Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (11 page)

I should probably try and organize my thoughts.

What they were calling the staging area was a madhouse. It was the parking lot of the high school in Orleans, which made sense because the school was right off the interstate highway and only about ten miles from Newport. Plus, there were acres of asphalt. Still, the vehicles were spilling out onto the track and the football field, too. There were all kinds of trucks from the National Guard and fire engines from all over northern Vermont and New Hampshire and Canada. I saw a couple of ambulances, just waiting, I guess. I saw a lot of guys in FEMA windbreakers with walkie-talkies on their belts. There were two tractor-trailer trucks with women and men from the Guard handing out those bright yellow hazmat suits with the window masks and respirators. And there were lines of white cruisers for the sheriffs’ departments and green ones for the Vermont State Police. Most people were inside the gymnasium—which had its big, gray double doors open to the parking lot—because no one wanted to get rained on: everyone was worried the rain was radioactive. It was, of course, but it wasn’t as bad as we feared because the wind was blowing northeast and Orleans was south of Cape Abenaki.

I hopped off the back of the fire engine, and not a soul knew I had ever been on it. I ran into the gymnasium, and I have a feeling that anyone who noticed me assumed I was just some young, eager-beaver first responder. I saw a fair number of them, too:
adults in their twenties, wearing rain slickers and gloves—gloves, even though it was June, because they were worried about fallout—and hats. A lot of them were wearing those little gauze masks my dad would wear when he was using an electric sander.

Immediately a woman who said she was a nurse asked me if I’d been given potassium iodide yet. I shook my head no, and so she plopped two tablets into my hand, telling me to take one right now and one tomorrow. Then she pointed at a long folding table with stacks of bottled water. “Do not use the water fountain,” she warned me. “No one knows yet how much has seeped into the groundwater.” The iodide wouldn’t protect me from leukemia in five or ten or fifty years, but it might reduce the risk of thyroid cancer.

After I’d taken the pill, I looked around to see if there was anyone I recognized from the plant or the Academy or my village. I saw no familiar faces at all. Not a one. But I did pass by two men with their sleeves rolled up, poring over a huge diagram of Cape Abenaki—the power plant itself. There were the two lines of cooling towers, and there was the pair of massive concrete boxes with the reactors. I must have been standing there long enough that one of the men turned around and looked at me.

“Are you supposed to be somewhere?” he asked. He was—and here’s a great SAT word—brusque.

“I was looking for my dad,” I answered, which was a pretty lame answer. But I was. It was the whole reason I had ridden back to the Kingdom on the rear of a fire engine, for crying out loud. I was looking for my dad
and
my mom.

“Little girl,” he began, and he was clearly going to tell me to run along; the world was falling apart, and he had much more important things to do than find some lost child’s father or mother—which is true. He did. But in my defense, it’s not like I’d asked for his help. He had, more or less, asked me what I was doing, and I’d answered. I didn’t expect him to stop what he was doing. Anyway, the guy who was with him cut him off and asked me who my dad
was. So I told him. And that was the first indication I got that my name might not be an asset.

“Your father is Bill Shepard?” he said, and his jaw hung a little slack.

I nodded.

The first guy, the one who called me a little girl, turned away and I heard him mutter, “Jesus fucking Christ.” Then he yelled across the gymnasium to a woman whose name was Libby and who did something with FEMA: she had a windbreaker and a walkie-talkie, which was sort of their uniform. She practically sprinted across the floor of the basketball court.

“What’s up, John?” she asked. “What now?” She sounded a little exasperated.

“This girl is Bill Shepard’s daughter.”

She was one of those organized and petite little women we sometimes call soccer moms, even if they’re not really moms. She had short blond hair that was cropped into a lid that looked kind of like a helmet, and even with her baggy windbreaker and khaki pants I could tell she was super fit. Her eyes were intense when she looked at me. She was only a little bit taller than I was.

“What’s your name? Mine is Libby. Libby Dunbar.”

“Emily.”

“Your dad is Bill Shepard?”

I nodded.

“And your mom is Mira?”

“Yes.”

She took a deep breath. I knew that suddenly people were watching us. Watching me. She put one of her hands on my shoulder and started guiding me away from the men with their diagram of the power plant and toward a door that led into one of the high school corridors.

