One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  Monday’s head whips to me. “I am not stupid. I figured that out. But I do not understand why.”

  “We don’t know,” I answer for both of us. And then, “I can’t believe you would do that to me.” I sound pathetic, but they’ve both heard me sound worse.

  “You mean you cannot believe River would do that to you,” says Monday. “Betray you. Tell his father.”

  “I don’t mean River,” I say. “I mean Mirabel. Why?” I want to hear her say it.

  “I do not know why,” says Monday.

  But there’s only one reason, isn’t there? Mirabel must have told for the same reason I did.

  “You love him?” I ask.

  “I love who?” Monday says.

  “Yes,” says Mirabel’s Voice.

  “But that’s”—my brain rolodexes through every vocabulary word it’s memorized in the past five years and lands on—“impossible.”

  “No,” says Mirabel’s Voice. There’s more there, sentences and paragraphs and tomes waiting to spill, but we don’t have time right now for her to tell them.

  “How can that be?” This is crudely—cruelly—put because of course it’s not impossible. It’s exactly as possible for Mirabel to fall in love as for me or River or anyone. Mirabel-champion is my most important job, not just telling her she can do it, whatever it is, not just helping her do it, but believing she can. She’s brilliant and funny and strong and, yes, lovable, and I’d fight anyone who said otherwise, but there are some things she just can’t do. So why does she have to do them with River, who, in addition to being the scion of her enemy, is mine? I feel terrible for asking these questions, even in my head, but mostly I just feel terrible.

  “I don’t know,” her Voice answers.

  “For how long?”

  She types. “All along.”

  “I do not know what that means,” Monday says.

  Me neither.

  “That’s no excuse,” I say.

  “No,” she agrees.

  “Just because I told too—” I stop. “I was wrong but only once and understandably. You were wrong twice—”

  “Because you told when you said not to tell and because you betrayed your very own sister!” Monday cannot help but put in. Enthusiastically.

  “And not understandably,” I finish.

  “Yes,” Mirabel’s Voice insists. I hope she means yes, she was wrong, twice. But she could as well mean, yes, it was understandable. And the fact that I don’t know might be the greatest loss of all. I wait, but she doesn’t clarify.

  Finally I admit, “He gave me this,” because I have to sometime, and it might as well be now. It’s mortifying really, but they are my sisters, so I hand over the brochure.

  “He wants to help you go to college.” Monday is puzzled but trying. “That is nice.”

  “It’s condescending,” I spit. “It’s pity. It’s tossing me his scraps. It’s rubbing in my face that he’s leaving and I never will. And even if it weren’t all that, it’s just mean because he knows damn well I can’t afford it.”

  No one says anything for a moment.

  Then Monday reaches over. “I will take it. For the library.”

  On top I am furious, raging at River, raging at Mirabel. And underneath that I am destroyed, betrayed by both of them, in pain from everywhere at once. And underneath that I am bereft. He is leaving, and how will it be here now without him? It will be the same as it was before, and I think I would rather go anywhere—anywhere—than back.

  I feel what it feels like to know I will never be happy again.

  I feel what it feels like to know not only do I have to feel this, I have to feel it alone because I’ve lost my sister, both of them probably (for we do not come in ones), and the only people who could help me find my way through are as lost in the woods as I am.

  I turn off the light and turn back toward the wall.

  I can hear Mirabel snuffling too.

  I can hear Monday turning the pages of that stupid catalog. I should never have given it to her because I would like to bury it in the woods or I would like to set it on fire or I would like to feed it to a wild animal, but of course she has to read it with a flashlight under her covers.

  And of course she has to do it out loud.

  Probably because there was never any chance she wasn’t going to, however, it is closer to soothing than grating. I can’t stop thinking about a million things I wish I could stop thinking about, so listening to Monday intone the first-year experience at the Templeton alma mater is as good a sheep-counting sort of exercise as any. Students take five courses each semester and can join any of hundreds of clubs. There are three dining halls for them to choose from plus two coffee shops. They live in coed dorms with roommates specially matched for compatibility.

  “There is a sidebar with photographs of famous alumni who used to be roommates,” Monday says. “Remember that blond guy from that movie we watched about dogs? He used to be roommates with that other blond guy from that other movie we watched about dogs. That is a good coincidence because—”

  Monday stops reading, but I wasn’t really paying attention anyway, so it takes me a little while to notice. Then she starts keening from under the covers.

  “Monday?”

  The keening gets louder. I turn on the light.

  “Shush! You’ll wake Mama.” No one slept much after Omar told us the election results last night. If Mama can get some rest, she should.

  But Monday can’t stop.

  “Tell us what’s wrong, Two.” Mirabel has that one long saved.

  I pull the covers off her. Her hands are clamped over her ears, so the college catalog River gave me as the sorriest of parting gifts has fallen to the floor. I pick it up and look.

  And there, grinning back at me, is River himself. “My only love sprung from my only hate!” (“Too early seen unknown, and known too late!” I’m realizing belatedly the important part of that quote is the second bit.) He has his arm around a guy I’ve never seen before, standing on a cobblestone path in front of a brick building covered in ivy. The pileup of love and hurt and anger and confusion—or maybe it’s just his sweet smile—makes the room spin. So it takes me longer than it should to realize this makes no sense. This cannot be a photo of River.

