Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  “How bad is it?” she kept asking me. Or, “Did your dad say anything this morning?”

  “I didn’t see my dad this morning.”

  “Did he say anything last night?”

  “No.”

  “Did—”

  Finally Ethan turned around and asked her to chill.

  I held my phone in my lap, but I didn’t open the browser to check the news. I just kept waiting and waiting for a text or a call from my mom or dad, which, of course, never came.

  They brought us to Johnson State College and put us in the school’s dining hall. By then we all knew that the crisis was bad and getting worse, because we had been on the bus for, like, forty-five minutes. All the news reports about the power outage and the batteries couldn’t be wrong. People kept saying to me, “They’ll fix it before it melts down, right?” I tried not to lash out, but a few times I did. I mean, how was I supposed to know?

  We also knew from our texting that kids from other schools had been evacuated, too, and had gone to places like St. Johnsbury and Hyde Park and Stowe. At the college dining hall with us were kids from an elementary school in Barton. Most of them, especially a lot of the kindergarteners and first and second graders, didn’t know enough to be really scared, and it seemed to me that their teachers were doing a pretty good job of keeping them from freaking out. There were a few girls who were crying, but they were clearly drama queen ten-year-olds—like the sixteen-year-old drama queen I had riding on the seat behind me on the bus.

  I have no idea how they decided which kids would go where and why they put a high school in Reddington with an elementary school from Barton. Like everything else in those first hours, the grown-ups had to make decisions on the fly about us, and sometimes they made good decisions and sometimes they just fucked up. But it was fine. I think the older kids kind of liked having all of those little kids around. I saw a ninth grader from the Academy meeting up with his younger sister and brother, who went to Barton Elementary School. It was really sweet.

  I found a bench against a window and tried calling the main line for the power plant, but I got nothing but busy signals. I tried my mom and dad, but I only got their voice mail recordings. Finally I stopped leaving them messages. Outside the dining hall it continued to rain and some of the branches on the pine trees moved up and down in the wind like Oriental fans. Ethan sat with me for a few minutes, but then my friend Lisa Curran found me. Lisa was one of the few girls whose families would have been there for me if things hadn’t started falling apart for us all so fucking fast. I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I had Lisa. She wanted to become a country music singer and was actually a pretty good songwriter. She had a beautiful voice. Her dad was an airline pilot, and when he was gone for three and four days at a time, I used to hang out at her house a lot. Actually, I would hang out with her and her mom, who was a librarian. She was a friend, too, I guess. Their house, like my family’s, is now in the middle of the blackest black in the Exclusion Zone. They probably won’t ever see it again. Or, if they do, it won’t be for a very long time, and when they go they’ll be wearing those hazmat suits you can still see people wearing sometimes at the edge of the zone when there’s a rainstorm. They stand out there with their Geiger counters measuring how radioactive the rain is.

  Anyway, Lisa sat down next to me and so Ethan figured he could take a breather from watching out for the zombie whose parents worked at Cape Abenaki.

  “It’s probably not that bad,” Lisa said.

  I looked at her. “And you think that … why?”

  She shrugged, but she wouldn’t meet my eye. “They’re just taking precautions.”

  “Any minute now, the reactors are going to start melting down,” I said. “Or, for all we know, they already are.” I realized after I spoke—actually verbalizing what most likely was happening—that I was on the verge of seriously losing it, of seriously falling apart. It would only take a little push to move me from catatonic to hysterical. And, of course, that push was coming.

  “But probably no one’s going to die,” she murmured. Then she reminded me of something Mr. Brodard, our chemistry teacher, had talked about the year before in the environmental sciences part of our chemistry class. While people died all the time working in coal mines, it was rare for them to get killed at nuclear power plants. There had been Chernobyl, of course. But he insisted that no one had died at Fukushima Daiichi and no one had died at Three Mile Island.

  But sometimes you just know things. You really do. I don’t know if it’s instinct or intuition or we’re just connected in ways that science can’t explain. But I knew in my heart that Lisa was wrong. This time, up at Cape Abenaki, people were going to die.

  I find myself making connections between words that are usually completely ridiculous—the connections, that is. I do this a lot with Emily Dickinson’s poems.

  I can wade grief,

  Whole pools of it,—

  You’d think it would be grief that would be the link for me or “grief” would be the word I would fixate on. Nope. That would be way too normal. It’s “pools.” I associate it with the spent fuel pools at nuclear plants. That’s where you have serious radioactivity. And then I imagine the pools of water that must have been flooding Cape Abenaki, first in the hours before the explosion and then after. In the beginning, the water is just murky. One time, the Reddington Library, which is right on the banks of the Clyde River, flooded: the first floor must have had three feet of water in it. I was maybe five years old and hadn’t lived in Vermont all that long, but I remember well how a lot of the children’s books were ruined because they were on the lowest shelves. That’s what I think of when I first think of the flood: all those picture books. The next day my mom and Lisa’s mom were helping with the cleanup and I was with them. The books were brown and waterlogged and smelled like the bottom of the river. Most of them had to be taken to the transfer station in the back of pickup trucks. Lisa’s mom was working hard to hold back her tears, but as I recall she was still crying a lot. It wasn’t her library, but it didn’t matter. She was devastated. We were all devastated. It was really sad to see all those ruined children’s books. Especially the bunny books, which I had always loved when I was a little kid. The Runaway Bunny. Pat the Bunny. The Velveteen Rabbit. They were all covered in brown crap and smelled horrible. It was awful. When I think of the water that flooded parts of the plant, that’s what I suspect it was like: just muddy and swamplike and annoying, but not dangerous.

