“He’s too sacerdotal to vote,” I explain.
“Heavenly justice works every time,” he says.
I raise my eyebrows at him without comment.
“You look exactly like your mother,” he says. “It works much of the time.”
“What about your mother?”
“What about her?”
“And your dad. They were activists. They were freedom fighters. They’d want you to vote against. What would your mother say?”
“‘Eat something,’” says Pastor Jeff. “‘Get more sleep. Put on a sweater.’”
“Same thing,” says Petra.
“Probably true,” agrees Pastor Jeff.
* * *
We stay after school one day to talk to Mrs. Shriver.
“We’re here to ask you to vote against Belsum,” I say.
“Of course.” She nods, distracted though, not looking up from the essays she’s grading. “Just don’t get your hopes up, girls.”
“We’re campaigning inimitably,” Petra assures her.
“I’m certain.” She smiles at us, one of those smiles that somehow means sad. “But people move on.” I consider her husband who cannot work and her children who cannot be born and her life which cannot ever be what she had every right and reason to believe it would. I consider how “move on” is exactly what she cannot do. “Some things are terrible enough it’s better to forget if you can.”
We’re staring at her with our mouths open.
“What?”
“You teach history.”
That sad smile again. “History and memory are unreliable narrators.” I think back to that first assignment, how galled I was to have to write it over still-summer, how much everything has changed since then. “It’s hard to remember when it’s so painful. It’s hard to remember when you’re dead.”
“I guess, but if—”
“It’s hard to remember the past,” she interrupts, “when it won’t pass.”
“So what do we do?” I ask.
She takes off her glasses, holds my gaze. “Anything you can.”
* * *
We find Mrs. Radcliffe at home. She regards us on her front stoop over crossed arms, already mid-sigh when she opens the door, and does not invite us in.
When we finish our spiel, she says, “If you both come back to tutoring, I’ll vote against.”
We agree to these terms. It’s the least we can do.
Petra’s mother resolves to leave the house for the first time in five years to vote no. Leandra is going to have a hard time getting to the polls, but Chris says he will carry her if necessary so they can both vote emphatically against. Donna Anvers says she will vote for flowers so against Belsum. Omar will vote for Nora maybe or for Bourne or for second chances, but in any case, we know, he will vote against.
Nathan is campaigning too. All over town, he’s put up posters with his face looking trustworthy. Every time Mama sees one, she draws a mustache on it. She mustaches so hard she breaks her marker and stains my father’s favorite shirt with ink. But excepting this sartorial tragedy, I know how she feels: better to be distracted, better to be doing something. Petra and I feel it too. Maybe we can’t vote, but we can convince lots of other people to vote the way we want them to, so that’s even better. It feels good to say our piece, to tell our side, to be heard for once. It feels good to think that this time, maybe, it’ll be different. It’s not hard to go to everyone’s door because they’re our neighbors after all, our friends. They’re us, and there aren’t so many of us.
For a little while, memory being unreliable and also, apparently, easily distracted, I almost forget all about River. But not really.
Two
Mab will not come with me because she does not want to see River. Or, to be more accurate, she wants to not see River.
Mama will not come with me because when I ask her if she wants to she says, “Over my dead body.” Which means no.
Mirabel will not come with me, but she turns away and will not say why, but it does not matter because it means I am out of people and have to go alone.
Nathan Templeton’s first campaign action was he brought me two binders containing Harburon Analytical’s extremely exacting, extremely thorough, extremely reassuring test results to lend from the library in case anyone wanted to borrow them. I said this was nice and responsible of him, but Mama and Mab and Mirabel all said that, to be more accurate, it was manipulative and disingenuous, so I shelved the binders behind the toilet, but no one came needing or even asking to borrow them anyway.
Next Nathan Templeton made his very own frisbees that read “Harburon Analytical Gives Belsum A+,” and he left these for anyone to take for free at cash registers and checkout lines and Frank’s Norma’s Bar and even, Pastor Jeff reports, at church. Mama said a stupid plastic toy in exchange for their lives not to mention justice not to mention self-respect is not a trade Bourners will make, but they are fun (the frisbees, not the Bourners) and come in many colors including yellow as well as green (so you could play in the rain since they are also waterproof) so Mama might be wrong.
Then Nathan Templeton printed posters and flyers with highlights from the test results and pictures of himself and put them up all over town. Mama defaced them, which should mean she removed his face but does not. But it was still funny.
Now, the night before the election, Nathan Templeton is having an open house, which means a party you can go to late and still not be rude. There are cookies and coffee and champagne and a slide show, and the slide show runs on a loop—in case you come politely late—and is all about the extremely exacting, extremely thorough, extremely reassuring test results.
I do not go just because I am invited. Everyone is invited.
I do not go for the cookies, even though he flew them in specially, because everyone knows cookies made by your mother are better than cookies bought from a store, even if that store is in Boston.
I do not go for the slide show because I read one of the binders he dropped off at the library (I did not have to read them both because they were exactly the same) so I know what the slide show shows.
