Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  Behind me I heard another of those trucks rumbling down the road, and so I swung my leg over the top tube of the bike so I could carry it with me into the brush about twenty yards away. Instead, however, I tripped. It was one of those completely ridiculous tumbles that just happen, especially if you’re not all that practiced at hoisting a bicycle off the ground and trying to hide in the nearby bushes and weeds. So I stood up and started lifting the bike off the grass, but already it was too late. There was this FEMA truck rolling into the lot. The driver jammed on the brakes the moment he saw me.

  My instinct was to just run like a madwoman into the brush. I figured that even in bike shoes with clips on the soles I could outrun a couple of middle-aged dudes in hazmat suits and little plastic booties on their feet. But I wanted that bike, and I figured that I could race past them before they could turn their truck around and motor after me.

  So I took the bike and ran with it onto the asphalt and clipped in. They were yelling at me to stop, and even though their voices were muffled beneath their masks I got the 411 on what they were screaming. There were two of them and they tried to position themselves between me and the access road to the parking lot, but I was just a hair quicker than they were. They tried to herd me toward each other, like I was a loose kitten or something. One of them almost made a grab for me—looking back, I think he might have if he wasn’t worried about ripping his suit if he fell—but he didn’t, and I was able to scoot between the two of them. If you didn’t know that the whole little world we were in was scarily toxic and nineteen people had died and thousands and thousands more had lost their homes and I was a fucking orphan and cutter, it would have been comic. Or not.

  I don’t know. I really don’t. As you have no doubt figured out by now, judgment—and what we call good judgment—is not topmost in my skill set.

  Anyway, I got away. I rode like I was sprinting in the Tour de France, pedaling as fast as I ever had. When I got home, I was exhausted. This was way beyond winded. This was way beyond tired. When I finally collapsed in the den, I discovered that I felt, pure and simple, shitty. I was nauseous and—and I hate to share this detail with you, but I promised I would always tell the truth—I had diarrhea. I was pretty sure I knew the problem: I’d finally gone and pulled an Icarus. I’d flown way too close to the sun. The parking lot of the plant? A very bad idea. Seriously radioactive. I told myself that maybe it was just a virus, but I didn’t really believe that.

  Moreover, it crossed my mind that I had outed myself and the jig might be up. People had spotted me—and no good could come from that. I knew what people thought of my family. And, of course, I knew what I had done. I knew all the things that I had done. I thought of my little buddy I had deserted back in Burlington—a boy who, for all I knew, might have died because I’d lacked the common sense to bring him to a doctor. I think I would have been in no-holds-barred panic mode if I had felt even a little bit better.

  That evening I curled up with Maggie on the living room rug after dinner and watched a candle burn down in a hurricane lamp that in the old days we’d kept outside on the porch for summer nights. I tried to think through carefully what had occurred. I tried to decide how long it would take for someone to figure out that the girl they had seen on the bike was the missing daughter of a dead Cape Abenaki engineer. Probably not very. Not all the world was filled with morons.

  And when someone did make that leap—which really wasn’t all that great—then they would come look for me here at my house. It was kind of natural, right?

  So, I was seriously pissed at myself. I didn’t want to leave my home. This was where I planned to live out my life and, I presumed, die of radiation sickness or cancer. I didn’t know if that was five months or five years in the distance. (And, given how I felt that night, I thought it might even be five days.) It’s weird, but the greatest desire I had was to outlive Maggie. That’s all I wanted that moment. I never again wanted my Maggie to have to fend for herself in the wild.

  I would have left that night—I should have left that night—but I was just too fucking sick. So I decided that the two of us would leave the next day. Hopefully I hadn’t fatally nuked myself and I’d feel better. I wasn’t sure where Maggie and I would go, but the hazmat police—or whatever—weren’t about to search the whole Exclusion Zone. Who had time for that? And there was nothing but empty houses. I could take my pick of meadow mansions and Victorians and farmhouses and Georgians and colonials. I could live in trailers and double-wides and the grocery store if I wanted. I could go to my home away from home as a kid—Lisa Curran’s family’s place. Lisa’s bedroom would even be packed with clothes I could wear. So, that was in fact what I decided: I’d take my journals and Skylar’s bike, and in the morning Maggie and I would leave for the Currans’ old place.

  But, like a lot of my plans, it didn’t quite work out that way. They came for me in the night.

  There could have been a big chase scene.

  It could have been like E.T., with people in hazmat suits pursuing me on my bike, my Maggie running along beside me.

  But there was no full moon.

  And, in the end, there was no race through the woods.

  There was only my shock when I realized that Maggie and I were trapped on the second floor of my house. I had just thrown up into a wastebasket by my bed—I knew not to use the toilet since I couldn’t flush it—so I was already awake. I heard the sound of the van and went to the window that faced the driveway and the street. Already they were at the front door. Already I saw someone else stomping like a moonwalker around the side of the house, past those spooky tomato cages, to the back. Maybe we still could have run, but I didn’t want that for my Maggie. Maybe I didn’t want that for me anymore. I was sick now—whatever it was (and, as I said, I was pretty sure it was radiation) had come on fast—and so maybe I was just done. I’m not even sure I was capable of running. Or, for that matter, biking.

