Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (10 page)

As I said, I wasn’t giving people my real name; I’d learned my lesson. So, I was calling myself Abby Bliss, because that was the name of one of Emily Dickinson’s friends (yes, she had friends) and it’s pretty unforgettable. I came up with it on the spot in a bread truck, and I kind of liked it. In hindsight, unforgettable was a
mistake. I should have chosen Susan Huntington, Emily’s sister-in-law. Or I should have stuck with Abby, which was the name that first came to me, but used her last name before she got married: Wood. Abby Wood is a name that does not draw attention to itself.

After Edie told Andrea that she wasn’t going to get the MasterCard, she sat down on the couch next to me. Actually, she sort of collapsed. Her big long body was like a marionette’s after you snip the strings. It just goes limp. And that’s when I wondered how old she really was. I guess because she was pierced and four or five inches taller than me, I’d pegged her for nineteen or twenty. But maybe she had been lying all along about her age, too. When she sat on the couch, she brought her knees up to her chest, and I saw the ivy tattoo on her ankle. She was wearing flip-flops, but the bottoms of her feet were so dirty it was like she’d stepped in a fireplace after the logs were nothing but ash. She was pretty jittery: her legs were almost vibrating, and she kept playing with her earrings and her earlobes.

“I’m Andrea,” she said, and I answered with my made-up name. There were nine or ten other kids there, some actually interested in getting help with job interview skills and some just after the fifty-buck MasterCard. Me? I was probably somewhere in between. I mean, I was seriously stressed out. And I was living this lie, and not just about who my parents were or what my name was. If the counselors had known I was a walker from the Kingdom, they would have turned me in to the Red Cross or one of the groups that was trying to help with the refugees from that corner of the state. And I wanted to disappear.

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know
.

Yeah, that would be me. I had to be a nobody so I wouldn’t be banished. The counselors thought I was a runaway from the
suburbs of New York City who’d wound up homeless. I picked Briarcliff because it was the town where I’d been a little kid: it was only a few miles from the nuclear power plant on the Hudson River where my dad had worked back then.

“Bliss? Really?” she asked. “Rhymes with kiss.”

“I know.”

“Can you sing?”

“Nope.”

“Too bad. You’ve got a great name for a rock star.”

I hadn’t thought of that, because in my head I always saw Abby Bliss in a bonnet and check dress that fell to her ankles. “I guess,” I agreed.

“You’re staying here?” she asked, and she motioned with her head upstairs to where the bedrooms were. We each had a bedroom of our own. They were small, but the counselors had figured out we were territorial and we needed our privacy. (Amazing, isn’t it? The boarders at Reddington Academy paid $45,000 a year to go there, and they lived in doubles and triples. Us? We were homeless, paid nothing, and each got a little room of our own.) There was a bed and a chest of drawers for each girl. The nights I was there, most of us needed no more than a drawer for our stuff. But not all of us. There were two girls at the shelter who were over-the-top hoarders. Wouldn’t part with anything. One of them had stacks and stacks of Burlington’s free weekly newspaper. (She liked reading the sexy personals in the back.) The other collected those elastic Livestrong and friendship bracelets. She must have had a thousand of them.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“I used to live here. But I needed more room. I needed more space.”

“What do you do?”

She shrugged. “This and that. You know.”

I didn’t know. She pulled her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and checked a text. It made me miss my phone.

“Anything new from Cape Abenaki?” I asked.

“What a fucking nightmare that is,” she said. “I just can’t believe it, can you? All those animals that are going to die? They say no one will be able to live in the Kingdom for, like, ten thousand years. Ten thousand years! They say the radiation—”

“Is there anything new about the plant operators?”

“You mean that guy who they think was drunk? The engineer who screwed up those condenser thingies?”

“Yeah … that guy.”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at the news. I really don’t look at the news. How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” I lied. “You?”

“Eighteen.” Then she said, “I like your hair.” She reached over and pushed a lock behind my ears.

“It’s kind of dirty,” I said. I wanted to lie and say I liked her hair, too, but I didn’t think I would sound convincing. I liked Edie’s hair a lot more.

“If my hair was like yours, I wouldn’t color it. I always wanted to be a blonde. My grandfather was an ad guy: ‘Blondes have more fun.’ He produced TV commercials. I think that was one of the slogans from one of his ads.”

“Are you from New York?” I asked.

“No, but my grandparents were.”

“Until I came here, I lived in Briarcliff,” I said, which actually was only a lie if you interpreted the word “here” to mean the drop-in or Burlington.

“I’ve heard of it,” she said, and then she leaned in close to me and whispered, “Look, everyone here is crazy righteous. Crazy. Righteous. We’re talking super do-gooders. If you ever need someone to really talk to, call me.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

Her eyes went a little wide. “You don’t have a phone?”

I shook my head. “I lost it.”

“Okay, I know someone who can fix that for you.”

“How?”

“Leave that to me. In the meantime, if you need me, sometimes
I hang out on Church Street. I like the benches by that statue of the kids playing leapfrog. And sometimes you can find me at Muddy Waters—the coffee place on Main Street.”

It was right about then that Edie and another staffer, a young guy in his twenties named Bret, came over and stood over us. I thought Edie was going to cry when she looked at Andrea. But the dude? Way too tough. He looked more like a Marine than the sort of crunchy granola types who usually tried to help us. Practically a buzz cut and serious guns for arms. He was wearing a black T-shirt and it was almost a second skin.

“Hello, Andrea,” Edie said.

“Hey,” she murmured, and she looked down at her phone, instead of making eye contact with the social worker. She pretended to be very focused on a text.

“Why are you here?”

