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.
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.