Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  Every hour or so I would go outside and call for Maggie.

  One day I walked to the home of Skylar Furney to steal his bike. Skylar was one of four Furney kids, but I only knew him because he was the one closest to my age. He was a year behind me at the Academy. His two brothers and his sister were even younger; they were all in middle school. But I remembered that Skylar was one of those manic bicyclists, and I figured I might as well use his bike since he wasn’t. I wanted to use it to look for Maggie. I wanted to expand my search area.

  The tires were flat, but he had a pump hanging on the wall in the garage. See what I mean about what a bike guy he was?

  And this was a much nicer bike than the one I had ridden partway to Burlington the previous June. It was very light. It had those clips that fit into the bottom of bike shoes, and at first I feared I was kind of screwed. Obviously I didn’t have bike shoes. But then it dawned on me: Skylar did. Duh. If I was going to steal his bike, I might as well steal his shoes. What’s that expression? In for a nickel, in for a dime. I wasn’t wild about rooting around his bedroom, but I was prepared to. Fortunately, I didn’t even have to trudge upstairs: I found his bike shoes in the mudroom right off the garage. And while his feet were bigger than mine, it didn’t matter once I clipped in. I was fine.

  Well, I was fine after an hour. I fell about sixty times that first hour, and my beginning spills were all on his driveway. It was after about the tenth tumble that it dawned on me: a smart chick would try to learn to ride in clips on the lawn. So that’s what I did. If you’re going to be a turtle on its back in its shell—that’s sort of what it’s like to topple over on a bicycle when you’re clipped into the pedals—do it on grass, not pavement. There were still patches of snow, but mostly they were in the shade. I even ran over or smashed a few blue and pink crocuses as I practiced.

  One of the doctors here asked me, “Weren’t you a little grossed out when you were wearing that strange boy’s smelly shoes?”

  I looked at her. “Really?” I said. “Really?” Over the last year I had been living in an igloo made of trash bags. I had been sexing down truckers in the cabs of their eighteen-wheelers. I had been carving up my thighs with an X-Acto knife. And now she thinks it’s going to freak me out to wear some teenage boy’s bike shoes? Hello?

  You know what? Skylar Furney’s male teenage stinkfoot had never even crossed my mind.

  It was the day after that, when I was passing our little white submarine of LP gas, that it clicked: I could light the stove and heat up my creamed corn and cheddar cheese soup if I wanted—at least until the gas in the tank ran out. I would use one of our fireplace matches the way my mom did whenever we had a blackout in a snowstorm. You just turned the knob and put a lit match near the burner.

  The first time I tried it, I was a little tentative: I think I was afraid I was going to blow up the whole house. But it was really kind of idiot-proof. The burner caught instantly.

  Son-of-a-bitch, I remember thinking. You can cook. Not shabby.

  And so I lived like that for three weeks. Maybe three and a half. And then, of course, it all came crashing down. (I know my therapist would quibble with “crashing down.” Her spin would be a little different. We would have one of those debates about the “passive voice” and how I need to take responsibility for my actions.)

  But until then, I continued to clean and eat canned soups and canned vegetables—sometimes cold, but mostly hot—and polish off all of our jugs of water and bottles of juice. I started to pillage the food at our nearest neighbors’ house, the Barbours, figuring when their food was gone I’d simply move on to the next family’s. Other than the occasional airplanes and a second helicopter that thwumped overhead on day six or day seven, I was completely alone. I no longer wondered about the wide tire tracks I’d seen soon after returning to the area. I wrote. I wrote poems and I wrote in my journals.

  One day I thought I would dress only in white. But then I worried I was getting into a weird area and climbed back into a tan and black dress I had gotten from Free People that I had always liked.

  My journals went back years. I still had my first Hello Kitty diary. I had my Barbie Rapunzel notebook from second grade. I had my Disney princess pink and purple and yellow notepads, one each for Cinderella and Jasmine and Belle. There were all the salt-and-pepper composition books from my middle school phase. And there were the leather-bound journals I had started to keep in ninth grade. There were six of them, or about two a year. I tended to fill one every six months.

