“Andrea—” Edie said.
“No, don’t take that tone with me. I don’t need your condescending bullshit! I just don’t need it!”
One of the boys who was watching this train wreck unfold walked past me toward Andrea. I don’t know what he had in mind, but Andrea put out her hand like a crossing guard signaling a kid to stop. So he did. Then Andrea kind of gathered herself. She turned toward the drop-in entrance to leave, but on her way out she said to me—and she said it really loud so everyone could hear—“Hey, Bliss, you remember where to find me, right? I’ll get you that phone and whatever else you need, since these fuckers are no help whatsoever.” Then she was out the door.
It would be three days before I’d leave the shelter myself. But when I did, she was the first person I thought of.
Chapter 5
The first time I saw Cameron, he was dragging a black plastic garbage bag that might have been as big as he was. I’m not kidding. He was like this Green Mountain Gavroche—you know, from that musical? The bag was filled with everything he owned, which wasn’t much because most of the space in it was taken up with something he called his mummy bag. A mummy bag is basically just a sleeping bag. But I remember the way he insisted a mummy bag was a lot better than a sleeping bag, and that he would have frozen to death the night before in a plain old sleeping bag. The way he loved that bag, you would have thought it had magical powers. Frankly, I thought the term “mummy bag” was kind of creepy, but Cameron didn’t think anything of it. What else was in there? A pair of those Heelys, those sneakers with wheels on the bottom, that he had tricked out with black and red duct tape so it looked like there were flames on the heels. A stuffed zebra. One of those zippered plastic bags the airlines give you when you’re traveling in first class, with a sleep mask and ChapStick and a toothbrush. (When my family went to France so my dad could visit a couple of nuclear power plants, the energy company flew us there in something called Envoy class. It sure beat coach, let me tell you. My dad joked that I shouldn’t get used to it. I didn’t.) Cameron also kept his comb in the kit. He had a few rolls of duct tape and some of his art, including the robot I told you about. And he had some clothes in the bag, like his pajamas and a couple of shirts and some underwear. His socks. But a lot of his clothes he was wearing, because it was the end of December. He had just run away from what he said was his seventh foster home, which, he’d confess later, was an exaggeration. It was his fourth. But he was right to get out, that’s for sure. He was nine, and so his favorite thing might have been his Red Sox hoodie, which he was wearing under this total piece-of-crap parka. His boots were crap, too. I’m amazed he wasn’t one of the ones who wound up with gangrene.
He was dragging the bag along a dusting of snow just outside of this derelict coal plant down by the waterfront, and he looked wider and bigger than he would turn out to be because of all the clothes he was wearing. He was, in fact, pretty thin. I mean, he was a kid. His hair was crow black and, when he pulled off his knit cap, a mess.
The plant had been empty for decades, and while the police used to try and kick us out, we’d still sometimes find corners and crevices where we could escape the worst of the cold. And while an empty coal plant is pretty filthy, unlike an empty nuclear plant at least it’s not radioactive. (I know, that’s not fair. There are plenty of decommissioned nuclear plants that aren’t radioactive. But you get my point.)
Cameron had been there the night before, but none of us had noticed him. There were four of us that I was aware of, maybe more, but I wasn’t with the others. They were strangers. It was one of those nights where I really didn’t sleep because I didn’t know whether to trust them. The group was three adults, two women and one man. (If it had been two men and one woman or three men, you can bet your ass I wouldn’t have stayed.) The police had scattered us the night before, and all of the people I knew hadn’t come back yet.
I had seen homeless little kids before, but not one who was so clearly alone. Usually I saw them sleeping with their moms—in a car, at least a dozen times—or coming or going from the shelter for families.
I don’t know why I stopped Cameron. It was only after I stopped him that I saw his black eye. I could have let him keep walking to wherever. But I did stop him. I guess I didn’t think I should be a bystander. Or, maybe, I was just curious.
I seem to be jumping around a lot. This is supposed to be the B.C. section of my story: Before Cameron.
