So he has to wait while I type. “The key-copying machine is in the church.”
He waits for me to amend that statement, like maybe it’s autocorrect’s fault. It’s not. Then he waits for me to explain, but it’d take me till winter to type in a thorough gloss of Pastor Jeff’s fundraising schemes.
“Weird,” he says eventually.
I don’t disagree.
“I was also looking for spoons to practice bending with my mind,” he adds, speaking of weird, “but your hardware store doesn’t carry spoons either.”
“Do they in Boston?” my Voice wonders.
“Well no, but there’s a separate store for everything in Boston. Whereas your store seems more … general. It had this”—he opens a brown paper bag to show me his purchase: a cookbook thick as a thigh—“which is also an odd thing to have in a hardware store, so I thought maybe there was some kind of culinary section.”
“You cook?”
“No.” He grins. “That’s why I bought a cookbook. But I figure cooking’s like magic. You follow the directions, stir a bunch of stuff together, and presto! Poof! Dinner! Plus if your brain could stir the spoon for you, think how much time you would save.”
I consider what a difference telekinesis would make in my life. So that’s another thing River and I have in common.
“Can I walk with you?” he says, and I nod and push my joystick forward, and he falls into pace beside me, and we take in the perfect October morning, that lovely-all-over feeling of being outside and neither sweating nor shivering, though I am shivering, just a little, the smell of leaves drying or dying or whatever that smell is that comes when the trees turn and the seasons change and the whole world shifts toward what comes next.
But then he says, “Oh, Mirabel,” and blushes hard. “I shouldn’t have said ‘walk with you.’ I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean … I just meant…”
“I know what you meant,” my Voice assures him. I did, but that’s not what’s remarkable. What’s remarkable is that he even noticed. And having noticed, he could have just pretended he never said it. He could have just ignored it. Instead, he was brave. Awkward and brave.
“Thanks,” he says, which is sweet, thanking me. “I need to expand my vocabulary. I should study with your sister, come up with some other words besides ‘walk’ to mean, you know, wander around next to you. Traipse? Ramble? Take the air?”
I laugh.
“She’s great at the whole synonym thing,” he says, then scoffs, “And she says she’s worried about getting into college.”
I nod, agreeing that this is silly, not her worry but that worry. She’ll have no trouble getting in.
“Seems like smart runs in your family,” which is a nice thing to say but nothing compared to what he says next. “Do you think you three will go together?”
We three?
I stop to look at him. So he stops and looks at me. He reads the confusion on my face. “You know, to college?”
I type. “I will not go to college.”
He laughs. “That’s what your sister said too. You’re both crazy.”
This is not as miraculous as telekinesis, but it’s close.
When even my Voice is speechless, he says, “Maybe it’s like the hardware store.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Different in Boston.”
Isn’t everything?
“At my old school, everyone goes to college. Everyone wants to get out of town, and our town’s a lot more … you know, than yours.”
I try to nod.
“And you’re smart, you and your sister. Your sisters. So, you know…”
He trails off, but honestly, I don’t know. Not whether or not I’m smart—I know that, obviously. What I don’t know is why he thinks smart has anything to do with leaving town. What I don’t know is why he’s not smart enough to realize that the options open to him and his Boston classmates and even Mab and even Monday are not open to me.
“Anyway”—he keeps talking because I’ve stopped—“what are you doing all weekend?”
“Don’t know.” My Voice finally finds its voice. “You?”
“Same. Maybe I’ll make something from my cookbook. Maybe I’ll practice bending something else with my mind.”
“Start easy,” my Voice advises.
“Like what?”
“Noodles.”
He laughs. “Even I don’t need a cookbook to make noodles.”
“To bend,” my Voice explains. “Just add boiling water.”
He stops in the middle of the sidewalk again, looks a little stunned. “Forget what I said about college. You don’t need it.” He grins at me. “You’re a genius already. That’s the best idea I ever heard.”
* * *
I take the long way home and try to decide whether the fact that River thinks I’m as likely to leave home as my sisters puts him on the side of the angels (big-hearted, faith-filled, and not just faith in general but faith in me) or the demons (completely oblivious). It was only a few years ago it occurred even to me to wonder how—literally how—I will someday live when Nora does not. Maybe I’ll go on her heels, like a brokenhearted lover, from grief but also lack of care. I need a lot of help to be me. It’s not that I couldn’t hire people. I could, of course. It’s that no one on earth could ever do it as thoroughly and thoughtfully and devotedly as Nora. Mother love is a powerful force. She is so essentially a part of me—like a limb, an organ—that maybe without her, I will simply cease to be.
But it’s bigger than that. Maybe we’ll all find Bourne was only ever for a little while, and as our beleaguered parents age away, the next generation will peter into nothing. We’ll leave if we can, stay if we can’t, but many of us won’t survive, won’t live without our platoon of parental carers, won’t have children of our own, and Bourne will shed its citizens softly like trees do their October leaves, green fading to gold fading to brown, then quickly, quietly, returned to dust. The remaining shops and suppliers will go, the post office and Tom’s depot. Some of us will die almost at once without meds, filled G-tubes, emptied catheter bags. Some of us will go up in flames when there’s no one to help with the stove or herd us away from steep stairs or run baths with no more than four inches of not-too-hot water. Others will go more slowly as our wheelchairs shudder to still without anyone to repair, push, or recharge, as our implants stop whispering, our joints no longer bend, our Voices fall silent. And then, sooner than we imagine, when there’s no one left, the plant will finally close again forever. Our homes will crumble back to dirt, our buildings rot to stone and soil. The library will overgrow with trees who remember when all those pages used to be theirs. Our streets will bristle with weeds. Maybe the flowers will come back. And the river will flow on, as rivers do, as rivers must, and if its waters eventually run clean again, it will not matter anyway because there will be no one left to drink.
It sounds dark, I know, but it will happen to you too, to you and your family and your town. It sounds dark, but that’s apt for somewhere that’s had its day in the sun. These places, they don’t last long. They don’t stay. But while they’re here, they’re safe and whole, like cocoons, like eggs, on the way to somewhere else, yes, but for the moment, a world entire.