Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Knock first. Always knock first. In the meantime, you should go sleep this one off at the coal plant,” Patrice told him. Then she looked a little closer at his hand. “What did she stick you with?” she asked.

  He couldn’t have known, so I showed Patrice my X-Acto. I held it up for her to inspect, but I didn’t let go of it. The blade was, much to my surprise, bent. I made a mental note to lift some new ones at the art supply store when it was daylight and the shop had opened.

  “Edgar, this is Abby and this is Cameron. Abby, this is Edgar. He doesn’t belong here, at least not when he’s like this.”

  “I’m bleeding!”

  “Of course you’re bleeding. What do you expect?”

  “I have some Bactine,” I said.

  All four of the grown-ups looked at me like I was a crazy person—which I guess I was. Cameron and I crawled back into the igloo to get it. When I reemerged, the men had let go of Edgar, and he was sitting down in the snow. After Patrice sprayed some of the antiseptic on his hand, the two men walked him back to the coal plant, and Cameron and I went back to bed. Apparently, Edgar could be violent. He had once gone to jail for knifing another homeless guy behind a bagel place on Church Street. And he wasn’t allowed anywhere near the men’s shelter because he was always picking fights. But Patrice didn’t believe he meant me or Cameron any harm. He was drunk and probably just wanted a place to get warm.

  Still, I viewed this as a close call. I realized after that how I always needed to be on my guard.

  One afternoon at Muddy Waters I ripped a flyer for some UVM garage band off the corkboard and wrote on the back, You sense the clock is ticking. I wrote more, some of which I remember, but it’s not worth sharing. I mention those six words, however, because I knew I couldn’t go on like this. Eventually I was going to run out of time. Or stamina. Or food. Or warmth. Or, pure and simple, the will to live. That carriage was coming.

  And while I had no conscious plan to go home to Reddington—God, I had no conscious plans at all—I found myself beginning to wonder what would happen if I did try and sneak back into the Exclusion Zone. That might, in fact, be my endgame. Some mornings, I would wake up so depressed that the only thing that kept me from leaving Burlington and doing exactly that was Cameron.

  I found myself trying to imagine where the other Cape Abenaki families had gone. I figured they’d left Vermont and New Hampshire. They knew they weren’t wanted here. I thought a lot about where Eric Cunningham’s family had wound up. Eric was the engineer who had blown his brains out. I knew he had a wife. I knew he had a couple of kids younger than me.

  But what was increasingly clear to me was that something had to give. The air felt weirdly electric, as if it was July and a storm was approaching. Something was coming; something had to change. I only had so much skin I could cut.

  I remember explaining to Cameron very precisely why people wore camouflage clothes. He understood it pretty much already because two of his foster dads went deer hunting in November—and, of course, because he was a Vermonter. But I added what I knew about hunting blinds and deer stands (which wasn’t much) and how I guessed soldiers used camo gear. Camo clothes and camo tents and camo packs. Camo boots.

  “I wouldn’t wear it to disguise myself,” he said.

  “No?” I asked.

  “No. It’s not like there’s anybody out there looking for me. And I think I’m pretty invisible anyway.”

  I knew just what he meant.

  Over lunch one day when Cameron and I were sitting on a ledge near the waterfront watching the airplanes bank over Lake Champlain and descend toward the airport, I asked him if he missed his friends. He’d told me a few names. There was an immigrant boy from the Sudan named Jean Paul. A kid named Kenny. Another boy named Finn. He said he didn’t know any of them all that well because he’d only been in the Burlington elementary school about four months.

  “Do you think about them?” I asked.

  He shrugged and took a bite of the energy bar. He chewed very carefully, like he wanted everything to last as long as possible. “I guess. Do you think about your friends?”

  “Sure. But I’m not going back.”

  “Me either.”

  “Briarcliff is a lot farther away. Your friends are, like, right here. If you could see your friends, would you want to?”

  “But I can’t.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you could just show up one afternoon at the skate park.”