I should probably try and organize my thoughts.
What they were calling the staging area was a madhouse. It was the parking lot of the high school in Orleans, which made sense because the school was right off the interstate highway and only about ten miles from Newport. Plus, there were acres of asphalt. Still, the vehicles were spilling out onto the track and the football field, too. There were all kinds of trucks from the National Guard and fire engines from all over northern Vermont and New Hampshire and Canada. I saw a couple of ambulances, just waiting, I guess. I saw a lot of guys in FEMA windbreakers with walkie-talkies on their belts. There were two tractor-trailer trucks with women and men from the Guard handing out those bright yellow hazmat suits with the window masks and respirators. And there were lines of white cruisers for the sheriffs’ departments and green ones for the Vermont State Police. Most people were inside the gymnasium—which had its big, gray double doors open to the parking lot—because no one wanted to get rained on: everyone was worried the rain was radioactive. It was, of course, but it wasn’t as bad as we feared because the wind was blowing northeast and Orleans was south of Cape Abenaki.
I hopped off the back of the fire engine, and not a soul knew I had ever been on it. I ran into the gymnasium, and I have a feeling that anyone who noticed me assumed I was just some young, eager-beaver first responder. I saw a fair number of them, too: adults in their twenties, wearing rain slickers and gloves—gloves, even though it was June, because they were worried about fallout—and hats. A lot of them were wearing those little gauze masks my dad would wear when he was using an electric sander.
Immediately a woman who said she was a nurse asked me if I’d been given potassium iodide yet. I shook my head no, and so she plopped two tablets into my hand, telling me to take one right now and one tomorrow. Then she pointed at a long folding table with stacks of bottled water. “Do not use the water fountain,” she warned me. “No one knows yet how much has seeped into the groundwater.” The iodide wouldn’t protect me from leukemia in five or ten or fifty years, but it might reduce the risk of thyroid cancer.
After I’d taken the pill, I looked around to see if there was anyone I recognized from the plant or the Academy or my village. I saw no familiar faces at all. Not a one. But I did pass by two men with their sleeves rolled up, poring over a huge diagram of Cape Abenaki—the power plant itself. There were the two lines of cooling towers, and there was the pair of massive concrete boxes with the reactors. I must have been standing there long enough that one of the men turned around and looked at me.
“Are you supposed to be somewhere?” he asked. He was—and here’s a great SAT word—brusque.
“I was looking for my dad,” I answered, which was a pretty lame answer. But I was. It was the whole reason I had ridden back to the Kingdom on the rear of a fire engine, for crying out loud. I was looking for my dad and my mom.
“Little girl,” he began, and he was clearly going to tell me to run along; the world was falling apart, and he had much more important things to do than find some lost child’s father or mother—which is true. He did. But in my defense, it’s not like I’d asked for his help. He had, more or less, asked me what I was doing, and I’d answered. I didn’t expect him to stop what he was doing. Anyway, the guy who was with him cut him off and asked me who my dad was. So I told him. And that was the first indication I got that my name might not be an asset.
“Your father is Bill Shepard?” he said, and his jaw hung a little slack.
I nodded.
The first guy, the one w
ho called me a little girl, turned away and I heard him mutter, “Jesus fucking Christ.” Then he yelled across the gymnasium to a woman whose name was Libby and who did something with FEMA: she had a windbreaker and a walkie-talkie, which was sort of their uniform. She practically sprinted across the floor of the basketball court.
“What’s up, John?” she asked. “What now?” She sounded a little exasperated.
“This girl is Bill Shepard’s daughter.”
She was one of those organized and petite little women we sometimes call soccer moms, even if they’re not really moms. She had short blond hair that was cropped into a lid that looked kind of like a helmet, and even with her baggy windbreaker and khaki pants I could tell she was super fit. Her eyes were intense when she looked at me. She was only a little bit taller than I was.
“What’s your name? Mine is Libby. Libby Dunbar.”
“Emily.”
“Your dad is Bill Shepard?”
