One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  “Yeah, that makes sense.” But it shouldn’t, not to him anyway. And probably this is the strangest thing of all: we’re not so strange anymore. He’s getting used to how things are around here. “Kind of a bummer for little kids though.”

  I try to shrug again. “It’s too far between occupied houses to trick-or-treat anyway.”

  He looks so sad about that—about that—that I change the subject. “So are you just super trustworthy or what?”

  “Completely,” he answers at once. “I’m completely trustworthy, Mab. I would never betray you.”

  Which is not what I meant.

  “Your father,” I clarify. “Your father must trust you. He doesn’t lock his phone. He leaves the key to the plant just lying around.”

  “The key’s completely hidden. In fact, the key is under lock and key. A second key I mean. Not the same one. That would be stupid.” He grins. “He didn’t leave it lying around. I sleuthed it out.”

  “In two days?” I’m impressed.

  “One.”

  “One?”

  “One day to find it. One day to copy it and put it back so he wouldn’t notice—it’s a good thing Mirabel already told me you have to go to church to get a key copied around here. But it only took dinner to trick him into giving up the clue.”

  “Are you a magician or a detective?” I ask.

  “Both. The plant has dozens of keys. It’s not like he carries them around in his pocket. But there’s one master, and I needed to know where it was. So I lost mine.”

  “Your what?”

  “My keys. So then he has to make a big production at dinner about how I’m growing up, and a man keeps track of his things, and a man has responsibilities, and now I’m sixteen years old, and it’s reasonable to expect me to be mature enough to keep track of my own house key, and how can he buy me a car if I keep losing my keys.” All this in a mock-deep voice, looking down his nose at me, poking the air with his index finger like he’s scolding a dog, and riding impressively one-handed. “Then Dad’s all, ‘You should do what I do. Devise a system. My house keys and car keys go on a hook by the front door. I hang them back in their spot the minute I get home, and then when I’m ready to leave again, you know where they are? Right where I left them and right where I need them to be. Smart, right? Remember the garden shed in the backyard in Boston? We kept that key at the backyard door. Work keys? Locked in the bottom drawer of my desk in my office. Get it? Backyard, shed. Work, desk. Simple.’ So then my mom in her super-sarcastic voice finally goes, ‘But where do you keep the key to your desk?’ And he’s all, ‘Behind Uncle Hickory. Of course.’”

  “Who’s Uncle Hickory?”

  “My great-uncle. Remember that super-big, super-ugly oil painting in my dad’s office? Point is, his tone—like Where does anyone keep a desk key? Behind Uncle Hickory. Duh—shows you exactly what kind of weirdo my father is. And the reason he drives my mother crazy.”

  “What if your mom hadn’t asked where he keeps the desk key?”

  When he turns his head to look at me, the hood of his sweatshirt blows over his eyes, and he sits upright to pull it back off his face, riding in the sun with no hands, eyes closed, open as a dying tulip. He laughs. “What kind of magician would I be if I couldn’t bust open the lock on a desk?”

  “The kind who loses the key in his underpants?”

  He beams. “Exactly.”

  When we cross the river and pull up at the plant, though, the cockiness fades a little and then a lot. There’s a truck parked out front, an old beat-up Ford pickup.

  “Shit. Someone’s here.”

  “Would your father be caught dead in a twenty-year-old Ford F-150?”

  River laughs nervously. “Not even twenty years ago.”

  “Then I think we’re fine.” I’m striding toward the front door like we own the place. In fairness, one of us does.

  “Mab, stop. He must have security on already.” River grabs my sleeve. “I didn’t think he would yet, but we’ll have to get in some other way.”

  I keep walking. I don’t recognize the pickup, but I’m not worried.

  At the door, there is indeed a security guard behind giant mirrored sunglasses, sitting on a desk chair that looks totally out of place outside though I guess a security guard in a lawn chair would be even stranger, and there’s no one here but us so there’s no need to stand. River is still clutching at my sleeve, still begging me to turn back, even though, clearly, we’ve already been seen. I look to see if security has been issued a gun. He has.