  “There was always a grown-up there. I’d get bagged.” By “bagged” he meant caught.

  “We could say you were going to school in Shelburne now. We could say I was your new nanny,” I suggested.

  “That like a babysitter?”

  “Yup. Exactly.”

  He seemed to think about this. As he did, I pointed at an Air Wisconsin regional jet in the skies above the western shore of the lake. It was just starting to dip its wing and begin its turn toward Vermont and the airport a few miles to our east. It was really pretty in the midday sun.

  “Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice—I, just wear my Wings,” I said. “I think of those lines sometimes when we watch the planes and the seagulls.” Cameron thought it was kind of random the way every once in a while I would just say aloud a line of poetry I liked. He was used to it by then, but he still thought I was insane.

  “What’s a surplice?” he asked now.

  “Honestly? I’m not sure. But I think it’s something a minister wears.”

  “But the poet was just wearing wings.”

  “Well, clothes, too.” I didn’t want him to imagine the poet was naked, because that wasn’t Emily Dickinson’s point.

  “She was kind of overconfident.”

  “You think?”

  He finished his energy bar. “If she thought she was an angel, she was.”

  “So, you want to see your buddies?”

  “I don’t know. I’d need a skateboard.”

  And suddenly I wanted him to have a skateboard. I wanted him to have it more than anything. And while there are many things you can lift—such as hand warmers and energy bars—a skateboard is sort of impossible. It’s not just the size. Let’s face it, I had lifted gallons of detergent the previous autumn. It’s the cost. A skateboard is big and expensive. That’s a tough combination. But I desperately wanted my little buddy to have a skateboard. I desperately wanted him to see his friends. So, that night I convinced Patrice the feral cat whisperer to keep an eye on Cameron, and then I cleaned myself up at the Y and went out to the interstate exit. It had been a while, but I remembered instantly how gross the men were and the weird things they wanted you to say while they were inside you. At one point I had yet another one of those strange out-of-body moments when I looked up at the dude, a thin and gangly and greasy trucker from Rhode Island, but at least this time I didn’t wind up weeping in the fetal position. Instead I found myself thinking, what did I need to do to make absolutely sure that Cameron never, ever became … this?

  But when I got back to the igloo, I had enough money for a skateboard and some new clothes for us both. And the next day, when I was watching Cameron pick out a pretty sick board at the skate shop—it had a bunch of skeletons rubbing these magic lamps and all kinds of genies rising from them in blue fog and smoke—I was seriously happy because he was seriously happy. Finally he had something he liked as much as that mummy bag! Finally! He was a little apprehensive at first because he couldn’t understand why out of the blue I was so flush, and he kept saying we should save the money for food or an emergency or something. But I was pretty adamant: I knew what I wanted.

  The next warm day we walked to the skate park, and Cameron did some pretty mad shit on that board. I was impressed. There was a boy he knew there, but not all that well. Still, the two of them had fun together. I stood there for a while chatting with some very nice mom who had recently arrived in Vermont from Syria. Her name was Nairi Shushan Checkosky (think Tchaikovsky) and she was half Armenian. She wanted to know
how long I had been an au pair—her term for nanny—and why a smart girl like me wasn’t in college. I said I was earning money for college, and clearly she approved. She gave me her business card because she said she knew other families who might need an au pair. She had dark eyes and chestnut hair and was very beautiful. I gather she was a singer—or had been a singer until everything went to hell in Syria. Now she sold real estate. I think she must have spoken a hundred languages.

  Cameron and I went back to the skate park maybe five or six times over the next two months. There was more snow and cold, but there were also times when we could feel the days getting longer and the warmth of spring. Some days we walked past crocuses, a flower that in Vermont has to have a death wish. You pop your head up out of the marshy ground, look around at the sun, and then get hammered with a foot and a half of snow.

  But on our way back to the waterfront that first time, Cameron and I watched the sun set over the Adirondacks and it was gorgeous. Postcard perfect. It was one of those moments when, somehow, I was at once impossibly happy and unbelievably blue.

