Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  I remember breathing a sigh of relief when we were back on the road. Missy punched on her headlights and slowed way down. She wasn’t sure what the speed limit was, but she guessed it was thirty-five. By now the flashing lights were long gone, as was the sound of that house alarm. I looked at Andrea and her head was bowed and her hands were over her eyes. I wondered if crying was going to make her eye better or worse, and I told myself it was only going to help because the tears might wash away some of the gunk.

  We drove until we got to this little elementary school and Missy pulled into the parking lot. I wasn’t sure why—I guess none of us were—and so she told us. “I’m going to cut across the playground. I want to be sure we’re on Dorset Street before the police,” she explained.

  And that might have been the end of our night, but Missy decided to press her luck. She accelerated off the pavement onto the grass, and we banged hard into a railroad tie for some little raised garden bed. And we hit it in just the right way that we kept going and didn’t even get a flat tire, but PJ went flying from the car, still clutching that lame vase. Missy jammed on the brakes and stopped, and we all jumped out after him. Even Andrea.

  When we got to him, he was curled up on his side in a ball. He looked up at us, winced, and then closed his eyes. “I am so fucked,” he grunted, his voice almost inaudible. Right about then we saw the blood starting to stain the side and the shoulder of his gray hoodie. There were big and small shards of the vase all around him.

  “One hell of a face plant there, PJ,” Trevor said, and I think he was trying to lessen the tension. “Can you get up?”

  PJ didn’t answer, so Trevor squatted beside him and repeated the question. This time PJ shook his head. “Give me a minute,” he groaned.

  “Okay, then. Good to know,” Trevor murmured, mostly to himself, and he went back and turned off the car lights. About then Andrea remembered that she was supposed to be going blind—which, for all I knew at the time, she really was. “I still can’t see!” she wailed hysterically, “I can’t see and none of you care!” Then she fell to her knees beside PJ. Trevor and Missy and I stood there for maybe half a minute, trying to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do. I was terrified for PJ. I was terrified for Andrea. I mean, I cared about these people, as fucked up as they were. They were my friends.

  That’s the moment in my mind that feels just like that image from the documentary about Bonnie and Clyde. A bunch of wounded criminals sitting in a field, one of them maybe dying and the other going blind.

  It was after that cluster fuck of a robbery that Missy’s parents came to get her and bring her home, leaving instead with only the Miata. They must have known that we were the ones who had broken into Missy’s aunt and uncle’s home, but no one ever pressed charges. We made a little over a thousand dollars from the stuff we sold, but that wasn’t nearly as much as we had hoped we would. And it was a lot of work and had involved a lot of risk. We were flirting with way more legal trouble if we’d been caught than when, for instance, we were walking out of the Grand Unions and Walmarts with big jugs of Tide. That would have been just a misdemeanor if we’d been caught. But that nightmarish moronathon at Missy’s aunt and uncle’s would have been a felony.

  Later that night we would bring Andrea and PJ to the hospital, but just in case we drove almost an hour south to Porter Hospital in Middlebury. The doctor and the nurse who took care of them were cool, but the receptionist was a total bitch. It was like it was our fault that we didn’t have insurance. (Okay, it was. But, really, did we have to be lectured about it right that moment?) Andrea was fine. In the emergency room, they numbed her eye and then touched it with a little strip that left behind this orange dye. She screamed like she had just been impaled in a slasher movie and then yelled at the doctor for having coffee breath, but he just nodded and said they should both try and breathe through their noses, and kept right on examining her. (That’s what I mean about how cool he was.) He was middle-aged but still seemed pretty buff, and when he was in her face it was like they should have kissed. It was very intimate. But, of course, that didn’t happen and she finally chilled and became an okay patient. He flushed out Andrea’s eye with saline solution and gave her some antibiotic ointment. He told her not to share her mascara brush with me.

  PJ’s situation was more complicated because he needed stitches for the two huge gashes on his arm and his side. And he had broken a couple of ribs. The vase and that fall had done a real number on him. He had to spend the night in the hospital.

  The next day when we went to bring him home, he was gone. He just up and left in the middle of the night without telling anyone. We texted and called him for days, but he didn’t respond. Finally we gave up. We never did see him again.

  Chapter 8

  This is not the most important thing I am going to tell you, but it may be the most interesting: Did you know that a lot of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the theme from Gilligan’s Island? Not kidding, this is totally legit. When my English teacher, Ms. Gagne, first told me that, I had never heard of Gilligan’s Island. But she explained to me it was an old sitcom, so I looked it up and watched it on YouTube. It’s from the really early days of TV: the 1960s. The first year, they didn’t even use color film, which makes it look prehistoric. And the show is ridiculous. As lots of people before me have pointed out, they’re stranded on this island after a shipwreck and seem to build whatever they want out of coconuts and bamboo … but for some reason they can’t fix their boat. Still, the starting music has a catchy tune, and you can learn it pretty quickly. I bet most of you know it, especially if you’re from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. So, try it.

  Because I could not stop for Death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The carriage held but just ourselves

  And Immortality.

  We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

  And I had put away

  My labor, and my leisure too,

  For his civility.

