Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Let me get you something for your nose,” I said. Camille and Dawn didn’t have Kleenex, so I took the roll of paper towels off the kitchen counter and tore off a couple of sheets. Then I asked Camille if they had any orange juice. They didn’t.

  “I’ll pick some up,” I said. “I want to go to the Laundromat.”

  “Do you have any money?”

  “Not a lot. But I have enough for orange juice and a load of laundry.”

  “How’d it go at the diner?”

  “I got a job. I start tomorrow.”

  “No shit? That’s awesome.” She went to hug me, but even though the gesture caught me off guard I was able to stop her before she got too close.

  “Whoa,” I said, and put out my arm, my hand a wall, like a traffic cop. “I think I’m coming down with a cold.”

  “You, too?”

  “Yup, me too.”

  Then she went to work, and I emptied out Cameron’s and my backpacks and piled all of our laundry onto the floor. Normally Cameron would have come with me to the Laundromat—he liked to sit on the hot dryers—but it was plenty warm at Camille’s. Besides, I wanted him to stay inside and rest.

  “I wish they had a TV,” he said. “Or a computer. It would be cool to watch something. Anything.”

  Somewhere, I figured, Camille had a laptop. After all, she was taking classes at CCV. But I didn’t want to search her and Dawn’s bedroom or “borrow” it for Cameron even if I found it. That would have been a pretty crappy betrayal after she had let us chill at her place. “I agree,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  He sneezed and shrugged, and so I packed up our clothes and left for the Laundromat.

  The other day I spied this note my therapist had written about me. “Welcomes seclusion. Not precisely antisocial, but reclusive. Aspirationally Dickinson?” Note the question mark she put after “Dickinson,” as if she’s wondering if I have a girl crush on the Belle of Amherst. Well, duh. If I’d had a pen when I saw that, I think I would have scratched out the hook above the dot and scribbled something like Watch out, Sigmund Freud. Honestly, I’m not sure how much of my crush focused on her poetry and how much focused on the mysteriousness of her life. Why did she retreat inside her home—and did she even consider it a retreat? How much of her life was about her daddy issues? Did the child whose father urged her to be “one of the best little girls” in Amherst ever unleash the passion that filled her poetry with one (or more!) of her gentleman friends? There was a novel I read about her in tenth grade that had all kinds of intriguing innuendo. In it she sleeps with a guy with tats. There was one biography that implied she had a wild side.

  When I was ten years old, I visited her house for the first time with my grandmother. When I was fourteen years old, I went again with my parents. As I think I told you, I had posters from the Homestead on the walls of my bedroom—framed posters. (My favorite is a painting of her in a long-sleeved white dress looking at herself at the edge of a very still pond.)

  I read one essay that suggested Emily Dickinson had a modernist approach to poetry as a writer—she had a contemporary sensibility. Why? Because elements of her work were short enough to tweet. I remember thinking that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever read. Just because something is 140 characters or less doesn’t mean it’s modern. God, think of all the ancient Japanese haiku about cherry blossoms and clouds. Are those modern? No, they’re just short.

  I don’t know, maybe I just wanted to be alone. Maybe I just didn’t want to be social because antisocial people have a whole lot less to lose.

  Chapter 18

  I only ended up working at Henry’s Diner for two days. That’s it. I got the tips I had earned those two shifts, but I never even got a paycheck. I wasn’t able to stick around long enough.

  That’s what I mean about how, maybe, I was never destined to turn things around.

