One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  Yours,

  Elmer

  “What is effluvia?” I say.

  Mirabel taps at her tablet. “Run off.” Her Voice seems to be giving me a command.

  “Run off where?” I ask.

  “Not run off,” says Mab. “Runoff. Effluent. Shit that’s leaked by a chemical plant into a river that then runs downstream and poisons the water and the soil and everyone who lives there.”

  “So Nathan’s parents knew and Apple’s parents knew and everyone’s parents always knew?”

  “Not everyone’s,” says Mab, and she means our parents. Our parents did not know.

  That is all anyone says for a while because it is hard to think about how some people so far away so long ago said okay to a thing that would totally change or, to be more accurate, harm my life before my life had even started because some wanted to sell land and some wanted to sell chemicals. And maybe the reason it is hard to think about is it is mean and a sad statement about human nature, or maybe the reason it is hard to think about is because maybe those people poisoned us.

  Here is what the rest of the letters say:

  Dear Hickory,

  Your solution to all this is a stroke of genius. I know it’s tiresome being there, but I wonder if you would have come up with it from Boston. If it took actually walking the land to think of this, it was worth it. That’s easy for me to say from here, but I’m grateful, and you’ll be home soon enough, sooner now that we’re sure to make progress.

  Harvey is on the Cape for a month, but another of the partners and two of his associates all assure me that your idea falls under the category of infrastructure and therefore, in this case, is the purview of the local government, not the landowners. So you have to get the mayor and town council on board, but once you do, they, not we, will incur the expense of both construction and maintenance going forward. Harvey’s partner had an engineer who sometimes does work for him take a look. That guy told us that the diversion of the river to the orchard will create a greenbelt where the river is currently and a small lake just upstream. So Harvey’s partner thinks the way to sell the mayor and town council on this is by pointing out there will be a greenbelt, a lake, and a pretty new park. You’d know better than I, but last I was there, Mother was telling me that the mayor’s finally retiring later this year. Perhaps he’ll be eager to leave a legacy in the form of a beautified town and be unconcerned about the price tag as it will soon no longer be his problem.

  Will keep you posted.

  Elm

  Dear Hick,

  Thrilled to hear the mayor and town council have agreed to finance construction. Smart of you not to even mention the Templetons or their plans for a chemical plant. Why muddy the waters, so to speak? That battle will belong to whoever wins the race for the next mayor anyway. It’s not this guy’s problem, and it’s not ours either.

  I invited Duke Templeton for lunch at the club yesterday. Because the orchard land will now have a river running through it, I significantly raised the asking price. When he balked, I cited increased expenses owing to having to build such substantial infrastructure. Who exactly is paying for what is not a detail he will have or could even reasonably expect to have access to. And regardless, the land is now quite a bit more valuable, so of course the price has gone up. It took some doing, but we settled, at last, on quite favorable terms.

  I have to admit to being secretly pleased that the outgoing mayor put a caveat on all this. I like a worthy adversary, negotiators who do something other than roll over and die, and I happen to agree with him that an in-kind donation is appropriate in this case. They should get something out of it. His argument that a growing town ought to be able to grow their minds as well is quaint, so I say we agree to the stipulation that we build the town a real library as a bit of tit for tat. I understand your concern over the cost, but they’re right that lending moldy old books and dated reading material out of their church basement is pitiable. I have a solution which, while maybe not as heaven-sent as yours, will, I think, make you quite happy. What if we converted Mother and Dad’s house? I know Mother likes it there, but how much more small-town living can Dad possibly take? And now that there’s a wedding to plan, Mother will want to be here to help Apple pick china patterns or bridesmaids’ dresses or whatever else needs butting into. The house is enormous so we can bequeath it for use as a library, and the only real expenses will be shelving and some new books. And then you can all leave poor little Bourne for more civilized climes. As I keep saying: win-win.

  Yours etc.

  Elm

  Dear Hickory,

  It’s done. The moment Bourne Town Council signed the paperwork and broke ground, our land deal went through with the Templetons for more than we dared hope. What happens next is Duke Templeton’s business to negotiate with Bourne and whoever they elect as mayor, not ours. I will be thrilled to wash my hands of this and have all of you out of there.

  I don’t know if she mentioned it to you, but as a parting gift, Mother’s designing a stained-glass mural to replace their living room picture window in the hopes this will make the old place seem less like a cast-off house and more like a library. I see why she likes it there—it’s a pretty little town—but I’ve never had a good feeling about their prospects. We did well to buy up so much land so inexpensively and sell on the upswing. But I fear it will not last. There is something about that place that makes me think there is more standing between them and good fortune than a lake and a park and a library. Perhaps the plant will bring an influx of new jobs, but between you and me, I don’t trust the Templetons and will be glad to have you all living somewhere where your well-being is not dependent on their integrity.

