One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  But Nora doesn’t get it. She’s grinning like the villain in act two of a superhero movie. “No, but you can find out. You can find everything.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I get up and go to church, seeking not salvation but alone time, which is nearly as elusive and just as holy. Mab and Monday rose not long after the sun and left before Nora even got me out of bed. Sometimes this eats at me. Sometimes them together without me seems as cruel as if my own legs went walking off and I had to wait for them here. But it’s hard to be forever one of three or half of two, a third of triplets, a dependent daughter. These solo Saturday mornings are my only time alone, so they’re painful but they’re also precious, and I’m grateful as a nun to be on my way somewhere as well.

  Before bed last night, we made a reluctant plan. Nora’s probably wrong that we’ll be able to find out anything never mind everything, but she’s even less likely to be able to let this go. Mab and Monday will go to the library this morning to see what they can learn there. I’ll go to yoga and do the same.

  Everyone at Pastor Jeff’s Saturday-morning yoga class is there for enlightenment, but not the spiritual kind. Whatever gossip there is in Bourne, it gets discussed at Yoga for Seniors. Mostly his students lie in savasana and whisper loudly mat to mat while Pastor Jeff demonstrates a variety of dogs from the dais. If anyone in town knows anything new about the Templetons, church will be the place to find out.

  I get Nora’s rancor toward Omar for his epic dropping of the mayoral ball once upon a time, but he deserves props too. On my way this morning, I find curb cuts at every intersection, wide, smooth pavement over every inch of sidewalk, extra-long reds at the stoplights. Nora’s point is let’s not lionize people for cleaning up messes they made themselves—especially if they’re not so much cleaning them up as straightening a little and shoving what can’t be mended into a closet or under the sofa and hoping no one notices—but in fact, at least as long as I’ve known him, Omar has quietly been doing a hard job well.

  It’s early still, drizzling, but fresh air and agency are an intoxicating combination. Tom fashioned rain gear for my chair long ago—an elaborate tangle of poncho, glove, and plastic bag—and being outside and unchaperoned is so lovely, I don’t mind getting a little wet. The smell is mossy and cool at the back of my nose. The world looks spit shined: green washed and water slick. The raindrops feel good on my skin. Nora got me dressed but let me go without socks and shoes—I’m not walking, after all—and the wind in my toes rivals the wind in my hair as far as the feel of freedom goes. Some of the kids in my class who can’t move their legs also can’t feel them, so though I sometimes have pain, I am grateful to have feeling at all. I wave good morning to the few early risers I pass, and they wave peaceably back.

  When I get to the church, it’s cool and dry inside and Saturday-morning loud. Pastor Jeff’s dog is downward. Everyone else’s is abuzz. Busybody Dog. Pooh has traded her wheelchair for her mat but isn’t stretching anything. Instead she’s telling everyone what Mab reported about River. Donna Anvers is telling about the moving vans. Mrs. Radcliffe and Mr. Beechman are telling what happened at school. Everyone is talking about the Templetons, but no one knows anything, which is itself noteworthy. Aside from enrolling the kid in school, the Templetons are lying low. Or else in wait.

  Pastor Jeff comes up to standing, lowers his hands to heart center, takes a deep inhale, and, without opening his eyes, calls, “Mirabel Mitchell. You are not a senior.”

  True. Not that I can do much yoga anyway.

  “So stop spying on my yogis for your mother,” he adds on the way to his toes.

  Maybe it’s years of doctoring the widest range of patients, maybe it’s years of ministering the widest range of parishioners, maybe his mind is focused from all the yoga, but it’s hard to hide things from Pastor Jeff. Plus he knows my mother almost as well as I do.

  When he finds me skulking near the chancel after class, his first question isn’t a question. “You can only chase your own demons, you know.” Strange advice from a pastor. “You can’t chase your mother’s.”

  I don’t need to plead the fifth to plead the fifth, but I make my face look as innocent as possible.

