One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  Russell Russo spoke of wrongful death, criminal negligence, perjury, failure of oversight, buried memos, biased reports, and attempted cover-ups. He had spoken already to many of her neighbors. He had a pledge from the senior partners at his firm that he could take the case on contingency. He had associates and paralegals and interns back at his office who were already wading through boxes and boxes of documents. He was certain that somewhere in them was the smoking gun, the damning evidence, the indisputable proof of what Belsum knew and when they knew it that would force them to hand out significant, much deserved, desperately needed, only fair cash settlements which, Russell admitted, would not make up for her losses, for nothing could, but which would make it easier to get on with her life, both financially and the part where she didn’t walk around all day long feeling like she’d been royally fucked and no one gave a shit. He was smart and passionate. And handsome, of course. Was there any chance she was not going to fall in love with him?

  There was not. It was the knight-in-shining-armor stuff. It was that he was intelligent and kind and going to save her. It was that he eased her way and carried her load. It was that he had never seen her other than she was now. It was that her husband was well and truly gone. And though the same could not be said about Russell’s wife, that wasn’t Nora’s fault because she didn’t know he had one. At least not at first.

  “Belsum has wronged you,” he told her, but of course she already knew that, “so they have to pay.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do they have to pay? You’re saying otherwise it’s not fair?”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “It’s not, but things usually aren’t. You’re not a five-year-old, Mr. Russo.”

  “Russell,” he corrected her.

  “You’re not a five-year-old, Russell. ‘It’s not fair’ isn’t a reason for adults.”

  “It’s the best reason there is.” Russell truly believed this.

  She found his conviction touching, but she didn’t buy it. “This is really about money,” she guessed. “Not fairness.”

  He kept his eyes on hers—would not allow them to wander over her meager home—when he said, “You’re going to need it.”

  “I don’t want their money.”

  “Sure you do. Besides, it’s not theirs. Money belongs to whoever has it. Don’t you think that should be you?”

  “They can stick it up their ass.”

  “You need it, Nora. These girls are going to need, well, many things. Three kids on a single mother’s salary would be hard no matter where you lived, but—”

  “What’s wrong with here?”

  “Not a lot of job prospects.”

  “And whose fault is that?” said Nora.

  “Belsum’s! That’s what I keep telling you.”

  “So you’re doing this to make up for my dead husband, my wronged children, and my poisoned town?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. Nothing can make up for that. No one’s talking ‘making up for.’ I’m talking money.”

  “As compensation?”

  “To meet your significant, egregious needs. Significant, egregious needs for which they are at fault.”

  “And you get a cut?”

  “If we win, yes, I would get a cut.”

  “For your pain and suffering?”

  He shrugged. “This is my job, Nora. You get paid for yours, don’t you?”

  “This is why people are slamming the door in your face, Russell.”

  “Why?”

  She laughed at his earnest confusion, real laughter. “It sounds an awful lot like the deal we started with.”

  “The deal you…?”

  “The one we’re still getting fucked by.”

  “How? I’m on your side! I’m making you money.”

  “So was Belsum.”

  “No they weren’t. Belsum was never on anyone’s side but Belsum’s.”

  “They pitched us exactly what you’re selling. We’d all be rich. Sure, they’d make money too, of course, but that just made it win-win. Without them we’d get nothing. With them, there’d be jobs, growth, opportunity. There’d be infrastructure improvement, increased services, a bolstered local economy.”

  “That’s completely different.”

  “How?”

  “They’re a giant corporation. Of course they don’t have your interests at heart.” He looked at her, considered. “Okay. It is about the money, but not the way you think. If we fought, if we won, you’d make some, and your neighbors would make some, and my firm would make some, enough to continue to do this kind of work. It wouldn’t make up for what’s happened to you, but it would make things easier.” Maybe he took her hand while he said it. Maybe their eyes met and sparked. “But none of that’s the reason to do it. The reason to do it is to prevent it from happening ever again. And the only way to do that is to punish them severely enough for what they did. And the only way to do that is to make them pay. Literally.”

  She smiled then. “You should have led with that.”

  “Prevention?”

  “Revenge.”

  He laughed. But then he was serious. “It’s the only thing that works. Legislation doesn’t. Corporations like Belsum just ignore it, knowing enforcement is years away, if ever, or they buy politicians and, with them, favorable policy. Citizen pressure doesn’t work. These issues are impossibly complicated, way too complex for the public to understand, and besides, Belsum can spin it and sound bite it into anything they like. Public shaming doesn’t even do it. People’s memories are too short. Corporations just wait for everyone to get over it, and we do, quickly. What works, the only thing that works, is simple math. It has to cost them more to ruin your life than it costs them not to. That is what we have to do.”

  “How?” Nora said simply.

  “Well, first you say yes to letting me help,” said Russell E. Russo. “And then we get to work.”

  Around her days at the clinic, they did get to work. Many of the people who said no to Russell said yes to Nora. Together, they held meetings at the then-library. First, people came to air grievances.

