“Anyway”—he keeps talking because I’ve stopped—“what are you doing all weekend?”
“Don’t know.” My Voice finally finds its voice. “You?”
“Same. Maybe I’ll make something from my cookbook. Maybe I’ll practice bending something else with my mind.”
“Start easy,” my Voice advises.
“Like what?”
“Noodles.”
He laughs. “Even I don’t need a cookbook to make noodles.”
“To bend,” my Voice explains. “Just add boiling water.”
He stops in the middle of the sidewalk again, looks a little stunned. “Forget what I said about college. You don’t need it.” He grins at me. “You’re a genius already. That’s the best idea I ever heard.”
* * *
I take the long way home and try to decide whether the fact that River thinks I’m as likely to leave home as my sisters puts him on the side of the angels (big-hearted, faith-filled, and not just faith in general but faith in me) or the demons (completely oblivious). It was only a few years ago it occurred even to me to wonder how—literally how—I will someday live when Nora does not. Maybe I’ll go on her heels, like a brokenhearted lover, from grief but also lack of care. I need a lot of help to be me. It’s not that I couldn’t hire people. I could, of course. It’s that no one on earth could ever do it as thoroughly and thoughtfully and devotedly as Nora. Mother love is a powerful force. She is so essentially a part of me—like a limb, an organ—that maybe without her, I will simply cease to be.
But it’s bigger than that. Maybe we’ll all find Bourne was only ever for a little while, and as our beleaguered parents age away, the next generation will peter into nothing. We’ll leave if we can, stay if we can’t, but many of us won’t survive, won’t live without our platoon of parental carers, won’t have children of our own, and Bourne will shed its citizens softly like trees do their October leaves, green fading to gold fading to brown, then quickly, quietly, returned to dust. The remaining shops and suppliers will go, the post office and Tom’s depot. Some of us will die almost at once without meds, filled G-tubes, emptied catheter bags. Some of us will go up in flames when there’s no one to help with the stove or herd us away from steep stairs or run baths with no more than four inches of not-too-hot water. Others will go more slowly as our wheelchairs shudder to still without anyone to repair, push, or recharge, as our implants stop whispering, our joints no longer bend, our Voices fall silent. And then, sooner than we imagine, when there’s no one left, the plant will finally close again forever. Our homes will crumble back to dirt, our buildings rot to stone and soil. The library will overgrow with trees who remember when all those pages used to be theirs. Our streets will bristle with weeds. Maybe the flowers will come back. And the river will flow on, as rivers do, as rivers must, and if its waters eventually run clean again, it will not matter anyway because there will be no one left to drink.
It sounds dark, I know, but it will happen to you too, to you and your family and your town. It sounds dark, but that’s apt for somewhere that’s had its day in the sun. These places, they don’t last long. They don’t stay. But while they’re here, they’re safe and whole, like cocoons, like eggs, on the way to somewhere else, yes, but for the moment, a world entire.
Of course River doesn’t see this. Of course my soul is older than his. Think of the world he’s grown up in versus the one I have. Think of the body he’s grown up in versus the one I have. So you see why he imagines that, like him, like Mab, like anyone, I will head toward unbound horizons with no fear of darkness brought by storm clouds or by night nor any need to save my power to get back home. His assumption is not naivete. It’s not unheedful. It’s not disregard. At least, it’s not only those things. It’s also him seeing me, how smart I am, yes, but also how capable. Sure, it’s a little oblivious and myopic, but it’s also empathetic and generous and kind. And, mostly, unexpected. That I’m seen and treated as normal by everyone else here is only because I am normal to everyone else here. That River sees me that way too is miraculous and magical. Like if he really could bend spoons with his mind.
One
Everything feels different.
It is a new feeling, difference. That difference should feel different makes sense I guess, but it means I feel it twice, once because you get to the other side and find everything’s changed, which is probably what change means, but what I didn’t expect was how change feels while it’s going on.
I am not explaining this well.
It’s a little because of River. When I catch him looking at me in calculus, I forget the integral of 1/x, and when I catch him looking at me in World History, I forget who built the Suez Canal, and when I catch him looking at me in English, his eyes make me remember how Juliet says, “If love be blind, it best agrees with night.” I have not forgotten what his family did to mine. I have not forgotten he comes from a different world than I do. But I can’t ignore how he’s helping us, how he’s choosing loyalty to my family over loyalty to his own, how he promised to find us information and is doing so.
It’s a little because work is progressing so quickly at the plant, construction equipment everywhere, a new welcome center that went from hole in the ground to solid structure over what seems like the course of a week, like it was built by ants or bees or whatever, whichever the super-industrious one is. But honestly, once the initial shock wore off, Belsum’s return seemed predictable as mud after three days of rain. It’s funny how something can be both shocking and inevitable, which Monday would here point out are opposites.
It’s a little because of the sister pact we’ve made to make certain Belsum’s decision to reopen the plant is shocking, inevitable, and ultimately futile. Monday would object that this is yet another opposite, and besides, Monday would further object, you can’t have three opposites, but somehow I seem to have found them.