  When I went back to the diner the next day right after lunch to get trained, Andy’s brother sent me home. I was, in his opinion, way too sick to work at a restaurant. He was probably right, but I needed to get cash fast because I wasn’t sure how long I could impose on Camille and Dawn. (In all fairness, I think I could have imposed on them for a very long time, especially if I was making money and could have helped with the rent. They really didn’t seem to mind that I slept on the couch for a couple of nights and Cameron had made a cave out of the one table in their apartment. Who knows? We might have become a new posse—a posse with actual jobs that wasn’t breaking into people’s houses and mistaking Oxies for vitamins.) So the day after I was sent home I doubled down on the DayQuil dosage: I felt like shit because I really did have one monster of a cold and because doubling down on DayQuil gets you kind of light-headed and high—and not a good high. But my nose? It was solid. They let me work right up until the place closed for the night, around nine p.m. And I liked the uniform: it had this retro Kat Dennings sort of vibe. I was the youngest girl there; in fact, I was the only waitress you might call a girl. The next youngest waitress was a mom whose name tag said Shari and who was probably thirty or thirty-five. She wore her hair in this Rosie the Riveter sort of updo and kept it back with a scarf. There was also a really lovely lady named Gail Arnoff with the most incredible hazel eyes; I recognized her from somewhere and wasn’t sure where, but then she told me she volunteered at the library when she wasn’t working at the diner and I got it.

  The platters were heavy and half the time I was terrified that I was going to spill gravy and milk and ice-cream scoops of mashed potatoes, but I never did. The cooks were two old guys who seemed to be barking at me all the time, but I figured out pretty quickly that most of the time they weren’t actually mad. As one of my therapists here would put it, they just communicated by yelling. And Andy was (Warning: SAT Word Fast Approaching) avuncular. He sometimes told the cooks to cut me some slack. He chided them about the unfinished food I’d cart back into the kitchen.

  When I returned to Camille’s, I was exhausted, but I had nearly forty-five dollars in tips in my pocket.

  Unfortunately, any happiness that I had earned some real money without begging or sucking some trucker’s dick evaporated within seconds of my closing the front door to the apartment. Cameron was way sicker than he had been at lunchtime when I’d left. Way sicker. And he was way sicker than I was. We didn’t have a thermometer, but it felt to me like Cameron was burning up. He was rag-doll weak, his head was throbbing, and he said he ached everywhere. His nose was a disaster. So I gave him some NyQuil and convinced him to eat a few spoonfuls of chicken soup–flavored ramen noodles.

  My heart hurt for him.

  That night Camille surprised me. As I was tossing a sheet back on the couch and getting ready to go to sleep, she said she had something for me and handed me a small, square box. It was the perfect size for a pair of earrings.

  “Open it,” Camille said, when I stared at it for a couple of seconds. “I swear, whatever’s in there won’t bite. It’s not like I hid a scorpion in there or something.”

  And so I untied the ribbon and opened it. Sure enough, silver earrings with a little blue stone in each. “It’s a tanzanite,” she said.

  I had no idea what a tanzanite was, but that didn’t matter. They were pretty.

  “I couldn’t afford moonstones,” Camille went on. “I went back to the pawnshop, but your earrings were long gone. I’m really sorry.”

  “These are beautiful,” I told her, and I meant it. “Thank you.” I started to put one on, but discovered the holes in my ears had closed up.

  “We’ll fix that this week,” she said.

  I looked at the earring in the palm of my hand. I focused on how vibrant the blue was and nodded. But I didn’t say anything because suddenly I was afraid to speak.

  I went to work the next day, too, as did Camille and Dawn. I felt like the worst mother in the world leaving Cameron in his mummy bag beneath the pumpkin pine table—he’d actually been moaning in his sleep the
night before—but what else could I do? When I left, Camille and Dawn were still at the apartment, but I knew they might both be gone by the time Cameron finally woke up.

  It was a Saturday and it was beautiful out. It felt like spring. One of the grown-up waitresses at Henry’s said she had seen a robin on the way in to work.

  I was working all the way through the lunch shift that day because Henry’s closed at three o’clock on Saturdays, and so I was back at Camille’s by about three-thirty. She had already left for Leunig’s and Dawn was at Macy’s, so Cameron was alone. He was curled up in a small ball in his mummy bag, asleep, and I didn’t wake him. But he was sweating, and when I touched his forehead I was shocked at how warm he still was—and a little worried. I was getting better. He wasn’t. It dawned on me that maybe we didn’t have the same cold. Maybe he didn’t have a cold at all.