I go to see Apple Templeton.
I ride my bicycle to my library all alone, even though I never ride anywhere all alone, even though it is very cold out, even though it is not my library anymore, and this time when I go in my eyes remember the last time they were here instead of all the times they were here before that. It looks less like a library now and more like a home because the Templetons have unpacked since the last time I was here but also because, now that my eyes know the history, they can see the home it was in the first place. And also the third place. The second place, when it was my library, turned out to be the short one. So my eyes feel very sad. The fancy kitchen in the Children’s section is full of the fancy cookies and other fancy treats, like tiny quiches that smell nice and are yellow, but I do not eat them anyway. There are a lot of people hanging around eating the snacks and watching the slide show and shaking hands with Nathan Templeton whose pants have become his expensive ones again and whose shirt and hair have both been ironed smooth. And in the corner, looking like how I sometimes want to be in the corner where it is quiet and safe and no one will touch you, is Apple Templeton.
No one is talking to her which is good because it means I can talk to her.
“Hello Apple Templeton,” I say politely.
“Monday Mitchell.” She makes a little smile which might mean happy to see me or might mean almost anything else. I cannot tell. “Glad you could make it.”
“You are?” I ask.
She looks surprised and like she does not know what to say but decides on “Sure.”
“Is it because of what I have brought you?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” She smiles more now. She might be happy someone brought her something. Or she might be laughing at me. “What have you brought me?”
I take the Elm/Hickory Grove folder out of my backpack and hand it to her. She looks at it, and her f
ace gets yellow, but not in a good way, and I can tell that she can tell from the label what I could not, which is what is in the folder.
“I was looking for this,” she says, but she is not looking at me when she says it and might not even be talking to me.
“I know,” I say because I do.
“You do?” She looks up at me so my eyes look away. “How?”
“Omar told us you were looking through his files but did not find what you were looking for.” This is not a lie. Omar did tell a whole bar full of people including my mother and my sister that Apple Templeton was looking through his files and did not find what she was looking for. But it is sort of a lie in that it is not the whole truth or even the part of the truth that led us to this folder. That truth is hard to understand though, even for me, and might get my mother or sister in trouble, which I know would not be fair, so I do not tell her that part.
Her eyes looking for my eyes have tears in them. “Why are you giving these to me?”
“Because it is not accurate to say they are yours, but they are closer to yours than anyone else’s.”
She nods, and she hugs the folder, and she says, “That is very, very kind of you, Monday.”
So I say, “You are welcome,” which is polite, and then I turn around to leave, but then she asks me another question.
“Did you read them?”
“Yes,” I answer. “Many, many times.”
She nods and seems like she will not say anything else and then she says, “Are they bad?”
And I am surprised so I look at her to see what she means so she looks away because her eyes do not want to look at my eyes any more than my eyes want to look at hers. I do not know what to say so I do not say anything.
“My father didn’t know what was going to happen.” Her voice is very quiet.
“Lie,” I say.
Tears fall out of her eyes so she rolls them up to the painted-over ceiling of the Children’s section like it is still covered in rainbows and clouds. “He didn’t know it was going to be that bad,” she says. Then she adds, “This bad.” Then she adds, “What happened after my father sold the land wasn’t his fault. Our family wasn’t even here anymore.”
“Then why do you want the letters?” I wonder.
She nods like I have asked her a yes-or-no question to which the answer is yes. “People might not understand if they read them. They might not believe that what happened had nothing to do with my family.”
“Truth,” I say for they might not. As an example, I do not.
“Dad was just doing his job. Buying and selling land. That’s what he did. He didn’t know the chemical was poisonous or that it would get in the water or what would happen if it did.”
“He said effluvia,” I tell her. “He said he did not trust Duke Templeton. He said he was glad his family would be far away from Bourne when the plant opened.”
“It wasn’t his job to protect you,” Apple says.
“Truth,” I say for it was not his job.
“Maybe he wasn’t perfect,” Apple says, “but he did the best he could.”
“For himself,” I say, “and for you, his family, it is accurate to say he did the best he could. But not for us. For us he could have done much, much better.”
“Truth,” she whispers. Then she says, “Thank you, Monday. I hope you win tomorrow.”
“Because you want to go home?” I ask, for I have learned that home is not just where you live. Home is also where you want and need and are meant to live. Home is also the people who are there with you, who are the people who will help you live, who are the people who will do the best they can, not just for themselves, but for you, their neighbors and friends, as well.
“Because I want what’s fair,” says Apple Templeton.
Three
Monday wore green to school today, but the rain keeps switching over to snow flurries then sleet then back to rain again, none of it lasting long enough to accumulate but relentless, sopping, and deep-in-the-bones cold. They say voter turnout is lower when the weather’s bad and the issues local, especially for whoever’s ahead in the polls, but in our case, there are no polls, and however near, the stakes could not range wider. The voting booth is a wooden box with a slit in the lid into which you insert a red poker chip if you want to rebuild the dam and reopen the plant and a green poker chip if you want Belsum to leave and never return. The jars of chips are helpfully labeled in case you’re color-blind or confused. It is extraordinarily appropriate that in Bourne voting literally feels like gambling.