“How did you get here, sweetie?” she asked as we walked. But I didn’t answer because I heard what people were murmuring or saying around us. Somehow everyone knew that this sopping
wet, filthy, shell-shocked teenager was Bill and Mira’s kid. Here the fucking sky was falling—really, radioactive fallout is about as close as you can get, I think, to the sky literally falling—and these grown-ups had stopped what they were doing as we went by.

“Have you had any iodide?” she asked when I didn’t answer her question, and this time I nodded. Meanwhile, all around us people were whispering or telling each other things like:
That’s Bill’s kid. My God, that’s the Shepard kid. They’ll want to talk to her—find out how drunk he was when he left home. Shit—that poor girl. Does she know about her dad—about both her parents? We don’t know it was his fault. Yeah, we do. We do
.

And, out of the blue, I started shivering. I wasn’t cold. I mean, I was wet, of course, but I hadn’t even been that cold when I’d been riding on the back of the fire engine: this was mid-June, so it wasn’t like the rain was freezing or anything. And the truck never went that fast. But there I was, shaking, as we walked through the gym and then down the hallway. My teeth were actually chattering. And the hallways were crowded, too, with people running back and forth and trying to talk on their cell phones or running back and forth and cursing about how bad the cell reception was inside the school building.

Finally Libby brought me inside the assistant principal’s office, which—unlike most of the rooms we passed—hadn’t been taken over by FEMA or, based on the signs people were sticking to the cement-block walls, the NRC. It was quiet, and she shut the door behind her. She sat me down in the nice leather chair behind the desk.

I guess because I was shaking, she took off her FEMA jacket and draped it around my shoulders like a shawl. “What you really need is a towel,” she muttered. Then she leaned over the desk. “So, Emily. A lot’s happened this morning. But you know that. How did you get here? Who brought you?”

I guess a normal girl whose teeth wouldn’t stop chattering would have figured out that the best thing to do was to stay cool
and answer the questions and get some help. Clearly I was fucked and was going to need all the help I could get. But, in hindsight, I was never going to win the Normal Girl award.

Instead I asked, “Where are my parents? Where’s my dad?”

She gave me that stare again, and I couldn’t meet her eyes. But I also wouldn’t look away, so I focused on her little ski slope of a nose. Someone called her on her walkie-talkie, but without turning away from me she reached down and pushed some button that silenced it.

“Your dad and your mom are currently … missing. They are … unaccounted for.”

I knew what that meant, and there was nothing I hated more than when my parents would beat around the bush or try and find euphemisms—especially euphemisms for my bad behavior or theirs. I knew what “missing” meant. I knew what “unaccounted for” meant.

And so I said—or, I guess, I tried to say, because the words came out in hiccups, like I was choking or gasping for air—“Are you telling me they’re dead?”

“No, we don’t know that,” she said.

But I did. I knew that. She was trying to ease into this, to break the bad news slowly. She leaned in toward me to hug me and I wanted to push her away, but now I really was having trouble breathing. I was practically hyperventilating and I thought I was going to be sick. She rubbed my back and whispered, “We don’t know, Emily, we really don’t know much of anything just yet.” I don’t know how long we were like that—maybe two or three minutes. I remember thinking that it must be hurting Libby’s back to be leaning over like that, which was—if you were to read the notes one of my first therapists kept about me—uncharacteristically empathetic. Finally my breathing started to settle, but I was still shaking. So I pushed her away, but I wasn’t rude about it. I just wanted her to know that I was going to keep it together.

“How many people are unaccounted for or missing?” I asked,
trying not to sound sarcastic or emphasize the words “unaccounted for” and “missing.”

“Seventeen,” she answered. “At least seventeen.”

“Is it still on fire?”

We both knew what
it
was. The reactor.

“Yes. It’s still on fire.”

“Does anybody know what happened?”

“Not yet.”

But they already had their suspicions.

“I have a dog …” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, so I just stopped talking.

“What’s its name?”

“Maggie.”

She nodded. She felt bad for me, and she felt bad for my dog. But the last thing she could do anything about was my poor nine-year-old Maggie.

In the end, there would be nineteen people “unaccounted for” or “missing.” And now I am being sarcastic and emphasizing those words when I say them. In the end, there would be nineteen people dead.

I had a fourth-grade teacher who told me I didn’t always have to be right. I had one in seventh grade—my French teacher—who told me that, too.

The problem with always having to be right is that sometimes you’re not. And so, if you’re like me, those times when you’re not, you try and save face—especially after you’ve seriously fucked up. You make one bad decision and then another, trying to fix that very first fuck-up.