The thing about holes is their size is deceptive. You can’t tell by looking if they’re wide but shallow or have gentle slopes to hidden depths. Or maybe it’s just that with holes, their size is not what matters. Black holes are infinitely small but infinitely dense, drawing into themselves everything there is. I don’t know what that means really, but if I were describing a hole, I’d be more interested in how much can fall into it or leak out of it than the size of the thing itself. You’d think those qualities would be related, but world-class physicists insist I’m wrong, and they seem like pretty smart people.
We have made a hole too big to cross back over, but not really because of its size. Going back was never an option. We can finally only go forward. We have made a hole too big to hold water, but that is true of any hole, no matter how small. We have only slightly widened a little crack in a low wall to let a shallow lake trickle back into the barely-more-than-a-swollen-creek it was always meant to be, but that small crack is the size of the moon, that wall the width of the world. That river flows like all the blood in all the veins of every person left in this town. It is not really about size.
Our destory is this: We are no longer waiting, imagining justice deferred but heralded, on its way. We are no longer left behind, forgotten but unable to forget. We have been wronged, but we are no longer wrong, no longer broken, no longer immovable and wishing ourselves other than we are. Our water is no longer green and no longer toxic because that water has flowed on, and so have that town, those people, that history, not gone but diluted, far away, and flowing farther every moment. We get to rest now, some of us. And others of us? We’re just getting started.
Because the flip side of our destory is the one not yet written, the one that happens next.
Duke Templeton doesn’t want word to get out about all he did to make us finally take matters into our own hands, or maybe he’s just embarrassed to be laid so low by three girls and his very own backhoe, but he declines to press charges against us for breaking and entering the plant and stealing his equipment. In contrast, property damage to town infrastructure is a municipal matter, which makes what to do about it Omar’s decision. Omar concludes that we have already performed more than commensurate community service. And our criminal records are expunged.
Therefore it’s a little year—a short little year—until Mab receives a postcard, her first from an address other than her own, congratulating her on her early acceptance to a college far away but also not so far, and six mere months after that until she and Petra pile into Petra’s horrible car and make it just into the parking lot of their dorm before breaking down, before meeting the rest of their incoming class, small and close, a poky town’s worth of students all new in their new world, young and excited and afraid and away from home for the first time, and though those homes are not like Bourne—of course they aren’t—they are also too small, too strange, too missed.
Meanwhile, the library is vacant again. Omar redesignates it to Monday—or, to be more accurate, as she would insist, redesignates it back to the town care of Monday. Tom and the Kyles spend a few days putting up shelves, rough-cut one-by-twelves on brackets screwed directly into the wall, inelegant but easily painted a cheery buttercup yellow. Monday stacks them carefully with the battered titles she’s loved and watched over all these years like children.
The relocation of Monday’s library—re-relocation, she says—makes our house feel palatial, but the Templetons’ state-of-the-art kitchen is still too tempting for Nora to resist. She starts doing her more marathon baking sessions there and then selling pastries from the reference desk, muffins and cupcakes and croissants for fifty cents apiece, day-olds for a quarter.
As the weeks until Mab leaves ebb away, she gets more and more anxious that when she and Petra go to school, we’ll miss them too much, or they’ll miss us too much, or, simply, they’ll miss too much, all that’s happening in Bourne. “Nothing will be happening in Bourne,” Monday assures them, but Mab is still worried. Change happened and it could again, could some more. So maybe because it will ease my sister’s mind or maybe because it was the start of the string that unspooled, heroically and unexpectedly, all the way to the dam or maybe just because it’s time, I relaunch the Herald Bourne. There is no staff. There is no money to print it. But there is the internet, however slow. And there is me, however slow as well, to write and research and listen and understand, me to give voice, to be there. To be here.
For a while, I have a subscriber base of one—or rather One—but Mab shares with Petra, reading her the articles aloud as they navigate their tiny dorm room. (Petra calls it incommodious, old habits being operose to break.) Soon Frank, Hobart, Zach, and Tom all subscribe too, never mind bar gossip is how most of my scoops originate, and Mrs. Shriver, though as a history teacher she hasn’t much use for current events, and Pastor Jeff, though his primary news source remains our Saturday morning breakfast table. Pooh is a subscriber until her death: in her home, in her sleep, and—this is the miraculous and wondrous part—of old age, natural causes, nothing more painful or insidious than time.
Wondrous though it may be, Mab is still heartbroken. Five minutes after Monday calls to tell them the news, Mab and Petra borrow a friend’s more reliable car and drive through the night straight home where Mab finds, of all things, a box of vintage shoes plus a note which reads:
Dearest Mab,
If I had jewels or gold or bonds or property, they would be yours. But I don’t. Standing in (get it?!)—and since those silver-tasseled mules look so cute on you—I’m leaving you these. It’s amazing how long shoes last if you get around town via wheelchair. But for you, my dear, these shoes are made for walking.
I leave out the part about the shoes, but I write about the funeral, even though every one of the Herald Bourne’s subscribers is there, including Pooh herself in some ways, maybe the most important ways. It’s a good story, the whole town turned out to file past her casket, struggling to corral their smiles because it is a sad occasion, somber, not a cause for celebration, but they keep forgetting, so long has it been since anyone died in Bourne just from being in their nineties, so long was she here and well and loved, as they file past my sister (in a black dress and knee-high pink polka-dotted go-go boots), also a wonder, wandering but home again. The piece reads like a fairy tale, a hint of myth, Odyssean, but every word is true.
Other news is more mixed and easier to believe, though also filigreed with hope and change. Leandra dies—not of old age or natural causes—but a few months later, to keep himself clean, Chris Wohl opens an ice rink. Frozen water—that does not flow or smell or color or relocate—is the kind of water Bourne can handle. I write about the new jobs renting skates, grilling hot dogs, smoothing the ice, plus the sled hockey team and the simple joy of having something different to do on weekends. Greenborough doesn’t have an ice rink, so we get visitors even, a few, strangers who come to glide over the ice holding hands under the mirror-ball lights, a small road trip to a sweet little town not so far away.
I write about Bourne Memorial High’s about-time restructuring of its classes to amend ableist assumptions that, for instance, someone with my body or Monday’s brain could not possibly be as smart as Mab. We are not as smart. We are different smart. We are also smart. We are other good things as well.