  The caption clarifies. And then sets the world on fire.

  “A match made in heaven! Roommates Duke Templeton (’68) and Scott Blakely (’68) on move-in day freshman year. Templeton went on to become owner and CEO of Belsum Basics. Blakely is owner and CEO of Harburon Analytical.”

  The most exacting, state-of-the-art independent testing and chemical analysis company in the world.

  I would like to join in Monday’s keening, but not as much as I would like my mother to sleep through this. I would like to hold Monday and rock her and tell her it will be all right, but Monday would never let me hold her and rock her, and I do not see how it will be all right ever again. Instead, I pull Mirabel into Monday’s bed and climb in myself, and we huddle there together, insofar as it is possible to huddle without touching, our warmth eventually melting Monday’s shrieks to cries to sniffles to silence.

  Finally she says, “Independent testing does not prove anything if the independent tester is your roommate from college specially matched for compatibility.”

  “Truth,” I say.

  “We will tell everyone what we have learned and hold another vote.”

  “That’s not how it works,” I tell her. “When you don’t like the outcome of a vote, you don’t just get to ask again.”

  “But they voted wrong.”

  “So they have to live with it.”

  “Me too,” she points out. “And that is not fair.”

  “Truth.”

  “But they did not just vote wrong,” she says. “They voted with incomplete information because they were lied to and tricked, so they deserve to know the true and complete information and then have another chance to vote the right way.”

  “It’
s too late,” I say.

  “For what?”

  “For everything.”

  And then Mirabel’s Voice out of the black darkness pricked only by faded, stapled-on stars. “The lawsuit was never the way. The vote was never the way. Nora’s way was never the way.”

  “What way?” Monday says.

  “Forward,” says Mirabel’s Voice.

  “What is the way?” Monday says.

  We wait while Mirabel types. “The dam needs repair because it is cracked and leaking already.”

  “Truth,” Monday agrees.

  More typing. “What if we help it?”

  “Help fix it?” Monday asks.

  “Help crack it,” Mirabel’s Voice corrects. “Tear it down. Open it up.”

  “Who?” Monday asks.

  “Three.” She does not mean herself. She means we three. She means us.

  “How?” Monday asks.

  Mirabel types. “Dynamite?”

  “We do not have dynamite,” Monday says.

  “Demolition equipment, backhoe, bulldozer, jackhammer.” This must be a folder buried deep in her Voice app for the toddler set, and she’s just going through and tapping each picture.

  “We do not have a backhoe or a bulldozer or a jackhammer,” Monday says.

  But I sit up, blow my nose, and turn the light back on again. Because it’s true we don’t have any demolition equipment. But I know where we can get some.

  Two

  When I first found the newspaper photograph of the pretending-to-fish Santas, I thought it was just Bourne.

  Then I realized it was Bourne of the past.

  Now I realize it is Bourne of the future, Bourne to come, the river—and everything—back where it belongs.

  Very, very carefully, I cut around the edges with a utility knife, cutting the photograph from the article and caption and cutting through the glue and cutting through the extra-thick scrapbook paper the glue has glued the photograph onto. I feel bad about defacing library materials, but a scrapbook is not officially a book, and the back of a newspaper clipping is more newspaper whereas the back of this scrapbook page is blank for writing on.

  I leave the Santa-postcard in the middle of the kitchen table for Mama to find when she wakes up in the morning and comes downstairs to start baking yellow things.

  It would be nice to give her a nice surprise. But we do not know what will happen. So in case it is a not-nice surprise or one that takes a long time to come, I do not want her to worry. She has already worried enough.

  Dear Mama,

  It is okay. We are taking care of it.

  One, Two, Three

  Three

  Remember I told you this at the beginning.

  That I can tell stories but slowly, more dripping faucet than rushing flow, more drizzle than hard, cleansing rain, but letter by letter I can get us there. And I was not in a rush, I said. I had plenty of time, I said.

  That is no longer the case.

  * * *

  The metaphor is always David and Goliath.

  Goliath is big and strong and well funded. He’s made so much money, either off your suffering or off not giving a shit about your suffering, that he can buy whatever and whoever he needs to ensure that his profiting off your suffering remains allowed or at least overlooked, which Monday would point out are not the same thing, but Monday would be wrong.

  And then there is David. He is poor and small. He is weak, overmatched, underfunded, outclassed. But he is right and he is righteous, quick of wit, fast of finger, pure of heart, helping those whom Goliath has destroyed. The good guy.

  And so it’s done in an instant. One well-placed rock, quick as a tick, and it’s over.

  I hate this metaphor. It’s offered all the time, but it’s apt as balloons at a funeral, suggesting, as it does, that if only you were more nimble or more right or more good, you would prevail. Suggesting, as it does, that you are destroyed not by other people’s shortsightedness, other people’s greed, or other people’s deciding you’re disposable, but by being yourself too slow, morally compromised, wicked, and weak. Goliath is not at fault in this story. Goliath is just a giant, following his giant nature, laid low by nothing more than a lucky shot. And David, David’s just a boy with a sling and a stone, kind of whiny and moralistic, a little bit of a pissant.

