I remember when I first saw the hill of dead cows I made a mental note that I’d find some bottled water and drink only that.
Or not.
The corn had continued to grow throughout the previous summer, but had never been harvested. There were whole fields with acres and acres of dead stalks—tasseled, their ears drooping like a submissive bunny’s—that had been bent but not toppled by the snow.
While I was standing before the first of the many fields of dead corn, a helicopter passed overhead.
An hour later, I saw high in the sky the white trails of what I supposed was a passenger jet.
Other than the occasional aircraft, I realized that the Exclusion Zone was going to be very, very quiet.
The first place I stopped was the Academy. Someone had locked the doors, but someone else had hurled a concrete block through a first-floor window. After the place had been abandoned last year, weeds had grown through the cracks in the front walkway, and now the long, dead strands lay there like clumps of flat hair. I crawled in through the window and saw that I was in Ms. Francis’s office. Ms. Francis was the guidance counselor I was always disappointing. There were still pictures of her two kids and her husband on a credenza and a couple of folders with my classmates’ names on her desk. There was a coffee mug with unbelievably disgusting fungus in the bottom.
I figured what the hell and opened a few filing cabinet drawers until I found her folder with my name on it. I brought it to her desk and sat down in her chair. In it I found my PSATs and my SATs and the slips showing all of the times I’d been disciplined. I read my report cards. There was nothing she herself had written about me, and nothing I hadn’t seen before. Still, it left me kind of breathless to read all in one place things like “Emily’s work has certainly been adequate, but we all know she is capable of much, much more.” Or, “It’s discouraging to see her utter unwillingness to apply herself. She is coasting. She should be soaring.” Or this one: “I’m frustrated. We all are. We all know how gifted Emily is, but so far nothing at all seems to interest her.” (That last one caused me to prickle a little bit: Writing interested me. Some teachers knew that. Poetry interested me. Okay, fine, I wasn’t into your environmental chemistry class. I’m sorry. Shoot me.)
One teacher asked rhetorically where the little girl had gone who had been such an enthusiastic middle schooler. She hinted that she was worried there might be problems at home, a comment that I remembered had made my mom go ballistic.
Still, when I put the folder back, my eyes were welling up. I shouldn’t have looked. It reminded me of what a disappointment I was. It reminded me of the ways I just blew everything apart.
My feet echoed along the corridors, and I realized I could really make some noise if I wanted. I considered screaming “Hello!” as if I were at the edge of a long cave and listening to the sound bounce around the walls, but I was actually a little creeped out. There was no electricity and it was already three o’clock, so the sun was falling, which meant there were whole parts of the Academy—such as the bathrooms, which had tiny windows, and the auditorium, which had none—that were almost pitch-black when I opened the doors. I wanted to leave the school by three-thirty so I could be home by five-thirty. That was my plan. I didn’t think it would take anywhere near two hours to walk home, because my house was only three miles away, but who knew what might distract me or slow me down along the way. I had usually taken the bus over the years, but I had walked to or from school a couple of times, too, and it had never taken more than an hour and five or ten minutes.
Among the rooms I visited that seemed to be getting the most light that time of day was my old biology classroom. The black microscopes were almost white with dust. So were the rows of textbooks on the shelves and the computer screens on the counters along the rear wall. I hadn’t set foot in there in nearly three years now, and I’m not sure what I expected. But I know I hadn’t planned on practically vomiting from the smell. This wasn’t just some Proustian nightmare—some benign opposite of those tasty little madeleines. This would have made anyone nauseous. The ninth graders had been dissecting crayfish when we were evacuated, and on all of the tables were the trays and the pails and the remains of the animals. The stench was unbearable, and so I slammed shut the door and ran away.
My dad sometimes made jokes about the ways small animals could shut down or nearly shut down a nuclear power plant. One time in Virginia a pelican flew into an overhead power cable and shorted out the connection between the plant and the off-site power grid. A bunch of jellyfish in Florida once blocked the filters at an intake station, nearly cutting off the water the plant had to have. And a few years ago a rat gnawed away the insulation around an electrical cable at a French plant, shorting out the whole cooling system. My dad had other stories. Those are just the ones I remember. His point? It doesn’t take a tsunami to raise holy hell.
Later, when I had caught my breath in Ms. Gagne’s classroom, I guessed it was the crayfish that made me think of the crazy little wildlife tales my dad sometimes shared.
In Ms. Gagne’s room, I sat in my chair at my old desk. Then I sat on top of her desk. Then I wandered aimlessly around the room, wiping the dust—which I figured was probably radioactive—off the novels we read and the filing cabinets and the Smart Board. I thought about how, here, the world had just stopped. Everyone had dropped what they were doing and run away as fast as they could. My mind roamed to the rest of Reddington, and I imagined kitchen tables with mice nibbling the toast people had left on their plates. I envisioned washing machines and dryers filled with clothes. I saw shopping carts overflowing with diapers and juice and plastic gallons of milk, now all alone in line at the grocery store registers, and dolls and blocks and little wooden trucks on the floors of the nurseries and day cares.