  I hadn’t smoked any weed since I’d left Poacher’s, but I did that night. Camille and I shared a bowl when she returned from the restaurant. Dawn was seriously DTF—okay, maybe not literally down to fuck, but at least in the mood for a hookup—and had gone to some club on Main Street where she could party and get some. I insisted that Camille and I smoke in her and Dawn’s bedroom so Cameron didn’t have to breathe any in while he shivered and sweat in his mummy bag on the living room floor. She sat on her little bed and I sat on Dawn’s. I hadn’t noticed it before, but Camille had this stuffed panda bear the size of a little dog. I thought she was going to use it as a pillow. Instead she sat it on her lap like it was a baby.

  “You know,” she murmured, “someday you are going to have to bring him to the police.”

  “He wouldn’t go,” I said. “He’d just run away again.”

  “But he’s, like, nine.”

  “He’s not like nine. He is nine.”

  She held a lit Bic over the bowl, and I watched the dope glow as she inhaled. It always looked like a night sky with lots of stars to me when someone did that. “You can’t do this forever,” she said, after she’d exhaled. I knew exactly what she meant by “this.” I thought it was pretty interesting that Camille of all people should be trying to get into my head as the voice of reason. “It’s more than a little dodgy. The little dude really should be in school. You should be in school.”

  I shrugged. “It’s whatever.”

  “You must have been good in school.”

  “Never as good as people thought I should be.”

  “You’re an only child?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She leaned off her bed and passed me the pipe, and I breathed in the smoke and held it. God, it felt good.

  “Still. There’s something else going on here,” she said. “It’s not just that he’s like this little brother you never had.”

  “I really like him.”

  “I get it. I like him, too. Did you see the way he duct taped the checkers pieces? Most colorful checkers set I’ve ever seen. But there are lots of things I like that I can’t have.”

  “He doesn’t have anyone else.”

  “And neither do you. Is that it?”

  When I didn’t say anything, she went on: “Have you googled your name? Your real name?”

  This was the first time she’d officially acknowledged she knew who I was since she had told me in the food court that she’d deleted the numbers I’d called from her old phone.

  “I did. Once. It made me a little sick.”

  “So you know what’s out there—what people are saying?”

  “Mostly. But I kind of steer clear of computers and the news.”

  “There must be people looking for you.”

  “It seemed to me they stopped a month or so after they started. I didn’t see anything about me after July.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. It just means you weren’t in the papers.”

  “Maybe. But after what they were saying about my dad, I don’t want to be found. I don’t want to have to testify.”

  “Because of the shit they’re trying to sell about him?”

  I must have winced, because her face fell like she had just said the wrong thing. “He wasn’t drunk that day,” I told her. “Sometimes he drank too much, but he hadn’t the night before. And there’s no way he was drinking that morning at the plant.”

  “Even if he was drunk, he’s not you. You were never to blame. You’re just a kid. It’s not like people were ever going to lynch you.”

  “Those first days, it sure felt like they were. You should have heard the stuff people said to me the day of the meltdown. It was really scary.”

  “Maybe back then people were a little crazy. They’re not anymore. That was a long time ago.”

  “Nine months.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I mean. That’s a long time.”

  It was, especially now. Even I know that a lot more happens in nine months these days than when my parents were kids. These days, did anyone outside of New England ever even think about Cape Abenaki? Did anyone think about the way only a year ago people were ice-fishing with the reactor a quick skate away? Skiing at Jay Peak? Taking French at Reddington Academy?

  I wondered what had been done with whatever was left of my parents’ radioactive bodies.

  I wondered how my Maggie had died.

  I wondered what the fuck I was doing.

  It’s a good thing I was stoned. It gave me an excuse not to talk.

