Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (2 page)

My family had a beautiful woodstove. Not one of those black boxes that look like they do nothing but pollute the crap out of the air. It was made of gray soapstone that was almost the color of my mom’s favorite piece of jewelry: an antique necklace that was made of moonstones. I think it had once belonged to my grandmother.
It was Danish. Anyway, the woodstove had a window in the front that was shaped like the window in a castle or a palace. I’m sure there’s a word for that shape, and I will look it up.

My dad or mom would build a fire in the woodstove when we were all home on the weekend and hanging around in the den. The den was next to the kitchen, and the woodstove would heat the den and the kitchen and even the TV room on the other side of the kitchen. The rooms had baseboards and LP gas heat, too, of course. The whole house did. It was pretty new. I know now that a lot of people called our kind of house a meadow mansion or a McMansion behind our backs, but we didn’t build it. We just moved there from a suburb of New York City when I was a little kid.

There was a thermostat stuck through a pipe-cleaner-sized hole in the stovepipe about a foot and a half above the soapstone box. When we had a fire going, my dad wanted it to be around four hundred to six hundred degrees. When it got above six hundred, one of us would close up the flue and the temperature would go down. If it got above eight hundred, you were in danger of a chimney fire. The thermostat was kind of like a car’s speedometer: the numbers went a lot higher than you were ever going to need. It went up to seventeen hundred, and you were totally fucked if it ever got that high. We’re talking chimney fire for sure.

My parents’ running joke when the woodstove thermostat climbed above six or seven hundred? It was “Chernobyling”—or about to melt down. I can still hear my mom’s voice when she would say that to my dad when he would come home from skiing late on a Saturday afternoon: “Honey, be sure and watch the stove when you add a log tonight. The damn thing nearly Chernobyled this afternoon.” You wouldn’t know it from the things people write or say about my dad these days, but he could be very funny. My mom, too. They could both be very funny.

I guess that’s why I use “Chernobyl” like a verb.

I don’t use Fukushima or Fukushima Daiichi like verbs.

But I could. After all, Fukushima had a pretty fucked-up end, too. And it even sounds a bit like a swear.

I don’t know why I began my story with the igloo. The igloo was really the beginning of the end—or, maybe, the end of the beginning. Here’s a sentence I read about me in one of the hospital staff’s case management notes: “Every kinship had fallen away.” Well, yeah. Duh. Even Maggie—my dog—was gone.

By the time I was building my igloo, the worst of the shit-storm was over. At least it was for most of Vermont. It wasn’t for me, of course. It wasn’t for a lot of us from up in that corner of the Kingdom. But it was for most everyone else. By the time I was building my igloo, I was just another one of the homeless kids who freaked out the middle-aged people at the Banana Republic or Williams-Sonoma when they saw me on the street or in the mall in Burlington.

So, maybe I shouldn’t begin with the igloo. Maybe I should begin with the posse and the SSI apartment where we crashed. That was a home, too, if a home is a place where you can say you lived for a while. Or I could begin with the Oxies—the OxyContin. Or the robbery. Or Andrea Simonetti, who for a few months was like a sister to me, but now I have no idea where she is and I worry. Or I could begin with Poacher or the johns or the tents with the squatters. Or the shelter—with the girls in the shelter. Or the people who tried to help me. (Yeah, there were sometimes people who wanted to help me.) Or I could begin with Cameron.

Or maybe I should just begin at the beginning. With Reactor Number One.

B.C.

Chapter 1

It was the middle
of June, and we only had two days of school left. We had one more day of exams and then one day when most of us would either not show up or, if we did, the teachers were pretty chill and didn’t mind what we did so long as we didn’t get stoned in their face or do something ridiculous that would make them look bad or get ourselves killed. I was in eleventh grade. It was midmorning, and I had just taken my physics final. I did okay, I think, but who knows? Doesn’t matter now and, to be honest, I really didn’t care that much even then. Besides, I was going to be a poet and a novelist, if only because I figured poet and novelist was a career choice that meant little or no human interaction. I kind of understood at a young age that I didn’t play well with most other kids in the sandbox. (Not all, of course. I mean, I had friends. Not many, but a few.) Anyway, I really believed I was going to write great books. I honestly thought like that. I was going to go to Amherst—the town, not the college, because there was no way I was getting into the college—and find out who Emily Dickinson actually was. You know, get the real dish. Discover things about her that no one else knew. Friends. Lovers. A secret society. Not kidding. I thought like that. We had the same first name, and her poems were as short as mine. Hers, of course, were better. But you see my point. There wasn’t a lot of logic to the connection. Still, she wasn’t hugely social, and we had that in common, too.

Dare you see a soul at the white heat?

Then crouch within the door
.

Red is the fire’s common tint;

But when the vivid ore

Has sated flame’s conditions
,

Its quivering substance plays

Without a color but the light

Of unanointed blaze
.

Obviously this poem wasn’t about a nuclear core. But it could be, right, if you didn’t know it had been written in the 1860s? Also, Emily’s pure hell on a computer’s spell check—and this poem isn’t anywhere near the grammatical nightmare that some of her other work is. I used to love that, too.

