Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (12 page)

A lot of my fights with my parents were over things that were incredibly stupid. We were all very stubborn, which was part of the problem. The serious fights started when I was, I guess, in fifth or sixth grade. Part of it was brain chemistry, of course, but we didn’t know that then. (Yeah, I know I blame a lot on “brain chemistry.” I worry it’s starting to sound like I’m trying not to take responsibility for my bad choices. Don’t worry. I am. I do. I’m just trying to explain.)

Also, it’s not like my entire adolescence was a complete disaster or that people thought I was a total train wreck. Sure, my parents and I fought and I burned some bridges, and there were moments when I was the definition of a hot mess. But I saw girls in the shelter who were much crazier than I was and made much worse decisions on a daily basis. The truth is, I got pretty good grades, especially in English. I was actually kind of a superstar in English. Ms. Gagne—Cecile—thought I had serious promise as a writer. Every year in May, Middlebury College brings two or three teenage writers from a boatload of high schools—and not just ones in Vermont—to Bread Loaf for something they call their “Young Writers’ Conference.” The students get to hang out for four days with professional writers and get their poetry or their fiction workshopped. The Reddington Academy English Department was willing to send me there both my sophomore and junior years. I only went my sophomore year, however, because I was being disciplined that May when I was a junior. (I was in a car that a boy I knew—not Ethan—had “borrowed” from his uncle. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell his uncle that he was borrowing it, and he only had a learner’s permit—not a real driver’s license. Also, when the local Newport cop shined his flashlight into the car, we each had an open bottle of beer in our hands. Contrary to the rumors that were flying around the school that month, the beer bottle was the only thing long and slender I had in my hands when
we were caught.) I know lots of people at the Academy (and my parents) were frustrated with me because I hadn’t spent enough time my junior year freaking out about college—you know, taking AP classes, doing things after school, starting a save-the-world recycling club—but I wasn’t ready to admit either that they were right or my decisions were wrong.

And, the truth is, I hid when I had to behind Emily Dickinson. (“Maybe you should start a poetry club,” my guidance counselor suggested. Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen.) The irony here is that Emily Dickinson was nothing if not under control. At least that’s what people who don’t know any better think. Me? Sometimes, I was completely out of control.

The leaves don’t fall one by one. They fall in drapes. There’s a breeze or a gust and a thousand break off at once.

The foliage the autumn after Reactor One exploded was phantasmagorically beautiful. The maples were crimson and cherry and red, the birches an almost neon yellow, and the ash a purple more flamboyant than the Magic Markers I’d used as a kid. We noticed that even in Burlington and the Champlain Valley.

What everyone understands but no one thinks about is that the leaves are spectacular because they’re dying. The tree is preparing for winter, and so it wants to shed all those dainty leaves. How does it evict them? It produces a layer of cells at the base of the leaves, so fluids can’t reach them. Meanwhile, the leaves themselves stop producing chlorophyll, which is the chemical they need for photosynthesis—the way a leaf uses sunlight to generate food. Without the deep, heady green of all that chlorophyll, the colors in the other chemicals finally get their day in the sun. That beautiful red leaf, in other words, is slowly starving to death.

Incidentally, I did not learn any of this in biology in ninth grade. I learned it in middle school in sixth grade. Foliage season is a big money maker in Vermont, and so we learn about leaves young
here. We use a thesaurus to find words to describe it: words like the one I just used, “phantasmagoric.” Or—another favorite word of mine—“luminescent.”

In any case, the adults seemed to be talking a lot that autumn about the effect of nuclear fallout on the fall foliage season. Supposedly, the leaves inside the Exclusion Zone were as colorful as the tropical fish that nose around the world’s most exotic coral reefs. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It wouldn’t be until the following year, long after Poacher and the posse and Andrea and Cameron, that I’d go back—that I’d go home.

And, by then, the prettiest color was rust.

Chapter 6

Libby Dunbar had way
more important things to do than to watch over me. And so when she decided—kind of mistakenly, in hindsight—that I was cool, she concluded that she had to do two things: She had to find someone else to look out for me. And she had to get me moved far away from the meltdown zone. She sure as hell had to get me out of the staging area. So she told me to wait where I was and she’d be right back. Honestly, I have no idea what she thought she was going to do, but she left me alone while she tried to solve the little problem that was … me. Here is basically our conversation just before she left. (As you can see, I didn’t help matters by lying.)

L
IBBY:
And you have no idea where the rest of the students from Reddington Academy have been taken?

M
E:
No.

L
IBBY:
You just didn’t get on any of the buses when they came to your school.

M
E:
I wanted to find my mom and dad.

L
IBBY:
I understand. And you said your grandmother has Alzheimer’s and your grandfather lives in Phoenix.

M
E:
Yup.

