One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

  “The left joystick also pushes the stick in and out and makes it shorter and longer.”

  “That doesn’t help her, Two. What should she do?”

  “Push the joystick away from you to push the stick out in front,” she says and I do. “Press up on the button on top to lower it down,” and I do that too. It is better that I can’t see what I’m doing I think. It is better to be gazing out over a dark, still lake. I can hear motors purring, though, gears engaging, the knock of metal against stone, the machine responding to my touch, but so far, it’s all prelude.

  Then Monday says, “Okay, now the boom. You need the other joystick.” And that joystick I can play as it was meant to be played. Right hand, facing front, watching what I wreak. She turns our chair. We all three gaze at the upcrooked elbow and its pointing finger, the dam before us, the plant out beyond, the lake bated above.

  “Side to side on the right joystick controls the curl,” Monday quotes at us. “Away lowers the boom down. Back toward you lifts it back up.”

  “What should she do?” Mab has her teeth clamped so hard together—to keep them from chattering or to keep herself from yelling, I do not know—it is hard to understand her. But Monday does.

  “Lower the boom, right into the wall, perpendicular—that means a ninety-degree angle,” she breaks off to tell me. I nod. “And press down.”

  I do. Suddenly, our front wheels are lifting off the dam. We are levitating. We are falling. Mab is screaming. I am screaming. “No, no, do not scream!” Monday screams. “That is what is supposed to happen. That is how we know we have the angle right and the attachment seated.”

  I try to breathe deeply. I try to calm down. I try to calm Mab down too.

  “Lower us,” says Monday, and I do, only too gladly. And then she says, “Move the hammer to the edge. And go. Fifteen seconds. Go.”

  Fifteen seconds does not sound like very many, but count it off in your head, one number at a time, a breath in between each one, and imagine while you do the very earth shaking into pieces all around you. It is a long, slow time. It is an eternity. It is the end of the world.

  One. Two. Three.

  There is a crack and a crash we hear over the hammering and feel in our bones and feel in our souls.

  Four. Five.

  Mab is counting off, slow and even, defiant, behind me, against me.

  Six. Seven. Eight.

  She gets to fifteen, and I stop. We are panting. We are waiting.

  “Now move it over to a new spot nearby and do it again,” Monday says.

  “Why a new spot?” Mab shouts.

  “I do not know!” Monday shouts back.

  I don’t either, but I do as Monday directs. She has got us this far. We will all go down together. I turn on the hammer. Mab counts to fifteen. I stop. I move the boom again. She counts and I move. She counts and I move. Again and again and again, and soon the whole world is shaking shattering shuddering convulsing-like-to-break-apart, and I am certain, as certain as I have ever been of anything in my life, that we are about to fall to our death, my sisters, our backhoe, and I, and I think of our mother and how heartbroken she will be and how proud, and suddenly, finally, there is a crack that must be what they mean when they say the crack of doom, and Bluebell Lake is water flowing faster and faster over the dam now, but there is so much debris, and I start to use the finger to poke it out of the way, to drag the rocks and stones and mud and cement and broken concrete and wood away from the hole we’ve made, and Monday screams, “Stop!”

  “What?” Mab pants. “What’s wrong?”

  “Using the hammer to hoist, pry, sweep, or move large objects may result in premature wear on the tool or poor long-term performance.”

  “No one gives a shit about long-term performance, Monday! We need this thing to last for another thirty seconds. Can it do that?”

  “Naaa,” I say. No. Look. And we all three do. And we all three see that there is no way back the way we’ve come for we have made a hole too large to cross, filling and spilling over now with water, and the only way we can go is forward, away from the plant and the river, home again.

  “Pull it up! Pull it back in!” Monday directs, and I do, and she turns our seat around so we face front again, our backs to Belsum, to the hole we have made, to the hole we have left behind.

