Ahh.
And what I do is laugh. It’s the wonder of the day and the magnitude of something like this coming on the heels of something like that. It’s the cumulative hours and weeks and years we’ve spent thinking about this and this and nothing but this. It’s running errands and just happening by the one restaurant in all the world you’ve been longing to try for sixteen years, and they have a table and your favorite food on special, and your dish comes out, and it smells like a dream, but they haven’t brought you any silverware so you just have to sit there, smelling it, knowing how great it would taste if only you had a fork while eventually it gets cold and eventually the place closes and eventually your perfect meal molds and then rots and then dries and turns to dust and blows away. Except that doesn’t make sense because you’d just use your hands, right? Even in that fancy, perfect restaurant, if you had to, if you didn’t have another choice, you’d plop your face into your plate and eat up like a farm animal. Want of utensils wouldn’t stop you. Nothing would stop you.
“Did Russell say it was completely inadmissible?” I wipe my eyes. “Maybe there’s a loophole.”
“She says,” Mirabel’s Voice begins, and I wait until I realize that’s all there is. Emphasis is hard for the Voice. What Mirabel means is She says. It isn’t Russell who won’t use it. It’s Mama.
“No. No way.” Not appalled. Incredulous. Less than incredulous. There’s not a part of me that believes it.
“Doctor-patient confidentiality,” Mirabel’s Voice repeats.
“Is that why he came?” I ask. “Somehow he knew we were close, and he thinks that since he told Mama in therapy she won’t use it?”
“I don’t think so,” Mirabel’s Voice says.
Monday is rubbing her bottom lip with her left thumb. Me too. It’s a weird thing to turn out to be genetic, or maybe we’ve just been mirrors for so long. You’d think she wouldn’t because it can’t be sanitary. You’d think I wouldn’t because she does. But maybe this is how it gets toward the end—everything stops making sense.
“Fine,” I finally sputter. “You’ll tell them.”
“No,” Mirabel’s Voice says.
“What do you mean?”
“No,” she explains.
“Why the hell not?”
“Doctor-patient confidentiality,” she says a third time.
“You’re not a doctor.”
“Neither is Mama,” Monday points out, predictably.
“You’re not a medical professional,” I amend, though I needn’t, not for Mirabel’s sake. “You aren’t a therapist. He wasn’t getting treatment from you. You were just there.”
She types. “Nora told him nothing he said would leave the room.”
“She was wrong!” I shout.
“No,” her Voice says.
“Why the hell not?” I demand again, louder.
“Wrong,” her Voice says.
“It’s not wrong. What they did was wrong. What they’re doing is wrong. The whole thing is wrong. They’re corrupt and morally bankrupt and ethically void, and they play dirty, and they’ve shown very clearly for two decades that they don’t give one shit about us. And you’re going to die on the hill of a tiny stupid technicality because you’d be breaking a pinky swear?”
“Yes,” says her Voice.
“Are you nine?”
“No.”
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“Then why do you even go to therapy?” My arms are wide, my head flung back so I can rail at the heavens but really at my sister and not the usual one.
“Didn’t know he was coming.”
“But you knew Apple was. You’ve been eavesdropping on Apple’s sessions for weeks. It’s not like it was ever much of a plan—that she would just happen to mention something to her therapist about some documents her husband and father-in-law were hiding—but if you weren’t going to use it anyway, why bother?”
“Point,” she says.
“How is that the point?”
But she shakes her head, annoyed, frustrated I’m not getting it. “… us,” she adds, and now I have even less idea what she means.
She rolls her eyes and types, “… to what we need.”
“So you’ve actually overheard the evidence we’ve been desperately searching for, which would end a battle your mother’s been fighting since you were born and avert a crisis for an entire town, but you won’t tell our lawyer about it because you overheard it in therapy. But if something Apple said, also in therapy, pointed us to evidence you could find yourself, that would be fine.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not Nancy Fucking Drew.”
“In addition to the Nancy Drews in our clothing drawers, there is a copy of The Clue in the Old Album on the fifth stair from the bottom on the right side as you are going up”—Monday sounds even more nervous than usual. She does not like yelling—“and a copy of Nancy’s Mysterious Letter under the rubber bands in the junk drawer.”
“Tell me that’s not why,” I say to Mirabel. Implore. Plead. Beg. Whatever. “You’re having such a good time putting together clues and solving mysteries and being at the center of the action for once in your life you hate to see it end.”
“No.”
“If he just tells you, it’s too easy.”
“No.”
“Nathan’s all, ‘We did it. We’re guilty.’ And you’re like, ‘No, I want to be the hero. I want to prove it with my own cunning.’”
“Feel bad for him,” she types.
“Oh, so you’re stupid!” I shout. Monday clamps her hands over her ears and is pressing herself into the wall. “Naive, manipulable, and stupid. He needs therapy because he feels so sad he poisoned us, especially since he’s trying really hard to do it again, and you feel bad for him?”
“Yes.”
“You got played.” I can’t even look at her.
She shrugs the one shoulder she can shrug. Then she types, “Moral high ground.”
“Bullshit,” I say.
“Difference between us and them.”
“They’re smart, and we’re dumb? They’re solvent, and we’re destitute? They’re living in the real world, and we’re dying here? In the unreal world? Abandoned, forsaken, and dumb as rocks?”
She’s ignoring me, typing while I yell at her. Her Voice says, “If we behave like them, we are no better.”
“Sure we are.”
“No.”
“Fine, then. I can live with that.”
“No.”
I grab fistfuls of my hair at both temples and pull hard. Mirabel and I usually understand each other without the Voice, and it is part of the genius of her that she says what she means in fewer words than you can. But right now her nos are more than succinct, more than stubborn even. They’re petulant, dismissive, a refusal to defend herself, not because she knows she’s right but because she doesn’t care whether she is or not, doesn’t care what I think, has already made up her mind and will not be moved. Which is not how it works between us.