  “Mab,” he says. “Mr. Templeton.”

  “Hey Hobart,” I say. “How’s things?”

  “I’m not—” River starts, but Hobart’s answering my question.

  “Not bad. Got a job.” He spreads his hands to show me, as if I couldn’t already see, as if I didn’t already know.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. How are you?”

  “Fine,” I say. “Same.” Even though that’s less true by the moment.

  “Your sisters?”

  “Them too.”

  “Glad to hear it.” A short pause. “You kids headed in?”

  “Yup,” I say.

  He turns to River. “Your dad know you’re here?”

  “We’ve even got the key,” I assure Hobart and gesture at River to show it to him.

  “No need, no need.” Hobart reaches around us and unlocks the front doors, glad to be of service. But on our way inside, he puts a hand on my arm.

  “Mab, listen.” I pause and do. “This job? Your mom knows, but she doesn’t know, you know? She doesn’t know I started yet. If she’s upset, would you tell her? I just really, really needed it.”

  * * *

  I was picturing derelict, dusty expanses, nails and washers and stray parts scattered across a stained and cratered floor, cobwebs and mouse shit and broken glass, hulking machinery so out of date even I would recognize it was beyond repair. I was picturing leaking, cracked, and broken because that’s what Apple said. But what I see is shocking, and the longer we look around the more shocking it gets.

  There is, at first, no hint of a chemical plant, no hint of a plant of any kind. It looks like an office but an office in a magazine, much nicer than anything we have in Bourne. There’s a lobby with comfortable-looking chairs and sofas surrounding a thick gray rug with splashes of red like uneven sunburn, a coffee table with fans of never-read magazines, a water dispenser with cold and hot and a variety of tea bags and cocoa packets and sweetener choices, a matched set of mugs, a coffee maker. A fireplace. Behind that, offices and conference rooms, some glass-walled so you can see inside, some with the glass frosted so you cannot.

  “Wow” is all I can manage.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to say,” River tells me grimly. “Come on. This is just the front office. That’s not what you wanted to see.”

  It’s not? I have no idea what I wanted to see.

  “Let’s find your revolution,” he says.

  A series of corridors, all pristine. Shining. A series of rooms, and River’s key opens them all. One holds nothing but office supplies. Another paper towels and tissues and toilet paper. Another is filled with brand-new desks and chairs wrapped in plastic like sandwiches. Another is empty save for maybe a dozen phones trailing cords from the wall and dotting the carpet like weeds.

  Finally, behind another nondescript door, row after row after row of filing cabinets, filing cabinets to the moon. This is the room I’ve come for. This is the room Mirabel’s sent me to find. But even if it’s in here, even if I knew exactly what to look for, I’m no closer to Duke’s buried paperwork now than I was at our house. It could be right in this room, inches from my fingertips, but given all the time there is between now and the end of the world, I’d still die in there before I found it.

  But River is on to the next door anyway. It opens to a garage like an airplane hangar full of forklifts fitted together like vertebrae, tires full and black as ticks.
You can tell just by looking that, unlike the equipment on the torn-up grass outside, these have never been driven. You can tell just by looking they have never even been turned on. The door next to that reveals another enormous garage, this one of demolition equipment—bulldozers, backhoes, dump trucks, excavators—some dirt-caked and mud-splattered, some fresh and untouched and yellow as buttercups. If real backhoes shipped like toy ones, most of these would still be in their original packaging. I realize: This is not a factory that’s been through a war. This is a factory gearing up for one.

