“Lie,” Monday pronounces.
“Truth,” my Voice insists.
“You did not even meet him, Three. He was nice.”
“Yeah, right,” says Mab.
“He was. He was polite. He was not angry I was blocking his way out of the bathroom even though there are many germs there. I would become alarmed if someone tried to trap me in a bathroom.”
“Duh,” I say, my one word you don’t need triplet-sense to understand.
“Plus he answered all of my questions.”
“Lie,” Mab says, and I giggle. “No one could ever answer all of your questions.”
“I am not playing right now,” Monday says. “I am making the point that River Templeton answered all my questions I asked him on the way out of the bathroom. And also he cannot be blamed because he was not even here when what happened happened because he was not alive yet.”
“Point,” I type.
“Exactly, Monday, that is the point. He wasn’t here. We were all here. We were all living with the consequences of what his family did. And where were they? Safely elsewhere. They protected themselves. They protected him. They kept their distance. And now look at him. He’s attractive, intelligent, fully mobile—”
“Truth or dare, Mab?” my Voice interrupts.
“It is my turn,” Monday says.
“Attractive?” my Voice presses Mab, but she ignores me.
Monday has turned on the light and is kneeling up in bed to look at herself in the mirror over the bureau. “I was born here, and I am attractive.”
“Lie.” The Voice is not great for comic timing, so it takes its opportunities when they come.
Monday knows she’s being teased, but Mab reassures her anyway. “It’s not that he’s attractive and we’re not. It’s that he’s whole.” And we’re not, she does not add. Does not need to add.
“Is the reason you said River Templeton is an asshole because he stole my library,” Monday asks, “and now I have to write a retraction postcard announcing that the library is not re-relocating to the library after all?”
I smile at Mab, and she smiles back. “Truth or dare?” she asks me.
“Truth.” It is my only option really.
“Is River Templeton an asshole because he stole Monday’s library”—Mab turns the light back off—“or is there another reason?”
I tap the picture of the adult woman. “Nora,” my Voice says but leaves the rest unspoken. What about her lawsuit? I shouldn’t say hers. She wouldn’t like it. It’s all of ours. It’s what she’s doing for us all, not “us all” her progeny, “us all” her entire town. This has been her obsession—you might say addiction—but also her solace for almost two decades. And though we don’t know what the Templetons’ reemergence into our lives means, we can be certain Nora will think it is very bad news.
We three lie in separate beds in the dark, considering our mother.
Finally Monday says, “Do me.”
“Truth or dare?” Mab asks, unnecessarily. Monday always chooses truth. For one thing, she’d rather die than stick her foot in a toilet. She might die if you tried to make her stick her foot in a toilet. But mostly, she thinks she’s incapable of telling a lie. This makes her feel like she’s winning the game.
“Truth.”
“What will we do when Mama finds out they’re back?”
“She cannot find out,” Monday says.
“Lie.” Mab sounds resigned, exhausted. “She’s going to find out.”
“It is not a lie, but it might be incorrect,” Monday admits. “It is more accurate to say we cannot be the ones to tell her.”
* * *
Monday tells her first thing the next morning. The coffee has not even cooled enough to sip before she blurts out, “We have a new student at school, and he is living in my library, and that means the library cannot move there, and that means my extra-large postcard was a lie, and his name is River Templeton, and his father is Nathan Templeton, and his grandfather is Duke Templeton, and it is not a different Duke Templeton but the exact same one.”
Nora’s expression passes from confusion to laughing because she’s sure she’s being teased to anger to horror, like a magician flipping over one card after another after another. She lands on the saddest face I’ve ever seen. “My Duke Templeton?” she whispers finally, the opposite of how Monday says “My library,” desperate to disavow ownership rather than claim it. She looks at Mab for confirmation because sometimes Monday doesn’t realize when someone’s kidding or lying or being sarcastic. Mab has to look away from our mother’s broken face, but she nods at her shoes.
Nora squeezes her earlobes for some reason then drops her hands to her chest. “Christ,” she says and doesn’t say anything more, and neither does anyone else until finally, what feels like an hour later, she says to, I guess, all of us, “Why?”
Mab shrugs, and Monday shrugs, and I make a motion with my hand that means what a shrug means. We do not know.
“They canceled tutoring” is all Mab can offer.
But Nora nods. “Like when someone dies.”
Mab and I exchange glances. It’s not that we don’t have the same question Nora does—Why?—it’s that that question is overwhelmed by the ones it presages. Nora is worried about what possible reason the Templetons have for being here. We are worried about our mother.
She sits, pale and not closing her mouth all the way. Her eyes are scary, somewhere else, like her mind is whirling away from us. She keeps shaking her head no, seeming about to speak, changing her mind. She leaves for work without another word.
But over scrambled eggs and summer squash for dinner, Nora is new, smile tight and bright, hopeful, which is not a thing we ever see her be, so it would be strange regardless. As it is, it’s alarming. Creepy. When she speaks, what she says, finally, beaming and to all three of us at once, is “You can find out.”
“What can we find out?” Monday asks, but I can see Mab feeling the same sinking feeling I am.
“The kid knows something,” Nora says. “Everything maybe. But maybe he doesn’t know he knows, or maybe he knows but he doesn’t know we don’t know, or he doesn’t know he isn’t supposed to know or isn’t supposed to tell.”
“I do not know,” Monday says. What our mother’s talking about, she means.
But Nora doesn’t get it. She’s grinning like the villain in act two of a superhero movie. “No, but you can find out. You can find everything.”
* * *
The next morning, I get up and go to church, seeking not salvation but alone time, which is nearly as elusive and just as holy. Mab and Monday rose not long after the sun and left before Nora even got me out of bed. Sometimes this eats at me. Sometimes them together without me seems as cruel as if my own legs went walking off and I had to wait for them here. But it’s hard to be forever one of three or half of two, a third of triplets, a dependent daughter. These solo Saturday mornings are my only time alone, so they’re painful but they’re also precious, and I’m grateful as a nun to be on my way somewhere as well.