  But I also wasn’t prepared to face whatever was next. It had been months, but some things, such as the words people said to me in the hours after the meltdown, you never forget:

  We’ve lost our house! Because of your fucking father, we’ve lost our house! What have you done?

  They had a daughter. You watch, they’ll make her testify or something. Talk about what an alcoholic her dad was. Make it clear this was all the fault of one idiot drunk.

  Young lady, we’re going to need to talk to you. You’re going to have to come with me right now.

  And yet while it looked like there was just nothing I could do—it was over, stick a fork in me—I also knew that someone like Missy would not have gone quietly. In my head I saw her once more racing her Miata in the dark around the swing sets and the gazebo. I saw Cameron throwing his duct tape and pajamas into a garbage bag, his eye black and blue, and leaving the Rougers. And, yes, I saw my mom and dad and the other engineers in the control room at the plant, trying to do what they could to stop a nuclear reactor from exploding. Say what you will about my dad and what he did or didn’t do, he fought till the bitter—loud and violent and deadly and bitter—end.

  I was shivering, but I didn’t know whether it was because I was cornered or sick. I tried to think about where in the house we might hide, places that were big enough for both Maggie and me. I thought of the closets. I thought of the dryer. I thought of the boxes in the attic.

  But eventually the hazmat police would go there. The evidence that I was living here was everywhere. It wasn’t just my bike. It was everything. It might take them ten minutes and it might take them an hour. But this was a contemporary meadow mansion; there were no secret passageways and walls that spun like revolving doors. There was no back stairway. They would find me. I had run and I had fought as long as I could, but this was it: this was, I realized, my own bitter end. I wrapped my arms around Maggie’s neck and allowed myself, one last time, to cry.

  I got a flashlight, but I didn’t turn it on, and I went to the top of the stairs and waited. Maggie, a
little curious, stood beside me. Then we both sat down.

  They didn’t ring the doorbell; they just came in. There were three of them, one entering through the sliding glass doors in the back and two through the front.

  I turned on the flashlight so they would know where I was and held my breath like a shadow. Maggie and I were but landscape.

  Or, I guess, Landscape.

  Then the room was bathed in so much light that I had to squint. Their flashlights were like high beams on a car.

  One of the dudes who had come in through the front spoke to me first. “We don’t want to hurt you,” he called up to me. His microphone made him sound like a robotic character from an Xbox game.

  “Way to ring the doorbell,” I said. “Way to knock.”

  “We’re not here to harm you,” he reassured me, like I was really such a pinhead that I might have thought that’s why they were here.

  So I said, “I know.” I would have rolled my eyes, but he wouldn’t have noticed.

  “You need to come with us. We have a suit for you in the truck.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Little girl—”

  “I am so far from being a little girl.”

  He nodded. “Please come with us.”

  “Maggie comes with me.”

  “We thought you were alone. Who’s Maggie?”

  “This is Maggie,” I answered, and I leaned over and scratched her neck where she liked it.

  His body language screamed exasperation. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was annoyed. I knew the three of them were irritated as hell. “Your dog?”

  “My dog.”

  “It’s Emily, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The dog is—”

  “The dog has a name. I just told you. Her name is Maggie.”

  “Fine. Maggie can come.”

  “I want to bring a few things.”

  “No. Everything here is tainted.”

  Tainted. I loved it. That was a word I would have expected Emily Dickinson to use, not this guy. He should have used “contaminated” or “radioactive.” I have no idea why he didn’t.

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  “Look: your clothes and—”

  “My journals. I want to bring my journals and my notebooks. I don’t care about my clothes.”

  He looked at the two other members of his—and please hear the sarcasm in my voice—rescue party and one of them seemed to shrug. It suddenly dawned on me that there might be a woman inside there.

  “Where are they? We’ll get them. You shouldn’t be handling them.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. Right. I’ll carry them.”

  “Does your dog need a leash?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “A leash? Somewhere.”

  So it really wasn’t much of a standoff. They let me bring my journals and my dog. That was all I wanted.

  It was indeed a woman in that suit, and her name was Jeannine. She helped pack me into a hazmat suit of my very own, although mine did not have a mic. Also, it’s worth sharing that they didn’t dress me in hazmat chic to protect me. I was already burnt toast. They put me into that hazmat suit to protect themselves and their precious van. I have a feeling that if they had bothered to turn their Geiger counters on me, they would have gone off like popcorn kernels in a microwave oven.

  At one point I felt a little carsick and so I made sure I knew how to rip my mask and hood off if I thought I was going to vomit again, but it never got that bad. It seemed to me that this was all very barn-door-after-the-horses-have-left, and when I thought of that expression, I was reminded of the protest back in January and explaining what the phrase meant to Cameron. I really didn’t care that my suit didn’t have a mic, because I didn’t want to talk to them anymore. Maggie sat in the backseat with Jeannine and me, more or less content on the floor between us. She had always been a pretty chill dog; she never minded the car. She let them drape a hazmat suit over her like it was a blanket because, like me, she was scarily contaminated.