  But then I think of the water in the spent fuel pool when it started to boil. And that water is a million times worse than annoying. It’s freaking terrifying. That water is whole pools of grief.

  They tell me, in the end, the pool boiled dry.

  Cameron wouldn’t let me call him Cam. “Cam” sounded too much like “Pam,” which of course is a girl’s name. “Cameron” sounds very regal, but it’s really not. It’s Gaelic and means “crooked nose.” I told him that once after I had looked it up, and he laughed. His nose was tiny and covered with freckles.

  He was—and I promise you, I am not making this up—a kind of amazing duct tape artist. On our first day together he showed me one of his most prized possessions.

  “It’s a robot,” he mumbled when I didn’t say anything right away. I think he was afraid I didn’t like it. I did like it. I thought it was from a museum store in Montreal or Boston and someone had bought it for him or he’d lifted it. It was about the size of a Barbie doll, but bulkier. It was a beautifully sculpted piece of modern art: a creature that was a bit like a Transformer, but even more colorful, if that’s possible, and it was made entirely of cut and wound duct tape. I had no idea that duct tape came in so many colors: we’re talking flower garden crazy, including purple and orange and highlighter yellow. When I asked him where the robot came from, he got very defensive and told me that he made it. I was impressed, in part because I am a total loser when it comes to the visual arts. I mean, I practically failed pottery in tenth grade, an
d you had to have hooks for hands to fail the pottery class at Reddington. It was the gut of all guts.

  “You made that?” I said. It wasn’t really a question, but I was so awed it came out that way.

  “I’m not lying!”

  “I didn’t say you were lying. I just think it’s awesome.”

  Quickly he put it back in his bag. He had long fingers for a little boy, and his nails were so feverishly gnawed that they were almost nonexistent. Over the next few months, he’d show me more of his duct tape creations. And to pass the time, I’d lift rolls of tape from the hardware store and he’d make new things. There was one night in the igloo when he was killing time by decorating this plastic horse we found in the garbage—it only had three legs—and I loaned him one of the razor blades from my cutting kit. (By then I had one of my very own.) He was a little weirded out that I had a blade like that, and maybe handing one to a nine-year-old wasn’t the most responsible move on my part, but my biggest worry was that he would wonder what the fuck I was doing with that kind of blade. Obviously, I never wanted him to know I was a cutter. But he was careful. And by the time he was done with the horse, it looked like the sort of psychedelic animal you’re supposed to see when you’re tripping. (I say “supposed to see” because I know I never saw anything like that.)

  We also read a lot. Yup. Crafts and reading. That igloo was just like a home school, right?

  I remember one time I stole a copy of Anastasia Krupnik from the library to read to him, but already he was a little too old for it. Also, he was a boy. He was definitely more of a Johnny Tremain or Harry Potter kind of kid. I took the first Harry Potter when I brought back Anastasia Krupnik (which I really did return), and I read it to him so many times that I had the plot totally memorized. Okay, maybe not totally memorized, but pretty close. One night after we lost the book, when we were in the igloo, I told him the whole story, scene by scene, and he repeated back to me some of Ron’s or Hermione’s best lines.

  There was another week when I read to him nothing but Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School. They were crazy fun and Sacher wrote lots of them. Also, the books were these little paperbacks that were very easy to lift.

  My mom was the communications director for the plant. (You’d think someone who was in charge of communications and her daughter, an aspiring writer, would be better at communicating. In hindsight, we both just sucked, which is too bad.)

  That meant my parents were—and this was a pun that was used to describe them in an article in the Burlington Free Press years before the accident—“Vermont’s power couple.” The article was very nice. It didn’t say anything snarky about nuclear power. A few months later, tritium was found in a groundwater monitoring well at a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, which suggested there was a leak at that plant somewhere. The newspaper interviewed my mom again, and this time the paper wasn’t so kind. My mom was annoyed that she even had to talk about it because the New Hampshire plant was three and a half hours away from Cape Abenaki and she had nothing to do with it. But it was the same kind of boiling water reactor as Abenaki and built about the same time, and so I guess it made sense to ask her about it.

  Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. That’s probably more than you need to know. All you really need to know is that it’s radioactive.

  Obviously I made some bad choices. I’m still here, however, so I made some okay ones, too. But leaving the dining hall at the college when I did? That was bad. I get it. Looking back, trying to get back to Reddington and find my parents and Maggie was the chain reaction that started everything. It’s that whole butterfly effect. If I had just stayed where I was and waited like everybody else, I have to believe that social services would have found someplace for me. Or one of my friends’ families who wasn’t homeless would have taken me in. People blamed my dad but no one was going to blame me, right?

