Remember I told you this at the beginning.
That I can tell stories but slowly, more dripping faucet than rushing flow, more drizzle than hard, cleansing rain, but letter by letter I can get us there. And I was not in a rush, I said. I had plenty of time, I said.
That is no longer the case.
The metaphor is always David and Goliath.
Goliath is big and strong and well funded. He’s made so much money, either off your suffering or off not giving a shit about your suffering, that he can buy whatever and whoever he needs to ensure that his profiting off your suffering remains allowed or at least overlooked, which Monday would point out are not the same thing, but Monday would be wrong.
And then there is David. He is poor and small. He is weak, overmatched, underfunded, outclassed. But he is right and he is righteous, quick of wit, fast of finger, pure of heart, helping those whom Goliath has destroyed. The good guy.
And so it’s done in an instant. One well-placed rock, quick as a tick, and it’s over.
I hate this metaphor. It’s offered all the time, but it’s apt as balloons at a funeral, suggesting, as it does, that if only you were more nimble or more right or more good, you would prevail. Suggesting, as it does, that you are destroyed not by other people’s shortsightedness, other people’s greed, or other people’s deciding you’re disposable, but by being yourself too slow, morally compromised, wicked, and weak. Goliath is not at fault in this story. Goliath is just a giant, following his giant nature, laid low by nothing more than a lucky shot. And David, David’s just a boy with a sling and a stone, kind of whiny and moralistic, a little bit of a pissant.
In fact, I think it is a metaphor perpetuated by the Goliaths themselves.
Because really Goliath is not the size of a giant. Goliath is the size of the sky. Goliath is the size of a mountain from the base of it, so it takes up everything, everywhere you look, all the room, all the air, all the past and the future as well, until there is nothing anywhere but him, and you have no choice, can’t remember ever having had a choice, and this is just the way it is, unfortunate but inevitable, inarguable, like how someday we’ll all die, Goliath taking, and taking up, everything, including you, including yours, including even the whisper of a suggestion that he might not be right or fair (for a mountain is not right or fair, it just is), including even the whisper of a suggestion that this might not be good for us, for any of us (for a mountain does not care what’s good for us), including even the whisper of a suggestion that there might be a different future than this (for a mountain in the future is still a mountain, long after you’re gone, long after your descendants have forgotten why they tell this story, long after whatever comes after humans has forgotten our name).
Mountains change, it is true. Grain of sand by speck of dust by infinitesimal layer by drop of rain by whisper of current by time by time by time, a mountain is worn away over eons and ages and the unremitting change of seasons.
But we can’t wait that long.
Why did I tell River, when I knew it could cost us our head start and our upper hand and our stealth injunction and ruin everything, when I knew, unlike Mab, that his loyalties probably didn’t lie with her and definitely didn’t lie with me, when I knew, unlike Mab, that he is nothing but a sixteen-year-old, a boy, sheltered and privileged and nearly as naive about the ways of the world as we are? Why did I tell him, when I knew he would probably tell his father and we’d lose our desperately honed, two-decades-in-the-making edge of getting there first, and not just getting there first but crossing the finish line before they even arrived at the track or really realized they were participating in a race to begin with? Why did I tell, when I knew it would break my sister’s heart?
Because I am also sixteen, with all the vain hopes a teenager is due and all the good sense from which she is absolved.
Because it was my turn.
Because I have a heart as well.
And because I was tired of waiting. Because it is time.
This is what they say about justice too, by the way, that it is slow. So that’s the other reason I told. It has taken Nora sixteen years, but she has finally exacted justice—by raising daughters who will see it served. She doesn’t see that yet. I’m only just starting to see it myself, a revelation seeded by, of all people, Nathan Templeton. This was what I started slowly to realize the afternoon he confessed everything to Nora in therapy. He was just trying to do right by a fallible parent. Apple too, for that matter. And, I’m finally realizing, us as well. We’ve been gathering wood for Nora’s fire, fanning the embers of her desperate, righteous cause. It feels different because she’s so good and she’s so right. But even Apple couldn’t quite believe her father’s “good enough” was good enough. Even Nathan knew he was wrong to bow to his dad’s corruptions. And us, we’ve been pure of heart, yes, on the side of the angels, on the side of our mother who is even holier than angels, but we have also hewn too close to her side.