  I was fascinated by my penmanship after so long away from them. I had forgotten I had written in only pink gel pens in fourth and fifth grade. I had forgotten I had a phase in ninth grade when I kept trying (and failing) to write villanelles. Nineteen lines. Five tercets and a quatrain. Refrains and repeating rhymes. Supposedly Elizabeth Bishop spent eighteen years on one villanelle before she decided she had gotten it right. Obviously my parents knew about my poems, but few of my friends did. I didn’t want people to know. They were … mine. How many of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime? Ten between 1850 and 1866. One in a book in 1878. That was it. Did she want more? Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact is that most of her work, especially the reams and reams of papers that her sister found after her death, never saw the light of day in her lifetime. In one parent-teacher fiasco that was supposed to be a “conference,” my mom revealed that I had all this writing I never shared with anyone. She was trying to argue that I had talent. Mad skills as a writer. I wasn’t a total loss. My reaction? Vesuvius. I felt betrayed and kind of wigged out.

  When I was reconciled with all my journals that spring, I told myself that cutting had replaced writing, but now that I was home I would write. I threw the X-Acto away.

  And, instead, a few days later I simply used a sharp little paring knife that I found in the kitchen. After that I used a pair of nail scissors that turned out to be unexpectedly sharp.

  So, now I was cutting and writing.

  But, in truth, mostly writing.

  My mom and dad had put a beautiful leather journal from Italy in my Easter basket my junior year, and that was the journal I used to begin this story.

  I wrote most of the time in my bedroom, just as I had when my parents had been alive, even though I had nothing but privacy. I could have written at the kitchen table, if I’d wanted. I could have written completely naked in the middle of the lawn, if it had been a little warmer. But instead I sat in my window seat, the sun on my back, just as I had a year and two and three years earlier. I would sometimes drape my hand where Maggie had once slept. I would have deep pangs of sadness when I came across a few strands of her fur.

  I didn’t mind the fact there was no electricity. After half a winter in an igloo, my life felt movie-star luxurious. Besides, I had candles and batteries for a couple of flashlights.

  If I had come across a cell phone that still had a charge, I would have called the hospital to make sure that Cameron really had gotten better. I wanted him to awake from his coma. I would have called Camille to see if she and Dawn were okay. But I never found a phone with a charge.

  I figured for sure that people were looking for me, but I doubted they’d ever look here.

  Besides: the world still had much bigger problems than me. No one was going to look very hard.

  I got used to a world without music.

  I got used to a world with dead animals and wild animals and sick animals. I would see a lot of the dead and the wild and the sick as I biked around the Exclusion Zone.

  I was drawn to my parents’ bedroom. Sometimes, I would just stare at the bed, which was still unmade because my mom had rushed out to the plant, and at their nightstands. I made a decision to respect their privacy and vowed I would never, ever go through their closets or drawers. My mom and dad were light-years from perfect, but I believed they had never, ever read my journals.

  Still, I spent a lot of time in their room. I curled up on their bed and inhaled the traces of th
em that remained on their pillowcases and sheets.

  It wasn’t until the day I decided to bike out to Newport and Cape Abenaki that I discovered I was not, in fact, alone. Far from it.

  The hill down into Newport had tons of mud on the road, a result of the runoff from thawing snow and the ferocious, icy-cold rains that mark the end of winter in northern Vermont. In the dried mud, I saw more tire tracks—and, clearly, fresh ones—as I sped down the slope. The main street through the center of town had even more tracks, and here I could see they were going in both directions.

  When I got to the shore of Lake Memphremagog, it dawned on me what was going on. And right on cue, I heard a third helicopter roaring up from the south and then hovering in the distance. It was just beyond the peninsula, and so while I couldn’t see what was beneath it, I knew as well as anyone in the world that below it were the remains of Cape Abenaki. It might take years and it might take decades … but they were actually trying to clean up the mess.

