Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  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.

  The Northeast Kingdom got its name a long time ago from a Vermont governor. It was, I think, a way to promote tourism. It’s the northeast corner of the state and, even by the standards of Vermont, crazy rural. But there are a couple of ski resorts and Lake Memphremagog, which is nowhere near as big as Lake Champlain. Not long after one Vermont governor nicknamed this part of the state the Northeast Kingdom, another one convinced the state legislature that Memphremagog was the perfect spot for a nuclear power plant, especially if it was built beside one of the rivers that fed the lake. Some people had been talking about constructing a plant on Lake Champlain, about ten miles south of Burlington. Can you imagine what kind of cluster-fuck disaster this would have been if the plant had been built there and had the same accident? God. People actually live in Burlington. Hundreds of thousands of people must live in Chittenden County and around Lake Champlain. Fortunately—there’s a weird word for me to use—they chose Memphremagog instead. It was just big enough, and the river current was just powerful enough for a nuclear power plant, especially after they built a special dam.

  And you know what? None of us really cared that we had a nuclear power plant. I mean, there were some folks who made a little noise after Fukushima. A few politicians and a few do-gooders with nothing better to do asked for a study of the evacuation plan and an investigation into the state of the reactors because they were pretty old. (How old? The plant was designed in the 1960s with slide rules—yup, slide rules—and built in the early 1970s.) But it was really no big deal. And it sure wasn’t our local politicians or our local do-gooders. I mean this: None of us cared.

  The plant existed along a spit of land covered with pine trees called Cape Abenaki (that was, as a matter of fact, the official name of the plant), where the Coburn River met the lake. The plant was a quarter mile downstream from the dam. You couldn’t even see it from Newport or Reddington, unless you were out in the middle of the lake or almost over onto the Canadian side of the water. And then, when you did see it, it was just a part of the shoreline. People used to ice-fish within maybe three hundred yards of the two long lines of cooling towers. People used to kayak within a stone’s throw of the two big rectangular blocks that housed the reactors themselves. I swear, no one thought about it until the meltdown. It was like the prison. We didn’t think about that either. They both gave people jobs. So, we boated and swam and fished in the lake, sometimes noticing the plant and sometimes not. We figured it was perfectly safe.

  Or, if it wasn’t perfectly safe, it was safe enough.

  My mom, who had always been in public relations, thought the name of the plant was really pretty and really exploitive. “It speaks to the proud heritage of the Native Americans in the United States and Canada,” she would say publicly, and then add (but only in private), “and the way we screwed them in every way possible.” That’s because nuclear power might be clean (except for when it’s spewing radioactivity like a Roman candle), but uranium mining is seriously toxic. I don’t know precisely how it poisons the water, but it does. One night I saw my mom looking at an article on the computer in the den about the way the uranium mines have fucked the Crow, the Odawa, the Algonquin, and the Sioux.

  “What’s that?” I asked her.

  “Propaganda.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’s really not.”

  I waited.

  “It’s our bargain with Mephistopheles. Unfortunately, radioactivity lasts as long as the soul.” I really didn’t know what she was talking about until I shared this memory with one of the doctors here, and he told me the story of Faust.

  A couple of months after the meltdown, when I was living in Burlington, I almost told Poacher who I was. He just thought I was one of the walkers who had streamed into the city. I think I wanted to see what he’d do if I told him. Would he freak out the way I always suspected the girls in the shelter would have, or would he be chill? Instead, at the last second, I told him that my dad was Ethan’s dad. You know, just lied. I said my dad had once been the Eye on the Sky.

  “Abby,” he murmured, flat on his back on the mattress on the floor, “you are a revelation.” Poacher was long and lean with thick dark hair he combed straight back off his forehead. His eyes were a little narrow, but otherwise he could have been an over-the-hill movie star—one of those dudes who was a leading man once but had managed to drink and party himself into early retirement and now only got work on TV shows like Celebrity Apprentice. He had sideburns that somehow didn’t look ridiculous and a goatee and mustache that were just this side of creepy. He had a tattoo on each biceps: barbed wire on his left arm and a marijuana leaf on his right. He had a leather vest that he was very—and I mean very—fond of.

  He was staring up at the ceiling when he said I was a revelation, stoned off his ass, and he thought I was stoned, too. I wasn’t. But he sure did use that word a lot. Revelation. It was one of about half a dozen words that peppered his vocabulary and seemed unexpected until you got to know him and realized what a total loser he was and why he used them. “Why are you not more fucked up?” he asked me. He meant generally—not why wasn’t I as baked as he was right that moment.

  “I think I am pretty fucked up,” I said. Really, if you only knew, I thought.

  He must have been forty-five, which meant he was about the age my parents had been. That also meant he was more than twice as old as the rest of us—three times as old as some of us—and some nights he had nine or ten of us crammed into his apartment. It was pretty squalid, because there was only one bathroom and one bedroom and no beds at all. There was hardly any furniture at all. He said he was a war veteran on disability, which was where he got the money for the apartment. He said he had liberated Kuwait and he said it like he had done it single-handedly. Yeah, right.

  “No,” he reassured me. “You are not fucked up at all. You have a future. I will see to that.”

  “You will, will you?” I was, as my mom would have said, dubious.