  “‘They killed my husband’ is not a grievance,” Nora objected. “‘I have only one leg now’ is not a complaint for the company comment box.”

  “First things first,” said Russell. “People need to talk, be heard. They’ve been ignored long enough.”

  They were long, weepy meetings, half the town, more, filling all the chairs in the Reference and Research section then sitting on the tables, packing in hip to hip, then standing along the encyclopedia shelves at the back of the room, boots tracking ice and mud into the carpet, everyone sweating beneath their winter coats because it was over-warm in there with all the people, all their rage. Nora stood at the podium and called on her friends and neighbors and even the ones she’d never liked much, for everyone who showed up was an ally, and everyone who showed up deserved to be heard, and everyone who showed up had a story that would help their cause. Russell sat beside her in a folding chair, hands between his knees, head bowed, concentrating.

  “Don’t you want to take notes?” Nora asked, early on.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I want to listen.”

  We three were parked in strollers on Nora’s other side because in those days Mab and Monday required wheeling around too and because our mother had nothing else to do with us but bring us along—anyone who might have babysat was there. I think of us like mascots, but we were more like crying, shitting irrefutable proof.

  The people of Bourne all knew what had happened, knew one another’s horror stories, knew what was lost and what was left behind, but there was something different about saying it out loud, in front of a stranger, in service of a cause. And if the stories had a dull repetitiveness to them—my water smelled funny for months; I ran the tap into a bottle and it was silty and brown, but when I brought it in, they sent me away; I’d cough and cough all
night; my wife found a lump; the doctors said nothing could be done; when I asked for more information they refused—taken all together, taken aloud, taken from a private hell to a public record, they began to give off heat, to sweat, like onions.

  Nora held these meetings for months. Eventually, with Russell’s help, they switched gears and started organizing people, signing them on to the suit, taking statements. At night, after work, after meetings, she was elated. He was worried.

  “It’s working,” Nora would whisper.

  “Not yet,” Russell insisted.

  But Nora could not see how that could possibly be true.

  She read over the notes Russell had started keeping on everyone’s evidence and documentation, piles and piles of it. Records of doctors’ visits. Lists of medications tried and failed, tried and exacerbated. Hospice intakes. IEPs. Explanations of diagnoses. Consultations. Second opinions and then third and fourth. Birth certificates. Death certificates. Before and after photos.

  Dr. Dexter, Bourne’s only vet, told Russell on tape that Belsum had offered him money to tell people their dogs’ tumors came from insufficient exercise or buying cheap dog food. If called upon to do so, he said they said, testify that any number of things can cause a young, seemingly healthy animal to develop cancer, even a lot of them in a very small town.

  Zach Finkelburg, one of the few guys who’d worked at the plant from the beginning to survive, said Belsum told employees they’d help them secure home loans, pay for their kids’ college, offer generous salary incentives if what happened at work stayed at work, if they had absolutely no contact with regulators, scientists, advocates, supporters, journalists, or any of the community members leading protests, demanding answers, or asking questions, if any requests for contact were not only rebuffed but reported immediately to management. If employees refused in any way to any degree—if, say, they went to a barbecue with a neighbor who’d brought a jar of cloudy tap water to the Belsum front office, or attended church with a fellow congregant who’d signed a petition for an independent water tester—Belsum would find them in breach of contract, punitively fine them, and take away their health insurance. And given how many of them were coming down with mysterious and alarming ailments all of a sudden, that was inadvisable. Zach said Belsum did, however, recommend changing out of work clothes before leaving the plant, not wearing those clothes home to where wives and children were.

  So Belsum knew, Nora said, triumphant.

  But it is true that many things can cause cancer in dogs, Russell devil’s-advocated. It is true that it’s not necessarily illegal to give your employees incentives or disincentives, especially if you’re smart enough not to put it in writing anywhere but to confine it instead to rumors in the hallways.

  Three scientists at the state university, three more from the regional office of the EPA, another two independent evaluators sent Russell pages and pages of tests which proved, they explained, repeatedly and conclusively, that the parts per billion of contaminant in the water downstream from the plant was a hundred times greater than was safe for human consumption.

  But Belsum had scientists of their own, Russell said, who told them one of the chemicals was safe and another present in amounts too small to impact human health and another unregulated, legally the same substance as the water itself.

  Russell subpoenaed documentation, permits, feasibility studies, environmental impact analyses. He requested from Belsum the tests they claimed to have done. He requested the health studies, the medical reports, the internal correspondence from Belsum’s own scientists.

  So Belsum sent over boxes and boxes and boxes of paper, hundreds of boxes, packed to overflowing with five hundred copies of a memo with instructions for how to set up voicemail on the new phone system, with an invitation to a baby shower for one of the admins in HR who was not finding out the sex so please only yellow or green clothing, with receipts for printer ink, staples, wastebaskets, toilet paper, with email threads about whether they should order ham or turkey sandwiches for the board meeting and Doria was a vegetarian so could they please order green salad instead of tuna and the sandwiches with the meat on the side. It was possible the documents which provided clear and convincing evidence that Belsum knew what their plant was doing to Bourne and its citizens and kept doing it anyway were in those boxes, but the odds of finding them were thin as a new moon, Russell warned. Moons wax, Nora said, and started looking.

