am.
I turn off the light and turn back toward the wall.
I can hear Mirabel snuffling too.
I can hear Monday turning the pages of that stupid catalog. I should never have given it to her because I would like to bury it in the woods or I would like to set it on fire or I would like to feed it to a wild animal, but of course she has to read it with a flashlight under her covers.
And of course she has to do it out loud.
Probably because there was never any chance she wasn’t going to, however, it is closer to soothing than grating. I can’t stop thinking about a million things I wish I could stop thinking about, so listening to Monday intone the first-year experience at the Templeton alma mater is as good a sheep-counting sort of exercise as any. Students take five courses each semester and can join any of hundreds of clubs. There are three dining halls for them to choose from plus two coffee shops. They live in coed dorms with roommates specially matched for compatibility.
“There is a sidebar with photographs of famous alumni who used to be roommates,” Monday says. “Remember that blond guy from that movie we watched about dogs? He used to be roommates with that other blond guy from that other movie we watched about dogs. That is a good coincidence because—”
Monday stops reading, but I wasn’t really paying attention anyway, so it takes me a little while to notice. Then she starts keening from under the covers.
“Monday?”
The keening gets louder. I turn on the light.
“Shush! You’ll wake Mama.” No one slept much after Omar told us the election results last night. If Mama can get some rest, she should.
But Monday can’t stop.
“Tell us what’s wrong, Two.” Mirabel has that one long saved.
I pull the covers off her. Her hands are clamped over her ears, so the college catalog River gave me as the sorriest of parting gifts has fallen to the floor. I pick it up and look.
And there, grinning back at me, is River himself. “My only love sprung from my only hate!” (“Too early seen unknown, and known too late!” I’m realizing belatedly the important part of that quote is the second bit.) He has his arm around a guy I’ve never seen before, standing on a cobblestone path in front of a brick building covered in ivy. The pileup of love and hurt and anger and confusion—or maybe it’s just his sweet smile—makes the room spin. So it takes me longer than it should to realize this makes no sense. This cannot be a photo of River.
The caption clarifies. And then sets the world on fire.
“A match made in heaven! Roommates Duke Templeton (’68) and Scott Blakely (’68) on move-in day freshman year. Templeton went on to become owner and CEO of Belsum Basics. Blakely is owner and CEO of Harburon Analytical.”
The most exacting, state-of-the-art independent testing and chemical analysis company in the world.
I would like to join in Monday’s keening, but not as much as I would like my mother to sleep through this. I would like to hold Monday and rock her and tell her it will be all right, but Monday would never let me hold her and rock her, and I do not see how it will be all right ever again. Instead, I pull Mirabel into Monday’s bed and climb in myself, and we huddle there together, insofar as it is possible to huddle without touching, our warmth eventually melting Monday’s shrieks to cries to sniffles to silence.
Finally she says, “Independent testing does not prove anything if the independent tester is your roommate from college specially matched for compatibility.”
“Truth,” I say.
“We will tell everyone what we have learned and hold another vote.”
“That’s not how it works,” I tell her. “When you don’t like the outcome of a vote, you don’t just get to ask again.”
“But they voted wrong.”
“So they have to live with it.”
“Me too,” she points out. “And that is not fair.”
“Truth.”
“But they did not just vote wrong,” she says. “They voted with incomplete information because they were lied to and tricked, so they deserve to know the true and complete information and then have another chance to vote the right way.”
“It’s too late,” I say.
“For what?”
“For everything.”
And then Mirabel’s Voice out of the black darkness pricked only by faded, stapled-on stars. “The lawsuit was never the way. The vote was never the way. Nora’s way was never the way.”
“What way?” Monday says.
“Forward,” says Mirabel’s Voice.
“What is the way?” Monday says.
We wait while Mirabel types. “The dam needs repair because it is cracked and leaking already.”
“Truth,” Monday agrees.
More typing. “What if we help it?”
“Help fix it?” Monday asks.
“Help crack it,” Mirabel’s Voice corrects. “Tear it down. Open it up.”
“Who?” Monday asks.
“Three.” She does not mean herself. She means we three. She means us.
“How?” Monday asks.
Mirabel types. “Dynamite?”
“We do not have dynamite,” Monday says.
“Demolition equipment, backhoe, bulldozer, jackhammer.” This must be a folder buried deep in her Voice app for the toddler set, and she’s just going through and tapping each picture.
“We do not have a backhoe or a bulldozer or a jackhammer,” Monday says.
But I sit up, blow my nose, and turn the light back on again. Because it’s true we don’t have any demolition equipment. But I know where we can get some.