  They told me they were going to take me to a place where I could be scrubbed clean. If I had felt like speaking, I would have made one of my dad’s sardonic references to Silkwood showers. I knew what was coming. After that they said they were bringing me to a hospital. If I’d had the emotional energy to open my mouth or give a damn, I would have joked, “Mental or regular?” I figured in my case either would have made sense. But I just sat there. I gazed out the window on my side of the van and I watched the night world go by. “The carriage held but just ourselves …,” I thought, and I hummed it in my head to the tune of Gilligan’s Island. We passed through my neighborhood for the last time and we passed my old school for the last time. We passed the field of dead cows and we passed the gun shop. Then we passed through the checkpoint and the Exclusion Zone was behind us. Behind me. Inside my mask I silently said good-bye.

  EPILOGUE

  They tell me I will get better. They tell me I am, in fact, getting better. They believe my hair will grow back. We’ll see. It seems to be coming back only in patches—in islands and clumps. Even if they hadn’t shaved me—all of me, eyebrows and legs and pubes—I gather a lot of it would have fallen out anyway. Gross. One more loss among the many.

  For instance, I know I’ll never see my phone with Andrea’s texts again or get to wear her Christmas sweater. And even if someday I do get around to repiercing my ears, the earrings Camille gave me are gone. They were all taken away from me or I left them behind, which, I guess, is fine. What the hell. I guess they had to take them away; I guess they weren’t really worth going back for.

  The damnedest thing was the way everyone went ballistic over my cutting. As if that was my biggest problem. Please. I—to use one of their favorite words—used to “manifest” and “act out” in ways that were lights-out crazy compared to a little cutting. I mean, my therapists know about Poacher and the Oxies and my igloo, but I don’t bore the dermatologists and gastroenterologists with those little details. I didn’t sit down with the oncologists—who mostly just wanted to run tests on me so they have baselines to look at when the inevitable happens someday—and say, “Yes, the food here is kind of a fiasco and I’m not wild about the plastic utensils they want me to use. But it sure beats doing a trucker at a gas station so you can score a crap egg salad sandwich and pay an Iraqi war vet so he’ll let you crash on his mattress.”

  They say I did most of this to myself that day I finally rode all the way out to the plant. I would have gotten sick eventually even if I hadn’t, but there were still whole clouds of radioactive dust floating around the parking lot. And—oh, by the way—there was a hot spot pretty close to where I had been standing with my bike. They had bulldozed all kinds of crap under the dirt along that side of the parking lot. My mind started to spin when they were talking about rems and BEIR. (FYI, BEIR is an antonym of beer. We’re not talking homonym. Beer is mostly good, unless you’re watching your weight. BEIR just sucks. It stands for the biological effects of ionizing radiation. It seems I got walloped by a boatload of rems, which was why we were even having this conversation about BEIR.)

  I still don’t spend much time on the web these days. I spend a little, but I’m careful. Besides, I don’t have the energy. I know if I spent too much time online, I would look up all of the things that I am afraid would set me back emotionally. I would look up my parents and read more about what people had said about them. I would investigate which cancers are most likely to kill me and when the hot particles will lead to hard tumors. (“The bone that has no marrow,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “What ultimate for that?” In my case? Maybe someday leukemia.) I would discover the news stories about me, as well as the ones about me and Cameron that implied I was a complete Looney Tune. And I am not a complete Looney Tune. I am only a quasi–Looney Tune.

  And all of that would just depress me. Correction: all of that would just depress me eve
n more.

  So, I guess I didn’t last very long as the Belle of Reddington. But I have logged some pretty serious time here as the Belle of Ward Six. (No, that’s not a cheeky reference to Chekhov. My wing really is called Ward Six by the nurses. Officially it’s named for some benefactor, but her name is unpronounceable and very many syllables. So everyone just calls it Ward Six.) And here I get to wear all the white I could ever want, which is only a drag when my nose does that thing where it bleeds like a fire hose or I have one of my coughing jags. Don’t ask about what those are like and what comes up. I get squeamish just thinking about it, and I’m a girl who has thighs that look like someone (well, me) got medieval on them. Lines of long puffy scar tissue, some a little pink, some an eggshell white.

  In a few days, they said, they would take me out for an airing, if I want. They’ve offered to show Maggie and me where my parents are buried. You might not think that would be the first place I would want to go, but it kind of is. If I went anywhere, I’d go there. Their bodies are in lead-lined coffins in a special cemetery where all the victims from the disaster have been laid to rest. It’s not open to the public.

  Maggie is living with the Currans because she can’t live here, but they have played fast and loose with the rules and categorized her as a “service dog” so she is allowed inside the hospital. They’ve done this to be nice. They also shaved her, too. Not kidding. Like me, her hair seems only to be growing back in spots. It looks like doggie hair plugs. We’re quite a pair.

  Apparently, not everyone hates me just because my last name is Shepard. And while they’ve asked me lots of questions about my dad, I’m never going to have to testify about anything or get hammered by reporters. They’ve promised. It seems a lot of people just want to give me some space.