Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (4 page)

My favorite moment from that babysitting class was when one of the other girls taking the course with me asked the teacher, “What happens if you die?” My second favorite was when another sixth grader told us, “My mom says to stay out of the high school band closet. You can get pregnant in there.” When I told my mom and dad that at dinner that night, my dad nodded and said, “Well, then: under no circumstances will you ever be babysitting in the high school band closet.” It gave us all a pretty big laugh. (I guess I could tell you the names of those two girls, but they’re probably both still alive, even though one lived in a house that was pretty close to the plant. So I won’t.)

Looking back, it seems totally crazy that it wound up Cameron and me against the world. I mean, it’s not like I had an Xbox to sit him in front of while I figured out what the hell we were going to eat or how we were going to stay warm.

So, the sirens. I put on my sneakers, and Ethan and I were herded with everyone else from the cafeteria. We started toward the lockers to get our backpacks, but we weren’t allowed. They said there wasn’t time. Mr. Pettitt and Ms. Francis, who was one of the guidance counselors—she was always talking to me about my “potential” and how I wasn’t living up to it—instead ordered all of us outside into the parking lot in the front of the school. Other kids were already there, and I could see a long line was climbing onto the first of seven school buses. I remember I was kind of pissed because I had my period, and of course my tampons were in my backpack. I asked Ms. Francis if there was any chance I could run back inside to get it, but she was pretty freaking tense and ignored me. She shoved me ahead into the lines with the other kids, and even though it was pouring, most of us didn’t have our raincoats or hoodies or anything. We were all soaked and—for reasons I didn’t understand at the time—that was causing a few of the teachers outside with us to seriously wig out. And whenever any of us would
try to find our own school bus, one of the adults would just scream at us, telling us we were wasting time, it didn’t matter, we were just to get on the next bus in line.

It was right about then I noticed that it wasn’t even our regular drivers behind the wheels of the buses. The bus in front of Ethan and me, which we just missed getting on, had some young guy driving who Ethan said was a volunteer firefighter from Newport a few years older than us. The volunteer looked pretty stoked, like driving this school bus was the most important thing he had ever done with his life. And the bus we got on had a middle-aged guy in a National Guard uniform behind the wheel.

Meanwhile, the sirens just kept screeching. And, of course, it wasn’t just the one at the Reddington firehouse. It was every firehouse in the county. It was the sirens at the plant.

Even before we got on the buses and saw it wasn’t our regular drivers, the rumors were insane. Some people were saying there had been terrorist attacks in Boston and Montreal, and one boy was telling everyone that a plane had crashed into Cape Abenaki, just like the planes that had crashed into the World Trade Center years ago. And some kids were still saying—hoping, really, you know, whistling past the graveyard in the dark—that it was just a practice evacuation. Especially the other kids whose moms or dads worked at the plant. (Looking back, I find it interesting that my parents weren’t friends with most of the families who worked at the plant—and so neither was I. Obviously they hung around with a few of the other employees, but the only close pal my dad had among the other engineers and managers was a guy named Eric Cunningham. Hours after the meltdown, late that afternoon, Mr. Cunningham would kill himself.)

But we had our phones so we were all checking the news, and pretty soon it was the news itself that was firing the rumors. By the time Ethan and I found seats in the middle of one of the buses, we knew that something seriously awful was happening at the plant. Some girls started crying and asking me what was going on, like I’d actually have a clue, and whether the worst reports we
were reading or watching on our phones were the accurate ones. But how could I know? I called my mom to see what was going on, but she never picked up. I sent her a text and never heard back. Same with my dad, but I never really expected to hear from him. I figured he was up to his ass in whatever nightmare was going on.

Still, not hearing from my mom was what started to freak me out inside. I tried to keep it together, because I didn’t want to get as dramatic as those other girls, but it was hard. Supposedly, there was a flood at the plant and the power was off. Some people thought that meant there was nothing at all to worry about, while others were already talking meltdown. One boy whose dad worked at the plant was debating with one of our science teachers the difference between a meltdown and a melt-through, like this was just a regular, everyday physics class.

But, in fact, none of us really knew anything. And us kids? We didn’t even know where we were going.