Pastor Jeff, who as a man of God is what passes around here for trustworthy and unbiased, serves as election chair, but it’s a weekday so he must also serve as Dr. Lilly. The voting box, therefore, sits in the clinic waiting room. As do I. People with appointments today come in and vote and then sit and wait their turn to be seen. People without appointments come in and vote and then sit and chitchat with the waiting patients. Some people come in and vote and then wait for nothing in particular except for the rain to abate. It is not a festive atmosphere exactly, but it is communal, all in, everyone here, at least for a little while. I would bet that counting uncomfortable glances at me and/or my mother’s shut door would be an effective exit poll. If so, at lunchtime, we are neck and neck. My mood, however, mirrors the weather.
Because win or lose, I am at every turn betrayed.
Not just by River, who told what he shouldn’t have, who chose his family over ours—which might maybe be understandable except he also chose wrong over right, cowardice over integrity, fear over fair, and, worst of all, reversion to form instead of change, growth, and becoming the person I had faith he was, or at least could be. His apology was heartfelt I’m sure, but also empty—too easy—and also too late.
I am betrayed by my eldest sister who also told what she shouldn’t have, who also chose someone else over our family, though at least in her case it was because of love, at least some of it was. But mostly it is this: We have shared a room, a life, a heart all these weeks and months and all the years before these weeks and months, and she has fallen in love without ever once noticing that I have fallen in love as well. Worse than not ever once noticing. Not ever once imagining. We communicate, Mab and I, without language, without motion, without space, passage, sense, or sometimes even purpose. We are so much the same—for two people who navigate the world so differently—it is appalling that she could love another and not realize that I would—of course I would—do the same.
I am betrayed by the adults whose job it is to look out for me because if you asked us, we who are coming slowly of age, we would vote Belsum out—without pause or pang or division—no matter what wonders they dangled before our innocent eyes. I am betrayed by my town, my neighbors and friends, these people with whom I have strived and struggled and suffered, the only people I have ever known, my entire world, roughly half of whom have come before me today to vote that it’s okay with them, or okay enough, what was done to all of us. And what was done to me.
Then the door to Nora’s office opens, her last patient of the day shuffles out, and my mother stands in her doorway regarding me through red, weary eyes.
“You okay?” She is tired but smiling, hopeful, willfully optimistic.
I nod and point to her.
“Oh yeah, me too, better than okay actually. It’ll be close, but I think it’s going to go our way finally.”
She glances at my face to see if I know something she doesn’t yet. I don’t. An hour ago, Pastor Jeff came out of his office, told me to cross my fingers, and left with the box of poker chips tucked inside his raincoat.
“Cheer up, Mir-Mir.” Nora’s bouncing a little. “Everything’s great. This time, I know it, I feel it, everything’s going to be just great.”
And it is the stress of the day maybe, of the damp quicksilver chill of the weather, of watching every single member of this entangled town trickle in to vote, or perhaps it is just one betrayal too many, but it is too much for me.
“It is not great.” I turn the volume on my Voice all the way up to shout at my mother. “And it is not going to be great.”
She is alert at once in case I’ve been withholding information about the vote. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” my Voice says. “Ever.”
“Mirabel, you scared me.”
“You should be scared.”
She is. I can see it in her face. And I feel bad, but not bad enough to stop. She waits while I type.
“No matter how the vote goes, I already lost.”
Mab thinks it’s not fair this town is so boring. Monday thinks it’s not fair that sometimes it’s raining in the morning but sunny in the afternoon and she didn’t bring a change of clothes to school. But what’s not fair is what’s not fair, the ways they feel they’ve been wronged by fate versus the ways I have.
“You have to look on the bright side, love,” my mother tells me. “It’s the only way.”
“No,” my Voice says, and she waits while I type. “You have to let me be on the dark side.”
“Never,” she says.
“Aaaaaaaahh!” I scream, I cry, I roar, and then I close my eyes to gather the energy necessary to type. “Even if everyone votes the right way, I will still be this way.”
“I love you this way,” Nora says.
“That is not enough,” my Voice says, and we are both stopped by it, for it is heartbreaking and it is worse than heartbreaking. And it is true. It is not enough to be loved by your mother. It is a good start, and you wouldn’t want to do without, and it helps, but it is not enough. You need also the love of your community, the love of friends and admirers, the love of strangers who don’t know you but still wish you well, the love that comes from passion and from commitment and from someone who will never, never betray you and not just because they’re related to you. You need more love. We all need more love. And here—in this town, in this body—love is abundant but it is not sufficient. It is not enough.
She crosses the room and takes my head in both her hands, makes me look into her eyes when she says, “You are wonderful exactly as you are, and I wouldn’t have you any other way.”
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