Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (24 page)

Someday I should rewrite this whole mess. Try to put it in some kind of order.

Someday I should probably do lots of things.

Sometimes it was the strangest things that would bring Cape Abenaki back into the news my last weeks at Poacher’s. In one case, it was nosebleeds. There were six little kids from the elementary school in Newport who all wound up in the same elementary school in Hanover, New Hampshire. They were in four different grades, but they all traipsed into the nurse’s office over the course of three or four school days in the middle of December for the same thing: nosebleeds that just didn’t want to stop. When the nurse realized they were all from Newport, she did a little research and figured out in about a nanosecond that a nosebleed was sometimes a sign of radiation sickness. The kids—all the kids from that school up in Newport—had been stuck outside in the rain after the explosion longer than a lot of the evacuees because all the emergency vehicles had created a gigundous traffic jam, and it took forever
for their school buses to arrive. Before you knew it, someone had figured out that a whole lot of kids from the Kingdom had “compromised” immune systems. They were always sick, and they were always getting colds. Out of the blue, a lot of New Agers wanted everyone drinking tea made from echinacea, and a lot of doctors wanted everyone on vitamin C and orange juice.

A few days after the nosebleed story broke, I got a nosebleed. I wondered if I had radiation sickness and got a little worried. But I didn’t have any other symptoms—which, trust me, are unbelievably gross—and so I decided it was just because the night before Poacher had had me sniff a little white for the first time.

“Hoarding and territorial issues. Predictable schism between haves and have-nots. Emily exudes education. Speaks like a have, aura’s a have. It probably made her a target in the shelter. Probably why she was bullied onto the street.”

I saw that written in one of the notebooks about me the other day. It made me feel bad about myself—like I had been putting on airs back at the shelter and deserved to be kicked out. I wanted to tell my therapist here, “If I’m that kind of a snot, how come everyone in the posse liked me?”

But I took a deep breath and chilled and kept that thought to myself. I was tired of confronting people. I guess I figured I had already caused everyone enough trouble. I guess I figured I had already done enough damage.

I left the posse for good on Christmas Day. The juxtaposition of my life that morning and my life on Christmas mornings past was just too fucking awful. A year earlier, I had given my mom and dad a poster I’d had made at the photo store in Newport. I gave the store all these pictures of the three of us on Christmas mornings
going all the way back to when I was a little kid in Briarcliff and a couple of stanzas from an Emily Dickinson poem:

Before the ice is in the pools
,

Before the skaters go
,

Or any cheek at nightfall

Is tarnished by the snow
,

Before the fields have finished
,

Before the Christmas tree
,

Wonder upon wonder

Will arrive to me!

A girl who worked at the store created a collage around the poem, and it really looked pretty good. There was one picture of my Maggie as a puppy, and her paw pads were massive, way too big for the rest of her, and the girl had positioned the photo so it looked like Maggie was pointing at the words. Then she edged the collage with gold Christmas foil and put it inside a red frame. There is no way I could have done something like that myself. My mom and dad loved it. I think it was by far their favorite thing I ever gave them.

But when I thought about that present—and, yeah, all the stuff they had given me over the years—I couldn’t help but compare it with the sinkhole my life had become. I’m not trying to get your sympathy: I knew that the meltdown had made lots of people’s lives suck. Exhibit A? I may have been the only kid to wind up an orphan because of Cape Abenaki, but seventeen grown-ups died in addition to my mom and dad, and twelve of them had children who were still living at home. Altogether, twenty-seven other kids lost a parent in the explosion. And then there were the thousands of people who were suddenly homeless: over thirteen thousand, according to one report.

But how could I not think of where I had been a year earlier and the collage I had given my parents? How could I not think
of all the images on the poster from all those other Christmases? Maybe I would have stayed with the posse if Andrea had stuck around. But she was gone. Who knows? Maybe I would have hung around another couple of months if Missy’s parents hadn’t brought her home to Concord. But they had.

So I left. I was terrified by what I saw in the mirror. I was disgusted by what I’d become.

Looking back, I was waffling between suicide and survival. One minute I was leaving with every intention of giving up somewhere on the streets. Seriously: just giving up. I’d simply freeze to death like that poor guy in all the snow in the Jack London short story. It wasn’t the worst way to die—at least it wasn’t for that dude. It was better than radiation sickness or cancer, right? But then the next minute I would be thinking how I was going to fuck the world by surviving. Take that, Fate, I’m still here. You thought you could kill me? No way. I am unkillable. It takes more than a nuclear meltdown to plant me six feet under.