  Chapter 15

  The sugaring season came early that spring. There were sugar runs by the middle of February, and some people were even blaming that on Cape Abenaki. Me? I blamed it on good old-fashioned global climate change. But for a week after Valentine’s Day, whenever Cameron and I would go to the library all of the people in the periodical room were chattering on and on about how much less maple syrup Vermont was now going to produce because so many of the sugarhouses were in the Exclusion Zone. Others were insisting that no one was going to buy Vermont maple syrup ever again, just like no one wanted Vermont milk and cheese anymore. This was, in their opinion, just one more reason to hate anyone who had ever had anything at all to do with the nuclear plant.

  My family didn’t sugar, but I knew people who did. I even knew some people from the plant—including an engineer, as a matter of fact—who loved sugaring precisely because it was so freaking low-tech. And if you’re a kid (and he had kids), a sugarhouse is a pretty enchanted place, even if it’s actually a decrepit shed so small it can barely fit an evaporator the size of a pool table. It might be thirty-five or forty degrees outside, but chances are the heat from the wood fire and all that steam will make it feel like a sauna inside. There is the mouthwatering aroma of maple. And there is that whole fake fairy-tale vibe: a shack at the edge of the woods with a roaring, medieval fire inside and something magic and strange occurring in the roiling fluid above the flames—a vat of sap that can be stilled in a heartbeat by a dollop of butter or a little drop of cream. Eventually all of that sap will thicken into ambrosia.

  Of course, the first thing I thought of then and I think of now when I see a sugarhouse is the rager. Yeah, I was there. Of course. And I got into trouble. The problem wasn’t that we were partying in a sugarhouse: it was that we were partying in the Snowman Haverford Sugarhouse. Snowman was the son of James Howard Haverford, the sewing machine bazillionaire who founded the Academy. Snowman wasn’t his son’s real name, of course. I have no idea anymore what his real first name was. But he was nicknamed Snowman because he used to take photographs of snowflakes at the end of the nineteenth century with a dude from Jericho, Vermont, named Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley. And Snowman had a massive sugarhouse that was now a museum to sugarmaking and to those photos of snowflakes. In the spring they fired up the evaporator, but most of the time it was a destination for elementary school field trips. It wasn’t that far from the Academy, and we often saw a line of yellow school buses there with the names of school districts two and three hours away. And why not? They had the whole history of sugarmaking in there, and the kids always went home with samples of maple sugar candies.

  Which, to be honest, was the main reason some kids broke in that night. It didn’t start out as a party. There were half a dozen Reddington seniors who were pretty stoned and had the munchies. One of them had a dad who was a sugarmaker and volunteer docent at the museum, and he knew where his dad kept the keys. So the plan was to stroll in, grab bags full of the sugar candy, and stroll out. Except that once they were inside, they decided to start a fire in the stove beneath the evaporator and hang out. And smoke some more dope. And once they had the fire going, they started texting friends to join them—and to bring more weed and beer.

  Which was how I wound up there. I was with Lisa Curran and we figured, why not? So we got a ride from a senior named Paul. By the time we got to the museum, there were at least thirty or thirty-five kids there, and maybe half were from the Academy and half were from as far away as St. Johnsbury. Someone actually brought a keg. By the time the police showed up, all of the boys had—I am not kidding—peed into the evaporator because someone figured out that there had to be fluid in the evaporator. A couple of the girls had pulled up their sweaters and were allowing the boys to lick maple syrup off their stomachs.

  Lisa and I were only sophomores then and this was the wildest, grossest thing either of us had ever been part of. The two of us didn’t get in trouble for breaking and entering or criminal trespassing or vandalism, the way a couple of kids did. But we were punished by our parents and the school and, yup, the law. We were among the students whose parents had to pay for all the damage we did. (This resulted in a scream-fest between my parents and me that I’m really not proud of at all.) And Lisa’s and my “legal” punishment? We were among the twenty-four minors who had to go to special after-school seminars for a week on the “important” work of Snowman Haverford. It seems when Snowman wasn’t taking pictures of snowflakes and making maple syrup, he was a poet. He might even have been the world’s worst poet. But the Academy didn’t think so.

