Your loving brother,
Elmer
I finish reading.
No one says anything.
Then Mab says, “Oh.”
Then she gets up and rummages around on her desk until she locates the emails River gave her.
First her face gets very white and then it gets very red. First her face gets very serious and then it smiles, but it is not a smile that means happy. It is a smile that means crazy. “I don’t believe it.” She laughs. It would be more accurate to say she cackles. “It’s a typo.”
“What typo?” People should proofread. It is a critical step because it ensures you have conveyed your intended meaning, and meaning is important. Otherwise, why would you bother to write it down?
“They’re not worried we’ll find the damn paperwork.” Mab’s face shows happy, surprised, and angry all at once which should not be possible but is. “They’re worried we’ll find the dam paperwork.”
I think she has forgotten all about the sex. So that is one good thing.
Three
Usually Nora goes into another room to call Russell. Leaves us in the kitchen and goes into the living room. Leaves us in the living room and goes up to hers. It’s a small house, so it’s more the illusion of privacy than the fact of it, but even the illusion of something precious can also be precious.
Today, though, she puts the laptop right on the coffee table with us gathered around, prays to the wifi gods for a strong enough connection, and lets Monday read Russell the letters she found. We are expecting tight, tentative optimism, but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen Russell or he’s seen all of us.
“Amazing!” he enthuses when Monday finishes reading.
“Really?” Nora breathes.
“Look at you girls!” He is grinning and shaking his head. “You’re all grown up!”
We forget that Russell knew us before we knew ourselves, back when we were brand-new. We forget that Russell began fighting this battle long before we did. We forget that Russell has loved not just our mother, however complicatedly, but the three of us as well for a very long time.
Last night, we looked—now that we finally knew what we were looking for—through Monday’s boxes in case the town deed to the dam was also hiding, misfiled, in the house all along.
“It could be like in a horror movie where the girl locks herself inside so she will be safe,” Monday said, “but the zombie or madman or monster or alien or deranged ex-boyfriend is already in there.”
“He’s only already in there if the girl is stupid,” Mab said, dismissing her, “or slutty.”
“You had sex,” Monday said, “so let us look through all the boxes again.”
Monday read over a great many pieces of paper herself, and I read over the great many pieces of paper she piled on my tray, and Mab lay on her bed with her legs up the wall and said things like “It’s so amazing. It’s beyond words. I really can’t tell you what sex is like.”
And Monday responded things like “Lie. That is all you have been doing since you had it.”
And Mab said, “Would you just concentrate on what you’re doing?”
And Monday said, “Why cannot you help us?”
And Mab said, “You’re the one in charge of pointless pieces of paper.”
And Monday said, “On television, sex makes people happy, but you are still annoyed and annoying.”
And I tried to remind myself that if I killed them both I would never be able to use the toilet again when my mother was not home.
Looking through all those papers was fruitless maybe, but not pointless. It was distracting. And I needed a distraction. It’s not like River and Mab having sex was a surprise, but that doesn’t make it any less of a betrayal—not by her and not of me, but a betrayal nonetheless. It’s not that I’m jealous—at least not exactly—more like I don’t want River to have sex with anyone. Not in an if-I-can’t-have-him-nobody-can way. In that I want him to be beyond—above maybe—his body’s baser limitations. I transcend mine every hour of every day. Is it too much to ask him to do the same for one afternoon with my sister?
Because I was trying to ignore Mab talking about River, because I was trying to ignore Monday talking about Mab, I was concentrating hard on the documents before us and can say this with confidence: Monday’s boxes do not contain the deed to the dam or anything relating to it or the land sale.
In their stead, Nora reads Russell the emails River got off his father’s phone in which, it is finally clear, on November 22, Duke Templeton plans to start repair work on the dam. Our dam. It was brand-new when he built the plant, but two decades later it’s as worse for wear as the rest of us. This is what Apple meant when she said Nathan could drown down here, the leaks and cracks she was worrying over in therapy. You can actually see them on the wall of the dam. Mab remembers brown curls of water wending their uneven way down the side from when she and River sat along its top and discussed leaping off the one in Switzerland. And those are only the cracks you can see. There must be at least as many on the lake side, but no reputable contractor would begin underwater work around here December through February. That’s why Duke was in such a hurry. Without a sufficiently functional dam there is no river there, and without the river there is no chemical plant.
The papers Duke was hoping stayed hidden and the papers Apple was desperate to find may have pointed the same place, but they are not the same papers. Neither wanted anyone to know about the dam but for different reasons. She wanted to destroy the letters that showed her father knew Belsum’s plan hinged on dumping chemical waste, knew the diverted river would be polluted and ruined, but sold them the land anyway, addressing the problem only by donating a house and taking his riches and moving away.
Apple knew her father’s actions were good profit-strategy but bad human-being, bad citizen-being, a bad legacy. What she didn’t know was that they were the missing link in the lawsuit, the elusive, irrefutable, incontestable proof Nora’s been after for our entire lifetimes.
What Russell says when Nora’s done laying all this out is “You’re gorgeous.” He is shaking his head in awe. “All four of you. Just gorgeous.”
“Russell. Focus. Are you listening? This is what we’ve been waiting for all these years. Proof Belsum knew before beginning operations that there was harmful effluent they needed to hide. In our river!” She discloses not a single word of Apple’s therapy sessions. She does not so much as hint at Nathan’s PhD or the reason for Belsum’s shift from container parts to chemicals or the question of GL606’s provenance. She does, though, report Omar’s story about Apple’s frantic search through the town filing cabinets, which, after all, is not a doctor-patient confidentiality breach, only hearsay.
“Just gorgeous,” Russell says again.
Nora blushes with exasperated pleasure, and also, of course, she is used to his cautious pessimism in the face of her surely-this-time enthusiasms. She hugs Mab with one arm, squeezes my foot with her other hand, bends her head toward Monday who gives Nora a small smile of thanks for not touching her.
“My girls,” she says.
Maybe she senses his sense that it’s too late. Maybe it’s all these revelations, finding everything she’s been searching for for so long and finding also that it doesn’t mean what she thought it would. Maybe it’s that the question Mab and I wrestled was never a question for her. I can see Mab grinding her teeth and know she’s wondering what I’m wondering. If we told him about Nathan’s tests would that be enough? Or would it not matter because we could never prove he shared them with his father, or that his father, without a PhD in chemistry himself, knew what they meant? But Nora was never going to use anything Nathan disclosed in therapy anyway. Maybe her sad smile is because of any of that, or maybe she’s just tired, or maybe she finally sees what Russell’s been trying to tell her for years now.