  No one on the Templetons’ side has thought to ask for the deed or anything else, and why would they? The sale is contingent only on the river running through the land they’ve bought, and we have assured them it will do so. They don’t care how, and even if they did, they wouldn’t ask in case it’s not been on the level. They certainly don’t want to take responsibility for any more than they have to, so I doubt they’ll think to ask for a very long time. What Bourne does next regarding the Templetons is their own decision to make, and we are lucky that we will all be somewhere else when they do so.

  Your loving brother,

  Elmer

  I finish reading.

  No one says anything.

  Then Mab says, “Oh.”

  Then she gets up and rummages around on her desk until she locates the emails River gave her.

  First her face gets very white and then it gets very red. First her face gets very serious and then it smiles, but it is not a smile that means happy. It is a smile that means crazy. “I don’t believe it.” She laughs. It would be more accurate to say she cackles. “It’s a typo.”

  “What typo?” People should proofread. It is a critical step because it ensures you have conveyed your intended meaning, and meaning is important. Otherwise, why would you bother to write it down?

  “They’re not worried we’ll find the damn paperwork.” Mab’s face shows happy, surprised, and angry all at once which should not be possible but is. “They’re worried we’ll find the dam paperwork.”

  I think she has forgotten all about the sex. So that is one good thing.

  Three

  Usually Nora goes into another room to call Russell. Leaves us in the kitchen and goes into the living room. Leaves us in the living room and goes up to hers. It’s a small house, so it’s more the illusion of privacy than the fact of it, but even the illusion of something precious can also be precious.

  Today, though, she puts the laptop right on the coffee table with us gathered around, prays to the wifi gods for a strong enough connection, and lets Monday read Russell the letters she found. We are expecting tight, tentative optimism, but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen Russell or he’s seen all of us.

  “Amazing!” he enthuses when Monday finishes reading.

  “Really?” Nora breathes.


  “Look at you girls!” He is grinning and shaking his head. “You’re all grown up!”

  We forget that Russell knew us before we knew ourselves, back when we were brand-new. We forget that Russell began fighting this battle long before we did. We forget that Russell has loved not just our mother, however complicatedly, but the three of us as well for a very long time.

  Last night, we looked—now that we finally knew what we were looking for—through Monday’s boxes in case the town deed to the dam was also hiding, misfiled, in the house all along.

  “It could be like in a horror movie where the girl locks herself inside so she will be safe,” Monday said, “but the zombie or madman or monster or alien or deranged ex-boyfriend is already in there.”

  “He’s only already in there if the girl is stupid,” Mab said, dismissing her, “or slutty.”

  “You had sex,” Monday said, “so let us look through all the boxes again.”

  Monday read over a great many pieces of paper herself, and I read over the great many pieces of paper she piled on my tray, and Mab lay on her bed with her legs up the wall and said things like “It’s so amazing. It’s beyond words. I really can’t tell you what sex is like.”

  And Monday responded things like “Lie. That is all you have been doing since you had it.”

  And Mab said, “Would you just concentrate on what you’re doing?”

  And Monday said, “Why cannot you help us?”

  And Mab said, “You’re the one in charge of pointless pieces of paper.”

  And Monday said, “On television, sex makes people happy, but you are still annoyed and annoying.”

  And I tried to remind myself that if I killed them both I would never be able to use the toilet again when my mother was not home.

  Looking through all those papers was fruitless maybe, but not pointless. It was distracting. And I needed a distraction. It’s not like River and Mab having sex was a surprise, but that doesn’t make it any less of a betrayal—not by her and not of me, but a betrayal nonetheless. It’s not that I’m jealous—at least not exactly—more like I don’t want River to have sex with anyone. Not in an if-I-can’t-have-him-nobody-can way. In that I want him to be beyond—above maybe—his body’s baser limitations. I transcend mine every hour of every day. Is it too much to ask him to do the same for one afternoon with my sister?

  Because I was trying to ignore Mab talking about River, because I was trying to ignore Monday talking about Mab, I was concentrating hard on the documents before us and can say this with confidence: Monday’s boxes do not contain the deed to the dam or anything relating to it or the land sale.

  In their stead, Nora reads Russell the emails River got off his father’s phone in which, it is finally clear, on November 22, Duke Templeton plans to start repair work on the dam. Our dam. It was brand-new when he built the plant, but two decades later it’s as worse for wear as the rest of us. This is what Apple meant when she said Nathan could drown down here, the leaks and cracks she was worrying over in therapy. You can actually see them on the wall of the dam. Mab remembers brown curls of water wending their uneven way down the side from when she and River sat along its top and discussed leaping off the one in Switzerland. And those are only the cracks you can see. There must be at least as many on the lake side, but no reputable contractor would begin underwater work around here December through February. That’s why Duke was in such a hurry. Without a sufficiently functional dam there is no river there, and without the river there is no chemical plant.

  The papers Duke was hoping stayed hidden and the papers Apple was desperate to find may have pointed the same place, but they are not the same papers. Neither wanted anyone to know about the dam but for different reasons. She wanted to destroy the letters that showed her father knew Belsum’s plan hinged on dumping chemical waste, knew the diverted river would be polluted and ruined, but sold them the land anyway, addressing the problem only by donating a house and taking his riches and moving away.