Now we’re on our way. Our own way. Monday is trying to be brave about it. Our new plan is incautious and impulsive and unstable as dynamite. Not that we have dynamite. We will have to blow everything up without it.
“How will we get in?” Monday demands as quietly as she’s able, which is not very quiet.
From under puffy eyes, Mab smiles, which an hour ago we all imagined she might never do again. “I have the key.”
“He gave you the key to the plant?” Monday can’t believe it. Me neither, actually.
We have bundled up because it is late now, and the temperature’s dropped. We have worn our darkest clothes, even Monday, who did have to borrow some from us but did not require much cajoling to see that it was necessary to blend in with the night as much as possible. We are all breathing great puffs of white in the darkness. And Mab is forgiving me. She has not forgiven me yet, but she is working on it. And I am working on forgiving her back.
“He didn’t give it to me,” Mab says. “I copied it. I pretended to lose it down my underwear when he was teaching me magic, and when I went in the church to get it out, I used Pastor Jeff’s key-cutting machine.”
“Why?” Monday asks.
“‘I have an ill-divining soul,’” Mab says.
“I do not know what that means,” Monday says.
“It’s Romeo and Juliet,” Mab explains.
“I do not know what that means anyway,” Monday says.
Mab looks at me, and I look at her. “Just in case,” she says.
There are Christmas lights winking cheerily from a few houses, our neighbors, our fellow citizens, survivors. I am praying no one will hear us, step out onto a creaking front step, turn on a porch light, and ask what the hell we think we’re doing in the middle of this night. But I am confident that if they do, and if we tell them, they will join arms and come along to help. We are all in this together now.
But Bourne sleeps on.
We cross Maple and the cemetery, and I find our father with my eyes. I wonder if he would applaud what we’re doing or chastise us for the foolishness we are about to undertake. If he were angry, I would remind him that the worst that can happen is we could all die, and then I’d ask him how it is, and if it isn’t after all worth it maybe for such a righteous cause. If we could sit and chat and compare stories, my father and I, reflect and philosophize, I am certain he would conclude what we have concluded, that there is nowhere his daughters could be right now but where we are.
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 arguments. 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 work 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?”
“The left joystick also pushes the stick in and out and makes it shorter and longer.”
“That doesn’t help her, Two. What should she do?”
“Push the joystick away from you to push the stick out in front,” she says and I do. “Press up on the button on top to lower it down,” and I do that too. It is better that I can’t see what I’m doing I think. It is better to be gazing out over a dark, still lake. I can hear motors purring, though, gears engaging, the knock of metal against stone, the machine responding to my touch, but so far, it’s all prelude.
Then Monday says, “Okay, now the boom. You need the other joystick.” And that joystick I can play as it was meant to be played. Right hand, facing front, watching what I wreak. She turns our chair. We all three gaze at the upcrooked elbow and its pointing finger, the dam before us, the plant out beyond, the lake bated above.
“Side to side on the right joystick controls the curl,” Monday quotes at us. “Away lowers the boom down. Back toward you lifts it back up.”
“What should she do?” Mab has her teeth clamped so hard together—to keep them from chattering or to keep herself from yelling, I do not know—it is hard to understand her. But Monday does.
“Lower the boom, right into the wall, perpendicular—that means a ninety-degree angle,” she breaks off to tell me. I nod. “And press down.”
I do. Suddenly, our front wheels are lifting off the dam. We are levitating. We are falling. Mab is screaming. I am screaming. “No, no, do not scream!” Monday screams. “That is what is supposed to happen. That is how we know we have the angle right and the attachment seated.”