That day a bunch of kids in the tenth and eleventh grades were just hanging out on the side of the cafeteria with all the windows that looked out on the courtyard, watching it rain, when we heard the sirens from the fire station. The courtyard had a couple of concrete tables and benches where mostly seniors went, especially the smokers, but it had been raining for days—weeks, actually, since Memorial Day weekend—and so nobody was out there now. There were mushrooms growing up between the tiles outside, that’s how wet it was. But the windows were open, and so even with the sound of the rain we could hear the sirens. Most of the seniors had peaced out by then because they were done with high school and knew what they were doing in September. A lot of us usually got out, you know. People outside the Kingdom think we’re all dumb shits up here, and a lot of us are; but a lot of us aren’t. I went to Reddington Academy, which is named after the town, and was built and funded years and years ago by a guy named James Howard Haverford. He fought in the Civil War and then made a fortune making sewing machines. Every kid in Newport and Reddington and Barton and Lowell goes to the Academy for free, like it’s a public school, but it’s also a pretty expensive boarding school
and students from something like seventeen states and a couple of countries come here every year. There are about four hundred locals and about two hundred boarders. Or there were. The school is still closed and will be pretty much forever.

It was ten o’clock in the morning, so they weren’t serving lunch yet. I was sitting on the table and kind of flirting with a boy named Ethan Gale, who was sitting on the bench. I was wearing pretty tight jeans and I had kicked off my sneakers, so I was barefoot. I don’t know why, but being barefoot always made me feel very sexy. Think poet. We were talking about a couple of local girls who worked after school at this nearby fitness club and, looking back, being kind of snarky. But the two of them sort of didn’t know what they were doing and just sat behind the front desk where gym members were supposed to sign in. If someone dropped a boatload of weights on his chest or something, he was completely screwed, because those girls sure as hell wouldn’t have known what to do. I mean, they were perfectly nice, but what the hell they were doing working at a gym was completely beyond Ethan and me.

Ethan was a junior and, like me, he was a local. His dad was the Eye on the Sky—the meteorologist for Vermont Public Radio—which meant that Ethan was kind of a celebrity because his dad’s voice was super well known. But it also meant that we gave Ethan cascades of shit because even a very good weatherman is wrong, like, half the time.

My dad sometimes joked about that. “What a great job,” he would say. “Imagine if pilots only had to be right half the time. Or doctors. Or architects. But the guys who try and forecast the weather? We sure cut them a lot of slack. And no matter how many times they’re wrong, we still tune in.” See what I mean about my dad? We used to have some very impressive fights—not nearly the shouting matches I used to have with my mom, but still pretty gnarly—but he really was kind of funny.

And, of course, he was very smart. I agree with him about the weather. With all the satellites and stuff we have orbiting the earth, I have no idea how you could ever get the weather wrong. Really,
I don’t. And doesn’t the weather usually just move from west to east? Frankly, I’d think you could just call some town a few hours away in New York or Ontario and ask what the hell was going on outside the window. But technology is what it is. It doesn’t always work. Exhibit A? A nuclear reactor, apparently.

I always figured Ethan was going places. Maybe he still is. Maybe, like me, he kind of gave up. I should make a note to see if he’s anywhere on Facebook. I should make a note to see if lots of people are anywhere on Facebook. I haven’t been super social the last year—even less than before the meltdown, if that’s possible. I know Ethan’s dad is no longer on the radio; they have a new Eye on the Sky. But that might only be because VPR doesn’t broadcast from the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury anymore. St. J. isn’t in the Exclusion Zone, but it’s close. Lots of people left, most of the town, they tell me.

Anyway, I knew instantly what the sirens were, but I figured it was just a drill. We’d had one a couple of years earlier. A pretend evacuation. Still, even those “this was just a drill” moments on the radio that the FCC requires could always make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I remember Ethan looked in the general direction of the firehouse and then in the direction of the plant.

“What do you think that’s about?” he asked.

The sirens were loud, but not so loud that we had to raise our voices or anything. We could still hear three serious overachievers from out of state freaking out about physics, and a couple of drama geeks making a very big deal about some summer musical in Stowe one of them was in. Everyone stopped talking for maybe a second or two when the sirens started and looked around, and then went right on with their conversations.

It was only when Mr. Pettitt, a history teacher, came into the cafeteria and clapped his hands to get our attention that we shut up. Most kids liked Mr. Pettitt, and a lot of them even called him Brandon—his first name. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t call him anything. He kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I thought he was totally bogus. He was in his early thirties, and he had a cute wife and
twin baby boys. He had curly blond hair, and I know there were girls who had a crush on him, but obviously I wasn’t one of them. Two things happened at almost the same time when he clapped. First, everyone looked at him, and then, once he said there might be a problem at the nuclear power plant, everyone looked at me. Second, Ethan handed me my sneakers.

“You better put them on,” he said.

“You think?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think.”

By then, of course, the crisis at the plant had been going on for roughly two and a half hours. I’m sure someone caught some serious shit for waiting so long to sound the alarm.