So it’s a little bit those things. But also it’s this: maybe surreptitious bottled water isn’t illegal, but if Nathan’s lying about that, think what else he’s probably lying about, and River’s promised to get his father’s phone and find out. What feels so different is having, for the first time in my life, in our lives, a little bit of control, a plan, some sense that what happens next might not be something done to us but something, for better or for worse, we do ourselves.
Everything feels different.
And different changes everything.
I start skipping tutoring more often than I go. It’s embarrassing, actually, that I never thought to before. The only person ever helped by tutoring was River because, since I talked to them, the Kyles have left him alone and made everyone else leave him alone. Tutoring itself was never doing them much good. It was never dulling my guilt, only sharply insisting I had something to feel guilty for. Someone is at fault. Someone should feel ashamed. But for the first time in my life, I realize it’s not me.
See? Everything is new.
So I stop going.
Petra is happy to skip tutoring but not to skip studying. “You should excogitate upon the matter.”
“I am convinced of this eschewal,” I assure her.
“What about college?” Ironically, none of our SAT vocabulary words have anything to do with higher education.
“I have other, clamant things on my mind now.”
“It’s our way out,” she says. “Our only way out.”
“Let’s take a peregrination,” I compromise, and make her drive me all the way to Greenborough—thirty-nine minutes there, forty-two back—for an ink cartridge.
“Why can’t he just forward you whatever he finds on his father’s phone?” Petra says on the way to her car.
“He wants to print it out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He says it’s a gesture. He says it’s momentous.”
“Because he’s flirting with you.”
“How is hard copy flirting with me?”
“I have no idea,” Petra says.
/> The next day at school I hand the cartridge over to River from both my hands into both of his. The task he’s undertaking feels heavy to me, and I know he feels it too. I guess that’s why he wanted to print out whatever he finds on actual paper. Plus, we’ve driven all that way; I don’t want him to drop it. I also give him two brand-new packs of paper, five hundred sheets apiece. Probably he won’t find a thousand pages’ worth of secret memos, damning internal correspondence, buried transcripts, and incriminating emails, but who knows what he’ll find? Better to err on the side of too much than too little. Better to make sure no one notices all that missing paper and ink.
“I shall put it to immediate good use, my liege”—he bows his head and pretends he’s receiving a sword like I’m knighting him—“and honor you in the doing of it.”
It’s awkward, the way he talks sometimes, but I get that our relationship is kind of awkward. On the one hand, I did save him from getting beat up, which was nice but not very ladylike of me, not super respectful of his manliness. On the other, it’s not like I beat the offenders up myself; I just asked them, as old friends. On the one hand, his family did poison mine. On the other, we weren’t involved or even there, neither one of us. It makes me think of Romeo and Juliet again, how they had nothing to do with starting the feud, only with ending it, and how they ended it only by also ending their lives, and whether that means River’s not just flirting with me and talking like an Elizabethan courtier but actually destined to help put to right our ancient grudge with the Templetons or fall in love with me or die. And die, Monday would insist. Though of course Romeo poisoned himself, and that’s a whole different thing.
So my thoughts are dark, but my feelings are pure joy anyway, bubbling up, curling the corners of my mouth, my feet dancy little cheerleaders waving Pooh’s silver tassels like pom-poms. It is the irrepressible giddiness of doing something. It’s hope and optimism and expectation. Who knows what he might find and what it might change and what new differences it might kick off? (“Engender,” Petra would say.)
I guess it’s good to be the liege.
But when he comes into the cafeteria the next day already halfway through lunch period, River looks grim.
He hands me a folder, a thin one, and three ten-dollar bills, damp and crumpled.
“You’re paying me?”
“Returning your money for the ink and the paper. I didn’t use much. I only got one little email thread.”
Shit. “Why?”
“The only time he doesn’t have his phone on him is when he’s in the shower, so I figured I’d take it then, look through it, forward anything pertinent to myself.”
“That’s a good idea.” I smile encouragingly.
“Yeah, but he takes really short showers here. So we don’t run out of bottled water. I only had a couple minutes. I barely had time to scan through his inbox. My grandfather wrote him yesterday. They went back and forth once. Three dumb emails. That’s all I could get.”
I press the thin folder to my chest.
“I apologize,” he says, “that I was not more worthy.”
“You are worthy.” It seems like the right thing to say, but I’m wondering: Worthy of what?
“I wanted to help but have fallen short.”
“You’ll get more.” Am I trying to convince him? Or me?
“I regret that I’ve failed you.”
I make myself look right into his eyes. “Thank you for helping us.” I try to mean it. I was picturing reams of documents, all unambiguous and implicating and accompanied by dates and signatures, and instead I’ve got one email thread. But he tried. And that’s more than we ever had any right to hope. It is a kindness, and maybe kindness from a Templeton is worth more than incriminating documents and smoking guns anyway. Maybe kindness leads to better things than emails would, no matter what they said. It is, in any case, quite a bit more unexpected.