I try to breathe deeply. I try to calm down. I try to calm Mab down too.
“Lower us,” says Monday, and I do, only too gladly. And then she says, “Move the hammer to the edge. And go. Fifteen seconds. Go.”
Fifteen seconds does not sound like very many, but count it off in your head, one number at a time, a breath in between each one, and imagine while you do the very earth shaking into pieces all around you. It is a long, slow time. It is an eternity. It is the end of the world.
One. Two. Three.
There is a crack and a crash we hear over the hammering and feel in our bones and feel in our souls.
Four. Five.
Mab is counting off, slow and even, defiant, behind me, against me.
Six. Seven. Eight.
She gets to fifteen, and I stop. We are panting. We are waiting.
“Now move it over to a new spot nearby and do it again,” Monday says.
“Why a new spot?” Mab shouts.
“I do not know!” Monday shouts back.
I don’t either, but I do as Monday directs. She has got us this far. We will all go down together. I turn on the hammer. Mab counts to fifteen. I stop. I move the boom again. She counts and I move. She counts and I move. Again and again and again, and soon the whole world is shaking shattering shuddering convulsing-like-to-break-apart, and I am certain, as certain as I have ever been of anything in my life, that we are about to fall to our death, my sisters, our backhoe, and I, and I think of our mother and how heartbroken she will be and how proud, and suddenly, finally, there is a crack that must be what they mean when they say the crack of doom, and Bluebell Lake is water flowing faster and faster over the dam now, but there is so much debris, and I start to use the finger to poke it out of the way, to drag the rocks and stones and mud and cement and broken concrete and wood away from the hole we’ve made, and Monday screams, “Stop!”
“What?” Mab pants. “What’s wrong?”
“Using the hammer to hoist, pry, sweep, or move large objects may result in premature wear on the tool or poor long-term performance.”
“No one gives a shit about long-term performance, Monday! We need this thing to last for another thirty seconds. Can it do that?”
“Naaa,” I say. No. Look. And we all three do. And we all three see that there is no way back the way we’ve come for we have made a hole too large to cross, filling and spilling over now with water, and the only way we can go is forward, away from the plant and the river, home again.
“Pull it up! Pull it back in!” Monday directs, and I do, and she turns our seat around so we face front again, our backs to Belsum, to the hole we have made, to the hole we have left behind.
What I feel is free, no longer shattering, no longer rattling, the pulsing hard but only my own. I clench and unclench my hand, clench and unclench, working blood back in, relishing its sting. For no doubt the first time in my life, my body is exultant. My body worked and obeyed, complied and triumphed, saved us all. Monday pulls forward one breath at a time over the rest of the dam we have destroyed the middle of, over the barrier we have all but removed, over a past which has not been kind but which is ours and which made us, back to mud, back to grass, back to Bourne, back home.
The thing about holes is their size is deceptive. You can’t tell by looking if they’re wide but shallow or have gentle slopes to hidden depths. Or maybe it’s just that with holes, their size is not what matters. Black holes are infinitely small but infinitely dense, drawing into themselves everything there is. I don’t know what that means really, but if I were describing a hole, I’d be more interested in how much can fall into it or leak out of it than the size of the thing itself. You’d think those qualities would be related, but world-class physicists insist I’m wrong, and they seem like pretty smart people.
We have made a hole too big to cross back over, but not really because of its size. Going back was never an option. We can finally only go forward. We have made a hole too big to hold water, but that is true of any hole, no matter how small. We have only slightly widened a little crack in a low wall to let a shallow lake trickle back into the barely-more-than-a-swollen-creek it was always meant to be, but that small crack is the size of the moon, that wall the width of the world. That river flows like all the blood in all the veins of every person left in this town. It is not really about size.
