The Fainting Room (5 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

BOOK: The Fainting Room
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Once, when Ingrid was seven, her father brought her a piece of uranium ore. She was watching television in the house they lived in then, a split-level they had moved into when her father married his second wife, Cathy. He came into the den with a metal box in one hand and a surprise something in the other.
“Hold out your hand,” he said, and dropped a small rock into her palm.
“Huh,” said Ingrid, unimpressed. Except for some yellow, lichenous crusts on one side, it looked like any rock you might pick up on the playground at school. She turned back to
Gilligan’s Island
.
“Now watch this,” her father said, and set the metal box on the coffee table. It was about the size of Ingrid’s lunch box, and had a circular gauge on one side and a silver tube on the other. “This is a Geiger counter,” he said. He held the tube against the rock in Ingrid’s hand and the needle on the gauge jumped. Ingrid heard a ticking like a sped-up clock.
She looked up at her father in surprise.
“That,” he said, pleased with her reaction, “is a measurement of the power inside that rock.”
“In
side
it?” Ingrid watched the needle jump on the meter.
“The electricity that lets you watch TV and run the air conditioner begins right inside this rock.”
“You’re telling me electricity is in this rock.” Ingrid frowned. She knew perfectly well electricity was in the electrical outlets in the wall.
“
Energy
is in the rock. Or to be exact, potential energy.” David Slade didn’t believe in talking down to children. “Right now it’s just a rock, but a very special one: it has in it what we need to make nuclear fission possible, and with that, the potential energy becomes real, usable energy. Through science.”
 
Science
. The way her father pronounced the word made her love it, too. There was nothing science could not do, and all of it was wonderful: cure disease, turn on the television in every kid’s living room, and help the entire nation by—as the inscription on a coffee mug her father got from Sandia Lab boasted—“Securing a free and peaceful world through nuclear technology.”
The day after Ingrid’s thirteenth birthday, the zirconium cladding in the Number Two unit at Three Mile Island ruptured and the fuel pellets inside began to melt. By then, Ingrid understood better than most adults what had actually happened, and listening to reports on the shortwave radio set her father had helped her build the summer before, she felt not only terrified but personally betrayed—her interest in the beauty and power of nuclear fission had never extended to its biological consequences. Now, with the rise of the No Nukes movement, she learned the darker history of splitting the atom. She worried that she would get cancer from all the nights she’d taken her uranium rock under the covers with her to watch it glow, and she became convinced that the bone cancer her mother had died of when she was four was the result of their having lived downwind from the Nevada test site when Ingrid was a baby. Then in August she watched a special on PBS about a Japanese girl who got leukemia from radiation poisoning in Hiroshima. The girl tried to fold a thousand paper cranes to cure herself and died anyway.
“Ingrid,” her father said at the end of the program, “dropping the bomb was a terrible thing, but it was the only way to end the war. That doesn’t mean everything nuclear is bad.”
In response, Ingrid shaved off all her hair with her father’s razor to demonstrate how she would look with radiation sickness, and three weeks later began ninth grade at the public high school with a murderous fuzz clinging to her scalp and the wig her stepmother Cathy had bought her in a wad at the bottom of her knapsack.
That night Cathy came into her room to talk to her. Ingrid was lying in bed reading
The Western Boy Scout’s Guide to Regional Plants and Trees
, a book that had been her dad’s when he was a boy.
“Ingrid,” said Cathy, I know this isn’t an easy time for you.”
Ingrid waited, looking at the shiny leaves of the poison oak.
“You’ve just started high school, your body is changing—”
Ingrid froze her face into a turned-to-stone slab, designed to arrest forever any potential body changes.
“—And you may have noticed your father and I aren’t having such an easy time right now.”
Ingrid shifted the stone slab into a scowl.
“Ingrid, the world doesn’t always go exactly the way we want it. We have to learn to accept that the world goes according to God’s plan, not ours. Sometimes that plan doesn’t seem to make much sense to us—”
“Huh,” said Ingrid and put her book over her face.
“—And that’s when God is testing our faith, that’s when we need Him most.”
“Does God plan to have us get into a war with Russia, or is he just going to send an earthquake to make all the reactors between here and San Francisco split in two?”
“Ingrid, Ingrid, honey.” Cathy moved to sit beside Ingrid on the bed, put her hand on Ingrid’s shoulder. Ingrid did not want a hug, and remained stubbornly flat on her back.
“You shouldn’t be thinking about things like that at your age,” her stepmother said.
“At what age should I be thinking about them?”
Her stepmother sighed one of those melancholy adult sighs that gave Ingrid the creeps.
“Ingrid, I know what you’re going through. But sometimes what we’re afraid of just doesn’t happen. So there’s no sense in worrying like this. Sometimes things just work out.”
“And we all live happily ever after?”
To Ingrid’s surprise, Cathy’s eyes filled with tears. She blinked them away again, but Ingrid decided that her stepmother knew something she wasn’t telling. The danger must be even greater than she had suspected.
 