Two
Mama and Mirabel saw Nathan at the bar (until Mama kicked him out). Tom Kandinsky saw Nathan at Bourne’s Best (and Worst) Pizza. Zacharias Finkelburg saw Nathan at the grocery store where he was buying cottage cheese and sliced turkey and diet cola. Mab and Petra saw Nathan driving on Maple, and he waved to them from his shiny black car. They pretended they did not see him, but they did. Pastor Jeff saw Nathan at church and said he did not sing, but he did stay after for the part where there is juice and cookies, but he did not drink the juice or eat the cookies, but he did talk to a lot of people and shake their hands. Kyle R. said he saw Nathan buying clothes at the Fitwit, and Kyle M. said there was no way someone like Nathan would buy clothes at the Fitwit, and Kyle R. said there was nowhere else to buy clothes in Bourne and Nathan was not going to go around naked, especially not now that it is getting cold out, and Kyle M. said he probably had his old clothes sent from Boston, and that is possible because Lulu Isaacs saw Nathan at the post office.
But no one has seen Apple. It can be assumed that she must leave her house to buy food, water, clothes, shoes, and supplies, but no one has seen her do it. And even if she brought or had sent her old clothes from Boston like her husband might have, it can be assumed she did not bring food and water from Boston, and even if she did, it can be assumed she would have run out by now because food is perishable which means it does not stay good forever.
Unless she is dead.
She could be dead because she did not buy any new food and starved.
Or she could not need to buy any new food because she is dead. Dead people do not get hungry.
Both of these scenarios are possible explanations for why no one has seen Apple anywhere which is why it is a relief but also a shock when the doorbell rings and I open the door and Apple Templeton is standing on the front porch. And relief and shock are opposites.
“You are not dead,” I say.
She looks surprised, but I do not know why because she must have known all along she was alive.
“That’s true,” she eventually agrees.
Her family likes Truth or Dare and a Lie as much as ours. Maybe she is here to play. So I start. “Truth or dare?”
“Pardon?”
So I try again louder. “Truth or dare?”
“You’re inviting me to play Truth or Dare?”
“Truth!” I answer although that was an easy one.
“I…” she begins but then looks like she does not know what to say. “Um. Monday, right?”
“Truth!” She is making this too easy.
“Ah, yes, well.” She is winning, but she looks embarrassed anyway. “I wonder, Monday … I hear the library is run out of your home now. Isn’t that lovely?”
This is cheating because half of this statement is a truth and half is a lie. So I do not say anything.
“I understand you have some materials from my home. House. Uh, from the library. The old library. Not just books. Boxes. Files.”
“Truth.”
Bourne does not have a town hall or a courthouse or a department of records. The town council meets at Bourne’s Best (and Worst) Pizza. The mayoral mansion is a one-room office above the laundromat. It smells like dryer sheets and has a desk for Omar to sit behind while citizens sit in front and yell at him. It has only three filing cabinets with only five drawers apiece. So some of the town paperwork and files and documents used to be stored in the library, back when we had a library. Now they are stored with me.
“Wonderful,” Apple Templeton says, though I do not know why she thinks so. “Can you point me toward them?”
I turn away from her in the doorway and point at some of the places the boxes of files from the old library are: in the closet under the stairs, in the cabinet under the canned goods, in the living room behind my yellow chair. There are lots of places the boxes are, but it is easy to point to them all because our house is small.
“Ah, yes, thank you.” Apple Templeton’s eyes do not want to look at my eyes, and that is good because my eyes do not want to look at hers. “But I suppose what I meant was can I just look
around a bit? You know, browse? Is that possible?”
“That is not possible, for you are living in the library.”
Her eyebrows rise up. “I see.”
“I have enough space for the lending of books, but, unlike you, I do not have enough space for the browsing of books.”
“Well”—even though I thought her eyebrows were already as high as they could go, they keep going up more—“I guess you better lend me a book then.”
So I let her in. She follows me through the kitchen into the living room. Her eyes look all around our house, and her face looks sadder and sadder.
“What a … full home,” she says.
I do not know what that means, and she looks like she does not know either, so I remember to be professional. “What kind of book are you looking for, Apple Templeton?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Surprise me.”
“I do not like surprises,” I inform her.
“How about…” She keeps trailing off for long pauses like she cannot find her way out of her sentence. “I bet you have a good writing section.”
“Lie,” I pronounce.
“Oh. Or just … old composition textbooks maybe, editing tips, what have you.”
At last a question I can answer. “What I have is many books piled many places. If you tell me what book you think you need, I will find what book you actually do.”
“Ah. Yes. Well. I see.” A lot of words are coming out of her mouth, but she is not saying anything. “My son—well, you’ve met him—needs to start thinking about applying to college. Among other things. He needs tips. Say, for writing good admissions essays. I fear he’s losing focus, forgetting the plan for his future, settling in somewhere … unsettling.”
“Do not move or touch anything,” I say.
But when I come back four and a half minutes later, she has both moved and touched something. Many things. I can see some piles of books have been pushed and some have been displaced and some have been rearranged. She has moved to behind my yellow chair. She has touched a picture that sits between the children’s books about gnomes and the children’s books about owls. She has touched it by holding it. It is a photograph of my mother and father at their wedding.
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