  What I feel is free, no longer shattering, no longer rattling, the pulsing hard but only my own. I clench and unclench my hand, clench and unclench, working blood back in, relishing its sting. For no doubt the first time in my life, my body is exultant. My body worked and obeyed, complied and triumphed, saved us all. Monday pulls forward one breath at a time over the rest of the dam we have destroyed the middle of, over the barrier we have all but removed, over a past which has not been kind but which is ours and which made us, back to mud, back to grass, back to Bourne, back home.

  The thing about holes is their size is deceptive. You can’t tell by looking if they’re wide but shallow or have gentle slopes to hidden depths. Or maybe it’s just that with holes, their size is not what matters. Black holes are infinitely small but infinitely dense, drawing into themselves everything there is. I don’t know what that means really, but if I were describing a hole, I’d be more interested in how much can fall into it or leak out of it than the size of the thing itself. You’d think those qualities would be related, but world-class physicists insist I’m wrong, and they seem like pretty smart people.

  We have made a hole too big to cross back over, but not really because of its size. Going back was never an option. We can finally only go forward. We have made a hole too big to hold water, but that is true of any hole, no matter how small. We have only slightly widened a little crack in a low wall to let a shallow lake trickle back into the barely-more-than-a-swollen-creek it was always meant to be, but that small crack is the size of the moon, that wall the width of the world. That river flows like all the blood in all the veins of every person left in this town. It is not really about size.

  Our destory is this: We are no longer waiting, imagining justice deferred but heralded, on its way. We are no longer left behind, forgotten but unable to forget. We have been wronged, but we are no longer wrong, no longer broken, no longer immovable and wishing ourselves other than we are. Our water is no longer green and no longer toxic because that water has flowed on, and so have that town, those people, that history, not gone but diluted, far away, and flowing farther every moment. We get to rest now, some of us. And others of us? We’re just getting started.

  Because the flip side of our destory is the one not yet written, the one that happens next.

  Duke Templeton doesn’t want word to get out about all he did to make us finally take matters into our own hands, or maybe he’s just embarrassed to be laid so low by three girls and his very own backhoe, but he declines to press charges against us for breaking and entering the plant and stealing his equipment. In contrast, property damage to town infrastructure is a municipal matter, which makes what to do about it Omar’s decision. Omar concludes that we have already performed more than commensurate community service. And our criminal records are expunged.

  Therefore it’s a little year—a short little year—until Mab receives a postcard, her first from an address other than her own, congratulating her on her early acceptance to a college far away but also not so far, and six mere months after that until she and Petra pile into Petra’s horrible car and make it just into the parking lot of their dorm before breaking down, before meeting the rest of their incoming class, small and close, a poky town’s worth of students all new in their new world, young and excited and afraid and away from home for the first time, and though those homes are not like Bourne—of course they aren’t—they are also too small, too strange, too missed.

  Meanwhile, the library is vacant again. Omar redesignates it to Monday—or, to be more accurate, as she would insist, redesignates it back to the town care of Monday. Tom and the Kyles spend a few days putting up shelves, rough-cut one-by-t
welves on brackets screwed directly into the wall, inelegant but easily painted a cheery buttercup yellow. Monday stacks them carefully with the battered titles she’s loved and watched over all these years like children.

  The relocation of Monday’s library—re-relocation, she says—makes our house feel palatial, but the Templetons’ state-of-the-art kitchen is still too tempting for Nora to resist. She starts doing her more marathon baking sessions there and then selling pastries from the reference desk, muffins and cupcakes and croissants for fifty cents apiece, day-olds for a quarter.

  As the weeks until Mab leaves ebb away, she gets more and more anxious that when she and Petra go to school, we’ll miss them too much, or they’ll miss us too much, or, simply, they’ll miss too much, all that’s happening in Bourne. “Nothing will be happening in Bourne,” Monday assures them, but Mab is still worried. Change happened and it could again, could some more. So maybe because it will ease my sister’s mind or maybe because it was the start of the string that unspooled, heroically and unexpectedly, all the way to the dam or maybe just because it’s time, I relaunch the Herald Bourne. There is no staff. There is no money to print it. But there is the internet, however slow. And there is me, however slow as well, to write and research and listen and understand, me to give voice, to be there. To be here.

