“Yes.” Clear but soft.
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes, Nora.” He joins her on the floor so that they’re kneeling face-to-face, and he reaches out and takes her hands. And she lets him. “It’s not fair, and it’s not right, and God knows it’s not easy. But it’s happening anyway, so not kicking the man out of the bar is our best chance of making it happen well.”
“Why should I want it to go well for them? Why aren’t my fingers and toes crossed that they’re burning in the flames of bankruptcy hell within a month of resumed operations?”
“Not go well for them. Go well for us. Protecting our citizens, making Bourne as good as it can be, this is my job.”
She wrenches her hands from his. “Congratulations on finally figuring that out, Omar.”
He winces again but says anyway, “No, Nora, I’ve known it all along. You think any of this was my plan? My hope for this place?”
“No, I think you were shortsighted and greedy, which is worse.” She stands, but he stays on his knees, so now it’s like she’s talking down to a child. “I think you went with a get-rich-quick scheme instead of doing the hard work to find the good and honest ways that would have shored us up instead of tearing us down. I think you failed to protect us.”
“I did fail to protect us.” He sits back on his heels, hangs his head, but then looks back up at her. “That I did. But I’m not sure the rest of that’s fair. I didn’t foresee what was going to happen. No one did.”
“They did.” Nora snorts. “You know Belsum knew GL606 wasn’t safe.”
“Maybe they did. But I didn’t. I wanted to grow this place. New jobs, new opportunities.” He stands finally and ranges around the living room while he talks, the politician in him walking the stage. “I thought we’d start slow, open a handful of new places to eat, to shop, and the plant would grow, and new families would move in and good doctors to treat them and a movie theater, and eventually there’d be nice hotels and shopping centers and four-star restaurants, and Bourne would thrive and all of us with it. That was my plan. It wasn’t quick and shortsighted. It was the opposite of that. It didn’t work out that way. I’m not saying it wasn’t an unmitigated disaster. I’m not saying I wouldn’t change every single thing if I could. But you can’t say my heart wasn’t in the right place. I was wrong, and it was my job to be right, and I failed at it. Miserably. But I was trying to do the hard, right thing.” He stops in front of her. “I just didn’t know, Nora. They lied to me too.”
She sighs and she waits and then she says, very quietly, “I know that, Omar. I do.”
“And I’m still trying.” He reaches for her hands again, but this time she won’t let him, so he clasps his own in front of him, pleading, almost praying. “If I could keep them from coming back, I would. But since I can’t, I’m working with what I have here, and that’s treating them well in the hope they treat us well back, being nice so they’ll be nice in return. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.”
“How am I not being nice?” Nora’s palms are upturned like she’s not asking Omar, she’s asking God.
“They’re beating his kid,” he says again.
“That’s not me.”
“You’re riling people up.”
“I’m not,” she protests.
“I hear different.”
“From whom?”
“Everyone.” His voice is rising again. “Everyone knows, Nora. It’s always you. You are the town crazy lady who just can’t let this go.”
She looks at him, and her eyes fill, and of the three of us, I don’t know who’s most surprised.
“And here I’ve been thinking it’s the rest of you who are crazy,” she says when she can speak again. “But maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s been me all along.” She balls her fists against her chest like she can’t decide whether to fight or to grasp her heart in her hands. “They poisoned us, Omar. And when they realized it—or realized we knew it—instead of stopping, they denied it so they could keep poisoning us because poisoning us was making them money. And when finally, finally they couldn’t deny it anymore, they just left. Didn’t try to help. Didn’t try to fix it. Just left us ruined. In ruins. In the face of that, is it crazy to chase after them for sixteen years, or is it crazy to just move on? Is it crazier to demand some kind of restitution, even though restitution is impossible, or to pretend all is well and everything’s fine when nothing is or will be ever again?”
“I don’t know,” Omar says quietly.
“You think I don’t know I look crazy?” She’s quiet too. “I know. You think I don’t know what this crusade is costing me? But what does it cost to think we never deserved any better, and this is just the way it is, and there’s no point in fighting?”
“Maybe it’ll be different this time.” He wraps his fingers around her fists.
“It’s too late.”
“Only for us.”
“Who else is there?”
“Them. Unfortunately. And they don’t owe us anything.”
“They owe us everything.”
“All we can hope for is their good grace.”
“Well, in that case”—Nora unclaws her hands from under his—“we are truly, truly fucked.”
One
The point my sisters ganged up on me to make in the hallway outside tutoring yesterday is the one it always is: it’s the least I can do.
It’s not that Mirabel inspires me in some sparkly-disabled-sister-inspirational-rainbow way. More like she shames me in a regular-sister-who’s-both-smarter-and-nicer-than-I-am way. It’s the least I can do, not the way Mrs. Radcliffe says when she makes us tutor: I am blessed so I should serve. More like: Mirabel can’t, but what’s my excuse? If Mirabel could, she would shout down the kids kicking River’s ass, demand protection for him from the school administration, use her body to shield his, use her fists to give as good as River got. I guess it makes sense Mirabel feels a kinship with anyone at the mercy of bullies, circumstance, their own physical limitations, and shit they inherited from their parents that isn’t their fault, but the only way she can help is to make me do it for her.
You know that saying “Easier said than done”? This is true even when you can’t talk.
Still, I was convinced. Am convinced. Can you be reluctantly hell-bent? I am that. What I can do and whether I should do it for River Templeton may be in question, but anything I can do for Mirabel, I do, if not always gladly then resolvedly.
So I submit that into evidence. Okay, yes, a part of me is thinking that if I help him, he’ll help me back, actually do what he said he would, spy harder on his father, get us proof we can use. But part of me—a bigger part—decides to help him because I love my sister. Petra would call this exculpating.
Our last class of the day is English, and River’s knee bounces through the whole of it. He sits one behind, one over from me, and I can feel him through the floor. When he catches me looking back at him, he smiles then winces. His bottom lip is split again.