The Longest Night (41 page)

“Nat,” he said. She let go, and he opened the door for her, and when she'd climbed in beside her daughters he shut it and went around to his own seat. Neither of them spoke as he drove across town to his apartment. Nat leaned forward to stroke Sadie's belly through the blanket, Sam chatted happily about the snow, and Liddie stared out the window in thrilled, silent wonder. When they got to Esrom's place, the building seemed to have deteriorated even since Nat had last seen it. The brick was sleety and chipped and appeared to be crumbling into the snow. Esrom pulled up alongside a slanted carport.

“Girls,” Nat said, turning toward them as much as she could in the cramped truck. “Mr. Esrom is going to take you to the cabin because I have to stay here. I wish I could go with you, but I can't.”

Sam looked at her, surprised, and Liddie turned a moment later.

Sam said, “I want you to come, too, Mama—”

“I can't, sweetheart,” Nat repeated. “But you'll still get your nice trip with Mr. Esrom. You'll be good for him, won't you?”

“Yes,” said Liddie.

Sam said, “We're taking Sadie, too?”

Nat felt a jitter in her rib cage. “Yes, Sadie, too. But I'll see you very soon.” She kissed each of their faces, tears blurring her sight, and looked at Esrom. “Take good care of my girls.”

“Of course. I'll treat them like gold.”

He handed her the key to the green car. Nat closed the door and stepped back, pressing the key into her palm, and watched Sam's and Liddie's heads and Esrom's profile as the truck groaned back down the snowy road.

T
he ambulance driver was allowed to leave, and then the nurse. Paul sat in his folding chair in the corner of the room and watched them go. He surveyed the small group of new people who had just come in from the showers. Listening in on their conversation, he learned that some of these men were part of the search team whose task had been to sprint onto the reactor floor, spend thirty-five seconds scanning for Sidorski's body—during which they absorbed a year's allotment of radiation—and race outside again. One claimed to be the man who himself spotted the doomed operator. “I saw him, too,” another voice said, “but I thought he was a clump of rags.”

The next task would be to recover Sidorski. Operators from across the testing site were being called in. They would take turns snagging at the dead man's skin with hooks until they could pull him down onto a giant stretcher. There was some fear that if the body missed its target and fell into the core, the reactor could go supercritical again.

Paul shuddered, overhearing this. He had done the right thing in sending his family away, even if it felt as though he'd handed Nat to another man. When he pictured her and the girls riding in Esrom's car, jaunting off into the country as if they were going on some kind of vacation, he felt physically ill. He could not sit still. He could not concentrate. Some part of him always had to be moving—his foot tapping the metal chair leg, his arm adjusting against his body, his head giving a small twitch—to shake off the agitation he felt building in him. It crept up his shoulders and back like a thousand near-weightless insects, and only by moving could he reset it and feel, for an instant, relieved. Then it would crawl onto him again, and he could tolerate it only for a few seconds before he had to shake it off.

He saw Webb in his mind, not just the devastating close-range view he'd had of him in the ambulance, but the initial shock: Webb rising half up from the reactor room floor, moaning, reaching out for something he couldn't see; his clothes stuck to him like tissue paper, as though he were being découpaged. He had looked horrific, but he'd still had animation, if only a last gasp of it. And then there he was in the ambulance, the nurse dialing in the time, and Webb's face slack as if it might slide off sideways. Webbsy, good-hearted, twenty years old. What a waste.

The creeping feeling came up over his shoulders again. It built and built, slowly. He tried to hold still but felt as if a fist were squeezing his lungs. Finally he could bear the sensation no longer and he jerked his shoulders, squirmed in his seat. For a moment it dissipated, and he sagged in the chair with relief.

When Nat bolted through the door, he thought for certain he was dreaming. He didn't even move until he saw her stride toward him, break into a run. He sat up, completely confused. She shouted his name, and the next thing he knew her arms were around his neck. She kissed his forehead, his cheek, his shoulder, her lips like butterflies landing on him, lifting. He stared at her in wonder as she knelt before him, stroking the hair above his eyes.

“You're here,” he murmured. The whole world had changed in one second.

“You look awful,” she said.

“Ma'am!” came a shout behind her, and the health physicist bustled over, waving his arms. Nat turned, her cheek on Paul's forehead, staring down the doc as if she had no idea where he'd come from and was sure his role was irrelevant.

“You can't be here,” Paul whispered. “You shouldn't be near me, you need to go.”

She shook her head, pressed against his.

“Ma'am!” The physicist was frantic. “Ma'am, this is absolutely a closed area. This man has not been cleared.”

Nat stood, gripped Paul's hand, and tucked his arm beneath hers. “I'm sorry. He's leaving now.”

The man pointed, nearly hopping in his shoes. “You're holding his hand! These men's hands are the most contaminated parts of their bodies. Ma'am! Would you like me to show you on the detector? You'll see that—”

“I don't care,” Nat said, and she tugged Paul's arm. Dazed, he stood. “We're going,” she said.

Paul followed her across the room, weaving through folding chairs as men stared. When she got to the front door she pushed straight through.

The door of the green Dodge Wayfarer was open for him, and for a moment he pulled up short. But she tightened her grip on his arm and guided him into the passenger seat. She jogged around to the other side.

“I'm calling the police,” the physicist shouted after them.

Nat set her mouth in a grim line and threw the car into gear. She stepped on the gas, and Paul's head thunked back against the seat. His heart filled with fear and relief and love for her.

“Where are the girls?” he asked.

“With Esrom.”

He nodded. The road flew beneath them.

“I'm going to stay with you,” she said. “We'll keep the girls out of the house until you think it's safe for them to come back, but I'm not leaving.” Her voice tightened: “We will not be separated again, do you understand? We are
together
.”