  Night after night, Nora would put the babies to bed then make a quick batch of cookies or open a bottle of wine or heat up something easy for dinner and look through boxes while Russell pored over records and transcripts. One night a song came up on shuffle, and he didn’t even look up from his paperwork when he said, “This was the theme song at my senior prom.”

  “Mine too!” Nora said.

  And he looked up at her then and removed his glasses and came around the table and took her hand and led her out onto the dance floor, which was just the other side of the kitchen table, and took her in his arms and pressed her to him, and very, very slowly they danced, and when the song was over he drew back to look at her, and she whispered, “I did not dance like that at my prom,” and he whispered, “Me neither.”

  I think I remember that, though I couldn’t possibly.

  They fell asleep working sometimes, but Russell did not otherwise spend the night. He had a hotel room when he was in town, but usually he wasn’t. He had a wife at home of whom Nora had been surprised but relieved to learn, surprised because he knew everything about her life and it turned out she knew so little about his, relieved because unrequited love of one’s lawyer seemed more likely to result in good legal counsel than the requited kind, and that was a trade she was willing to make. His office was in New York, a city he described as loud and bustly and smelly compared to wide, green, open, quiet, poisoned Bourne, and he told Nora, “I wish I could stay here,” and Nora told him, “Stay then,” but after a few days of work, he always left.

  Still, surely it didn’t stop at dancing. I don’t know the details because I was a child and because I was her child, but I know it happened. For a while. And then his wife got pregnant.

  Russell is a good guy, the adultery notwithstanding, but it wasn’t the prospect of becoming a father that stopped it. It was actually becoming a father.

  One morning he knocked on the door, soaking and lost. He wasn’t scheduled to be in town—he’d been coming less and less—so when Nora opened the door and found him on her front step, she was surprised then delighted then worried in very short order. It was pouring, and he was drenched, but he didn’t even look up when the door opened.

  “Russell?”

  “Nora.”

  “You’re here.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  Nothing.

  “Come in.”

  Nothing.

  “Russell, you’re soaking. Come inside.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Nothing. Then finally he looked up from his sodden shoes. “The baby was born,” he said.

  “Oh, Russell,” she gasped. “I’m so glad.” And she looked it. That’s what I remember from that moment: she was truly glad, truly happy for him, like he was her best friend and not her lover, which, I suppose, he was.

  “No,” he said.

  “No?” she said.

  And then Russell whispered, “He has Down syndrome.” Her face fell, and he dropped to his knees right there on the front porch, and she bent down over him, an attempt to shield him, which did not work.

  “Did you know?” Nora asked, as if that were the point.

  He shook his head. “Sarah said no to all the tests. The midwives told us they were unnecessary.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Who?”

  “The baby.”

  “No, Nora.” His eyes focused on her clutching him in the rain. “He has Down syndrome.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Nora, “but is he o
kay?”

  “I don’t know.” His eyes were wild. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “As long as he’s healthy,” Nora said, “as long as Sarah’s okay, you’ll be okay. You’ll all be okay. There are so many worse things than Down syndrome.” Maybe this was fumblingly put. Heat of the moment and all that. Shock and sadness and no time to pick your words over like lentils, looking for stones. And to her credit, her eyes did not so much as flicker in my direction. But I know she thought it all the same. Me. I am what’s worse than Down syndrome. Among other things.

  “We were wrong,” Russell said.

  “Who?”

  “You and I.”

  “About what?” said Nora.

  “It wasn’t the water. It wasn’t the chemicals. It wasn’t the plant. Who knows what it was.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “So many things can ruin a baby. So many things get broken on the way. No one can ever say why.”

  Nora stood upright, backed away a step. You’d like to think she was appalled by his words, the horrible things he was saying, or maybe appalled by the state he must have been in to utter them. And maybe she was. But mostly I think she was stumbling under the dawning realization of what he was going to say next. “Why are you here, Russell?”

  “To tell you it’s over.” He did not specify what it was that was over. Everything, maybe.

  But it wasn’t that simple.

  For one thing, no one understood as well as Nora what Russell was going through. He felt at first that he could hardly stand under the weight of loving his newborn son but that his heart was also broken because no one else ever would. What we know now—that Sarah had shock and postpartum depression, not lack of love, that Matthew’s teachers and neighbors and doorman and the guy who runs the bodega downstairs and the two women who own their favorite coffee shop and all the kids at the Ninety-First Street playground would adore everything about him, especially his smile, wide as the arc of the swings—Russell could not see at the time. But I could. And Nora could. She was so thoroughly, entirely, in-all-the-world the right person to talk him off this particular ledge it seemed like a miracle to Russell that he’d ever met her. But, of course, that was why he’d left the hospital and driven through the night to show up at our door. That was the one thing, the main thing.