  At last we reach the floor of the plant, the heart of the beast. We’re up above it on a kind of walkway enclosed in glass, peering down like far-off gods. There’s something very strange about looking out windows and seeing inside. You expect trees when you look out a window. Or, if your view is unlovely, then cars, parking lots, the outside of the house across the way. But to look out a window and see in is dizzying. Also, because we’re so high, the floor so far below, I can’t quite make out what I’m looking at. But slowly it resolves. Vats upon vats upon vats, pipes snaking into their tops, out from their bottoms, crisscrossing in layers of chrome and steel, bending hard at right angles and veering away, plunging into the floor only to re-emerge somewhere farther along, like loons. They are punctuated at intervals even as railroad ties by bolts that rise like nipples from their rounded hulls.

  I don’t know if Apple was wrong or lying or being lied to herself, but this place is not a leaky mess in need of repair. This place is perfect, pristine, and ready to go.

  I’m having trouble catching my breath.

  “You okay?” River looks at me, worried.

  I nod. He takes my hand. This does not make it any easier to breathe.

  “You’re kind of pale.”

  “I’m fine. Really.” He looks unconvinced. “It’s not what I was expecting.”

  “What were you expecting?”

  A fair question. Smaller. Dirtier. Brokener. Less whole.

  Less ready.

  “It’s so…” I trail off because I cannot tell him any of that, can I? But he seems to get it anyway.

  “They hauled so much out of here. You can’t believe the cursing my father does into his phone every day. All new this, all new that, tear out those, get rid of that other thing. They had to fly in some kind of special cleaning crew.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess the stuff that was already here was too old?”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever they’re going to make next.”

  And when I don’t say anything to that, he says, very gently, “What did you think reopening the plant meant?”

  I shake my head. I do not know.

  He smiles. “Don’t worry. We’ll find what you’re looking for.” He holds out his fists, and I choose one. He opens it, empty, waves it over the other, also empty, and shows me the first again with its prize gleaming in the center of his palm. “After all, we have the key.”

  So I lean over and kiss him.

  I don’t know why.

  It’s terrible. Atrocious. My sisters would scream if they saw. My mother would be dismayed beyond the power of speech. But I can’t think what else to do. Being in here is so overwhelming and strange that what’s steady and safe is actually River. Though he’s new and the plant’s older than I am, comparatively speaking he’s what feels familiar and comforting. Possible.

  And even though my mother would label me treasonous right now, I’m here on her quest. She started it. She’s the one who told us to find out what we could from River. Plus, he’s betraying his parents more than I’m betraying mine, and he’s done it for us, for me. Stealing those emails, stealing that key, these are the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me. When I started kissing him, it was just spontaneous, a thing to do, an opportunity—and maybe the only one I’ll ever get—but now it might be something more than that because after I start I don’t stop. It was kind of him to bring me here. It was kind of him to worry about me. It was kind of him to promise me his key. I doubt he did it so I’d kiss him. But I don’t know why he did do it. Or, really, why I am either.

  It’s terrible, it is, but also it’s amazing.

  First he tastes surprised.

  Then he tastes euphoric.

  Or maybe it’s not taste but some new sense that’s feeding that information straight into my brain. When he puts his arms around me, I can feel him pressing that key against my lower back. When I put mine around his shoulders, I can feel those muscles that flexed when he changed gears. I can feel his mouth, outside and in, and his breath, bated as mine.

  We kiss for a little while which is surprising because when you think about your first kiss, you think of it like a finite thing, measurable, contained, begun in a blink and over just as fast, but this is not contained. This sprawls and wanes, except the waning is actually waiting, the begging of more to come, and then more does come, and that’s all part of it, a small thing that proves to be part of a much larger, growing one. Expanding. Like the universe. But eventually, we part.

  When we do, he takes my hand again. “It’s not really a museum, I guess.”

  “No,” I agree. Museums preserve the old. This is all new, gravely new. “More like a monument.”

  He smiles like I’m making a joke. I’m not. “To what?”

  “To what’s to come.”

