“I guess not.”
“You’ll leave, I’m certain, and out there, you’ll have your absolute pick of fellas, but afterward, maybe you might surprise yourself. Maybe you’ll come back.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew for sure I’d be able to leave, never mind return. I wanted to ask her where I would go and what it would be like. I wanted to ask her why anyone would fall in love with me when I didn’t know anything about anything. Instead I said, “Fellas?”
“Oh yes.” Pooh rubbed her hands together like a bad guy in a cartoon. “Fellas falling all over themselves to make Mab Mitchell’s babies. Now that I’d like to see.”
Which got me thinking about how she probably never would. That’s the part Petra and I don’t talk about when we talk about the SATs. If we get into college, we’ll go. We’ll get to leave Bourne, but we’ll have to leave everyone we know. And the difference between get and have is everything.
“Why don’t you ever serve cake?” I asked Pooh at the time, around the lump in my throat.
“Child, your mother bakes three a week. You don’t need me for cake. When you come to me, you get protein.” Bulgogi is an unusual after-school snack, but Pooh is an unusual friend.
Now Pooh lives in an apartment so she doesn’t have to negotiate steps, and there’s no one in the house next door to us. Most of our block sits empty, in fact. River turns to head back the way he came in, but I reach out and tug his sweatshirt sleeve, careful not to actually touch him, and pull him the other way.
It’s wet in the woods, but from below rather than above—the ground is sodden and muddy, but the leaf cover is thick enough that I lower my hood. River does the same, seems surprised it’s not raining in here, as if we’ve passed into some parallel dimension, and then looks at me, full on, like for the first time.
He puts out a hand—also to my sleeve, also not touching me—and says, “Wait.”
I do. I stop. I don’t say a word. Just look at him. And wait.
River is panting lightly, like we’ve been running. His color is high, red cheeks, bright eyes. He seems to be buzzhumming underneath where you can quite hear like the overhead lights at school.
What he says is “Your sister.”
“Yeah,” I say.
He shakes his head. Then he adds. “Is this whole town…?”
He trails off.
“Yeah,” I answer anyway.
“Whyyy?” He draws the word out. Not an idle why. A what-the-fuck why. A how-on-earth why. The why-God-why kind of why. Like he actually doesn’t know.
“Do you actually not know?”
“Know what?” he says.
How could they not tell him?
How could they tell him?
How can I tell him myself?
Seventeen years ago, your family built a chemical plant, killed a lot of people, ruined my whole generation, destroyed our town, mumbled a half-assed non-apology, packed up their shit, and left. And now, apparently, you’ve come back to reopen the plant and do it all over again.
“What’s … wrong with them?” he manages and then blushes. “I mean, sorry, it’s probably not cool to say it like that. What do you say? From what do they suffer?”
“If you’re in Elizabethan England.”
“What ails them?”
“You talk very strangely,” I can’t stop myself saying.
“So I’ve been told.” And then he tries again, more simply. More gently. “Are they okay?”
“Who?” He needs to narrow his question down.
“Everyone. Your sister.”
“Which one?”
He looks more stunned, takes this in, can’t think quite how to proceed.
“Mirabel developed brain damage in utero,” I begin. “She has lesions on her brain. Some days are better than others. But she’ll never walk. She’ll never talk so that many people besides us understand her. She’ll never be able to live on her own.” A swallow swoops low overhead. We must be too near her nest.
“God.” He pauses, forgets I’m there, takes this in too. “Is that what they all have? All those kids at school?”
“No. Some of them do. Some of them have other stuff.”
“Other stuff?”
“Cerebral palsy, spina bifida, hearing loss, blindness, microcephaly, heart defects. Missing limbs. Pastor Jeff’s not big on labels, official diagnoses, that kind of thing, but we’ve got it all.”
“Pastor Jeff?”
“Town doctor,” I supply, and because that stuns him into further silence, “Have you noticed all the buildings in town have ramps? Have you noticed most of the parking is wheelchair parking?”
“Why?” Bewildered again, full of appalled wonderment.
“There’s a lot of people who use wheelchairs.”
“No, why?” he explains.
“Or it’s intellectual disabilities,” I continue without answering. “Or learning or emotional ones. Or low birth weight, cognitive impairments, disrupted endocrine system, central nervous system toxicity, thyroid disease, high blood pressure, a whole lot of really nasty cancers. Not that there are any especially pleasant ones.”
“I don’t…” He has stopped looking horrified and started looking scared. “Mab, I don’t understand.”
He doesn’t. This is obvious. So our eyes look at each other, but our heads are both flooding with too many impossible details. He has no idea what’s going on here, how he’s landed in a town of people like this, how a town like this can even exist. He must be thinking of all the science fiction movies he’s ever seen, all the fantasy he read as a little kid. Maybe he fell asleep and woke to a new reality. Maybe he wandered through an invisible veil between worlds. Maybe he fell through a portal to another universe where everyone seems normal at first until you look more closely and realize something is very, very wrong.
And me? I can’t believe his parents brought him here without a warning about what we’re like, how we got this way, and their family’s role in making it happen. Even if they dispute the facts, even if they want to spin it differently for their kid, sending him into a den of wolves as if we’re only poodles seems mean. And shortsighted.
Plus now I have to tell him. Maybe that was their plan all along. Make someone else break all this to their son. Make someone else lay out the facts and the cause and effect. And then when he brings home the wild accusations, they get to deny and laugh them off and say, “Oh, of course not, don’t be silly,” and say, “Does that sound like something we’d do?” and say, “These people have too much imagination and too little sense.”
But I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to keep talking without telling him. And besides, he needs to know. Of course he needs to know. For his own safety. For his own comprehension. If he’s going to be lonely, shunned, and tortured—and he is—he should at least understand why.
And never mind all that, it’s his birthright.
I have the speech ready. I have heard it often enough from my mother. I can recite it like other people’s children can recite Scripture. It starts like the Bible, in fact. In the beginning. Felled innocence, followed hard by retribution and terrible fury. “Twenty years ago, Belsum scientists invented a chemical called GL606.”