  See what I mean? Pick another of her poems at random and see what happens. Most of the time, it works. I don’t know what this says about Emily Dickinson’s writing or American sitcoms of a certain era, but it sure was helpful when I started trying to memorize some of my favorite poems.

  You can also sing “Because I could not stop for Death” to a sort of disturbing folk song called “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” You probably know that tune, too. Go ahead: try singing the poem to that song. What’s really interesting to me is that “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” supposedly, was written about a Galveston, Texas, girl named … Emily.

  Sometimes, it seems that everything is connected, doesn’t it?

  Someday I will put together a list of Interesting People Named Emily. They won’t have to be famous. Just interesting.

  Sandy, the guy who delivered bread for that bakery, wasn’t on his rounds by the time he picked me up that afternoon. Like everyone else, he was either trying to get away or get to family—or both. He was on his way to Jeffersonville, where his daughter and son-in-law and two of his grandchildren lived. He was meeting his wife there.

  “Why don’t you wait at my daughter’s house for someone from Burlington to pick you up?” he said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  I had told him that I was a boarding student at Reddington Academy, not a local, and I had grandparents who lived in Burlington. He seemed so nice that I almost confessed to him who my parents were, but after what had occurred at the convenience store and what I’d overheard back at the staging area, I was worried about the reaction I’d get. So I said—as I would a lot that year—that I was from Briarcliff. And when we got to the house, I was very glad that I hadn’t told him who I really was. The TV was on, and his wife and his daughter and his son-in-law were watching the endless stream of news from Cape Abenaki. And every few minutes, I would hear my dad’s name and it was never good. There was film, shot from Canada, I guess, of just billows and billows of smoke roiling up from t
he reactor. In front of the plant was Lake Memphremagog, and the water was calm and dark and seemed to stretch forever. It had always seemed to me to be a very long lake. But after the rain and the flood? It seemed massive, much wider than usual—because it was much wider than usual. I could see how high the water was against the first row of cooling towers. And there were talking heads debating the severity of the explosion and explaining maps and diagrams on the screen and (of course) offering their opinion as to the cause. It had stopped raining, and some of them seemed to think that everything would have been okay if it had stopped a day or even half a day sooner.

  And, they hinted, everything might still have been okay if my dad had been sober. But then someone would say that no one knew for sure if he had been drunk or if alcohol had figured in the disaster. But everyone agreed that operator error was involved. Something about an isolation condenser. Someone, most likely my dad, had turned it off and then—for some reason—could not get it restarted. There were witnesses among the survivors—people who had fled the building before the explosion. My dad was dead, and so he was the perfect choice for the fall guy.

  Sandy’s daughter had married a guy named Walter Thomas, and the Thomas family home was small but very cozy. It was a yellow and green ranch house, and everyone clearly enjoyed snowmobiling. They had two massive machines and two little ones for the kids—who were younger than me—and a whole room dedicated to clothing and gear and the trophies the kids had won at junior snowmobile competitions. The girl was named Melissa and she was scary smart. Kind of a jock, too, based on the ribbons and medals and photos that hung on the walls along the stairway. Clearly she was going to be an all-American something someday. She was eleven. Her brother was nine and much quieter. I was too numb to have a strong opinion about either of them, but Melissa didn’t seem to mind that I was going to sleep that night on an inflatable mattress on the floor of her bedroom. I guess that was enough for me to like her.

  And, thankfully, they had two cats and no dog. I think I would have lost it completely if they had had a dog.

  So, I took a shower and then ate dinner with the family. I was too sad and scared and tired to say much, but I lied shamelessly and impressively about my situation when they asked me questions. At one point, I went into another room and pretended to talk to my parents and my fictional grandparents on my cell phone—which was long gone by then—and I even made a pretend call to Lisa Curran. I must admit, after that one, I considered lying again and saying my cell was now out of juice and I needed to use their landline. Then I would call Lisa’s cell and beg for help. But I would have had to make that call in front of the family, because the landline phones seemed to be in the living room and the kitchen, and that would have meant toppling the whole house of cards I had built from my lies. And I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t want them to see what a liar I was or who my dad was.

  Sandy’s daughter was named Bridget, and she was a hairdresser—but she was probably the least glamorous hairdresser on the planet. Bridget Thomas said she mostly did blue hairs, which did not mean eccentric, attention-starved teens: it meant old ladies. Like her dad (like everyone in the family), she was very nice. She was going to bring me to my fictional grandparents in Burlington the next morning, because I’d said they both had pretty bad eyesight and didn’t drive much. I was okay with this plan, but I wasn’t wild about it. It meant that I would have to come up with a boatload more lies when we got to the city. I’d have to make up some address or pick some random house and hope no one was home. Then I’d have to come up with a reason why no one was home that was so logical that Bridget wouldn’t feel any reason to wait. When Melissa and I turned out the light in her bedroom around ten, I hadn’t come up with one yet.

  “Are you scared?” she asked me suddenly as we lay there awake in the dark.

