Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (17 page)

PJ’s situation was more complicated because he needed stitches for the two huge gashes on his arm and his side. And he had broken a couple of ribs. The vase and that fall had done a real number on him. He had to spend the night in the hospital.

The next day when we went to bring him home, he was gone. He just up and left in the middle of the night without telling anyone. We texted and called him for days, but he didn’t respond. Finally we gave up. We never did see him again.

Chapter 8

This is not the
most important thing I am going to tell you, but it may be the most interesting: Did you know that a lot of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the theme from
Gilligan’s Island
? Not kidding, this is totally legit. When my English teacher, Ms. Gagne, first told me that, I had never heard of
Gilligan’s Island
. But she explained to me it was an old sitcom, so I looked it up and watched it on YouTube. It’s from the really early days of TV: the 1960s. The first year, they didn’t even use color film, which makes it look prehistoric. And the show is ridiculous. As lots of people before me have pointed out, they’re stranded on this island after a shipwreck and seem to build whatever they want out of coconuts and bamboo … but for some reason they can’t fix their boat. Still, the starting music has a catchy tune, and you can learn it pretty quickly. I bet most of you know it, especially if you’re from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. So, try it.

Because I could not stop for Death
,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality
.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste
,

And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too
,

For his civility
.

See what I mean? Pick another of her poems at random and see what happens. Most of the time, it works. I don’t know what this says about Emily Dickinson’s writing or American sitcoms of a certain era, but it sure was helpful when I started trying to memorize some of my favorite poems.

You can also sing “Because I could not stop for Death” to a sort of disturbing folk song called “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” You probably know that tune, too. Go ahead: try singing the poem to that song. What’s really interesting to me is that “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” supposedly, was written about a Galveston, Texas, girl named … Emily.

Sometimes, it seems that everything is connected, doesn’t it?

Someday I will put together a list of Interesting People Named Emily. They won’t have to be famous. Just interesting.

Sandy, the guy who delivered bread for that bakery, wasn’t on his rounds by the time he picked me up that afternoon. Like everyone else, he was either trying to get away or get to family—or both. He was on his way to Jeffersonville, where his daughter and son-in-law and two of his grandchildren lived. He was meeting his wife there.

“Why don’t you wait at my daughter’s house for someone from Burlington to pick you up?” he said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

I had told him that I was a boarding student at Reddington Academy, not a local, and I had grandparents who lived in Burlington. He seemed so nice that I almost confessed to him who my parents were, but after what had occurred at the convenience store and what I’d overheard back at the staging area, I was worried about the reaction I’d get. So I said—as I would a lot that year—that I was from Briarcliff. And when we got to the house, I was very glad that I hadn’t told him who I really was. The TV was on, and his wife and his daughter and his son-in-law were watching the endless stream of news from Cape Abenaki. And every few
minutes, I would hear my dad’s name and it was never good. There was film, shot from Canada, I guess, of just billows and billows of smoke roiling up from the reactor. In front of the plant was Lake Memphremagog, and the water was calm and dark and seemed to stretch forever. It had always seemed to me to be a very long lake. But after the rain and the flood? It seemed massive, much wider than usual—because it
was
much wider than usual. I could see how high the water was against the first row of cooling towers. And there were talking heads debating the severity of the explosion and explaining maps and diagrams on the screen and (of course) offering their opinion as to the cause. It had stopped raining, and some of them seemed to think that everything would have been okay if it had stopped a day or even half a day sooner.

And, they hinted, everything might still have been okay if my dad had been sober. But then someone would say that no one knew for sure if he had been drunk or if alcohol had figured in the disaster. But everyone agreed that operator error was involved. Something about an isolation condenser. Someone, most likely my dad, had turned it off and then—for some reason—could not get it restarted. There were witnesses among the survivors—people who had fled the building before the explosion. My dad was dead, and so he was the perfect choice for the fall guy.

Sandy’s daughter had married a guy named Walter Thomas, and the Thomas family home was small but very cozy. It was a yellow and green ranch house, and everyone clearly enjoyed snowmobiling. They had two massive machines and two little ones for the kids—who were younger than me—and a whole room dedicated to clothing and gear and the trophies the kids had won at junior snowmobile competitions. The girl was named Melissa and she was scary smart. Kind of a jock, too, based on the ribbons and medals and photos that hung on the walls along the stairway. Clearly she was going to be an all-American something someday. She was eleven. Her brother was nine and much quieter. I was too numb to have a strong opinion about either of them, but Melissa didn’t seem to mind that I was going to sleep that night on an
inflatable mattress on the floor of her bedroom. I guess that was enough for me to like her.

And, thankfully, they had two cats and no dog. I think I would have lost it completely if they had had a dog.