Our destory is this: We are no longer waiting, imagining justice deferred but heralded, on its way. We are no longer left behind, forgotten but unable to forget. We have been wronged, but we are no longer wrong, no longer broken, no longer immovable and wishing ourselves other than we are. Our water is no longer green and no longer toxic because that water has flowed on, and so have that town, those people, that history, not gone but diluted, far away, and flowing farther every moment. We get to rest now, some of us. And others of us? We’re just getting started.
Because the flip side of our destory is the one not yet written, the one that happens next.
Duke Templeton doesn’t want word to get out about all he did to make us finally take matters into our own hands, or maybe he’s just embarrassed to be laid so low by three girls and his very own backhoe, but he declines to press charges against us for breaking and entering the plant and stealing his equipment. In contrast, property damage to town infrastructure is a municipal matter, which makes what to do about it Omar’s decision. Omar concludes that we have already performed more than commensurate community service. And our criminal records are expunged.
Therefore it’s a little year—a short little year—until Mab receives a postcard, her first from an address other than her own, congratulating her on her early acceptance to a college far away but also not so far, and six mere months after that until she and Petra pile into Petra’s horrible car and make it just into the parking lot of their dorm before breaking down, before meeting the rest of their incoming class, small and close, a poky town’s worth of students all new in their new world, young and excited and afraid and away from home for the first time, and though those homes are not like Bourne—of course they aren’t—they are also too small, too strange, too missed.
Meanwhile, the library is vacant again. Omar redesignates it to Monday—or, to be more accurate, as she would insist, redesignates it back to the town care of Monday. Tom and the Kyles spend a few days putting up shelves, rough-cut one-by-twelves on brackets screwed directly into the wall, inelegant but easily painted a cheery buttercup yellow. Monday stacks them carefully with the battered titles she’s loved and watched over all these years like children.
The relocation of Monday’s library—re-relocation, she says—makes our house feel palatial, but the Templetons’ state-of-the-art kitchen is still too tempting for Nora to resist. She starts doing her more marathon baking sessions there and then selling pastries from the reference desk, muffins and cupcakes and croissants for fifty cents apiece, day-olds for a quarter.
As the weeks until Mab leaves ebb away, she gets more and more anxious that when she and Petra go to school, we’ll miss them too much, or they’ll miss us too much, or, simply, they’ll miss too much, all that’s happening in Bourne. “Nothing will be happening in Bourne,” Monday assures them, but Mab is still worried. Change happened and it could again, could some more. So maybe because it will ease my sister’s mind or maybe because it was the start of the string that unspooled, heroically and unexpectedly, all the way to the dam or maybe just because it’s time, I relaunch the Herald Bourne. There is no staff. There is no money to print it. But there is the internet, however slow. And there is me, however slow as well, to write and research and listen and understand, me to give voice, to be there. To be here.
For a while, I have a subscriber base of one—or rather One—but Mab shares with Petra, reading her the articles aloud as they navigate their tiny dorm room. (Petra calls it incommodious, old habits being operose to break.) Soon Frank, Hobart, Zach, and Tom all subscribe too, never mind bar gossip is how most of my scoops originate, and Mrs. Shriver, though as a history teacher she hasn’t much use for current events, and Pastor Jeff, though his primary news source remains our Saturday morning breakfast table. Pooh is a subscriber until her death: in her home, in her sleep, and—this is the miraculous and wondrous part—of old age, natural causes, nothing more painful or insidious than time.
Wondrous though it may be, Mab is still heartbroken. Five minutes after Monday calls to tell them the news, Mab and Petra borrow a friend’s more reliable car and drive through the night straight home where Mab finds, of all things, a box of vintage shoes plus a note which reads:
Dearest Mab,
If I had jewels or gold or bonds or property, they would be yours. But I don’t. Standing in (get it?!)—and since those silver-tasseled mules look so cute on you—I’m leaving you these. It’s amazing how long shoes last if you get around town via wheelchair. But for you, my dear, these shoes are made for walking.
