“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?”