  For a while, I have a subscriber base of one—or rather One—but Mab shares with Petra, reading her the articles aloud as they navigate their tiny dorm room. (Petra calls it incommodious, old habits being operose to break.) Soon Frank, Hobart, Zach, and Tom all subscribe too, never mind bar gossip is how most of my scoops originate, and Mrs. Shriver, though as a history teacher she hasn’t much use for current events, and Pastor Jeff, though his primary news source remains our Saturday morning breakfast table. Pooh is a subscriber until her death: in her home, in her sleep, and—this is the miraculous and wondrous part—of old age, natural causes, nothing more painful or insidious than time.

  Wondrous though it may be, Mab is still heartbroken. Five minutes after Monday calls to tell them the news, Mab and Petra borrow a friend’s more reliable car and drive through the night straight home where Mab finds, of all things, a box of vintage shoes plus a note which reads:

  Dearest Mab,

  If I had jewels or gold or bonds or property, they would be yours. But I don’t. Standing in (get it?!)—and since those silver-tasseled mules look so cute on you—I’m leaving you these. It’s amazing how long shoes last if you get around town via wheelchair. But for you, my dear, these shoes are made for walking.

  I leave out the part about the shoes, but I write about the funeral, even though every one of the Herald Bourne’s subscribers is there, including Pooh herself in some ways, maybe the most important ways. It’s a good story, the whole town turned out to file past her casket, struggling to corral their smiles because it is a sad occasion, somber, not a cause for celebration, but they keep forgetting, so long has it been since anyone died in Bourne just from being in their nineties, so long was she here and well and loved, as they file past my sister (in a black dress and knee-high pink polka-dotted go-go boots), also a wonder, wandering but home again. The piece reads like a fairy tale, a hint of myth, Odyssean, but every word is true.

  Other news is more mixed and easier to believe, though also filigreed with hope and change. Leandra dies—not of old age or natural causes—but a few months later, to keep himself clean, Chris Wohl opens an ice rink. Frozen water—that does not flow or smell or color or relocate—is the kind of water Bourne can handle. I write about the new jobs renting skates, grilling hot dogs, smoothing the ice, plus the sled hockey team and the simple joy of having something different to do on weekends. Greenborough doesn’t have an ice rink, so we get visitors even, a few, strangers who come to glide over the ice holding hands under the mirror-ball lights, a small road trip to a sweet little town not so far away.

  I write about Bourne Memorial High’s about-time restructuring of its classes to amend ableist assumptions that, for instance, someone with my body or Monday’s brain could not possibly be as smart as Mab. We are not as smart. We are different smart. We are also smart. We are other good things as well.

  I write about what we learned from the college catalog River Templeton quietly put into my sister’s hands, how the test results that proved GL606 was finally safe were faked, a favor from an old family friend, how Bourne’s citizens had cast votes based on lies and therefore had their say denied. Again. I write about Nathan’s response to the email I send him where he says he was lied to too, where he claims he didn’t realize Duke had his old roommate tamper with the results. “I never imagined Harburon would risk their own stellar reputation to bury proof of unfavorable outcomes as a favor to my father,” Nathan tells me. “I assumed they just gave us, like, a discount on the testing.” He admits, though, that he is not surprised to learn everything wasn’t on the up-and-up and regrets his part in convincing the citizens of Bourne to take their chances with his family again, and he makes good on that apology by supplying documentation, his original test results that we could never lay our hands on, that prove finally—finally, finally—that Belsum knew and knew and knew and knew. And did it anyway.

  I do not write about the emails I exchange with his son where he says sorry and thank you and goodbye and I also say sorry and thank you and goodbye.

