One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

A doctor’s job and a priest’s job are both to spread care and love and healing no matter what you believe, he says.

“Everyone needs air, water, food, shelter, and clothing all the time, Monday. Everyone needs care when they’re sick or hurt, love when they’re sad or scared, someone to tell them no or stop when they’re being unsafe. Everything else people need sometimes—and it’s a lot—is special. All of us have special needs.”

“Sometimes they do. And sometimes they just give you the illusion of those things. Giving something a label and putting it in a box makes you feel like you’ve understood it and accounted for it and can keep track of it, and that’s great for things like paperwork or books, but sometimes things get mislabeled or misfiled, and then they get misunderstood or misaccounted for.”

and the way to get less stupid is to read more books.

As I have said—and as should be obvious—stupid people need to read books in order to get smarter, but unfortunately people who like books are usually smart already, and stupid people do not read.

I get up and go to church, seeking not salvation but alone time, which is nearly as elusive and just as holy.

I realized he’d meant windows, and it blew my mind—that a window was nothing more than a hole cut in a wall and filled with glass, that even something as stable and permanent as a wall was no more solid or nonnegotiable than anything else.

There is so much, therefore, that stays wrong and unmended.

is not enough to be loved by your mother. It is a good start, and you wouldn’t want to do without, and it helps, but it is not enough. You need also the love of your community, the love of friends and admirers, the love of strangers who don’t know you but still wish you well, the love that comes from passion and from commitment and from someone who will never, never betray you and not just because they’re related to you. You need more love. We all need more love. And here—in this town, in this body—love is abundant but it is not sufficient. It is not enough.

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.