  On Sunday morning Cameron was kind of delirious, and I wondered if I was overdosing him on NyQuil by accident. I even had this paranoid thought that Dawn was overdosing him on purpose. Maybe she was secretly psycho. Isn’t there some mental illness where moms try and make their kids sick so the moms feel needed and important?

  But I don’t think I ever really believed that about Dawn.

  Still, between the strange ways that Cameron was talking to himself in this half-awake, half-asleep dream state and the fact his body was trembling, I went from worried to scared. I was really glad the diner was closed on Sundays so I didn’t have to leave him. I decided if he wasn’t a lot better by dinnertime, I was going to take him to the ER at the hospital up the hill from us and get him some serious meds.

  Flu shots are a lot like condoms. They’re very effective, but apparently they are not 100 percent perfect.

  You can just imagine how pissed I was that night when some know-it-all ER resident told me this in his holier-than-thou, I-know-my-shit-and-you-don’t tone of voice. “The flu vaccine is very good,” he said, “but it’s only one of the many things you need to do to stay safe during flu season.”

  All I had said was “But I got him a flu shot.” It’s not like I was questioning his “preliminary” diagnosis or even getting all defensive on him. I was, more or less, just speaking aloud. Talking to myself. But I got him a flu shot.

  And I got this fucking quasi-rebuke. The guy had thick blond hair and perfect skin and rimless eyeglasses. He reminded me of an artsy kind of movie star.

  It had still been light out when I’d had a cab bring Cameron and me to the hospital. But there are no windows in the ER so it felt like night anyway. Cameron was lying down on this gurney behind some drapes, and I was standing up beside this crap orange chair with metal armrests.

  Looking back, the whole moment shows how surreal and childish my expectations were. I knew I was going to have to lie my ass off about who I was and what our relationship was and why I didn’t have a health insurance card, but I was pretty sure I could out-lie and out-bluster anyone there. I honestly expected a doctor or nurse would look at Cameron and say, “Here are some antibiotics, you’ll be fine in a day or two.” I mean, already I felt much better—practically well—and all I’d been doing was scarfing down DayQuil.

  And my lie was pretty simple. I said I was Abby and this was my brother, Alex—two syllables, like Abby, so it was going to be easy for us both to remember—and I had forgotten my phone at home and our parents were in the Adirondacks for some spring skiing, but here was their phone number and it was okay to call
them. I said they wouldn’t have cell service right now, but they would when they were back at the hotel after dinner that night. And then the number I gave the woman at the front counter was Camille’s phone. If anything, the woman who checked us in must have thought that my pretend parents were the assholes; after all, they were the ones who had gone skiing and left their older daughter alone to care for their sick younger son. I said my wallet with my health insurance card was with my phone, but my mom could give them all the information when they reached her.

  But two things happened that I hadn’t expected.

  “Your brother certainly has the symptoms of the flu, but I think there may be a little more going on. When will your parents get here?” Dr. Know-It-All asked me.

  “They weren’t going to come back until tomorrow.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “They should come back now. Right now. We’re going to admit your brother.”

  “For the flu?”

  “For encephalitis.”

  I had never heard of encephalitis, but obviously I didn’t like the sound of this. So the first thing that happened that I hadn’t anticipated was that they were going to keep Cameron overnight. And the second? He might be way sicker than I realized.

  “What’s encephalitis?” I asked, but now there was this ringing in my ears and I was feeling a little dizzy myself. I had to sit down, and so I sort of collapsed into that ugly orange chair and only heard bits and pieces of his answer. The only things that lodged were inflamed brain tissue, maybe a virus, and MRI. They actually wanted to do an MRI of Cameron’s brain.

  “So, let’s get him admitted,” the doctor said when he was done. Then, whether he meant to or not, he put the dagger to me. “I really wish you’d brought him in sooner,” he said.

  And suddenly someone had stuck an IV into Cameron’s arm because he needed fluids and someone else was wheeling his gurney down the corridor and into an elevator. And then, of course, he was gone. Just like that. He was gone.