  But this is the story that gets picked up anyway. At first it’s the story of the story—the paper of an only slightly larger town upstate runs something in the spirit of a condescending “Small-Town Girl in Wheelchair Thinks She’s a Real Reporter” piece—but slowly a larger paper and a larger one still and other states and countries and wire services begin to understand the real story here. With their greater resources, they start to dig. And Belsum, and all they’ve done to us, is—at last and fully—exposed.

  Nora says she’s disappointed because she was hoping for more—an embarrassing public arrest at the country club, copious jail sentences served consecutively, maybe a light hanging—but she’s faking. She’s ecstatic. Vindicated. The settlement offer is not generous—because what would be overly much, given the circumstances?—but it is a lot: enough to change Bourne forever, to buy us a future, to buy us the world.

  Nora refuses on principle.

  But Russell explains: It’s not settling like compromise, concession, surrender. It’s settling like building a nest, a community, a place to live and to be. Home.

  And to this, Nora will at last agree.

  The money is maybe not enough to drive Belsum out of business, but something is—the bad press, the failure to relaunch, the abdication of the son. And of his son as well. The river no longer where they need it to be. Demolition equipment far larger and more powerful and, one imagines, harder to operate than our backhoe arrives and, in the course of only an afternoon, a few enormous small hours, levels the plant that has shadowed our town and our lives all our lives.

  That summer Pastor Jeff borrows Hobart’s truck for his thrift-shop tour and returns with boxes and boxes of used but new-to-Bourne books. Monday needs more shelves to home them all and is, momentously, out of wall space, but when Tom offers to rip out the kitchen and restore the Children’s section, Nora balks. With the spare change she’s raising fifty cents at a time from her reference-desk bake sales, soon the town will have enough money to replace Monday’s shoebox card catalog. Besides, Omar says, if they leave the kitchen in, the library could double as an event space and catering could use it, like if someone wanted to hold a wedding there, say, and though Monday does not like change or think libraries need ovens, she is well used to lending books from a kitchen. And though Omar does not say who might get married, his eyes, and Nora’s too, shine as if he did.

  And I keep writing. For I can write as well as anyone, writing requiring but one well-honed brain, a ranging imagination, a determined mind, and a resilient and wide-open heart. For I have voice to give we voiceless few. Or maybe “voiceless” is too strong. Undervoiced, let’s say. I
have perspective. Opinions. Ideas. And more than all that, it is by writing this down that I will honor my mother’s legacy, take up the mantle of her life’s work—never mind, as Pastor Jeff points out, that both are ongoing. She gets to lay it down now, as he also said, for it is our turn. We won’t forget. We won’t let you forget, either.

  I have stories to tell and, even better, stories to live.

  It’s only six months after Mab leaves for college that Monday bundles me onto a bus to another bus to another, and we go visit our sister. Monday spends two hours on Mab’s tiny dorm-room bed with her hands clamped over her ears shrieking about the state of Mab’s bathroom, shared by twenty-two teenage girls and professionally cleaned but once a week. To be honest, it’s not necessarily an overreaction, and besides, she managed the buses and going somewhere unknown and all the unpredictability of me, not to mention those many months of being one of only two instead of three. After she calms down, we go into town, and Mab shows us around, takes us to her favorite coffee place and her favorite restaurant and her favorite shops. In one of them, there’s a spinning rack of postcards. Monday turns it round and round and finally buys them all. Watching out the window on the bus ride home, she starts to think maybe she could leave Bourne after all, go to college herself (somewhere they let students live off-campus in en suite apartments with walls you can paint any shade of yellow you like), and then get a job out there, somewhere, anywhere, anywhere she wants.

  And me? Our road trip makes me see that needing help doesn’t mean there aren’t other places to get it besides home, other people who can provide it besides family, that having limits doesn’t mean I cannot—must not, maybe—bewitch and bewilder, range far and wander wide and wild. For home is like black holes—no matter how small, no matter how humble, they capture everything in range and trap it inside. The only way to escape their draw is to be far enough away.