I nodded.
“And your mom is Mira?”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath. I knew that suddenly people were watching us. Watching me. She put one of her hands on my shoulder and started guiding me away from the men with their diagram of the power plant and toward a door that led into one of the high school corridors.
“How did you get here, sweetie?” she asked as we walked. But I didn’t answer because I heard what people were murmuring or saying around us. Somehow everyone knew that this sopping wet, filthy, shell-shocked teenager was Bill and Mira’s kid. Here the fucking sky was falling—really, radioactive fallout is about as close as you can get, I think, to the sky literally falling—and these grown-ups had stopped what they were doing as we went by.
“Have you had any iodide?” she asked when I didn’t answer her question, and this time I nodded. Meanwhile, all around us people were whispering or telling each other things like: That’s Bill’s kid. My God, that’s the Shepard kid. They’ll want to talk to her—find out how drunk he was when he left home. Shit—that poor girl. Does she know about her dad—about both her parents? We don’t know it was his fault. Yeah, we do. We do.
And, out of the blue, I started shivering. I wasn’t cold. I mean, I was wet, of course, but I hadn’t even been that cold when I’d been riding on the back of the fire engine: this was mid-June, so it wasn’t like the rain was freezing or anything. And the truck never went that fast. But there I was, shaking, as we walked through the gym and then down the hallway. My teeth were actually chattering. And the hallways were crowded, too, with people running back and forth and trying to talk on their cell phones or running back and forth and cursing about how bad the cell reception was inside the school building.
Finally Libby brought me inside the assistant principal’s office, which—unlike most of the rooms we passed—hadn’t been taken over by FEMA or, based on the signs people were sticking to the cement-block walls, the NRC. It was quiet, and she shut the door behind her. She sat me down in the nice leather chair behind the desk.
I guess because I was shaking, she took off her FEMA jacket and draped it around my shoulders like a shawl. “What you really need is a towel,” she muttered. Then she leaned over the desk. “So, Emily. A lot’s happened this morning. But you know that. How did you get here? Who brought you?”
I guess a normal girl whose teeth wouldn’t stop chattering would have figured out that the best thing to do was to stay cool and answer the questions and get some help. Clearly I was fucked and was going to need all the help I could get. But, in hindsight, I was never going to win the Normal Girl award.
Instead I asked, “Where are my parents? Where’s my dad?”
She gave me that stare again, and I couldn’t meet her eyes. But I also wouldn’t look away, so I focused on her little ski slope of a nose. Someone called her on her walkie-talkie, but without turning away from me she reached down and pushed some button that silenced it.
“Your dad and your mom are currently … missing. They are … unaccounted for.”
I knew what that meant, and there was nothing I hated more than when my parents would beat around the bush or try and find euphemisms—especially euphemisms for my bad behavior or theirs. I knew what “missing” meant. I knew what “unaccounted for” meant.
And so I said—or, I guess, I tried to say, because the words came out in hiccups, like I was choking or gasping for air—“Are you telling me they’re dead?”
“No, we don’t know that,” she said.
But I did. I knew that. She was trying to ease into this, to break the bad news slowly. She leaned in toward me to hug me and I wanted to push her away, but now I really was having trouble breathing. I was practically hyperventilating and I thought I was going to be sick. She rubbed my back and whispered, “We don’t know, Emily, we really don’t know much of anything just yet.” I don’t know how long we were like that—maybe two or three minutes. I remember thinking that it must be hurting Libby’s back to be leaning over like that, which was—if you were to read the notes one of my first therapists kept about me—uncharacteristically empathetic. Finally my breathing started to settle, but I was still shaking. So I pushed her away, but I wasn’t rude about it. I just wanted her to know that I was going to keep it together.
“How many people are unaccounted for or missing?” I asked, trying not to sound sarcastic or emphasize the words “unaccounted for” and “missing.”
“Seventeen,” she answered. “At least seventeen.”
“Is it still on fire?”
We both knew what it was. The reactor.
