But I realize, hearing myself incant it, that that makes it sound inevitable, handed down remotely and anonymously, no one to blame, too long ago to have anything to do with us here right now, and since none of that’s true, and since its not being true is the most important point really, I give up on the speech. We find a log and sit on it, and I try to figure out where to start if not at the beginning.
“You know at first it was great, I guess.” I’m not looking at him, but I can feel that he’s not looking at me either. “You—Belsum—brought a lot of jobs, a lot of business to town. You had big plans. GL606 was something to make something else better or cheaper. I never totally understood how or what. Before you even started production, though, you had dozens of companies signed up to buy it to put it in whatever they made. It was one of those things, between one thing and another thing, you know?”
“Not really.” He’s not touching me, but he is sitting a little closer than seems normal.
“You weren’t making a thing or selling a thing. You were making and selling a thing—this chemical—for other people to put in other things they were making and selling.”
“Oh.” He looks confused. I’ve never had to explain this to anyone before, and the dark spots in the story my mother’s told again and again reveal themselves slowly to be holes.
“That was nice,” he adds, “to make something for others.”
I am telling this wrong.
“My mother says the smell came first.” There’s no reason to tell him fast. We’re not in a rush. We have nothing else to do. There’s no reason not to tell it all except it’s overwhelming. It’s hard to explain something that’s completely foreign to the person you’re explaining it to but has always been true for you, like when you try to describe color to someone who’s blind or if you had to teach a frog to use its lungs when it had spent its whole life underwater using its gills. Or a toad. Whichever one is the amphibian. “When you ask my mother what it smelled like, she says chemicals. When you ask her what the chemicals smelled like, she says death. Sometimes she says it’s not what it smelled like, it’s what it stopped smelling like—wisteria and honeysuckle because everything stopped blooming all at once that spring, and then fresh-cut grass because people couldn’t be outside long enough to mow due to the reek, and eventually snow because sometimes it fell but never enough to freeze over the stench. And she also remembers how they had to cancel Fourth of July that year because the stink stank too much for anyone to go out and grill or roast marshmallows or watch fireworks. She remembers everyone kept their windows shut tight and just sat around sweating in their houses because the air was too foul to let inside. She remembers when it was over ninety degrees every day for three and a half weeks, but they wouldn’t open the pool because this yellow dust fell out of the sky and settled over the water half an inch thick.”
“Gross,” says River. “What was it?”
“No one knew”—I am playing tic-tac-toe with myself with a stick in the mud—“but then the smell stopped being just outside and came inside because the water smelled bad coming out of the tap, and it looked bad too—brown or oily or murky, like maybe there was something in it—and then you could taste it. People filled bottles and jars and took them down to the plant. At first, they just wanted to raise the alarm or whatever, like of course no one realized what was happening, and if they knew they’d do something immediately. And when that didn’t work, people stopped complaining and started, you know, panicking.”
“Why?”
I stop playing tic-tac-toe and turn to look at him. I make sure I’m looking at his eyes. “You—Belsum—didn’t stop. You kept doing what you were doing. You just kept saying the water was fine. It was fine for water to smell like that and taste like that and be that color. Perfectly safe.”
“Maybe it was,” River says hopefully.
I press my sneakers into the game I’ve drawn and pull them up again, watch water seep into the pattern the treads have left behind.
“My parents had a dog. Sparkle. Stupid name for a dog. This was before we were born. Sparkle was like a practice kid for them. He was a rescue dog, and he was like the son they’d never have. Not that they knew that yet. He got a lump one day.” I have one in my throat telling River this. When Mama gets to this part of the story, Mirabel always cries. When we were little, you’d think Mirabel wasn’t even listening, maybe not even hearing, and then Mama would come to this part of the story and tears would start to fall right out of Mirabel’s eyes without her making a sound. “Sparkle got a lump one day and then lots of lumps in the days after that, but Mama couldn’t get an appointment at the vet because suddenly the vet was full.”
I stop because probably he gets it, and what happens next is terrible and better left unsaid.
But he doesn’t get it. “Was one of the vets away? We had a cat for a while in Boston, and there were only two vets in the office, so it took forever to get an appointment in the summer because one or the other was always on vacation.”
“Doc Dexter wasn’t on vacation. It was hard to get an appointment because so many people’s pets were having seizures or bleeding from their mouths or growing tumors. Sparkle just lay in the kitchen with his tongue out on the tile all day long, trying to cool off in the closed-up-tight house.”
“And then what happened?”
“And then he died.”
“Holy shit!” He keeps looking at me, at my face, I think because he expects it to crack into a smile any moment now. Like I’m going to punch him in the arm and laugh and say, I’m just messin’ with you, or, Kidding! Gotcha!
But all I say is “Yeah. I know.” I do. It’s hard to hear. I get that. I would like to stop. I would like not to tell him the rest. I would like there not to be a rest.
“So what happened?” he asks, like we are indeed at the end of the story, like dead dogs is as bad as it gets, and all that’s left from here on out is the epilogue where everyone learns a lesson and cleans up the mess and moves on. But this is not that story. And this is not the end.
“The animals got sick and died. The pets and also whatever was living in the river—dead fish washing up all along the shore, dead frogs.” I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And then the people started getting sick. People who never had asthma before suddenly had it a lot. Rashes and burning. Seizures. Stomach problems. Headaches and coughs that didn’t go away.”
“Jesus.”
“And then people started getting cancer, and that didn’t go away either.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“No, I mean … shit.”
“Yeah.”
I let him just sit with it for a while. It’s a lot to take in. It’d be a lot to take in anyway, but it’s probably more if it’s your fault. His eyebrows have pulled into one in the middle, and he’s rubbing the spot between them as if easing them apart will also erase what’s drawing them together.
“Everyone?”
“Everyone what?”
“Did everyone … get sick or whatever?”