  Two

  The days we have left before November 22 are precious now and shrinking in number, but for nine of them, I did not tell anyone about my Santa picture because it was not a clue to the mystery of how to not reopen the plant. We are looking for paperwork, and the Santas are not paperwork. We are looking for activities you used to be able to do in winter, but the Santas were only pretending to fish which you could do anytime. We were looking in the plant for something leaking, cracked, and broken, but that was Mab’s job not mine, and those issues do not apply to Santas.

  But it turned out it was more accurate to say the Santa picture was a clue, it was just not a clue to the answer. It was a clue to the question. The Santa picture was a clue to what the mystery actually was.

  On the day I showed my sisters the Santa picture, which was yesterday, Mab got home from school even later than when tutoring got out, and I knew she did not go to tutoring. When Mab finally got home the reason she was late was because she got River to take her in the plant, and since she went in the plant she wanted to talk and talk and talk about all the things she saw and one she kissed. Mirabel was listening hard for clues, but it sounded to me like a boring description of the difference between what Mab was expecting (a plant that had been sitting vacant for seventeen years) and what Mab actually saw (a plant that is about to reopen). Since we already knew the plant is about to reopen, the only clue I could find was that Mab is not as smart as she appears.

  Mirabel was also interested in hearing about the kissing. I was not.

  I sighed, but they ignored me, so I sighed louder and then I sighed louder and then I sighed louder, and then Mab talked again about the kissing which she had already talked about a lot, so I started running around them in circles so they would know that I wanted them to talk about something else. We were in our room where there are three beds. Mirabel was lying on hers. Mab was lying on hers with her legs up the wall in a funny position because her part of the wall is covered in postcards I sent her. So the circles I ran in were small, but I have had a lot of practice running in small circles.

  “Jesus, Monday, this is kind of important.” Mab said this as if kissing River Templeton were the key to not reopening the plant.

  “This will not work,” I told her.

  “What won’t?” Her face made a face that meant whatever I was going to say next was going to be stupid, but she did not know that because I had not said it yet.

  “I do not think River will go to his father and say, ‘Father, I have kissed Mab Mitchell, and it was nice, so I do not think you should reopen the plant,’ so his father wi
ll say, ‘Okay, River, you have convinced me.’”

  “No one’s saying that,” Mab sneered but she did not say what anyone was saying. “At least I’m trying to help. What are you doing?”

  “I am looking at scrapbooks to see if there used to be an indoor pool,” I said.

  “What does an indoor pool have to do with anything?”

  “I do not know,” I said because I did not.

  “Did there?” Mab asked.

  “Not that I could see,” I said.

  “Not much of a clue,” she said.

  I was going to say I could not find clues if I did not know what clues I was looking for. I was going to say scrapbooks were more likely places to hold hints about the past than the inside of River’s mouth. I was going to say she should just shut up because I could not think of a better comeback. But instead I said I did find one clue.

  They both stopped looking at each other and looked at me instead.

  “About the river,” I said, and I thought they would say who cares because nothing in the emails said anything about a river.

  But Mab sat up and looked at me. “What about it?”

  “There used to be two,” I said. “Twins at least. There might have been triplets. We cannot assume,” and I felt stupid because rivers are not twins or triplets, but I said it anyway because I could not think of another reason why the river was where it was not and also because they are my sisters and I know they love me even when I am stupid.

  “Two?” Mab said, and she did not mean me. She meant two rivers.

  “It is probably not important,” I admitted.

  Mirabel typed. “River is important,” her Voice said, and I thought she meant because Mab kissed him, but then I realized she meant the river is important.

  “Why?” I asked because the river has nothing to do with paperwork or winter activities.

  Mirabel looked at Mab. Mab said, “Because it runs next to the plant? Because that’s what got poisoned in the first place? Because it smelled and ran contaminated water to our taps and turned green? Because that’s what killed us last time Belsum was up and running?” Her voice made questions at the end, but I did not know what the questions were. “What do you mean there used to be two?”