  Apple knew her father’s actions were good profit-strategy but bad human-being, bad citizen-being, a bad legacy. What she didn’t know was that they were the missing link in the lawsuit, the elusive, irrefutable, incontestable proof Nora’s been after for our entire lifetimes.

  What Russell says when Nora’s done laying all this out is “You’re gorgeous.” He is shaking his head in awe. “All four of you. Just gorgeous.”

  “Russell. Focus. Are you listening? This is what we’ve been waiting for all these years. Proof Belsum knew before beginning operations that there was harmful effluent they needed to hide. In our river!” She discloses not a single word of Apple’s therapy sessions. She does not so much as hint at Nathan’s PhD or the reason for Belsum’s shift from container parts to chemicals or the question of GL606’s provenance. She does, though, report Omar’s story about Apple’s frantic search through the town filing cabinets, which, after all, is not a doctor-patient confidentiality breach, only hearsay.

  “Just gorgeous,” Russell says again.

  Nora blushes with exasperated pleasure, and also, of course, she is used to his cautious pessimism in the face of her surely-this-time enthusiasms. She hugs Mab with one arm, squeezes my foot with her other hand, bends her head toward Monday who gives Nora a small smile of thanks for not touching her.

  “My girls,” she says.

  Maybe she senses his sense that it’s too late. Maybe it’s all these revelations, finding everything she’s been searching for for so long and finding also that it doesn’t mean what she thought it would. Maybe it’s that the question Mab and I wrestled was never a question for her. I can see Mab grinding her teeth and know she’s wondering what I’m wondering. If we told him about Nathan’s tests would that be enough? Or would it not matter because we could never prove he shared them with his father, or that his father, without a PhD in chemistry himself, knew what they meant? But Nora was never going to use anything Nathan disclosed in therapy anyway. Maybe her sad smile is because of any of that, or maybe she’s just tired, or maybe she finally sees what Russell’s been trying to tell her for years now.

  “It’s not enough?” She’s smiling with wet eyes.

  “Probably not.” He smiles back. “Especially not now that nearly everyone’s dropped off the suit. Especially because this brings in other parties, the Groves, mostly deceased and with whom your beef is not. Especially not after so much time.”

  “I can get more emails,” Mab says weakly. “I can look more places. There’s more evidence out there.” She looks at me. “I know it.”

  What we three feel is desperate. What Nora and Russell feel is more like goodbye. This is its own victory—maybe the most important one—but we’re not ready.

  “The problem is you have all the proof you need of their disregard and their scheming and their willingness to do you great harm. It’s just not enough to take them down or make them stop. However—Hey! Look who’s here! It’s Matthew Pumpkin! Come on over, Mr. Pumpkin.”

  Matthew in a pumpkin costume wanders on screen and also lights up to see us, his huge grin mooning larger. He throws his arms wide. “My friends!”

  “Do you remember the Mitchells?” Russell prompts his son. “This is Mab, Monday, Mirabel, and Nora.”

  “Hello!” he calls cheerfully. “I’m a pumpkin for Halloween.”

  “It is November,” says Monday.

  “I’m a pumpkin for Thanksgiving.” He waves vine-laced arms at us, shimmies his pillowed orange middle like he’s hula-hooping.

  “You’re such a big boy, Matthew.” Nora is smiling the same smile Russell gave us. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Why?” He’s delighted but puzzled.

  “Because look what a good job you’ve done growing up.”

  She’s teary still but grinning now, Russell too, surrounded by four impatient, awkward, embarrassed kids, looking across too many miles and too many years into each other’s eyes like they are in the same room, which they will never be ag
ain.

  “However what?” says Monday.

  No one has any idea what she’s talking about.

  “You said we do not have enough to take them down or make them stop however.”

  “However what?” says Russell.

  “That is what I am asking you!” Monday shouts.

  “No idea. Here’s a thought, though.” Russell’s face changes. “You won’t get any money, and I can’t guarantee Duke Templeton won’t come back, but if all you want to do is stop the plant from reopening, you don’t need to win a lawsuit. Just take away his dam.”

  “How?” Nora looks perplexed. My sisters look perplexed. Even Russell looks like he’s still puzzling this out. But all at once, I see it. I see everything.

  “He doesn’t own it,” Russell says. “Bourne does. Who knows how he’s planning to get this done—forged paperwork, shady contractors—doesn’t matter. There wasn’t any way for us to keep them from coming back because they own the land the plant’s built on and those extended land-use rights, but we can stop any work he’s doing on the dam simply on account of its not being his.”

  Because I was wrong. Duke wasn’t in a rush to get dam repairs underway before winter. Duke was in a rush to get dam repairs underway before anyone thought to look for the paperwork and realized the most astonishing thing of all: that it’s been in our power all along to say no. The land is theirs but the dam is ours, meaning all we have to do is nothing.