Her ninth-grade year ended as it had begun, in crisis. The last day of school, Ingrid went to class only because the science teacher had said she could have the garter snake over the summer. She hadn’t bothered to figure out how she was going to transport it from the terrarium in the classroom to the one in her bedroom, so when the dismissal bell rang that afternoon Ingrid had the snake in a brown paper lunch bag clutched firmly in one hand as she pedaled her bicycle home. In celebration of being finished with school, she left the bike on the front lawn, where her stepmother had told her not to leave it, and banged into the house. Her father and stepmother were in the den, her dad on the Barca Lounger and Cathy on the sofa. They both looked up at her when she came in and Ingrid felt a shiver of fear at their blank expressions.
“Why are you home so early?” she asked her father.
“I left early today. Come sit down, sweetie, there’s something we want to talk to you about.”
Ingrid stayed where she was, clutching the neck of her paper bag. She couldn’t move. She knew why her father had come home early. She knew what they were going to tell her. There had been an accident at the lab. Radiation was seeping through the air, through the walls of the house, through the air conditioner and into their bodies, their bloodstreams, their lungs. First they would become nauseated, then their hair would begin to fall out. Their skin would blister and bleed as the radiation lodged in their thyroids; their chromosomes would mutate and break, blood cells would die while tumors sprouted like dandelions on a lawn. And then slowly, agonizingly, everyone would die. She would never grow up. She would never start 10th grade because she wouldn’t live that long.
“Ingrid, Ingrid,” said her stepmother, and pulled a frozen Ingrid down beside her on the sofa.
Ingrid burst into tears.
“She already knows,” her father said, “I told you she could hear us.” He looked at his daughter sobbing on the plaid couch beside his wife and said, “Now, sweetie, I know it seems hard—”
“It
is
hard,” said Cathy, glaring at Ingrid’s father.
Ingrid wept harder. Everything would be gone, everyone, all the kids at school who hated her, her teachers, her poor garter snake who hadn’t done anything, all of them would sicken and die and she had known it all along and her father hadn’t stopped it.
He moved to sit beside her on the couch. She looked up at him, her father who had gone to work every day like an idiot and done nothing at all to stop this.
“How could you?” she sobbed.
“Ingrid, this decision wasn’t easy. But we have to take into consideration—”
“
Decision
? What are you talking about? I don’t want to die.”
Her father and Cathy exchanged glances over Ingrid’s head.
“Sweetie, you won’t die for a very long time,” said her father. “I know a shock like this might seem as if it’s the end of the world, but it isn’t, not really.”
This was too much. “It
is
the end of the world,” Ingrid wailed. “All the people will die and the rivers will be poisoned and the fish and birds and there won’t be any more fruit or vegetables we can eat and the rain will poison everything it falls on.”
“What?” her father said.
“Everyone is going to die and you know it. Any victims within a five-mile radius from ground zero can expect to die from radiation sickness, cancer, or leukemia within the first six months.”
There was a short silence.
“What are you talking about?” said Cathy.
“Ingrid,” said her father, “there’s not going to be any bombing.”
“A meltdown, then. Same difference.”
“Sweetie, there’s no meltdown. We’re not—”
“Oh my God,” said Cathy, and put her hands over her face.
“Then what?” Ingrid demanded. “What happened? Why are we all sitting here? Why is Cathy crying?”
“Sweetie,” said Ingrid’s father, “we wanted to tell you. What we wanted to tell you is.” He looked at the carpet. “We’re getting divorced.”
She was going to live, she was going to live, and she loved the plaid couch, the orange shag carpet, the dusty eucalyptus-scented air outside, the itch of poison oak on her left forearm, the candy dish on the coffee table beside her stepmother’s knee, her father’s polyester pants scratchy against her thigh. The world was not ending just yet after all, and Ingrid began to cry again, this time with relief.
Then her stepmother screamed. Her legs kicked out in front of her, upsetting the coffee table. The candy dish went flying, scattering miniature Clark bars over the rug.
“Jesus Christ, Cathy,” said Ingrid’s father, “what is it now?”
Ingrid’s stepmother jumped into a crouch on the sofa. “A fucking snake,” she gasped. “A snake just crawled over my foot. There.”
Ingrid and her father looked where Cathy pointed. The three of them watched Ingrid’s garter snake as it moved slithering through the shag carpet as if through dry grass. It paused, disoriented, by the leg of the TV stand, then turned suddenly and vanished behind the drapes.
The empty paper bag lay on its side at Ingrid’s feet. Ingrid picked it up and absently began crumpling it into a ball and then stopped. No one said anything more, and no one moved. The silence settled in around them and thickened, holding the three of them on the couch in a kind of suspended animation, eyes fixed on the spot where the snake had disappeared.
 