  Yes and no. There were a lot of people who wanted nothing to do with me. I wasn’t radioactive, but I might as well have been. Look at the way that girl at the shelter treated me when she began to figure out who I might be. Look at what I overheard at the staging area. Look at what happened at that convenience store on my way into Burlington.

  But none of that matters now because I did leave the dining hall that day. Like I said, I was on the verge of hysteria all morning and early afternoon. What finally pushed me over the edge? Around one o’clock, one of the news sites said there had been an explosion at Cape Abenaki. Another said there had been two. Both reported that there were fatalities, perhaps as many as seventeen, which they said was an indication of the size of the explosion—or explosions—because no one had been killed when a reactor had blown up at Fukushima. And, of course, everyone was talking meltdown. Everyone—in the news and in the cafeteria—was talking about plumes of radioactive fallout and the rain and the direction of the wind. And so I realized there was a chance that my mom and dad were injured or possibly dead—and a lot of folks in the cafeteria probably knew this but hadn’t figured out how to tell me. I mean, seriously? Was no teacher willing to man up and break the news? Were none of my friends—not even Ethan or Lisa—willing to drop the bomb? I get it, I really do. They were all worried that they were now homeless. Or at least a lot of them were. And they were all worried about their own loved ones. Their moms, their dads, their dogs. Who knew how bad it really was, despite what Mr. Brodard had said in chemistry? People panic.

  And, just so you don’t think that I’m some kind of whack-job paranoid, I don’t believe there was a conspiracy not to tell me my parents might be dead. I think, to be honest, everyone figured someone else would tell me. I’m sure Ethan and Lisa figured that one of the teachers would tell me—one of the “people in authority.” In my mind, I can almost see Mr. Adams, who worked with Ms. Francis in the guidance department, whispering with my English teacher, Ms. Gagne, beside the water fountain against the brick wall. I can almost hear Mr. Adams saying, “You know her best. I’ll come with you. But you know her best.” Ms. Gagne was only about ten or twelve years older than me and liked me to call her Cecile. She worried about my behavioral issues and my underachieving, but I think she figured I’d pull myself together and be fine in the end. Maybe she thought I was a good writer. Maybe not. Maybe she thought I was a good writer but eventually I’d just put my head in the oven and there was nothing she could do. Anyway, I think a lot about that moment in the cafeteria. Maybe, if they did speak, it was more like Ms. Gagne saying, “Yes, I’ll tell her. Let me just take a minute to figure out how to break the news.” Then one minute became ten, and then ten became an hour, and then I knew. I knew.

  Here’s how I found out. A girl named Dina Ramsey whose mom was a technician at the plant asked to borrow my phone. She said hers was out of power and her charger was in her backpack at school. So I handed her mine, even though I only had, like, 10 percent power left. (I had, as a matter of fact, gotten a warning that I was down to 10 percent power a few minutes before Dina came over to me. Power figures a lot in my story, doesn’t it?) But then I saw her talking on her phone—not my phone. And I knew it was her phone because she had one of those cases with plastic studs that were silver and gold. My case was straight-up black. I watched her for a while, figuring at first that she must have had a little bit of juice left after all, and some call had come in and she’d taken it. Not a big deal. But it was one freaking long conversation. After she hung up, she said something to a kid named Katina and then made another call—on her phone. That’s when it clicked that something was up. She’d been talking with a bunch of kids and Mr. Adams before she had come over to me to get my phone. Why did she need to walk over to me to get mine? There were like five other phones right there with her. And hers sure seemed to have beaucoup battery left.

  So, I went over to her and asked if she was done with my phone. I said I wanted to try my parents again. She said she had one more call. But she knew something; she looked seriously stricken. (Yes, I learned that word from the Dickinso
n poem.) I stood there and waited like a totally passive-aggressive asshole for her to dial someone—anyone—and for, like, thirty seconds she just stood there, fighting back tears. The file cards behind her eyes were flipping as she tried to think of someone to call, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She froze. And, meanwhile, I could feel everyone was watching me. Everyone.

  That’s how I knew.

  And then Ms. Gagne started walking over to me.

  So I grabbed my phone from Dina’s hand, turned around, and ran like a madwoman out of the cafeteria, down the corridor, and then outside into the rain. I heard them yelling for me to stop, to come back, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I wanted my mom. I wanted my dad. I wanted my dog.

  I divide my life after the meltdown into two parts: B.C. and A.C. B.C. is “Before Cameron.” A.C., obviously, is after.

  That’s totally simplifying things, of course. I mean, I had a whole life—sixteen years—before the meltdown at Cape Abenaki. And all of that, technically, was B.C.

  But you get my point.

  I guess right now I’m telling you the B.C. part of my story.

  One day in the fall after the meltdown, Andrea and I were chilling on a bench on Church Street in Burlington. The night before, we had taken the bus to the University Mall, because it’s right by the highway and there are all these exits with gas stations and motels. It’s where the truckers gas up. So we’d gone there and hooked up with these two really sketchy, kind of disgusting truckers from Montreal. They were in their forties, and they actually listened to that embarrassing Playboy porn on the Sirius in their truck. But it didn’t take very long.