So, I took a shower and then ate dinner with the family. I was too sad and scared and tired to say much, but I lied shamelessly and impressively about my situation when they asked me questions. At one point, I went into another room and pretended to talk to my parents and my fictional grandparents on my cell phone—which was long gone by then—and I even made a pretend call to Lisa Curran. I must admit, after that one, I considered lying again and saying my cell was now out of juice and I needed to use their landline. Then I would call Lisa’s cell and beg for help. But I would have had to make that call in front of the family, because the landline phones seemed to be in the living room and the kitchen, and that would have meant toppling the whole house of cards I had built from my lies. And I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t want them to see what a liar I was or who my dad was.

Sandy’s daughter was named Bridget, and she was a hairdresser—but she was probably the least glamorous hairdresser on the planet. Bridget Thomas said she mostly did blue hairs, which did not mean eccentric, attention-starved teens: it meant old ladies. Like her dad (like everyone in the family), she was very nice. She was going to bring me to my fictional grandparents in Burlington the next morning, because I’d said they both had pretty bad eyesight and didn’t drive much. I was okay with this plan, but I wasn’t wild about it. It meant that I would have to come up with a boatload more lies when we got to the city. I’d have to make up some address or pick some random house and hope no one was home. Then I’d have to come up with a reason why no one was home that was so logical that Bridget wouldn’t feel any reason to wait. When Melissa and I turned out the light in her bedroom around ten, I hadn’t come up with one yet.

“Are you scared?” she asked me suddenly as we lay there awake in the dark.

Incidentally, I almost wrote “as we lied there awake in the dark,” but I know the difference between “lay” and “lie.” I had a seventh-grade English teacher who taught me the difference. We were working from a textbook, and he read this sentence from it aloud: “Father is laying tile on the kitchen floor.” Then he looked up at all of us and said, pretending to be confused, “Tile. What an interesting name for Mother.” I never forgot that. Of course, given how much I was lying in the days after Reactor One melted down, it would, in fact, have been correct if I had written, “as I lied there awake in the dark.” I told Melissa some serious whoppers that night as we talked before she finally fell asleep.

But I also admitted to the girl that I was scared.

“Me, too,” she said. “But I’m not sure why. They say the radiation won’t come this far.”

“It won’t,” I said. “You’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.” But I didn’t believe that. I was just trying to make her feel better. If I’d been honest, I would have told her that she was scared because what
they
said didn’t matter.
They
didn’t know what they were doing. And, on some level, she had figured that out. I also understood, but didn’t know how to explain at the time, that even the people who weren’t totally fucked—everyone, in other words, who did not live or work near Cape Abenaki—were scared of the unknown. None of us knew what this was going to mean for our food or our water or our air. None of us knew if the electricity would suddenly go out and ATMs would stop working. None of us knew anything.

That night all I understood was what I felt. And what I felt was dread.

The inflatable mattress was comfortable enough, but I still slept pretty restlessly. I woke up about five in the morning, just before the sun was going to rise, but the sky was already growing light outside one of Melissa’s bedroom windows. Because I had never fallen into a very deep sleep, I didn’t have a
Where am I?
moment
when I opened my eyes. I knew right where I was. I knew instantly my parents were dead.

And as I watched the light begin to trickle into the room, I realized it was actually going to be a beautiful sunny day—the first in forever. A sunny day in June? Once upon a time that was awesome. It was all it took to make a person smile.

I thought of what it would be like when Bridget asked me for my grandparents’ address over breakfast.

M
E:
Um, I’m not sure. But I know how to get there.

B
RIDGET:
What’s their phone number? I can call them.

M
E:
I don’t know it.

B
RIDGET:
Would you mind getting it from your mom or dad in that case?

M
E:
Oh, I can find the house for you. I know right where it is. I just don’t know the names of most of the streets in Burlington.

I imagined Sandy offering some solution as well. Pulling a Garmin out of his delivery truck and handing it to his daughter, after I had gotten a street address from my parents.

And so I climbed out from under the light blue sheet on the inflatable, found my clothes, and got dressed. Everyone was still sound asleep. I went to the kitchen as quietly as I could and found a magnetic notepad on the refrigerator where they kept an ongoing grocery list and ripped off the top sheet. I wrote them a thank-you note. I said it was a beautiful day and I thought I would ride my bike into Burlington. It was only about thirty miles away. (
Only
. I was there by early afternoon, but I was toast. My knees ached, my butt was sore, and my back was actually spasming.) At the bottom of the note I wrote my name: Abby.

When I was about two or three miles down the road, I wondered if they would be so worried about me that they would call the police. In my imagination, I saw some missing persons report or AMBER Alert and all of Vermont looking for a teenage girl
named Abby Bliss. I wondered who would be the first person to google her and discover that she’d actually been dead for a hundred years.