  Incidentally, I almost wrote “as we lied there awake in the dark,” but I know the difference between “lay” and “lie.” I had a seventh-grade English teacher who taught me the difference. We were working from a textbook, and he read this sentence from it aloud: “Father is laying tile on the kitchen floor.” Then he looked up at all of us and said, pretending to be confused, “Tile. What an interesting name for Mother.” I never forgot that. Of course, given how much I was lying in the days after Reactor One melted down, it would, in fact, have been correct if I had written, “as I lied there awake in the dark.” I told Melissa some serious whoppers that night as we talked before she finally fell asleep.

  But I also admitted to the girl that I was scared.

  “Me, too,” she said. “But I’m not sure why. They say the radiation won’t come this far.”

  “It won’t,” I said. “You’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.” But I didn’t believe that. I was just trying to make her feel better. If I’d been honest, I would have told her that she was scared because what they said didn’t matter. They didn’t know what they were doing. And, on some level, she had figured that out. I also understood, but didn’t know how to explain at the time, that even the people who weren’t totally fucked—everyone, in other words, who did not live or work near Cape Abenaki—were scared of the unknown. None of us knew what this was going to mean for our food or our water or our air. None of us knew if the electricity would suddenly go out and ATMs would stop working. None of us knew anything.

  That night all I understood was what I felt. And what I felt was dread.

  The inflatable mattress was comfortable enough, but I still slept pretty restlessly. I woke up about five in the morning, just before the sun was going to rise, but the sky was already growing light outside one of Melissa’s bedroom windows. Because I had never fallen into a very deep sleep, I didn’t have a Where am I? moment when I opened my eyes. I knew right where I was. I knew instantly my parents were dead.

  And as I watched the light begin to trickle into the room, I realized it was actually going to be a beautiful sunny day—the first in forever. A sunny day in June? Once upon a time that was awesome. It was all it took to make a person smile.

  I thought of what it would be like when Bridget asked me for my grandparents’ address over breakfast.

  ME: Um, I’m not sure. But I know how to get there.

  BRIDGET: What’s their phone number? I can call them.

  ME: I don’t know it.

  BRIDGET: Would you mind getting it from your mom or dad in that case?

  ME: Oh, I can find the house for you. I know right where it is. I just don’t know the names of most of the streets in Burlington.

  I imagined Sandy offering some solution as well. Pulling a Garmin out of his delivery truck and handing it to his daughter, after I had gotten a street address from my parents.

  And so I climbed out from under the light blue sheet on the inflatable, found my clothes, and got dressed. Everyone was still sound asleep. I went to the kitchen as quietly as I could and found a magnetic notepad on the refrigerator where they kept an ongoing grocery list and ripped off the top sheet. I wrote them a thank-you note. I said it was a beautiful day and I thought I would ride my bike into Burlington. It was only about thirty miles away. (Only. I was there by early afternoon, but I was toast. My knees ached, my butt was sore, and my back was actually spasming.) At the bottom of the note I wrote my name: Abby.

  When I was about two or three miles down the road, I wondered if they would be so worried about me that they would call the police. In my imagination, I saw some missing persons report or AMBER Alert and all of Vermont looking for a teenage girl named Abby Bliss. I wondered who would be the first person to google her and discover that she’d actually been dead for a hundred years.

  But they never did call the police. Or, if they did, a teen girl who wanted to ride her bike thirty miles to Burlington was the last thing a state trooper or sheriff was going to worry about the day after Cape Abenaki exploded.

  Sometimes I think I have talked too much about pills. We did a lot of pills, but we also smoked a lot of dope. Once one
of us had come up with a twomp—twenty dollars in Poacher-speak—we would score whatever we could.

  Just so you know, I never tried heroin. Poacher said heroin was like “God kissing your cheek,” but I felt very small those days and wasn’t sure how I would handle something as big as God getting that close. We had a drawer in the kitchen beside the sink with nothing but needles and spoons and cotton swabs. It kind of scared me.

  And as for meth? I once watched Trevor and PJ try and shake and bake a batch in a one-liter bottle of Pepsi, and I was terrified. I didn’t mind the cold pills. They seemed way more harmless than the painkillers I’d discovered I liked. But peeling batteries? Lighter fluid? That’s just insane. When Poacher came home, he nearly blew a gasket. “What the fuck are you two trying to do,” he screamed at them, “blow up my apartment?” Apparently, if you don’t know precisely what you’re doing, it’s easy to turn what once was a harmless one-liter bottle of Pepsi into a firebomb. Live and learn.

  Nine months later when I had lost everything, including Cameron, and was trying to make my way home to Reddington, I occasionally came across shake-and-bake debris in the high grass by the side of the road: those plastic one-liter bottles filled with brown sludge. Sometimes they’d still have a tube. I was grossed out. But I can remember also feeling like I’d dodged a bullet. By then I didn’t think I had much of a future—that was, after all, why I was going home—but at least I was going out on my own terms, not because one of my idiot roommates had blown us up while trying to cook himself a little meth.

  I used to love to go skiing with my dad. I had a snowboard and I rode pretty well, but usually I skied so I could be with him. We would talk on the chairlift in ways we never spoke elsewhere—in ways we couldn’t.