I leave out the part about the shoes, but I write about the funeral, even though every one of the Herald Bourne’s subscribers is there, including Pooh herself in some ways, maybe the most important ways. It’s a good story, the whole town turned out to file past her casket, struggling to corral their smiles because it is a sad occasion, somber, not a cause for celebration, but they keep forgetting, so long has it been since anyone died in Bourne just from being in their nineties, so long was she here and well and loved, as they file past my sister (in a black dress and knee-high pink polka-dotted go-go boots), also a wonder, wandering but home again. The piece reads like a fairy tale, a hint of myth, Odyssean, but every word is true.
Other news is more mixed and easier to believe, though also filigreed with hope and change. Leandra dies—not of old age or natural causes—but a few months later, to keep himself clean, Chris Wohl opens an ice rink. Frozen water—that does not flow or smell or color or relocate—is the kind of water Bourne can handle. I write about the new jobs renting skates, grilling hot dogs, smoothing the ice, plus the sled hockey team and the simple joy of having something different to do on weekends. Greenborough doesn’t have an ice rink, so we get visitors even, a few, strangers who come to glide over the ice holding hands under the mirror-ball lights, a small road trip to a sweet little town not so far away.
I write about Bourne Memorial High’s about-time restructuring of its classes to amend ableist assumptions that, for instance, someone with my body or Monday’s brain could not possibly be as smart as Mab. We are not as smart. We are different smart. We are also smart. We are other good things as well.
I write about what we learned from the college catalog River Templeton quietly put into my sister’s hands, how the test results that proved GL606 was finally safe were faked, a favor from an old family friend, how Bourne’s citizens had cast votes based on lies and therefore had their say denied. Again. I write about Nathan’s response to the email I send him where he says he was lied to too, where he claims he didn’t realize Duke had his old roommate tamper with the results. “I never imagined Harburon would risk their own stellar reputation to bury proof of unfavorable outcomes as a favor to my father,” Nathan tells me. “I assumed they just gave us, like, a discount on the testing.” He admits, though, that he is not surprised to learn everything wasn’t on the up-and-up and regrets his part in convincing the citizens of Bourne to take their chances with his family again, and he makes good on that apology by supplying documentation, his original test results that we could never lay our hands on, that prove finally—finally, finally—that Belsum knew and knew and knew and knew. And did it anyway.
I do not write about the emails I exchange with his son where he says sorry and thank you and goodbye and I also say sorry and thank you and goodbye.
But this is the story that gets picked up anyway. At first it’s the story of the story—the paper of an only slightly larger town upstate runs something in the spirit of a condescending “Small-Town Girl in Wheelchair Thinks She’s a Real Reporter” piece—but slowly a larger paper and a larger one still and other states and countries and wire services begin to understand the real story here. With their greater resources, they start to dig. And Belsum, and all they’ve done to us, is—at last and fully—exposed.
Nora says she’s disappointed because she was hoping for more—an embarrassing public arrest at the country club, copious jail sentences served consecutively, maybe a light hanging—but she’s faking. She’s ecstatic. Vindicated. The settlement offer is not generous—because what would be overly much, given the circumstances?—but it is a lot: enough to change Bourne forever, to buy us a future, to buy us the world.
Nora refuses on principle.
But Russell explains: It’s not settling like compromise, concession, surrender. It’s settling like building a nest, a community, a place to live and to be. Home.
And to this, Nora will at last agree.
The money is maybe not enough to drive Belsum out of business, but something is—the bad press, the failure to relaunch, the abdication of the son. And of his son as well. The river no longer where they need it to be. Demolition equipment far larger and more powerful and, one imagines, harder to operate than our backhoe arrives and, in the course of only an afternoon, a few enormous small hours, levels the plant that has shadowed our town and our lives all our lives.