  Chapter 21

  I found a place where I could wait and watch the trucks coming and going without being seen: one of the twin towers of the St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Church. It was on a hill overlooking the lake and the city, perfectly situated if I wanted to lurk. (Just so you know, I did not break into the church. I have limits. When everyone had raced away from the meltdown, someone had left one of the side doors unlocked. I was able to walk right in.) The towers allowed me a 360-degree view. I could look out at the peninsula, behind which sat whatever was left of the plant, and I could look down at the city itself and the roads that veered north to Cape Abenaki. Some of the trucks were from the National Guard, but others were from FEMA and the NRC. I could see through the vehicle windows that everyone inside was always wearing hazmat suits, which would have made me uneasy about the radiation around me if I wasn’t pretty sure I had already done myself in.

  I still had not seen the plant itself because it was shielded by the trees on the peninsula, but every so often I would bike a little bit closer before turning around. And it was clear that soon there were going to be a lot fewer trees: workers were clearing the woods to the south to make room for massive silver and gray storage tanks. And I mean massive; this is not teen-speak hyperbole. They were the size of gymnasiums. At first I couldn’t figure out what they were for, but then that part of me that’s a nuclear engineer’s daughter kicked in and I got it: all that radioactive wastewater had to go somewhere, and those tanks were the destination. It looked like they were making room for hundreds of them.

  And always I would call for Maggie when there were no trucks nearby. I had given up hope, but I was seriously into that “magical thinking” routine once again. So long as I kept looking for Maggie, I convinced myself, she might still be alive.

  I never did break into the supermarket in Newport. There seemed to be too many trucks coming and going through the small city, and I was afraid of being cornered inside there. One time I considered going at night, but for some reason I was afraid. I have no idea why. By now I knew there were no nuclear mutants or AMC zombies walking around. Just wild dogs and turkeys and deer.

  It was warm now, and maybe that’s why my mind went “bear” when I heard the noise outside the sliding glass doors. The bears had come out of hibernation. I was eating a late dinner by candlelight on the floor—the Barbours’ vegetable soup and a couple of Luna bars I had found at the Furneys’—when I heard the animal outside. I guessed the flickering candlelight had attracted it, but I didn’t know enough about animals to know if that really made any sense. It didn’t matter, however, because a second later I heard the animal bark and I nearly tipped over the candles and set the house on fire when I leapt to my feet, because I knew instantly it was Maggie.

  I threw open the glass door and what was left of the screen door, and there she was. She jumped at me, her paws almost on my shoulders, and she started licking my face and I was weeping and I think she was, too—at least as much as a dog can weep. But if she was crying, it was, like me, with joy. She was freaky thin and she had nasty sores on her legs and her coat was a disaster: matted and filled with twigs and burrs. But she was alive and a thousand times healthier than I would have guessed. I got her a bottle of water and opened two cans of dog food, and she slept on the window seat in my bedroom that night like nothing in the world had changed.

  For the next four days, I didn’t leave the yard. Maggie didn’t either. I didn’t want her out of my sight, and I don’t think she wanted me tooling around on Skylar’s bike. Besides, I didn’t need to look for her anymore. Here she was. I brushed out her coat little by little, sponging away the smell of stale swamp, and watched her eat and eat … and eat. I figured in a few days I would have to break into the Woodsons’ house and steal some of their dog food. But I wasn’t worried. Just as there were plenty of cans of creamed corn and vegetable soup in the Exclusion Zone for me, there was probably a lifetime supply of canned dog food for my Maggie. When I would smooth some Bacitracin onto her legs, I would rub some into my thighs, and it seemed as if we both were getting better.

  I felt a bit like I had when I had gotten that job at the diner back in Burlington: the future had a little promise. Perhaps I was finally leaving behind the absolute suckage that my life had become.