L
IBBY:
And you have no aunts or uncles.

M
E:
Nope.

L
IBBY:
Which I guess means you have no cousins.

M
E:
I guess.

L
IBBY:
Your friend—this Lisa Current—

M
E:
Curran.

L
IBBY:
Right. Curran. You’re friends with the whole family?

M
E:
Uh-huh.

L
IBBY:
Okay. Let me see if I can find Lisa’s mom and dad.

Given that she was pretty sure my parents were dead (God, that’s an awful thing to write), it was pretty clear that she had no plans to have me sent wherever the rest of Reddington Academy was holed up. It really made no sense to just drop me into a sea of high school students who were already wigging out. But I wasn’t wild about the idea of spending the rest of the day alone in an assistant principal’s office while she tried to find Lisa Curran’s mom. I felt that I had to
do
something. Anything. I couldn’t just sit there.

So I left. According to one of my therapists, this was “a manifestation of a kindling PTSD.” (I thought that was kind of poetic when I read it.) It “presented” with “an exaggerated fight/flight mentality.” Apparently, I chose “flight.”

Still, I remember when I stood up to leave, I told myself that I was only going to see if she had any tampons in her purse (which she did) and go to the bathroom. Then I might walk from the office to the end of the hallway and peek back into the gym. That’s all. Watch the madness there for a moment or two. I actually thought to myself,
You need to be back here when Libby returns
. But when I got to the gym and saw all that chaos, I gave myself permission to go to those double doors that opened out onto the parking lot and the athletic fields. And then, when I saw it had stopped raining, I had to walk out there. When was the last time any of us had stood outside and not gotten wet? It had been days. Seriously, it had been raining practically nonstop for days! So I did, fallout be damned. I went outside. I mean, it wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. There were other people out there. Granted, they were trying to cover themselves with anything they could find, using newspapers and trash bags if necessary. But still: they were out there.

I have absolutely no sense of direction, and so I had no idea
which way was north: the direction of the power plant and my home. My house. My dog. Maybe if it had been sunny I could have figured it out, but, really, even that wouldn’t have helped all that much. As you might have guessed, I was a pretty lousy Brownie and never spent even a second of my life as a Girl Scout. Besides, it wasn’t sunny. And so I just started walking across the parking lot, past the cruisers and fire engines and camo-colored National Guard trucks. I was midway to the entrance to the school when I overheard a group of the guardsmen talking under a tent. I stopped and listened, which looking back was a big mistake. There were four of them and they were wearing hazmat suits, but they had pulled off the hoods and were drinking bottled water. They were covered in sweat and looked pretty beaten.

“It’s like pilot error,” one of the guys was saying. “Operator error is the term. Whatever his name—Shepard—fucked up.”

“His wife is the spokesperson for the plant, you know,” someone else said. “Pretty despicable, right? Whole family: fucking despicable.”

“There’ll be a cover-up.”

“You can’t cover up a fucking meltdown.”

“Melt-through.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Besides, the energy company will want this to be human error. If it’s human error, then nuclear power doesn’t look so bad. The industry doesn’t look so bad. And they’re both dead by now. There’s not a lot of collateral damage when you have dead people you can blame.”

“Even his wife? She’s dead, too?”

“The side of the container was gone! Just gone! The surrounding building was, like, rubble. You saw the size of the blast.”

“Someone was saying he was drunk. That true?”

“Yup. I hear 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.”

“Wow. Where did you hear that?”

I knew I didn’t want to hear any more. I’d heard enough. I started to run, and it was at the edge of the parking lot that I saw a bike leaning up against the side of a fire truck from the village of Barton. So I took it. I just took it—and I was off.

I’m not going to pretend I understand even half of the poems that Emily Dickinson wrote. But when I get them, I get them. I get the rhythms and I get the point:

Life, and Death, and Giants

There’s a lot more, but let’s start with that first line. How can you not love it? How could anyone not love it? Read it aloud:

Life (slight pause) and Death (slight pause) and Giants. I love that capital
G
.

Or this:

REMEMBRANCE has a rear and front,—

It really does, doesn’t it? Again, that’s just the first line. She goes on to compare remembrance to a house with a garret, and God knows I could use a garret to squirrel away a lot of my crazy mental shit—my crazy mental demons. Actually, I need way more than a garret. I need a self-store garage bay. You know, the ones that always seem to end up having a dead body in them? I practically need a warehouse.

And while I have pretty shamelessly thrown my brain under the bus and blamed it for some of the seriously bad choices I’ve made, I understand that it has its assets, too. It has its moments.

The brain is wider than the sky
,

For, put them side by side
,

The one the other will include

With ease, and you beside
.

I love it when therapists talk about boundaries. I really could have used some, right? But how can you fence in a brain? How can you ask a person to rein in something that really is wider than the sky?