Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (18 page)

But they never did call the police. Or, if they did, a teen girl who wanted to ride her bike thirty miles to Burlington was the last thing a state trooper or sheriff was going to worry about the day after Cape Abenaki exploded.

Sometimes I think I have talked too much about pills. We did a lot of pills, but we also smoked a lot of dope. Once one of us had come up with a twomp—twenty dollars in Poacher-speak—we would score whatever we could.

Just so you know, I never tried heroin. Poacher said heroin was like “God kissing your cheek,” but I felt very small those days and wasn’t sure how I would handle something as big as God getting that close. We had a drawer in the kitchen beside the sink with nothing but needles and spoons and cotton swabs. It kind of scared me.

And as for meth? I once watched Trevor and PJ try and shake and bake a batch in a one-liter bottle of Pepsi, and I was terrified. I didn’t mind the cold pills. They seemed way more harmless than the painkillers I’d discovered I liked. But peeling batteries? Lighter fluid? That’s just insane. When Poacher came home, he nearly blew a gasket. “What the fuck are you two trying to do,” he screamed at them, “blow up my apartment?” Apparently, if you don’t know precisely what you’re doing, it’s easy to turn what once was a harmless one-liter bottle of Pepsi into a firebomb. Live and learn.

Nine months later when I had lost everything, including Cameron, and was trying to make my way home to Reddington, I occasionally came across shake-and-bake debris in the high grass by the side of the road: those plastic one-liter bottles filled with brown sludge. Sometimes they’d still have a tube. I was grossed
out. But I can remember also feeling like I’d dodged a bullet. By then I didn’t think I had much of a future—that was, after all, why I was going home—but at least I was going out on my own terms, not because one of my idiot roommates had blown us up while trying to cook himself a little meth.

I used to love to go skiing with my dad. I had a snowboard and I rode pretty well, but usually I skied so I could be with him. We would talk on the chairlift in ways we never spoke elsewhere—in ways we couldn’t.

I used to love to watch DVDs of
Friends
with my mom. We would sit on the couch in the den and sip hot chocolate. My mom made very, very good hot chocolate. Sometimes she made it with a sprinkling of coconut and sometimes she made it with a dash of hot chili powder. She never made it from a packet.

I loved how sophisticated and exotic my mom was in some ways. Just think of her name: Mira. I used to love to look at the
New York Times Style Magazine
with her those weekends when it would appear with the Sunday newspaper. Sometimes, she’d show me pictures of the ways she had dressed when she was living in Greenwich Village before she met my dad. It was nothing like how she dressed in Vermont.

I used to love to be read to in bed when I was a toddler and a little girl. My mom and dad would alternate nights, and the rule was that they would read me four books when I was very young and then forty minutes to an hour when I was older. One night when my dad was reading to me from
Sideways Stories from Wayside School
, we got to the scene where we learn that Calvin has a tattoo of a potato on his ankle, and for some reason we wound up laughing hysterically for fifteen minutes. We just couldn’t stop.

I loved my bedroom with my stuffed animals and trolls and the chest that still had my dress-up clothes from when I was a little kid.
I loved my bookcases, two of them, both white, which went to the ceiling. I loved my window seat in the sun. I loved my diaries and my journals.

I loved my clothes. I loved my iPod. I loved my phone.

I loved the posters I brought back from the Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst when I was fourteen that my mom had gotten framed.

I loved Maggie. I loved the way my dad called her Maggie May and sometimes sang her a line or two from that song when he rubbed her tummy.

I am telling you this so you know that my life wasn’t always wall-to-wall suckage. I know I’ve tried to make that point before, but it’s really important to me that you get this. Sure, my parents were not happy in Vermont. They didn’t belong here. Sure, they fought in ways that left me scared. They drank—they drank a lot. And, of course, I was starting to screw up well before the meltdown that made me an orphan.

But if I am being as honest as I promised I’d be, you need to know that in some ways I was really a lucky child. I know I brought a lot of my nightmare down upon myself.

I’m not sure why I picked Burlington. But I know now that the homeless of all ages from northern Vermont and New Hampshire and upstate New York wind up there. Always have. It’s a city, which means it has social services. And drugs. And bars. And people—some of whom want to help you and some of whom just want to exploit you.

And I guess I was following the crowds, that whole stream that was flowing away from the Kingdom. It was amazing the sort of chaos I found in Burlington. Reactor One had exploded little more than twenty-five hours earlier, and already there were tents all over the waterfront and City Hall Park and I heard for the first time the terms “walker” and “downwinder.” I’ve already told you
that most of the walkers didn’t actually walk to Burlington; likewise, many of the downwinders didn’t technically live downwind of the fallout. Some of us, like me, were from right smack in the middle of the disaster—not downwind of it at all. And others were coming from areas that, in the end, would prove to be safe. Or, I guess, safe enough. But there were lots of pregnant women among the downwinders and lots of young moms with their toddlers and lots of old people. These were people who didn’t want to leave anything to chance and just got the hell out.