I wondered where Ms. Gagne—Cecile—was now. I touched the desks where Ethan Gale and Lisa Curran and Dina Ramsey had sat.
Then I went to the old-fashioned blackboard and took a piece of chalk and started writing. Most of what I wrote I erased, but not these five words. This is what I wrote:
Close your eyes, hold hands.
Someday I figured someone would see it. They’d make of it whatever they wanted. Maybe they’d think it was random. Maybe they’d just be confused.
Chapter 20
Our mailbox was still standing when I got to my house. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was white with a red flag, but now that white was more the color of a ratty old T-shirt. The pavement on our driveway was finally fading from asphalt black to a more seasoned salt and pepper. There was that ridiculous stone wall running along the edge of our lawn.
Our house—that meadow mansion that didn’t belong—was a yellow clapboard colonial. There was a bay window. There were shutters made of something called “architectural grade” vinyl siding, and they were evergreen. (It mattered to my mother that the vinyl was “architectural grade,” because she didn’t approve of vinyl siding. But my dad didn’t want to have to constantly take down and repaint wooden shutters. Shutters, I gather, are a boatload of work. So when I was in fourth grade, we had the wooden shutters replaced with those vinyl ones.)
Most of the yard was free of snow, but there was a line of small drifts where it had fallen off the eaves on the shady side of the house. The snow was crusted with crap from the roof.
I stared at my bedroom window. At the shade that was half up. At the edge of the curtains.
Neither of my parents was much of a gardener, but this was Vermont so we had flowers along the front walkway and a vegetable garden in the yard on the southern side of our house. We grew lots of tomatoes—mostly cherry and plum tomatoes—and the tomato cages were still upright, but the dead plants draped from the metal like the tentacles on man o’ war jellyfish. The tomatoes had grown and ripened after everyone had left and then fallen to the ground and rotted. The flowers along the walkway had died and collapsed under the snow and now were nothing but mounds of decomposing daylilies and sedum and phlox.
No, that wasn’t quite true. That wasn’t true at all. Some regrets can’t be undone. There was no “after” Cameron: My letting him get so sick and then leaving him behind? My running away once and for all? Unforgivable.
Still, I would be lying if I did not admit that I stared at the house experiencing all that we bring to one small, simple word: home.
Finally I took a deep breath, journeyed up the walkway, and tried the front door.
It was locked.
Of course.
The poetry of a nuclear disaster is weirdly beautiful. There is alliteration: rads and roentgens and rems. To a scientist, those are just units of measurement. To a poet? Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my.
And then there are the “iums.” Tellurium. Cesium. Strontium. And—I know this ruins the rule of three, but it is the mother of nuclear iums—plutonium.
Unfortunately, whenever I write those words down I instantly recall the dead cows and the dead moose and the dead birds, and the poems in my head turn to steam.
It might have been a schoolteacher who first said, “Close your eyes and hold hands.” And it might have been a police officer. It was back in December 2012, right after Adam Lanza had massacred all those little kids and teachers and the principal at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. After Lanza had killed himself, the grown-ups had to walk the surviving kids out of the school building, right past the bodies of their classmates who had been slaughtered. So, to keep the kids from seeing the corpses, either a teacher or one of the police officers instructed the children to close their eyes and hold hands.
I had been thinking of that moment and those words a lot since I had dropped off Cameron’s stuff at the hospital in Burlington and started back to the Kingdom. I had thought of it even more since I had passed into the Exclusion Zone. I never quite knew what I was going to see.
It seemed to me that if you didn’t know the context of those words, they were kind of pretty. They’re like those three R’s I just mentioned. Close your eyes, hold hands might, if you didn’t know the truth, sound life-affirming. I see the words on some dorky note card with the sun setting in the ocean, the sky streaked with red, and a couple on the beach with their backs to the camera holding hands. Maybe the woman has her head on the dude’s shoulder. The message, if you think about it this way, is all about taking chances because fate or destiny or God will protect you. Take a risk, have a little faith. It’s all about life, not death. It’s not about a bunch of small children who’ve been gunned down with a Bushmaster assault rifle.
Anyway, I recalled those instructions with serious dread in the pit of my stomach as I was walking around the side of my house, past the garden and the stone wall and the white tank with our LP gas that I had thought was a mini-submarine when I was a little kid. My keys to the front door were long gone—I hadn’t seen them in months—and so I was going to have to break the windows in the sliding glass doors in the back. But as I was making my way there, it dawned on me: whatever was left of my Maggie was behind those walls. With no one around to let her out, she’d died of hunger or thirst. I had no idea which would have killed her first, but my sense was that either way it was a slow and horrible way to die. In my head I heard her barking for help, but by then everybody was gone and there was no one left to come rescue her.
Still, I couldn’t stand outside forever. I was going to have to smash those sliding glass doors to get in—sort of like the way someone before me had broken a window to get into the Academy—because one of the things I had come here to do was to bury my Maggie. She deserved that. And that would mean seeing her corpse.
The problem?
I could close my eyes all I wanted, but I still had no one to hold my hand.