  It was a weekday when I finally biked so far that I could see the plant beyond the wastewater storage tanks they were building. Before Maggie had returned I had been inching a little closer on each journey.

  I think there were a couple of reasons why I wanted to see it, but the big one was that it was where my mom and dad had died. Where I assumed their bodies still were. It was like visiting their graves. (In a disturbing sort of way, “grave” is the right word. The remains of the Chernobyl reactor are encased in a massive concrete sarcophagus. The Fukushima ruins are, too. So, I figured a part of the cleanup in the Kingdom involved building a sarcophagus atop Reactor One.) A therapist here thinks it may also have had something to do with Cameron: I had tried to be his parent and fallen short, and these visits were about “identification.” I was bonding with my mom and dad. Maybe. But mostly I just wanted to say good-bye.

  I had to close the sliding glass door at my house when I left because it seemed like otherwise Maggie was going to follow me. But I wanted the house and our yard to be her whole universe from now on, and I think she preferred it that way, too. She only wanted to come with me because she loved me and didn’t want to be alone. I couldn’t say I blamed her. But I figured nothing would happen to me and she’d be fine here alone.

  Obviously, I was wrong. Something, I guess, was bound to happen.

  I saw the carcass of a massive rubber berm that was supposed to protect Cape Abenaki from the flood. It was in a field between the river and the remains of Reactor One. It looked a little like a giant snake. Around it were hundreds—maybe thousands—of sandbags.

  Like everything else, they were radioactive.

  I guess on some level I understood that the closer I got to the plant, the worse the radiation was going to be. Even a mile away, the folks who were cementing the lake bed wherever Memphremagog met the northern swamps and streams were decked out like astronauts. Their outfits and masks made the hazmat suits I’d seen look like bikinis and swim goggles. I have no idea how they could move. In addition to their masks, they were wearing yellow hard-hats. And while I only watched the concrete mixers and the chutes and the cranes for an hour, I saw a shift change. Maybe that was a coincidence, and maybe they were only allowed to work there for forty-five minutes or an hour at a time. I still don’t know.

  The “containment vehicle”—I’ve always loved that term—for Reactor One also housed a spent-fuel pool. Delightful. Even from a distance I could see that the roof was demolished. A whole wall was gone, blown away, and in the charred sides I could see rows and rows of rebar spikes. I saw a grid of metal stanchions and scaffolding that looked like it had started to melt—and, in some cases, really had melted. There were three large cranes around the react
or, and I watched a pair of helicopters come and hover above it, and then fly away. While I was there, one of the choppers started to lower something through what I guessed was a hole in the roof, and as it descended I understood what it was: a robot. They were actually lowering robots into whatever was left of the reactor. Something had to clean up all those uranium pellets that had melted down, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be a human something.

  I had pulled my bike off to the side of the road, but I was only on the edge of the grass. My bike—well, Skylar’s bike—was between my legs. I was at the entrance to the farthest corner of the employee parking lot. I had expected there would still be all the Subarus and pickups and Volvos of the people who once worked at the plant, but all the cars had been towed away or driven off and now were rotting wherever the country housed its radioactive fleet. Instead I saw only a few NRC trucks and a couple of long FEMA trailers. The asphalt had buckled here and there, a combination of frost heaves that no one had bothered to smooth out and the weight from the massive trucks that must have been coming and going since the meltdown.

  For a while I gazed at where the offices and the control room had been. Once there had been a building there. It was on the side where the wall of the containment vessel had blown apart. Now it was a gigantic concrete block. That’s where my parents had been when they’d died. I rolled around in my mind the idea that if the government had made the effort to get rid of all those cars, they had probably found a way to remove the dead bodies. Maybe the dead were somewhere in the midst of that concrete, but I wasn’t sure. I realized now that the dead might have been buried—my parents, of course, among them. And that left me vacillating between emptiness and relief: emptiness because I had wanted to say good-bye and was being denied even that, and relief that their bodies (or whatever was left of their bodies) might have been treated with respect and laid to rest … somewhere.