Sometimes I think we all got used to the word “walker” instead of “downwinder” because it had one less syllable. And it was a lot faster for everyone who gave a damn about Twitter to hashtag, right?

Still, it took me a while to even get those last few miles into the city to see all the madness for myself. Traffic on the roads around Burlington was either at a complete standstill or moving no more than a couple of miles an hour. And I couldn’t even really bike around the cars a lot of the time, because what was supposed to be two lanes in each direction had become four lanes in one and one in the other. That’s right, five rows of vehicles were wedged into four lanes. And the sidewalks were filled with people who had hitchhiked their way this close or had gotten rides from friends (and, I guess, bread trucks), and so even those of us with bikes finally just got off them and walked them for miles.

But the road into Burlington is filled with fast-food and coffee places like McDonald’s and Starbucks and Moe’s, and they were all giving us bottles of water and juice until they ran out. It was kind of sweet. The police officers were trying to move the cars along, but it was gridlock at every intersection. People would ask for news, and the news was just depressing. The worst for me? This was the moment when I learned that my dad’s engineer friend Eric Cunningham had killed himself. Apparently he had survived the blast, but he felt so bad about whatever had happened—whatever had gone wrong—that he’d shot himself with a hunting rifle later that day. I didn’t even know he had one. I mean, he and my dad
played paddle tennis together. Once in a while, they went skiing together. (They never went hunting together. My dad wasn’t a hunter.)

Still, at least it wasn’t raining. And when I finally reached the top of the hill above Burlington, Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains looked like a travel and tourism ad. Really, everything Vermont is supposed to be. As a matter of fact, because the sun was out, I was kind of sunburned by the time I was finally able to climb back onto my bike and coast down the shoulder of Main Street into the city.

Chapter 9

I never did get
my driver’s license, as you know, but I did have a learner’s permit. A couple of days a week, my parents would drive to and from the plant together in my dad’s Audi. So I’d just take my mom’s Subaru and drive wherever. To Lisa’s or Ethan’s. One time all the way to Littleton, New Hampshire, where there are actual stores with decent blue jeans and tops. Obviously this was against the law and impressively clueless. I never got caught by the police, but when my parents found out what I was doing, it was kind of like being busted. They screamed at me and I screamed back. And then they took away my phone and grounded me for a week.

Poacher was very smart—or, at least, smarter than a person might sometimes think he was. One time when we were all sitting around with a nice little buzz on watching the news on TV, some expert started talking about operator error at Cape Abenaki, and what went wrong and why the fuel rods broke and the uranium pellets fell out and started melting down. It was the eleven o’clock news, so we were all pretty chill.

Poacher sat forward a little bit on the mattress, shaking his head, and said, “Those poor fucks never had a chance.”

Trevor, who was in one of those slightly defiant, challenge-the-alpha-male-father-figure modes, said, “I don’t know. I think
they blew it. Don’t you? Just screwed up. I mean, weren’t they trained for this sort of bullshit?”

“Oh, sure, they were trained,” Poacher answered. “Some might have been very well trained. But there are some folks who have the right stuff and there are some folks who just don’t. I saw that all the time in Kuwait. There are some people who will stay cool no matter what’s going down, and there are some people who wig out. Or do nothing, when doing anything is better than doing nothing. They just freeze. And those dudes in the control room running Cape Abenaki? This was no drill. This was the real thing. And they’re just, like, operators. They
operate
systems. That’s what they do. It’s all rote. It’s all procedure. And think about it: these days, all the procedures are on computers. Sure, they probably had some paper manual explaining what the fuck they were supposed to do. But if it’s anything like the systems shit I saw in the army, all the piping and instrument diagrams would have been stored on the computers. And so when the computer network goes down—poof!—a big part of the road map they need is gone. The electronic records just disappear. I mean, I have no idea what kind of light is left when the batteries are failing. Is it dim? Is it, suddenly, pitch-black? Those poor
operator
sons-of-bitches must have been shitting in their pants. Picture it. I don’t know, maybe one of them had the right stuff. Maybe not. But all that training? Forgotten in the panic. In the dark. I feel for them. They’re just people and it’s black or at least almost black and you’re in this control room next to a pair of nuclear reactors and you know that at least one of them is about to explode and there’s not a thing you can do. Not one fucking thing. Let’s face it: When you can’t find the valves or the piping or whatever the fuck materials you need? Game over. Game … over.” And then he made that noise the Pac-Man games make when Blinky, Pinky, or Clyde gobbles up the very last of your Pac-Men, and he spiraled his finger like water was leaving a bathtub.