  Because Pastor Jeff has to doctor during the week and lead services on Sundays, Saturday is his only day off, and he usually starts it, after yoga, at our house for breakfast. He and Nora don’t talk shop over the weekend, and my mother doesn’t let him preach to her, but she does like to feed him. All those pastries have to go somewhere. So after he puts all the mats away, he wanders back toward home with me. For a while, we’re both quiet. Then he asks his second question, an actual question at least, if at first it seems like a subject change.

  “Did I ever tell you my mother was almost a nun?”

  Pastor Jeff’s parents met in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. He doesn’t talk about that time much—he wasn’t born yet, after all—but we know all about it anyway from Mab’s ninth-grade history class. Mrs. Shriver said Pastor Jeff was descended from royalty, that his parents, whose only relation to Bourne was raising a son who later moved here, were the most monumental thing that ever happened to this town. And that’s saying something.

  “She saw injustice and felt called to help, and she’d been told all her life the path to righteousness was God. She was beloved at church, and love feels holy. Is holy. But mostly, she wanted to be a teacher, and every teacher she’d ever had to that point was a nun. So that was her plan: graduate high school, go to college, become a nun.”

  “What happened?” my Voice asks.

  “She met my dad. Learned there were other ways to be beloved and other kinds of holy. Learned there were as many paths to righteousness and as many ways to serve as there are fights against injustice.”

  I wait, but he doesn’t say anything else, so I type, “Point?”

  He winks. “Not all teachers are nuns.”

  I consider this. “Point?” my Voice repeats.

  “Just because your mother’s cause is just and right, doesn’t mean you have to fight her fight. And if you do, it doesn’t mean you have to fight her way.”

  * * *

  “If you knew something, you’d tell me, right?” Nora’s waiting at the door for us and plows right in. “You wouldn’t keep it from me so I don’t start yelling like a crazy lady?”

  “You are a crazy lady, Nora.”

  “Exactly. So there’s no need to lie.”

  “Lying is against the code,” says Pastor Jeff.

  “What code?”

  “Medical ethics, religious leader, take your pick.”

  “I went to yoga,” my Voice tries to reassure her. “No one knows anything. Maybe there’s nothing to know.”

  “I don’t need yoga.” She snorts. “I know why the Templetons are back.”

  Pastor Jeff has filled his mouth with pineapple scone but raises his eyebrows at her.

  “They’re here to bury evidence.” She gives a little shudder. It’s glee.

  He humors her through crumbs. “Evidence?”

  “Something we’re close to finding. Something that would break the lawsuit wide open.”

  His eyebrows turn to waggle at me. Your mama’s nuts, they say. I grin at him.

  “If they’ve come in person, it must mean they’re scared. If they’re scared—finally, after all this time—it must be because we’re closing in. We’ve always had a critical mass of people signed on to the suit. We’ve always had tons of evidence. So far, they’ve been able to spin it as circumstantial or inadmissible or unreliable or biased or fabricated or ambiguous. So now we must be close to something they know they can’t deny, something they won’t be able to get dismissed. Something that could really hurt them. Point is, they never come in person. They must be worried.”

  Nora’s so charged she’s trembling, shimmering at the edges, not so far gone as optimistic, but something’s changed, at least it’s starting to, and it’s been so long since anything has. Maybe they know
something we don’t and they’re here to hide it before we find it, but at least that means it exists. Maybe their being here at all is evidence they’re hiding something, the smoking gun she searches for like the Holy Grail.

  Pastor Jeff swallows his mouthful and echoes my thoughts. “Maybe.”

  She rolls her eyes. “You’re not a Zen priest, you know.”

  “I do,” he intones, exactly like a Zen priest.

  “You can pass judgment.”

  “I could if I had any basis for one.”

  “Jesus, Jeff—”

  “You’re right, Nora,” he interrupts because he knows it’s time to stop teasing when he’s driven her to blasphemy. “It could be the lawsuit. It could be there’s evidence you’re about to uncover, and they’re here to better bury it. It could be Russell and the firm have got them scared finally. Maybe. But I think it would be prudent not to get your hopes up.”

  “I don’t give a shit about prudent, Jeff.”