  There were two other girls who were, more or less, passed out on another mattress in the Pink pajamas we’d lifted that afternoon from the Victoria’s Secret in the mall. One was Andrea, and she’d been a cu
tter even before all hell broke loose in Vermont. Still was, of course. A nuclear meltdown changes people—and I don’t mean radiation sickness or Twilight Zone kinds of mutations in babies—but it sure as hell doesn’t make a cutter stop cutting. Especially a cutter who’s now doing OxyContin and Percocet. God, the whole world becomes fucking anxious when there’s a meltdown. Anyway, Andrea was eighteen, two years older than I was back then. One of her eyes was closed, and the other was open just a slit. She had just done a little of that hillbilly heroin and was really content.

  “Do your dad again,” Poacher said, his eyes closed. When I had told him my dad was the Eye on the Sky, I had mimicked the voice we all knew on the radio.

  “It’s not that good an imitation,” I said.

  “Oh, it is. It is. It is … awesome.” He put his hand on my knee and tried to run it up toward my thigh, but I put my fingers on his like I wanted to hold his hand and stopped him. Then I pretended to be the Eye on the Sky and made up a weather report. I made up one from the days before the accident, when it just rained and rained and eventually—and here is some of the nuke-speak the plant experts and engineers like my dad just loved—there was a LOOP: a loss of off-site power. There was an SBO: a station blackout. In plain English, there was a flood. It was one of those once-every-five-hundred-years kinds of floods, someone said. Then lots of people said that. Then it was the once-in-a-millennium flood, because that sounds way more epic. It sounds downright biblical, doesn’t it? But it’s not subtle. It’s not poetic.

  But no man moved me till the tide

  Went past my simple shoe,

  And past my apron and my belt.

  And past my bodice too.

  See what I mean? That’s what you do with high water.

  On the day of the Memphremagog flood, the waters poured over the Coburn River Dam and climbed up and over the sides of the brooks and rose from the marshes. It wasn’t a tsunami, but people who were there said it sure felt like one. Officially, the dam was breached at 7:31 in the morning. The lake and river water flooded the rooms where the diesel generators were kept and so the diesel generators failed. The water swamped and short-circuited the power lines that led to the plant, which cut the electricity to the pumps that must always—and I mean always—circulate coolant water through the reactors. That meant Cape Abenaki had maybe four hours of life left: the length of time the batteries would last. My father and the engineers who worked for him had that much time to restore power and get the pumps back online. They didn’t make it. The reactors began to overheat.

  By then it had been raining for two solid weeks, of course, but that dawn it was raining something like four inches an hour, especially between five and seven a.m. If my dad was concerned, he’d never said anything around me in the days before the disaster. I don’t remember my mom saying anything either until that very morning. My dad had already left for the plant when I came down for breakfast that day. My mom said he had left sometime in the middle of the night. And I could see as I ate my Cheerios that she was worried. (Cheerios. What a weirdly happy memory Cheerios have become for me. Eating them once upon a time had just seemed so normal.)

  The last time I ever saw my dad had been the night before. The last time I ever saw my mom? That morning. She actually went to work, though I’ll never know if she went knowing the dam had been breached. But I think she did. I think she went knowing that she was doing something that was either very stupid or very brave. I opened the back door and let Maggie, a shelter dog that looked a lot like a black Lab but was really a mutt, run into the woods way behind our house to poop, and watched for a moment as she wrestled with a piece of birch bark that was at the edge of our lawn. She didn’t play with it long because she never much liked the rain. She was nine and very, very sweet. In the winter she slept in a dog bed we kept near the woodstove, but in the summer she slept on the window seat in my bedroom.

  After I let her back inside, I went to school, took my physics final, and went to the cafeteria. Then I watched the world—at least the corner where I had lived since I was a little girl—go completely to shit.

  Chapter 2

  It would be months before I would meet Cameron. Or, I guess, before I would find Cameron.

  Here’s the weirdest part: I had always completely sucked as a babysitter. I just wasn’t into it. I really wasn’t into kids. When I was in sixth grade, I took a babysitter’s course at the library in Reddington. It was my mom’s idea, not mine. (Yeah, we fought about that, too. But I went.) It met once a week after school for six weeks, and it taught us things like what to put in a babysitter’s bag. The woman teaching it, who was kind of like the social workers I’d meet when I was older but was also seriously New Age, said we should put a flashlight and first-aid stuff in a special bag we would always bring with us when we had a job. (And by “first-aid stuff,” she meant Bactine and Band-Aids, not iodide pills.) She also said we should include things to entertain little kids. So, while mine did have a couple of Band-Aids, mostly I wedged picture books and little paperbacks like Junie B. Jones and Bunnicula into it. I stuffed paper dolls and Barbie dolls (lots of Barbie dolls) and Magic Markers into it. It was kind of retro. I also put in a lot of my dress-up feather boas. I don’t know why. My dad said it was so I could tie the kids up when they misbehaved. Nope. As you can see, I was a lot more comfortable babysitting little girls than little boys. As I recall, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to entertain little boys. The few times I babysat a boy it was always Michael Dinnan, and I just plopped him in front of his Xbox and let him go to town killing things and blowing shit up.

  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.