“Yes. It’s still on fire.”
“Does anybody know what happened?”
“Not yet.”
But they already had their suspicions.
“I have a dog …” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, so I just stopped talking.
“What’s its name?”
“Maggie.”
She nodded. She felt bad for me, and she felt bad for my dog. But the last thing she could do anything about was my poor nine-year-old Maggie.
In the end, there would be nineteen people “unaccounted for” or “missing.” And now I am being sarcastic and emphasizing those words when I say them. In the end, there would be nineteen people dead.
I had a fourth-grade teacher who told me I didn’t always have to be right. I had one in seventh grade—my French teacher—who told me that, too.
The problem with always having to be right is that sometimes you’re not. And so, if you’re like me, those times when you’re not, you try and save face—especially after you’ve seriously fucked up. You make one bad decision and then another, trying to fix that very first fuck-up.
A lot of my fights with my parents were over things that were incredibly stupid. We were all very stubborn, which was part of the problem. The serious fights started when I was, I guess, in fifth or sixth grade. Part of it was brain chemistry, of course, but we didn’t know that then. (Yeah, I know I blame a lot on “brain chemistry.” I worry it’s starting to sound like I’m trying not to take responsibility for my bad choices. Don’t worry. I am. I do. I’m just trying to explain.)
Also, it’s not like my entire adolescence was a complete disaster or that people thought I was a total train wreck. Sure, my parents and I fought and I burned some bridges, and there were moments when I was the definition of a hot mess. But I saw girls in the shelter who were much crazier than I was and made much worse decisions on a daily basis. The truth is, I got pretty good grades, especially in English. I was actually kind of a superstar in English. Ms. Gagne—Cecile—thought I had serious promise as a writer. Every year in May, Middlebury College brings two or three teenage writers from a boatload of high schools—and not just ones in Vermont—to Bread Loaf for something they call their “Young Writers’ Conference.” The students get to hang out for four days with professional writers and get their poetry or their fiction workshopped. The Reddington Academy English Department was willing to send me there both my soph
omore and junior years. I only went my sophomore year, however, because I was being disciplined that May when I was a junior. (I was in a car that a boy I knew—not Ethan—had “borrowed” from his uncle. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell his uncle that he was borrowing it, and he only had a learner’s permit—not a real driver’s license. Also, when the local Newport cop shined his flashlight into the car, we each had an open bottle of beer in our hands. Contrary to the rumors that were flying around the school that month, the beer bottle was the only thing long and slender I had in my hands when we were caught.) I know lots of people at the Academy (and my parents) were frustrated with me because I hadn’t spent enough time my junior year freaking out about college—you know, taking AP classes, doing things after school, starting a save-the-world recycling club—but I wasn’t ready to admit either that they were right or my decisions were wrong.
And, the truth is, I hid when I had to behind Emily Dickinson. (“Maybe you should start a poetry club,” my guidance counselor suggested. Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen.) The irony here is that Emily Dickinson was nothing if not under control. At least that’s what people who don’t know any better think. Me? Sometimes, I was completely out of control.
The leaves don’t fall one by one. They fall in drapes. There’s a breeze or a gust and a thousand break off at once.
The foliage the autumn after Reactor One exploded was phantasmagorically beautiful. The maples were crimson and cherry and red, the birches an almost neon yellow, and the ash a purple more flamboyant than the Magic Markers I’d used as a kid. We noticed that even in Burlington and the Champlain Valley.
What everyone understands but no one thinks about is that the leaves are spectacular because they’re dying. The tree is preparing for winter, and so it wants to shed all those dainty leaves. How does it evict them? It produces a layer of cells at the base of the leaves, so fluids can’t reach them. Meanwhile, the leaves themselves stop producing chlorophyll, which is the chemical they need for photosynthesis—the way a leaf uses sunlight to generate food. Without the deep, heady green of all that chlorophyll, the colors in the other chemicals finally get their day in the sun. That beautiful red leaf, in other words, is slowly starving to death.
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