  “I noticed.” He smiles at me from inside his coffee. “Maybe you’re on to something. Or maybe they’re going to find whatever they’re looking for before you do. Or maybe there’s nothing to find.”

  “Of course there’s something to find,” Nora scoffs. “We’re not pretending they fucked us. They did fuck us.”

  This. This is Nora’s religion. I have solo Saturday mornings. Pastor Jeff has God, the Catholic Church, and any number of other denominations he borrows from liberally in order to meet his congregants’ needs and practices. Nora’s faith is just as fervently held, just as life guiding and path determining, and for the same reason: she believes in her soul it will save her.

  And this is her central tenet: They did fuck us. Therefore there must be evidence of this fact somewhere. Therefore she has only to find it. Then justice will be served, the wicked unmasked and punished, the good and faithful rewarded for their patience and fidelity.

  Why else do people believe in God?

  One

  We are not girl detectives. We’re not plucky like that. We can’t hide. Maybe this would be true anyway—there are three of us—but there’s also Mirabel’s inability to walk, Monday’s inability to lie, my inability to go places without them. The lack of places to go. Under our folded clothes, our dresser drawers are all lined with Nancy Drews—Monday likes to keep them there because their spines are yellow—but Nancy’s got skills, resources, and horizons we can only dream of. Suffice it to say, some kind of teen-spies thing where we get wigs and fake mustaches and sit outside the library pretending to read a newspaper (Petra would say “surreptitiously”) is not an option.

  Last night, in response to our mother’s mania, Mirabel suggested a fact-finding mission, but it’s not even fact finding. More like information gathering. Situation determining. It doesn’t make sense to think we’ll find the elusive, conclusive proof Mama and Russell have been searching for for entire lifetimes—our entire lifetimes—simply by befriending River Templeton. If her lawyer can’t, what chance do her teenage daughters have? So let’s just say we’re getting there first. Not before anyone else in town—no one will care as much as my mother, and everyone knows it. Getting to the Templetons before the Templetons get to us.

  It’s overcast, which makes it seem dark still, dawning, and drizzling hard, almost raining, so it feels closer to floating, or maybe sinking, than riding bikes. Monday and I fly down Baker, the hill steeper than it is on foot and slippery with wet, just the hint of fall in our noses. The wind and rain tease our hair. Snaggled grass whips our legs. Our tires throw up gravel and pebbles like popcorn. We close our eyes for a moment, two, and I could not stop now if I wanted to. If I had to.

  And then—like a sign spontaneously generated by flying too fast downhill—the road curves up again past the cemetery. It’s tragic but apt that this is the one place in Bourne that’s as it should be. It has soft, deep-green grass and meandery paths between sprawling trees. There are all these old, weathered gravestones because, hard as it is to remember, Bourne’s citizens died even before Belsum came to town. It’s hilly, and at the crest of a ridge are the showy monuments: giant angels, giant crosses, tombs that look like houses that would be cramped to live in but are probably plenty roomy if you’re dead, the same few family names over and over—Grove, Alcott, Anderson—town founders, our ancestors, our history. We used to ride by fast so we could hold our breath as we crossed, but now Monday slows as we pass, and I see her eyes seek and find our father’s grave.

  This is the part of Bourne’s cemetery that is not as it should be. They had to dig it too fast without making any kind of plan. Mrs. Shriver says that when demand is greater than supply, it makes the economy stronger, but in our cemetery, it just made things overcrowded and chaotic. Maybe that whole supply-demand thing only applies to the living. And it’s sad, which makes sense for a graveyard, but ours is sadder than most because the years on either side of the hyphens are too close together. Bourne was not prepared for all our sudden dead. Maybe no town ever is, though.

  Our dad lucked out. He is under a giant oak tree. Some of the trees in Bourne go straight to brown in the fall now, but his still blushes as if embarrassed. It’s already pinking a little as we go by. Monday closes her eyes too long, and I know, I know she doesn’t like to be touched, but I’m worried she’ll crash. I reach out and tap her arm as lightly as I can, but she still snatches it away from me like I burned her.