“Why do you think I’m here?” she answered. “Life skills. That’s what it’s all about, right?”

“Where are you living?” the guy with Edie asked.

“I have a place,” she answered.

He folded his arms across his chest. “Where?”

“Girl’s gotta have a little privacy,” she mumbled.

“Are you clean?”

“Of course,” she said. “Wouldn’t be here if I weren’t, right? Isn’t that the rule?”

Edie leaned in to get a closer look at Andrea’s face. I guess she wanted to scope out Andrea’s pupils. But Andrea jumped up from the couch and swiped Edie out of her way, knocking the social worker off balance and sending her to her knees. Somehow, the girl also sent her phone flying onto the hard wooden floor of the drop-in. It slid like a hockey puck into the baseboard radiators. Edie and Bret froze, and everyone in the room just went silent—except Andrea.

“My phone!” she shrieked. “Goddamit, my phone!” She ran to the radiator and picked it up and immediately started checking to see if it still worked. Then she turned back to the two staffers and
hissed at them, “You could have broken it. You know that, right? You could have broken it!”

I expected one of them to say something to her. Maybe point out to her the detail that they hadn’t done anything. She was the one who had accidentally hurled her phone across the floor like a skipping stone. But Edie just got back on her feet and stood there next to Bret, taking it all in. Totally chill. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when Andrea finally broke.

“I don’t need your sympathy!” she said, and she started to cry. “Stop looking at me! I don’t want your fucking help. I can take care of myself! Besides, you don’t want to help me. You don’t want to help anybody. You say you do, but you’re like everybody else. So, fuck you! Fuck you all!” She was sobbing suddenly, the mascara running down her cheeks like raindrops on glass. “I need money and if you don’t want to help me, then fuck you! Fuck you all!”

“Andrea—” Edie said.

“No, don’t take that tone with me. I don’t need your condescending bullshit! I just don’t need it!”

One of the boys who was watching this train wreck unfold walked past me toward Andrea. I don’t know what he had in mind, but Andrea put out her hand like a crossing guard signaling a kid to stop. So he did. Then Andrea kind of gathered herself. She turned toward the drop-in entrance to leave, but on her way out she said to me—and she said it really loud so everyone could hear—“Hey, Bliss, you remember where to find me, right? I’ll get you that phone and whatever else you need, since these fuckers are no help whatsoever.” Then she was out the door.

It would be three days before I’d leave the shelter myself. But when I did, she was the first person I thought of.

Chapter 5

The first time I saw
Cameron, he was dragging a black plastic garbage bag that might have been as big as he was. I’m not kidding. He was like this Green Mountain Gavroche—you know, from that musical? The bag was filled with everything he owned, which wasn’t much because most of the space in it was taken up with something he called his mummy bag. A mummy bag is basically just a sleeping bag. But I remember the way he insisted a mummy bag was a lot better than a sleeping bag, and that he would have frozen to death the night before in a plain old sleeping bag. The way he loved that bag, you would have thought it had magical powers. Frankly, I thought the term “mummy bag” was kind of creepy, but Cameron didn’t think anything of it. What else was in there? A pair of those Heelys, those sneakers with wheels on the bottom, that he had tricked out with black and red duct tape so it looked like there were flames on the heels. A stuffed zebra. One of those zippered plastic bags the airlines give you when you’re traveling in first class, with a sleep mask and ChapStick and a toothbrush. (When my family went to France so my dad could visit a couple of nuclear power plants, the energy company flew us there in something called Envoy class. It sure beat coach, let me tell you. My dad joked that I shouldn’t get used to it. I didn’t.) Cameron also kept his comb in the kit. He had a few rolls of duct tape and some of his art, including the robot I told you about. And he had some clothes in the bag, like his pajamas and a couple of shirts and some underwear. His socks. But a lot of his clothes he was wearing, because
it was the end of December. He had just run away from what he said was his seventh foster home, which, he’d confess later, was an exaggeration. It was his fourth. But he was right to get out, that’s for sure. He was nine, and so his favorite thing might have been his Red Sox hoodie, which he was wearing under this total piece-of-crap parka. His boots were crap, too. I’m amazed he wasn’t one of the ones who wound up with gangrene.

He was dragging the bag along a dusting of snow just outside of this derelict coal plant down by the waterfront, and he looked wider and bigger than he would turn out to be because of all the clothes he was wearing. He was, in fact, pretty thin. I mean, he was a kid. His hair was crow black and, when he pulled off his knit cap, a mess.

The plant had been empty for decades, and while the police used to try and kick us out, we’d still sometimes find corners and crevices where we could escape the worst of the cold. And while an empty coal plant is pretty filthy, unlike an empty nuclear plant at least it’s not radioactive. (I know, that’s not fair. There are plenty of decommissioned nuclear plants that aren’t radioactive. But you get my point.)

Cameron had been there the night before, but none of us had noticed him. There were four of us that I was aware of, maybe more, but I wasn’t with the others. They were strangers. It was one of those nights where I really didn’t sleep because I didn’t know whether to trust them. The group was three adults, two women and one man. (If it had been two men and one woman or three men, you can bet your ass I wouldn’t have stayed.) The police had scattered us the night before, and all of the people I knew hadn’t come back yet.

I had seen homeless little kids before, but not one who was so clearly alone. Usually I saw them sleeping with their moms—in a car, at least a dozen times—or coming or going from the shelter for families.

I don’t know why I stopped Cameron. It was only after I stopped him that I saw his black eye. I could have let him keep
walking to wherever. But I did stop him. I guess I didn’t think I should be a bystander. Or, maybe, I was just curious.

I seem to be jumping around a lot. This is supposed to be the B.C. section of my story: Before Cameron.