  In fact, I think it is a metaphor perpetuated by the Goliaths themselves.

  Because really Goliath is not the size of a giant. Goliath is the size of the sky. Goliath is the size of a mountain from the base of it, so it takes up everything, everywhere you look, all the room, all the air, all the past and the future as well, until there is nothing anywhere but him, and you have no choice, can’t remember ever having had a choice, and this is just the way it is, unfortunate but inevitable, inarguable, like how someday we’ll all die, Goliath taking, and taking up, everything, including you, including yours, including even the whisper of a suggestion that he might not be right or fair (for a mountain is not right or fair, it just is), including even the whisper of a suggestion that this might not be good for us, for any of us (for a mountain does not care what’s good for us), including even the whisper of a suggestion that there might be a different future than this (for a mountain in the future is still a mountain, long after you’re gone, long after your descendants have forgotten why they tell this story, long after whatever comes after humans has forgotten our name).

  Mountains change, it is true. Grain of sand by speck of dust by infinitesimal layer by drop of rain by whisper of current by time by time by time, a mountain is worn away over eons and ages and the unremitting change of seasons.

  But we can’t wait that long.

  Why did I tell River, when I knew it could cost us our head start and our upper hand and our stealth injunction and ruin everything, when I knew, unlike Mab, that his loyalties probably didn’t lie with her and definitely didn’t lie with me, when I knew, unlike Mab, that he is nothing but a sixteen-year-old, a boy, sheltered and privileged and nearly as naive about the ways of the world as we are? Why did I tell him, when I knew he would probably tell his father and we’d lose our desperately honed, two-decades-in-the-making edge of getting there first, and not just getting there first but crossing the finish line before they even arrived at the track or really realized they were participating in a race to begin with? Why did I tell, when I knew it would break my sister’s heart?

  Because I am also sixteen, with all the vain hopes a teenager is due and all the good sense from which she is absolved.

  Because it was my turn.

  Because I have a heart as well.

  And because I was tired of waiting. Because it is time.

  This is what they say about justice too, by the way, that it is slow. So that’s the other reason I told. It has taken Nora sixteen years, but she has finally exacted justice—by raising daughters who will see it served. She doesn’t see that yet. I’m only just starting to see it myself, a revelation seeded by, of all people, Nathan Templeton. This was what I started slowly to realize the afternoon he confessed everything to Nora in therapy. He was just trying to do right by a fallible parent. Apple too, for that matter. And, I’m finally realizing, us as well. We’ve been gathering wood for Nora’s fire, fanning the embers of her desperate, righteous cause. It feels different because she’s so good and she’s so right. But even Apple couldn’t quite believe her father’s “good enough” was good enough. Even Nathan knew he was wrong to bow to his dad’s corruptions. And us, we’ve been pure of heart, yes, on the side of the angels, on the side of our mother who is even holier than angels, but we have also hewn too close to her side.

  Now we’re on our way. Our own way. Monday is trying to be brave about it. Our new plan is incautious and impulsive and unstable as dynamite. Not that we have dynamite. We will have to blow everything up without it.

  “How will we get in?” Monday demands as quietly as she’s able, which is not very quiet.

  From under puffy eyes, Mab smiles,
which an hour ago we all imagined she might never do again. “I have the key.”

  “He gave you the key to the plant?” Monday can’t believe it. Me neither, actually.

  We have bundled up because it is late now, and the temperature’s dropped. We have worn our darkest clothes, even Monday, who did have to borrow some from us but did not require much cajoling to see that it was necessary to blend in with the night as much as possible. We are all breathing great puffs of white in the darkness. And Mab is forgiving me. She has not forgiven me yet, but she is working on it. And I am working on forgiving her back.

  “He didn’t give it to me,” Mab says. “I copied it. I pretended to lose it down my underwear when he was teaching me magic, and when I went in the church to get it out, I used Pastor Jeff’s key-cutting machine.”

  “Why?” Monday asks.

  “‘I have an ill-divining soul,’” Mab says.

  “I do not know what that means,” Monday says.

  “It’s Romeo and Juliet,” Mab explains.

  “I do not know what that means anyway,” Monday says.

  Mab looks at me, and I look at her. “Just in case,” she says.

  There are Christmas lights winking cheerily from a few houses, our neighbors, our fellow citizens, survivors. I am praying no one will hear us, step out onto a creaking front step, turn on a porch light, and ask what the hell we think we’re doing in the middle of this night. But I am confident that if they do, and if we tell them, they will join arms and come along to help. We are all in this together now.

  But Bourne sleeps on.

  We cross Maple and the cemetery, and I find our father with my eyes. I wonder if he would applaud what we’re doing or chastise us for the foolishness we are about to undertake. If he were angry, I would remind him that the worst that can happen is we could all die, and then I’d ask him how it is, and if it isn’t after all worth it maybe for such a righteous cause. If we could sit and chat and compare stories, my father and I, reflect and philosophize, I am certain he would conclude what we have concluded, that there is nowhere his daughters could be right now but where we are.