“My grandfather will be furious. My dad will just be taking it.”
“Will your grandfather be mad at you?”
“Me, you, my father, my mother, your mother, everyone.”
“I’m sorry,” I say but that’s not it, not exactly. I’m not sorry to be doing it. I’m desperate to be doing it. I’m not sorry his grandfather will be mad. It’s his turn. But I’m sorry River will have to bear it.
“It’s okay.” He pulls the back of me against the front of him. “I’m used to my family.”
“You think they’ll raze the whole place or convert it into something else or just leave it here to rot?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean not right away, of course. I know it’ll take a while. But when it’s a done deal and they have to give up. When they realize it’s dead.”
And what River replies is “If.”
But I’m not really listening.
* * *
I get home distracted, floating, a little bit sore in the best, most secret way.
I would like the house to myself.
I would settle for the bedroom to myself. For an hour to myself. For a little bit of time alone to consider what just happened and replay it without anyone watching me or demanding to know what I’m daydreaming about or making fun of the stupid smile on my face or pestering me with questions or wanting me to think about what they want to think about instead of what I want to think about.
But, as usual, what I would like has nothing to do with what I find when I get home.
“Mirabel found the gun,” Monday reports before I even have my coat off.
Gun?
“Smoking gun,” Mirabel’s Voice corrects.
“At therapy,” Monday continues. “Nathan Templeton invented GL606 in college for his environmental chemistry dissertation, and he tested it, and the tests showed it caused bad things, and he wrote them all down, and he told his father, but Belsum Industrial changed its name to Belsum Chemical and made GL606 anyway, and now we know they knew.”
“Apple said all that in therapy?” This doesn’t sound right.
“Lie,” says Monday. “Nathan himself came to therapy because he feels worried about what the GL606 did and worried about what it will do next when they reopen the plant but not that worried because they fixed it.”
I hear and I follow and I understand, but I don’t believe it. Not quite. It’s too big a thing.
“Was it a trick?” I ask.
Mirabel shakes her head no. “He was scared,” her Voice says.
I nod. The room is spinning. “Mama must be … Is she celebrating? Buying party supplies? Buying fireworks?” I’m happy for her, for all of us, but “happy” isn’t really the right word. Even Petra wouldn’t have a word for this I don’t think. Or maybe the point is more like I have just had a big beginning, the first of firsts, which makes it feel unsettling rather than joyous to come home to such an unexpected, unnameable end.
“She will not use it,” Monday says.
“Won’t use what?” I don’t get it. Maybe it’s the spinning room. Maybe Monday is just maddening.
“The gun.”
I look at Mirabel, wordlessly, and she looks back the same way. It’s slower for Mirabel to explain, but it’s often the more direct path to get where you’re going.
“Doctor-patient confidentiality,” her Voice intones like it’s nothing, like the world hasn’t just been offered and then snatched away.
Ahh.
And what I do is laugh. It’s the wonder of the day and the magnitude of something like this coming on the heels of something like that. It’s the cumulative hours and weeks and years we’ve spent thinking about this and this and nothing but this. It’s running errands and just happening by the one restaurant in all the world you’ve been longing to try for sixteen years, and they have a table and your favorite food on special, and your dish comes out, and it smells like a dream, but they haven’t brought you any silverware so you just have to sit there, smelling it, knowing how great it would taste if only you had a fork while eventually it gets cold and eventually the place closes and eventually your perfect meal molds and then rots and then dries and turns to dust and blows away. Except that doesn’t make sense because you’d just use your hands, right? Even in that fancy, perfect restaurant, if you had to, if you didn’t have another choice, you’d plop your face into your plate and eat up like a farm animal. Want of utensils wouldn’t stop you. Nothing would stop you.