  Or maybe they did. Maybe they figured out that ten hours of after-school “tutelage” in his accomplishments and work—his tree-tapping innovations, his pictures, his poems—would make sure we never again broke into a sugarhouse to party.

  This was one more black mark against me in the eyes of a lot of people at the Academy: further proof that I was the smartest loser they’d ever had to teach—the absolute Queen of the Underachievers.

  When I think of the word “homesick,” I think of kids the first week at a sleepaway summer camp who are missing their moms and dads and their house. I think of some of the boarders when they first arrived at the Academy. Not a super big deal. If they’re summer camp kids, they’re going to go home in a week or a month. If they’re Reddington boarders, they’ll blend in soon enough and get over it. They’ll outgrow it.

  As for me: after the meltdown, I was always and I was never homesick. Never, because—remember—I thought I was never going to see my home again. Never, because I knew for a fact that I would never see my parents again.

  So, homesickness becomes merely wistfulness if home has become uninhabitable. It’s more like a phantom pain than the kind you can gift yourself with an X-Acto.

  On the other hand, I never stopped missing what I had. What I was. What was home.

  Not always, but often I kept an eye out for Camille or some of the other kids from the shelter. I was especially careful when I was getting Cameron and me food at the Salvation Army or we were using day passes at the Y. And sometimes I did see people—shelter kids as well as the counselors—and either I was able to steer clear of them or they didn’t recognize me. The thing is, most of the teens at the shelter would eventually move on: either the shelter would help them figure it all out and they’d go to college or get jobs and decent apartments, or they’d fall off the map and wind up at places like Poacher’s. Sometimes they’d disappear completely, heading south to New York or Boston (like Andrea) or even west to L.A. And sometimes their parents would come and get them and maybe over time they would get their acts together. I’m sure Missy’s okay. The pendulum could swing either way.

  My point? I was totally unprepared when Camille surprised me one day in February. I had seen her from a distance two or three times, but I’d managed to avoid her so we hadn’t spoken in almost eight months.

/>   “Hey, you want a cigarette?” Those were the first words out of her mouth.

  Cameron and I were sitting downstairs in the food court in the mall downtown. It was, just so you know, the most depressing food court in any mall anywhere in the world. It was belowground and had no windows. No plants. Nothing but the smell of crap Chinese food. But it was warm and it was private because no one ever went there. Everyone ate at the nice places on Church Street or the Starbucks on the floor above the food court. I recognized the voice instantly and looked up. I was reading a three-month-old Cosmopolitan magazine I’d found in a blue recycling bin (it was a little too much about Christmas by then, but what the hell), and Cameron was reading one of those classic novels that have been turned into a comic book. I used to pick them up cheap for him at the comic book store. This one was A Tale of Two Cities. The pictures of the guillotine and the nobles who were about to be beheaded were seriously cool and, given my frame of mind, a lot more interesting to me than glossy photos of stiletto heels and tips on how to drive a man wild in bed.

  So, there was Camille standing over us. She looked great, she really did. I knew instantly she was one of the shelter alumni who were rocking it. She was wearing a very cheerful, robin’s-egg blue peacoat, khaki slacks, and a scarf that fell like waterfalls down her front. She was no longer using peroxide on her hair and it was growing out. It was mostly red now.

  “No,” I said, “I really don’t smoke.”

  She put the pack in the pocket of her coat and smiled. “We’re not supposed to smoke in here anyway. Not that anyone cares in this sad little corner.” Then she nodded at Cameron, who was looking up at her warily, and asked, “What’s your name?”

  He turned to me, unsure whether this was someone who would give us our space or someone who might rat us out. I couldn’t tell myself. Still, I answered for him. “This is Cameron,” I said. To try and turn the attention away from us I told her that I liked her coat and I thought she looked really good.