“I don't want to hurt you,” he said.

“You won't.”

“You don't know that. Every second you're around me, it's like you're getting X-rays.”

“How bad are X-rays?” she dismissed with a wave of her hand. “They X-ray the girls' feet every time we go in for new shoes.”

“Those only last a second.”

She didn't answer this but shook her head. She reached for his hand and squeezed it. “It's awful about Webb,” she said, her eyes filling. “And the other two. Did you see them?”

“I did,” he said. He had only seen one, but didn't have it in him to explain. He looked out across the testing station, barren and cold. A wind sock flapped on its pole. He could just make out the CR-1's silhouette on the horizon, enlarged by a crowd of vehicles.

Nat ran her thumb over the top of his hand, still holding it. “The whole drive here I was looking for some kind of sign,” she said, almost to herself. “You know, giant flames, or a pink mushroom cloud, or something like that. A guard just waved me through at the gate when I told him I was coming to pick you up. All I saw were a few men in white hazard suits back on the highway and an ambulance off by itself in the bushes.”

Images of the ambulance swarmed his thoughts: heading into the darkness, just the glow of taillights; the slapping footsteps of the driver racing back to them. He shuddered. Webb could still be in there, destroyed, alone.

“What?”

He shook his head. When Nat still looked at him he said, “I'm glad we got the girls out of here.”

“Me, too,” she murmured.

“Part of me wants to be there,” he said. “At the reactor. I feel like I
should
be there, helping remove the men. I'm already shot, anyway.”

“What do you mean, you're already
shot
?” she snapped, indignant.

“Sorry.”

“Don't talk like that. You'll be fine now. You just need to rest.”

Paul leaned his head against the car seat and closed his eyes. “Sidorski must have been working the rod,” he murmured, trying to picture it in his head. “I'll bet it got stuck, so he was pulling on it. If it were really jammed in there, he might have yanked it up past four inches on accident.”

“What's four inches?” Nat asked.

“We were always told never to lift the rod above four inches. People took it pretty serious even though we didn't know exactly what would happen if the rod went that high. Sidorski was new,” Paul said. “He was called in as my replacement when I was in Greenland. He was twenty-two years old; he has a son. If I'd been there, I might have been able to stop it.”

“Or you might have been killed,” Nat said. “God was looking out for you.”

“Why would God look out for me?” He'd never be able to convince Nat how absurd he thought this was.

She frowned, shook it off. “We need to be happy that you're alive,” she said. “Just think: You get to go home. You get to hold your little girls again. You can't feel bad about that, just grateful.”

Paul looked out the window. He felt thankful for this, he truly did. But he didn't deserve it any more than the other operators.

“You were there when it mattered most, Paul,” she said. “Esrom told me. You couldn't have done any more.”

His eyes welled, and he blinked. “Thank you,” he said.

Esrom had told his story. This was an odd relief. But he knew that Nat wanted to hear it from him, too, the way she always wanted him to tell her things, and he feared he would not be able to do it. This was the common disappointment, and it should have been easy for him to overcome: Just talk, damn it! Just talk and make your wife happy! But he couldn't do it, and so she had found Esrom who, though he seemed nearly silent to Paul, apparently talked.

She fumbled in her pocket as if just remembering something and came up with a piece of light blue graph paper. “Paul, I forgot to ask. What is this?”

He could see even before he unfolded it that it was a page from the reactor log, but how it had come into Nat's hands was beyond him.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“It was left in our mailbox.”

All the dates, he noticed, were from about a year and a half ago, when the rods first began sticking in earnest. He ran his index finger down the page and saw that Franks had taken the rare and bold step of recording that the number nine rod had stuck.

He looked at her. “Someone put this in our mailbox? Who?”

“Jeannie Richards, I think.”

“Jeannie Richards?” he repeated, bewildered. “How do you know it was her?

“Yesterday, I was taking out the trash and saw Jeannie driving down the street. She'd put the flag on the mailbox up. When I checked it, I found this.”

“So you're pretty sure it was her—”

“I'm almost positive.”

“She couldn't have taken this from the reactor herself,” Paul said. “She'd never go to the CR-1, or be in any position to handle the logbook if she did. Richards must have brought it home.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don't know,” Paul said. Whatever his supervisor's reasoning, he felt fairly certain that Richards had hardly known what he was doing, either. It was a hopeless, almost childish move, taking a page from the logbook as if just erasing bits of evidence here and there could sanitize the history of a machine so fatally flawed as the CR-1.

“Was it some kind of a cover-up?” Nat asked.

“An attempt at one, maybe,” Paul said. “Franks recorded here that the number nine rod, our most powerful control rod, had stuck that day. Richards and Harbaugh were pressuring him to leave any big glitches out of the written record, I guess in the hope that they both could coast until the new core arrived.”

“But look what happened!”

“Well, yes. But if the reactor had lasted until the new core arrived, no one would have thought anything of it. No one would have looked, and the record would have been a little cleaner for Richards's efforts. I think he was hoping to promote one more time.”

“He'd risk all that for a promotion?”

“I really don't think he grasped how much he was risking. He never worked the floor with us. And, yes, in his mind, it might have been worth it. There's a lot more pressure around promotion when you get to his level, far more than at my level.” Paul shook his head. “People are going to go over every last line of the logbook, now. I'll bet they have DOE folks flying out from Washington as we speak.”

“So it was true what Harbaugh said that night at the Richardses' party? Your reactor was having trouble this whole time? Every day when you went to work you could have been killed?”

“We didn't quite see it that way; we were making do. There's always an element of risk. We were waiting for the new core to arrive—they have one ordered for this spring.”