So, I lifted a rock the size of a soccer ball from that stone wall, a little impressed that it was finally serving a purpose, and wandered past those disturbing tomato cages with the dead vines clinging to the wire and around the corner of the house. It took both arms to carry the rock, and it was going to take both hands to hurl it through the sliding glass door.
And then I saw something that caused me to stop where I was. I stood perfectly still and stared, my mind racing as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. I dropped the rock right where I was. The sliding glass door was open. And the screen door had a massive hole ripped in it.
Make no mistake, I didn’t necessarily believe that Maggie was alive. Still, I couldn’t help but get my hopes up that she was. There was absolutely no sign of her anywhere in the house.
Here is what I told myself might have happened. My mom had opened the glass door to let some fresh air in and then, when she went to the plant to be with my dad and see what the hell was really going on, she had left it open for Maggie. Maggie loved to sniff the outside air through the big screen. She would sit up on her dog bed when the glass door was first opened, and her nose would go a little crazy. It was adorable. At some point, either crazed with hunger or boredom or thirst, she had ripped that hole in the screen and gotten out. Thank God. She might be long dead, but at least she hadn’t died trapped and alone in the house.
When I couldn’t find her or her remains anywhere inside, I went outside and started calling her name. I wondered if the animals thought it was strange to suddenly hear a human voice. It had probably been a long time. I guessed a lot had never heard one. I walked around our yard and the edge of the woods, yelling, “Maggie! C’mon, girl. Maggie, I’m home!” I must have done that for ten minutes, and my voice was growing hoarse.
Finally, when Maggie didn’t come racing out of the evergreens, I went back inside and inspected the house a little more carefully. I wanted to see what we had in the way of canned food and bottled water or juice. My plan was to live there. I would write my poems. I would keep my journals. I would become the Belle of Reddington.
I slid shut the glass door so animals wouldn’t join me in the night and went upstairs to my bedroom. It was freezing cold, but otherwise exactly as I had left it. There were the jeans on the floor I had chosen not to wear on the morning that Cape Abenaki had melted down, and there was the shirt that I had tossed on my desk when I decided it made my arms look fat. There was the earring I had left on my dresser when I couldn’t find its matching partner. There was my armoire, open as always, and there on the top of my bookcase were my journals. The only thing in my room I ever kept neat was the top of the bookcase with my journals. And there they were, lined up between the two brass unicorn bookends.
I was tempted to start reading them right then, but it could wait. I was exhausted. And I figured I had nothing but time.
I took off my clothes, which I realized now were revolting, sponged myself off with water from a Saratoga bottle I found in the pantry, and climbed into my favorite red check pajamas. Dorky beyond belief.
And then I went to sleep in my very own bed. I pulled the quilt over my head and didn’t wake up until close to nine-thirty the next morning.
The next day I began to clean. Maggie may have gone out through the screen door, but a lot of animals had since used it to come in. I guessed there had been squirrels and raccoons and fisher cats inside the house. The hole wasn’t so big that a bear could have wandered in, but the rug in the den and the tile in the kitchen were spotted with mud and animal tracks. The bag with Maggie’s dry kibbles, which we kept in a pantry closet, was empty and the heavy paper had been gnawed into little pieces. That might have been Maggie because the pantry door was partway open, but it might also have been wild animals. Also, all of the cereal boxes we’d opened had been destroyed and the wax bags inside them licked clean. Wind had blown rain into the den and the couch was moldy and damp. I found piles of scat in the living
room—which, they would tell me later, had probably been seriously radioactive. Lovely, right?
I was never big into vacuuming, but I would have vacuumed now if there had been any electricity. There wasn’t. So the first thing I did was drag the couch through the glass doors and out into the sun in the yard. I thought I might dry it out during the day and drag it back inside at night. Maybe in a few days it would be okay. If not, I would leave it in the garage. Both of my parents’ cars were gone, parked in the lot at Cape Abenaki, I guessed. So why not store the couch there? Then I got the broom and a dustpan and a bucket and a mop, and I started to clean. I used a little Windex on the glass on the framed poster of my parents and me on the Christmas mornings when I’d been a kid. I went through a whole roll of paper towels as I dusted.
And I ate. Everything in the refrigerator was unbelievably gross, and I just tossed it all into a pair of black garbage bags. The most grotesque thing I found was what I think in another era might have been chicken breasts. I would have poured the liquids that hadn’t completely evaporated down the sink, but I didn’t have running water, so those cartons and bottles and jars went into the trash bags, too.
But there was still plenty to eat in the pantry. I opened a can of Campbell’s cheddar cheese soup, the stuff that was the key ingredient in my mom’s mac and cheese, and ate cold spoonfuls of it. I polished off a bottle of Diet Snapple and a can of V-8. (I’m not a big fan of V-8, but I used to drink it because it wasn’t hugely caloric and you got some vegetables.) I ate a can of creamed corn.
And when I ran out of the food in my house? I figured I’d wander to our neighbors’. I’d take a walk to the general store in Reddington. I’d throw a rock through the windows of the supermarket in Newport. It seemed to me that I would die years before the Exclusion Zone ran out of food.
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