“It wasn’t his job to protect you,” Apple says.
“Truth,” I say for it was not his job.
“Maybe he wasn’t perfect,” Apple says, “but he did the best he could.”
“For himself,” I say, “and for you, his family, it is accurate to say he did the best he could. But not for us. For us he could have done much, much better.”
“Truth,” she whispers. Then she says, “Thank you, Monday. I hope you win tomorrow.”
“Because you want to go home?” I ask, for I have learned that home is not just where you live. Home is also where you want and need and are meant to live. Home is also the people who are there with you, who are the people who will help you live, who are the people who will do the best they can, not just for themselves, but for you, their neighbors and friends, as well.
“Because I want what’s fair,” says Apple Templeton.
Three
Monday wore green to school today, but the rain keeps switching over to snow flurries then sleet then back to rain again, none of it lasting long enough to accumulate but relentless, sopping, and deep-in-the-bones cold. They say voter turnout is lower when the weather’s bad and the issues local, especially for whoever’s ahead in the polls, but in our case, there are no polls, and however near, the stakes could not range wider. The voting booth is a wooden box with a slit in the lid into which you insert a red poker chip if you want to rebuild the dam and reopen the plant and a green poker chip if you want Belsum to leave and never return. The jars of chips are helpfully labeled in case you’re color-blind or confused. It is extraordinarily appropriate that in Bourne voting literally feels like gambling.
Pastor Jeff, who as a man of God is what passes around here for trustworthy and unbiased, serves as election chair, but it’s a weekday so he must also serve as Dr. Lilly. The voting box, therefore, sits in the clinic waiting room. As do I. People with appointments today come in and vote and then sit and wait their turn to be seen. People without appointments come in and vote and then sit and chitchat with the waiting patients. Some people come in and vote and then wait for nothing in particular except for the rain to abate. It is not a festive atmosphere exactly, but it is communal, all in, everyone here, at least for a little while. I would bet that counting uncomfortable glances at me and/or my mother’s shut door would be an effective exit poll. If so, at lunchtime, we are neck and neck. My mood, however, mirrors the weather.
Because win or lose, I am at every turn betrayed.
Not just by River, who told what he shouldn’t have, who chose his family over ours—which might maybe be understandable except he also chose wrong over right, cowardice over integrity, fear over fair, and, worst of all, reversion to form instead of change, growth, and becoming the person I had faith he was, or at least could be. His apology was heartfelt I’m sure, but also empty—too easy—and also too late.
I am betrayed by my eldest sister who also told what she shouldn’t have, who also chose someone else over our family, though at least in her case it was because of love, at least some of it was. But mostly it is this: We have shared a room, a life, a heart all these weeks and months and all the years before these weeks and months, and she has fallen in love without ever once noticing that I have fallen in love as well. Worse than not ever once noticing. Not ever once imagining. We communicate, Mab and I, without language, without motion, without space, passage, sense, or sometimes even purpose. We are so much the same—for two people who navigate the world so differently—it is appalling that she could love another and not realize that I would—of course I would—do the same.
I am betrayed by the adults whose job it is to look out for me because if you asked us, we who are coming slowly of age, we would vote Belsum out—without pause or pang or division—no matter what wonders they dangled before our innocent eyes. I am betrayed by my town, my neighbors and friends, these people with whom I have strived and struggled and suffered, the only people I have ever known, my entire world, roughly half of whom have come before me today to vote that it’s okay with them, or okay enough, what was done to all of us. And what was done to me.
Then the door to Nora’s office opens, her last patient of the day shuffles out, and my mother stands in her doorway regarding me through red, weary eyes.
“You okay?” She is tired but smiling, hopeful, willfully optimistic.
I nod and point to her.
“Oh yeah, me too, better than okay actually. It’ll be close, but I think it’s going to go our way finally.”
She glances at my face to see if I know something she doesn’t yet. I don’t. An hour ago, Pastor Jeff came out of his office, told me to cross my fingers, and left with the box of poker chips tucked inside his raincoat.
“Cheer up, Mir-Mir.” Nora’s bouncing a little. “Everything’s great. This time, I know it, I feel it, everything’s going to be just great.”
And it is the stress of the day maybe, of the damp quicksilver chill of the weather, of watching every single member of this entangled town trickle in to vote, or perhaps it is just one betrayal too many, but it is too much for me.
“It is not great.” I turn the volume on my Voice all the way up to shout at my mother. “And it is not going to be great.”
She is alert at once in case I’ve been withholding information about the vote. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” my Voice says. “Ever.”
“Mirabel, you scared me.”
“You should be scared.”
She is. I can see it in her face. And I feel bad, but not bad enough to stop. She waits while I type.
“No matter how the vote goes, I already lost.”
Mab thinks it’s not fair this town is so boring. Monday thinks it’s not fair that sometimes it’s raining in the morning but sunny in the afternoon and she didn’t bring a change of clothes to school. But what’s not fair is what’s not fair, the ways they feel they’ve been wronged by fate versus the ways I have.
“You have to look on the bright side, love,” my mother tells me. “It’s the only way.”
“No,” my Voice says, and she waits while I type. “You have to let me be on the dark side.”
“Never,” she says.
“Aaaaaaaahh!” I scream, I cry, I roar, and then I close my eyes to gather the energy necessary to type. “Even if everyone votes the right way, I will still be this way.”
“I love you this way,” Nora says.
“That is not enough,” my Voice says, and we are both stopped by it, for it is heartbreaking and it is worse than heartbreaking. And it is true. It is not enough to be loved by your mother. It is a good start, and you wouldn’t want to do without, and it helps, but it is not enough. You need also the love of your community, the love of friends and admirers, the love of strangers who don’t know you but still wish you well, the love that comes from passion and from commitment and from someone who will never, never betray you and not just because they’re related to you. You need more love. We all need more love. And here—in this town, in this body—love is abundant but it is not sufficient. It is not enough.
She crosses the room and takes my head in both her hands, makes me look into her eyes when she says, “You are wonderful exactly as you are, and I wouldn’t have you any other way.”