“Why?” Monday asks.
“‘I have an ill-divining soul,’” Mab says.
“I do not know what that means,” Monday says.
“It’s Romeo and Juliet,” Mab explains.
“I do not know what that means anyway,” Monday says.
Mab looks at me, and I look at her. “Just in case,” she says.
There are Christmas lights winking cheerily from a few houses, our neighbors, our fellow citizens, survivors. I am praying no one will hear us, step out onto a creaking front step, turn on a porch light, and ask what the hell we think we’re doing in the middle of this night. But I am confident that if they do, and if we tell them, they will join arms and come along to help. We are all in this together now.
But Bourne sleeps on.
We cross Maple and the cemetery, and I find our father with my eyes. I wonder if he would applaud what we’re doing or chastise us for the foolishness we are about to undertake. If he were angry, I would remind him that the worst that can happen is we could all die, and then I’d ask him how it is, and if it isn’t after all worth it maybe for such a righteous cause. If we could sit and chat and compare stories, my father and I, reflect and philosophize, I am certain he would conclude what we have concluded, that there is nowhere his daughters could be right now but where we are.
If you type much with only one hand—or too fast or thinking of other things—you may have noticed, as I have, as Duke Templeton should have, that there is only one tiny transposition, the merest trip of the fingertips, between “destroy” and “destory.” I have long thought of ours as a town destroyed, but it occurs to me now it’s not that bad. Bourne is not destroyed, just destoried—stripped of our past, our memories, our lessons, our sense of shared history and how we came to be. Our destory is not our story, which is what would have been had Belsum never entered our pages, but it does not mean that we have no future. We do. We just don’t know what it is yet.
But I do know this: part of our destory is who’s telling it. My mother, she’s telling Bourne’s old story, its should-be story. It’s our turn now, and we must tell the destory, what happened instead, what happens next. Revenge, recrimination, restitution—where you prove it and you sue and you win and that’s why they leave and that’s how you move on—all of that is the old story, and we left that one somewhere along the path, forking off to where we are now, on our secret way in the night. It’s not our mother—our mothers, the last generation—who can fix this. They can’t. It is up to us now, the daughters, to move our town forward, to save us all, to tell a different story. Her way was lawyers and injunctions and lawsuits and the bounds of the system. Ours will be something else because here is a thing we know which Nora does not: sometimes you have to destroy—or destory—something in order to save it.
Appealing as the symbolism would be, Bluebell Lake is not large enough to flood all of Bourne. A catastrophic swell of water will not drown our town and everyone in it, sleeping in their beds unawares, many of them utterly unable to run away in the event of an emergency or really anything else. The dam itself is so small that even if we somehow destroyed the whole thing, it wouldn’t mean an exploding wall of stone and steel and cement flattening Bourne back to earth. All it will do is move a river. Less than that, even. All it will do is return the river whence it came. But without the river right where it is now, the plant can’t operate. The dam is such an insignificant thing, not as tall as our house and not much wider, that it’s hard to believe it’s caused so much trouble. It’s even harder to believe its removal will end, and then begin, so much else. But that’s what we’re counting on anyway.
We traverse the quiet streets of our sleeping town, a parade, a cavalcade, the triumphant march of battle-worn just-barely survivors, midnight riders, three against the world. To me it feels like floating, but that’s easy for me to say since all I have to do is sit here and hard for me to say since all I get to do is sit here. As we near the plant and push up and over the bridge, I am thinking about what we’ll say to Hobart when we show up in the dead of night without River to vouch for us. My first plan is to get Mab to show him the key. If she’s been given a key to the place, surely she’s allowed inside, and we’re her sisters, after all. My second plan, though, if he balks at the first, is to admit what we intend. Job or no job, whose side is he going to be on, Belsum’s or ours?
But it turns out not to matter. The plant has security during the day; if you come at midnight, apparently all you need is the key. Mab fits it into the lock and opens the door like we’re coming home.