That summer Pastor Jeff borrows Hobart’s truck for his thrift-shop tour and returns with boxes and boxes of used but new-to-Bourne books. Monday needs more shelves to home them all and is, momentously, out of wall space, but when Tom offers to rip out the kitchen and restore the Children’s section, Nora balks. With the spare change she’s raising fifty cents at a time from her reference-desk bake sales, soon the town will have enough money to replace Monday’s shoebox card catalog. Besides, Omar says, if they leave the kitchen in, the library could double as an event space and catering could use it, like if someone wanted to hold a wedding there, say, and though Monday does not like change or think libraries need ovens, she is well used to lending books from a kitchen. And though Omar does not say who might get married, his eyes, and Nora’s too, shine as if he did.
And I keep writing. For I can write as well as anyone, writing requiring but one well-honed brain, a ranging imagination, a determined mind, and a resilient and wide-open heart. For I have voice to give we voiceless few. Or maybe “voiceless” is too strong. Undervoiced, let’s say. I have perspective. Opinions. Ideas. And more than all that, it is by writing this down that I will honor my mother’s legacy, take up the mantle of her life’s work—never mind, as Pastor Jeff points out, that both are ongoing. She gets to lay it down now, as he also said, for it is our turn. We won’t forget. We won’t let you forget, either.
I have stories to tell and, even better, stories to live.
It’s only six months after Mab leaves for college that Monday bundles me onto a bus to another bus to another, and we go visit our sister. Monday spends two hours on Mab’s tiny dorm-room bed with her hands clamped over her ears shrieking about the state of Mab’s bathroom, shared by twenty-two teenage girls and professionally cleaned but once a week. To be honest, it’s not necessarily an overreaction, and besides, she managed the buses and going somewhere unknown and all the unpredictability of me, not to mention those many months of being one of only two instead of three. After she calms down, we go into town, and Mab shows us around, takes us to her favorite coffee place and her favorite restaurant and her favorite shops. In one of them, there’s a spinning rack of postcards. Monday turns it round and round and finally buys them all. Watching out the window on the bus ride home, she starts to think maybe she could leave Bourne after all, go to college herself (somewhere they let students live off-campus in en suite apartments with walls you can paint any shade of yellow you like), and then get a job out there, somewhere, anywhere, anywhere she wants.
And me? Our road trip makes me see that needing help doesn’t mean there aren’t other places to get it besides home, other people who can provide it besides family, that having limits doesn’t mean I cannot—must not, maybe—bewitch and bewilder, range far and wander wide and wild. For home is like black holes—no matter how small, no matter how humble, they capture everything in range and trap it inside. The only way to escape their draw is to be far enough away.
Nora will stay as her house empties of daughters, slowly but steadily, like, well, like water flowing out of a busted dam. She’ll stay because, after all, it is home. She believes in this town. There are other providers of jobs besides chemical companies. There are more ways to grow than you imagine. She has friends here, more than friends, more than family even, people she’s survived a tragedy—and its aftermath—alongside, people who she knows will be there for her, for one another, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health, not forsaking but forsaken certainly. For worse but also for better, for when it gets better. Tough as tigers. Able to forgive. Unbowed. Her girls are leaving, and she’s heartbroken, and she’s euphoric. Her great loves are leaving, but she has great love yet to come.
Maybe our story won’t be exactly that.
But it will be something like that.
For now, Monday turns off the backhoe’s ignition. She and Mab pull me out of my seat. We are all three sliding down the side of the machine, scrambling onto the earth, all in a pile, a single, weeping, trembling organism. Since my chair is back at the plant, they prop me up with their bodies, and we watch together, we three, under the frozen stars, under the dark, until the night lightens and the sun comes up, as the lake becomes a stream and then a river again, as the dam becomes a weir and then a hole and then a bridge between one grassy shore and another, water flowing below again, between what we have rendered at last a fallen, slain, and desiccated chemical plant and our very own small town, our home, Bourne again, coming slowly back to life.