In the ensuing shuffle of the divorce, Ingrid was allowed to leave Melvin High and go to boarding school, which her father referred to as A Good School Back East. She did not exactly fit in, not even with the other mohawked kids, but no one made fun of her, either. She did her schoolwork, had one real friend, and dreaded the holidays that meant a return to Melvin. The thought of spending the whole summer back there, waking up every morning at Linda’s in one of the twin beds in Melanie’s room, with its yellow daisy curtains and matching bedspread, its walls plastered with posters of Scott Baio and Andy Gibb—well, it was enough to make you want to be dead.
 
Ingrid had been pedaling her bicycle as fast as she could go through Newell and around the reservoir. Now, coming into Randall, she felt winded. At the crest of the hill she stopped and gazed down at Randall Center.
The Town Green looked just like a postcard, the kind that says GREETINGS FROM NEW ENGLAND across the top. All picture-perfect, Mister. Grass so manicured it looked like each blade had been cut with nail scissors, old wrought iron benches that didn’t know the meaning of the word rust. A white clapboard church with a big bell in the steeple, nice maple trees. Whatever problems the people who lived here had, they could probably just sprinkle them with a little money and make them go away again.
At least, that was how it looked from the outside.
As she stood straddling her bike and trying to light a cigarette, the rain began, sudden and intense and very cold. By the time she had pedaled ten yards to take shelter under the nearest maple tree, she was drenched. Too wet to smoke, even. So she got back on her bike and pushed on, around the green and out Old Adams Road.
When she found the Shepards’ house, Ingrid wiped the water from her face and stared. The house was worth staring at. It was different from all the others she’d passed, neither rambling farmhouse nor boring colonial. Her eyes ranged appreciatively over the steep roof of blue-gray slate, the wide porch detailed with gingerbread scrollwork under the eaves. There were arched stained-glass windows flanking the front door, copper downspouts etched with the turquoise patina of age. It looked to Ingrid like a house in an old movie, the kind that hid a lunatic in the attic or a body in the basement. She propped her bike against an oak tree, ran across the lawn and up onto the porch, pushed her sodden hair back from her eyes and rang the bell.

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