I write about what we learned from the college catalog River Templeton quietly put into my sister’s hands, how the test results that proved GL606 was finally safe were faked, a favor from an old family friend, how Bourne’s citizens had cast votes based on lies and therefore had their say denied. Again. I write about Nathan’s response to the email I send him where he says he was lied to too, where he claims he didn’t realize Duke had his old roommate tamper with the results. “I never imagined Harburon would risk their own stellar reputation to bury proof of unfavorable outcomes as a favor to my father,” Nathan tells me. “I assumed they just gave us, like, a discount on the testing.” He admits, though, that he is not surprised to learn everything wasn’t on the up-and-up and regrets his part in convincing the citizens of Bourne to take their chances with his family again, and he makes good on that apology by supplying documentation, his original test results that we could never lay our hands on, that prove finally—finally, finally—that Belsum knew and knew and knew and knew. And did it anyway.
I do not write about the emails I exchange with his son where he says sorry and thank you and goodbye and I also say sorry and thank you and goodbye.
But this is the story that gets picked up anyway. At first it’s the story of the story—the paper of an only slightly larger town upstate runs something in the spirit of a condescending “Small-Town Girl in Wheelchair Thinks She’s a Real Reporter” piece—but slowly a larger paper and a larger one still and other states and countries and wire services begin to understand the real story here. With their greater resources, they start to dig. And Belsum, and all they’ve done to us, is—at last and fully—exposed.
Nora says she’s disappointed because she was hoping for more—an embarrassing public arrest at the country club, copious jail sentences served consecutively, maybe a light hanging—but she’s faking. She’s ecstatic. Vindicated. The settlement offer is not generous—because what would be overly much, given the circumstances?—but it is a lot: enough to change Bourne forever, to buy us a future, to buy us the world.
Nora refuses on principle.
But Russell explains: It’s not settling like compromise, concession, surrender. It’s settling like building a nest, a community, a place to live and to be. Home.
And to this, Nora will at last agree.
The money is maybe not enough to drive Belsum out of business, but something is—the bad press, the failure to relaunch, the abdication of the son. And of his son as well. The river no longer where they need it to be. Demolition equipment far larger and more powerful and, one imagines, harder to operate than our backhoe arrives and, in the course of only an afternoon, a few enormous small hours, levels the plant that has shadowed our town and our lives all our lives.
That summer Pastor Jeff borrows Hobart’s truck for his thrift-shop tour and returns with boxes and boxes of used but new-to-Bourne books. Monday needs more shelves to home them all and is, momentously, out of wall space, but when Tom offers to rip out the kitchen and restore the Children’s section, Nora balks. With the spare change she’s raising fifty cents at a time from her reference-desk bake sales, soon the town will have enough money to replace Monday’s shoebox card catalog. Besides, Omar says, if they leave the kitchen in, the library could double as an event space and catering could use it, like if someone wanted to hold a wedding there, say, and though Monday does not like change or think libraries need ovens, she is well used to lending books from a kitchen. And though Omar does not say who might get married, his eyes, and Nora’s too, shine as if he did.
And I keep writing. For I can write as well as anyone, writing requiring but one well-honed brain, a ranging imagination, a determined mind, and a resilient and wide-open heart. For I have voice to give we voiceless few. Or maybe “voiceless” is too strong. Undervoiced, let’s say. I have perspective. Opinions. Ideas. And more than all that, it is by writing this down that I will honor my mother’s legacy, take up the mantle of her life’s work—never mind, as Pastor Jeff points out, that both are ongoing. She gets to lay it down now, as he also said, for it is our turn. We won’t forget. We won’t let you forget, either.
I have stories to tell and, even better, stories to live.
It’s only six months after Mab leaves for college that Monday bundles me onto a bus to another bus to another, and we go visit our sister. Monday spends two hours on Mab’s tiny dorm-room bed with her hands clamped over her ears shrieking about the state of Mab’s bathroom, shared by twenty-two teenage girls and professionally cleaned but once a week. To be honest, it’s not necessarily an overreaction, and besides, she managed the buses and going somewhere unknown and all the unpredictability of me, not to mention those many months of being one of only two instead of three. After she calms down, we go into town, and Mab shows us around, takes us to her favorite coffee place and her favorite restaurant and her favorite shops. In one of them, there’s a spinning rack of postcards. Monday turns it round and round and finally buys them all. Watching out the window on the bus ride home, she starts to think maybe she could leave Bourne after all, go to college herself (somewhere they let students live off-campus in en suite apartments with walls you can paint any shade of yellow you like), and then get a job out there, somewhere, anywhere, anywhere she wants.
And me? Our road trip makes me see that needing help doesn’t mean there aren’t other places to get it besides home, other people who can provide it besides family, that having limits doesn’t mean I cannot—must not, maybe—bewitch and bewilder, range far and wander wide and wild. For home is like black holes—no matter how small, no matter how humble, they capture everything in range and trap it inside. The only way to escape their draw is to be far enough away.
Nora will stay as her house empties of daughters, slowly but steadily, like, well, like water flowing out of a busted dam. She’ll stay because, after all, it is home. She believes in this town. There are other providers of jobs besides chemical companies. There are more ways to grow than you imagine. She has friends here, more than friends, more than family even, people she’s survived a tragedy—and its aftermath—alongside, people who she knows will be there for her, for one another, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health, not forsaking but forsaken certainly. For worse but also for better, for when it gets better. Tough as tigers. Able to forgive. Unbowed. Her girls are leaving, and she’s heartbroken, and she’s euphoric. Her great loves are leaving, but she has great love yet to come.
Maybe our story won’t be exactly that.
But it will be something like that.
For now, Monday turns off the backhoe’s ignition. She and Mab pull me out of my seat. We are all three sliding down the side of the machine, scrambling onto the earth, all in a pile, a single, weeping, trembling organism. Since my chair is back at the plant, they prop me up with their bodies, and we watch together, we three, under the frozen stars, under the dark, until the night lightens and the sun comes up, as the lake becomes a stream and then a river again, as the dam becomes a weir and then a hole and then a bridge between one grassy shore and another, water flowing below again, between what we have rendered at last a fallen, slain, and desiccated chemical plant and our very own small town, our home, Bourne again, coming slowly back to life.