Tears snail down my cheeks which make tears snail down hers, and we sit there looking at each other through our mollusky eyes. I know that she means what she says. And I know there are ways she does not mean what she says.
Because why wouldn’t she want me different than I am? Why wouldn’t she wish it for me? Anyone would want a child whole and limitless. Anyone would wish it for themselves as a parent, and anyone would wish it for their child, for any child.
“I mean it.” She can see me doubting her. “You are so strong. You do a whole body’s worth of work with one hand and one amazing brain. You are so gentle. You are so smart. I know there are things you can’t do, but it’s a package deal. And it’s such a lovely package I think it’s worth the trade-off.”
She is still holding my face so I can’t see my tablet to raise my Voice. If I could, I would say I don’t want a trade-off. I want both.
“I know it sucks,” she says. “I know it’s not fair. I would trade places with you if I could. You know I would.”
I acknowledge the truth of this statement with my eyebrows.
She smiles, but a sad smile. “But if your body didn’t limit you, if it didn’t make you sit still and watch and listen and process, if you didn’t have so much time to think, you wouldn’t be you. And I love you.” I roll my eyes, but there’s more. “You wouldn’t be so wise or so observant or the smartest person I know.”
For she is my mother. Of course she thinks the part of me that works best is beautiful.
And this is Nora’s permanent, impossible bind.
If her children are perfect just as they are, then why is she so angry at Belsum?
If they’ve caused such damage, where is her proof?
And if the proof is us, doesn’t that mean we are broken indeed?
She sees my skepticism, or maybe it’s my scorn. “It’s possible to want two things at once, you know.”
I do, of course.
“Even opposite things. Even things that contradict and contraindicate. We don’t talk about that enough.”
I don’t talk about anything enough.
“Not we,” she clarifies. “They. In the world. Out there.” She waves at it, a world beyond Bourne. Sometimes it seems so close I think I’d be able to see it if only I could get up a little higher, like from the roof of the school maybe or the crest of the cemetery. Sometimes it seems so far I don’t even believe it exists. Opposites. This is her point. She means she is angry at what was done to her—what was done to hers—but she still loves us as we are. She means she can live in the past and still drag it along with her into the future. She means—or maybe she doesn’t but it’s still true—that this lawsuit is killing her and this vote is killing her and this battle is killing her. But she would not survive without it. So it’s hard to argue Nora can’t fight while she’s moving on just because those things are opposites.
“It is because of you I do this,” she allows, “but not the way you think. I want you to know you can fight. I want you to know you should fight. You will be treated carelessly and cruelly, unfairly and maliciously, shortsightedly and selfishly in this world, and when you are, I want you to know you do not have to take it like you deserve nothing better and you’re powerless to protest. I want you to know you can win.”
Another impossible paradox: how to show your children they can keep getting up when all they ever see is the part where you fall.
She lets me go. I turn back to my Voice. “I am angry and sad I cannot have what I should have.”
“Me too,” she says. Maybe she means she is also angry and sad I cannot have what I should have. Or maybe she means she is angry and sad she cannot have what she should have. Both probably.
“It is okay we are angry and sad,” I type. “You have to be okay.”
Nora wants to comfort me, wants to praise me, cheer me, bolster me, applaud me. But not as much as she wants to hear me.
“Okay,” she says.
What else can I ask of her?
* * *
The bar is closed on account of the vote as if it’s a polling place. Truth be told, voting at the bar makes a lot more sense than voting at the medical clinic, but that’s not how it is and it’s not why Frank closed. He wants to go back to being neutral territory. He wants the bar to be a place of succor and comfort not hostility and rancor. He doesn’t want to spend all night looking at everyone looking at each other like they’ve all been betrayed. So Nora and I bundle up and head for home. She makes dinner. Mab cleans up—by herself and without complaint. Monday sits and squirms like she sat on a crab.
At last, the phone rings.
It’s Omar.
And it’s official.
The truth is, it wasn’t a vote. Not really. You can’t ask people to vote if they can’t make a choice. The question was not was Belsum culpable all those years ago. It was not are they repentant and reformed now. It was not do we believe improvements were made and operations are safe going forward. It was one thing. Are we more angry or more desperate? Which is a measure of our souls. It may be a question, but it isn’t a choice.
Still, we were asked. They were asked. And the voters of Bourne—not all of them but enough of them—voted to repair the dam and take their chances and their jobs and the rest of us down with them. It is not okay. Not remotely. But Belsum wins anyway.
One
The next night there’s a knock on the door after a dinner no one ate anyway.
River.
I exchange looks with my sisters. Petra would call them inscrutable.
We didn’t go to school today. None of us went to school today. Maybe school was canceled, for all I know. Maybe we all—my whole sick and sorry generation—boycotted en masse without discussion. But apparently even burning the place down wouldn’t have been enough to keep avoiding this conversation.
We go for a walk.
It’s cold, even though I’ve bundled up, even though we’re moving, even though he holds my hand and I let him, even though it’s not that cold. The leaves are gone now, all of them, so you can see straight into the woods, moonlit, which should be romantic but instead makes me feel naked too, exposed. It is very quiet out. There is no noise—no wind, no cars, no one talking, no streetlight buzz even—nothing but us. I can see our breath, which feels somehow like a step backward, relationship-wise, like his breath used to be only mine to share but now it’s out there for any raccoon or owl or other nocturnal creature with good eyes to see.
As far as steps backward relationship-wise go, that’s probably the least of them.
“What you told me and made me promise not to tell…” He starts and trails off. Maddeningly.
I hold my breath. But what he says next knocks the wind out of me anyway.
“I already knew,” he says.
He can read minds. He can tell the future. He really is magic. “How?”
“Mirabel told me.”
I drop his hand. I stop walking. I understand suddenly what it means to be struck dumb. You think it means “struck” like it happens all at once, but no, it means “struck” like you’ve been slapped. You think it means “dumb” like you can’t talk, but no, it means “dumb” like stupid, like all sense has all at once been removed from my brain.