  Her eyes snap open. “Why can it not be yellow?”

  “What?”

  “His tree. Many trees turn yellow in the fall. His turns red. It is not fair.”

  “No,” I agree, “it is not fair.”

  We continue down the hill, brake into the curve on Main, stand to pedal hard over the slight slope by the Do Not Shop, wobble off the end of the pavement and through the gravel, climb up across the bridge and over the ravine and pull, breathless and sticky-damp from drizzle and sweat, into the empty parking lot of the library.

  Well, almost empty.

  The moving vans are gone, but there are two cars. One is a shiny, black BMW, new, immense, almost uncomfortable to look at. (Petra would say “carnal,” “corporeal,” “lascivious,” “lubricious”—it’s weird how many vocabulary words there are to describe kind of gross and inappropriate cars.) The other is the same, only gray. Cars in Bourne are mostly not the shiny luxury variety. More like dented, rusted, ancient pickups or sad sedans with doors of different colors. Or tricked-out, million-year-old wheelchair vans.

  Heaped at the far end of the lot are a dozen of those squat little library stools, some of them tipped over, like maybe they were bowled out the front door, their casters spinning uselessly up at the sky.

  “Motherfuckers,” Monday curses.

  Monday never curses. Which makes me think we can go home now. That word coming out of that mouth says it all really. My mother will be disappointed when we return without a single shred of new evidence, our holsters empty of smoking guns, but my mother is used to being disappointed. It was a dumb plan anyway. I’d maybe buy that River’s just a kid and can’t keep a secret. It’s that he has any confidences to betray that’s hard to believe. When you’re obsessed with something, as my mother is, it’s hard to remember that everyone else isn’t obsessed with it too, but I think about how healthy and whole and normal River seemed—oblivious, ignorant—and I’m certain we already know all we’re going to. We can leave now. But before I can explain this logic to Monday, the front door opens.

  River Templeton stands in the doorway with an older version of himself. His father. Must be. My in-breath is quick and loud, and Monday’s head whips around from them to me again.

  “Why did you gasp, One?”

  “He looks just like his father,” I whisper, “who looks just like—”

  “Why are you whispering?” Monday interrupts. “They are too far away to hear.”

  Our river has washed away more even than we think. More even than our lives and livelihoods. It’s not just that we are pale, whittle
d down, water worn, corroded. Our actual DNA is weaker than theirs. Monday and I barely look related. Triplets are rarely identical, but the three of us don’t really even look alike or all that much like Nora either. River is a copy of his father who’s a copy of his. It’s like our genes are not just infirm but mutated, like we’ve sloughed off our essential natures. They’re shiny and strong and cloning themselves. We’re eroding toward gone.

  Shiny Nathan Templeton claps his son’s shoulder and then gives him a little shove, and River stumbles out the door in our direction, slow and sheepish, like a cranky toddler.

  “He is coming, One!” Monday shrieks, drops her bike, and tries to hide behind me. She is five inches taller than I am.

  He stops a foot away from us. He looks more normal than he did at school—he’s got on a T-shirt and shorts and mussy Saturday-morning hair, but he still has that glow. It might, like Pooh said, be a lifetime of wealth, clean water, high (and met) expectations. Or it might be more a shimmer than a glow, like when it’s hot and it looks like there’s water pooling on the asphalt up ahead, but when you actually get there it’s flat and dry and empty.

  He’s also carrying a top hat. And a wand. He’s bright red, trying to hide the wand by shoving it into his back pocket, and having about as much luck—for about the same reason—as Monday.

  If he were my friend or even my sort-of friend, I’d be embarrassed for him since he was clearly in the middle of something private when his father pushed him out the door like a two-year-old. But since his family’s basically my family’s sworn enemy, I’m thinking it’s okay to laugh at him.

  What Monday’s thinking (and therefore saying) is “There are no dance classes in Bourne,” her first words to him since they met on his way out of the boys’ bathroom at school. “There used to be Miss Molly’s when we were little, but she died and that was only ballet.”

  He has no idea what she’s talking about. Even I have no idea what she’s talking about.