I’m an only child of only children. It’s not as weird or as rare as you might think. My parents always said that they had loved being only children and, until Cape Abenaki, I don’t think it had any effect on me one way or another. (I mean, yes, I had what one therapist called “behavioral issues,” but they had nothing to do with being an only child. If they had to do with anything, they had to do with the hardwiring inside my head and the fact my parents hated Vermont, drank too much, and sometimes fought like fisher cats.) As a matter of fact, being an only child might have worked for me even after the reactor blew up. Who knows? Yeah, I was seriously alone afterward. But those first months when all hell was breaking loose? I was in no condition to take care of a younger sister or brother. If I’d found Cameron back then, in the early days? It wouldn’t have been pretty. I don’t know, maybe it would have been nice to have had an older brother or an older sister at the time. Or a twin. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a twin.
But aunts or uncles or cousins were what I needed, I guess. I had two grandparents still alive. My mom’s mom and my dad’s dad. But my grandma was deep into the shadows of Alzheimer’s by then. The last time I had seen her had been about three months before the explosion. She lived in a place for people with Alzheimer’s in Hanover, New Hampshire, and she couldn’t even find her way out of the bathroom by the time I was in eleventh grade. And my grandpa lived in Phoenix, Arizona. That’s where my dad grew up. My grandpa had had a colostomy the year before and wasn’t coping real well with it. He was also in an assisted living place.

Still, on some level I was also really angry in those months after the meltdown. Really pissed. Way more pissed than usual. That’s pretty clear. The truth was, I felt deserted. I felt unbelievably alone, but not in a playful “I’m nobody! Who are you?” sort of way. I just knew I had no one. Not a soul. Even my Maggie was gone. It didn’t matter that my parents hadn’t made a conscious decision to peace out on me. It’s not like they were at some spa in Montreal or Venice or someplace.

And, of course, I was terrified. It was like the end of the world.

About a month after the explosion, when things were starting to settle down for most of New England, I was watching TV at this bar on Main Street in Burlington. I wasn’t actually in the bar because I knew I smelled awful and I looked pretty sketchy. I was outside on the curb. But this was July, remember, and so this big awning was open and I could stand there on the sidewalk and look in at the TV behind the bartender—a pretty handsome dude in his mid-twenties. He had red hair, and it was pulled back in a ponytail with a blue rubber band. A lot of guys can’t make that look work, but he sure could.

On the TV screen was a map of something the newswoman was calling the “Exclusion Zone.” She was explaining that nothing had been decided yet, but it looked like there was going to be an exclusion area around Cape Abenaki. It was more of an oval than a circle, because the wind had been blowing northeast, and the anchor said it might be as large as thirty square miles. There had
been some sort of presidential decree, and the whole area was going to be under military control for a while. (Translation? Forever.) They said there were people’s pets—dogs and cats—left behind and running wild inside the zone, and of course I thought of Maggie. The truth is, I thought about Maggie a lot. Maybe I thought of her as often as I thought of my mom and dad. Sometimes, when I’d imagine her trapped inside our house, slowly starving to death, I’d get a little sick and hope for a miracle: Maybe my mom had let her out before she left for the plant. Maybe my friend Lisa’s mom had rescued her. Of course, even if Maggie was outside, that didn’t mean she was going to be okay. She still might starve to death. She still might die of radiation. She still might get eaten herself by a coyote or a wolf. A couple of times I considered texting Lisa to see if she knew if Maggie was okay, but what if she wasn’t? What, at that point, could anyone have done? Besides, I didn’t want anyone to know where I was. I wanted to remain anonymous.

Anyway, as big as thirty square miles sounded, it really didn’t look that huge on the map—and a part of it was Lake Memphremagog. Of course, it did include most of my world when I was a kid. All of Newport and Reddington were in the middle. The woman on TV said they were in the “black” zone. And Barton and Lowell were in something she was calling the red zone. But then there was the issue of the rivers. There were three of them, the Clyde, the Coburn, and the Black. In theory, they all flowed north into Lake Memphremagog. But it’s impossible for people outside of the Kingdom to look at a map of Memphremagog and not assume that all that water is flowing south. And so when people were talking about the Exclusion Zone in the beginning, they often talked about the plume and the rivers. In the end, it was mostly the plume that mattered. Besides, no one was going to fish in those rivers again: everyone figured the trout would all have three and four eyes and glow in the dark.

As far as I know, the fish never did glow. But by the next spring there would be some super-scary, super-gross mutations. There were frogs with three legs. There were turtles with shells as soft as
damp pastry dough. There were fish with strange, funky lumps. I saw the photos on the web and one day in a newspaper—which, you can bet your ass, I hid from Cameron.

The word for the kind of window on my family’s woodstove was “Palladian.” I told you, I’d look it up.