I was the first member of the posse to wake up that Christmas morning, and I remember sitting up on my mattress and looking around at the room and thinking how squalid it was. Everything looked way worse simply because it was Christmas. Things are supposed to be special on Christmas, right? But the room was dingy and skanky and smelled kind of like a locker room and kind of like a head shop because we’d been burning incense the night before. After all, the night before was Christmas Eve. We didn’t have a tree or lights, but Joseph had lifted a pack of incense from the place in the North End where we always lifted our papers and pipes. (Incidentally, there’s no symbolism in the fact that I just used Joseph’s name and I’m telling you my Christmas story. Trust me, there’s no symbolism in any of this. It’s all just what happened.)

My room back in Reddington had always been a colossal mess, too, but it was a different kind of mess. First of all, there’s a difference between unclean and messy. My room was messy, but it wasn’t gross. There was stuff everywhere, but it was always clean. And—and this is important—it was all my stuff. When I would
sit up in bed (which was, of course, a real bed and not just a mattress) and look at the floor, the carpet was covered by my high heels and my hoodies and my coat hangers and my earrings and my blue jeans and my blouses and my dresses and my DVDs and the snakelike cords for my broken iPods and my old cell phones. Those were my old
Cosmopolitan
and
Elle
magazines. Those were my posters I had tacked to the yellow rose wallpaper. That was my Disney glass unicorn. That was my glass pen with a gold-plated nib. (I didn’t really write with it because this isn’t, like, the sixteenth century. But it was very beautiful.) Those were my leather journals where I wrote my poems and my observations that—to be honest—always seemed a lot more profound at nighttime than they did in the morning. Sometimes there was some dog hair on my things in the spring when Maggie would shed, but, seriously, a little dog hair was about as dirty as my room ever got.

Sometimes my mom would ask me why I didn’t put the clothes back in my dresser or my closet when I was deciding what to wear before school. Usually it was just because I was rushed and I figured I would put the stuff away when I got home from school. At least that’s what I would tell myself at seven thirty-five in the morning, when I had about five minutes before the school bus arrived to brush my hair and put on my makeup and find my winter boots and throw my homework in a backpack that some days weighed as much as a Mini Cooper. It was crazy how much crap we were supposed to have with us.

So, Christmas morning at Poacher’s was sort of a wake-up call. I stared at Trevor with his hair in his eyes and a girl named Izzie who I didn’t like much, her head in a knit cap to keep warm, and Joseph, who I could see had an erection even under the quilt, and two empty orange vials on the windowsill. And I just wanted out. So, I pushed off my own quilt and stood up. My footing was a little funky because I was standing on a pretty soft mattress.

When I tiptoed past Poacher’s bedroom, I could see he had passed out in his army jacket. I knew he kept some of his cash under his mattress when he was sleeping because he didn’t trust
us, but it wasn’t all that hard to reach underneath it and steal two twenty-dollar bills. Then I stole two more. He didn’t even move.

I got dressed in the bathroom so no one would hear me and made a list in my mind of what I should put in my knapsack. I didn’t lift any pills or any of Poacher’s stash, but I did take a lighter. I guess I was still thinking of that Jack London short story. I wanted to be damn sure I could start a fire if I had to. The biggest decision, weirdly enough, was my X-Acto. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t need it. I wouldn’t need it. I would only take my Bactine and some Band-Aids in case I got a cut. But, in the end, I did take the X-Acto. I might need a weapon, right? I remember thinking to myself,
But, Emily, you need to promise yourself that you won’t use it as a weapon against yourself
.

Of course, I did. That was just one of my many promises to myself that I broke.

When I unlocked the door it made a ridiculously loud click. Had it always made that much noise? Probably. I’d just never noticed. Then I heard somebody coughing, and I was pretty sure it was Tory, a new girl I did like even if she had the ugliest face tats I’d ever seen in my life, and I slipped through the door.

Outside it was sunny. I could see a dusting of fresh snow on the ground. It was pretty and I watched my breath steam into the air.

I zipped up my parka and pulled tight the hood. I had wedged a lot of clothes into the backpack, but I was wearing a lot, too. I was wearing as much as I could. I wished I had left the posse a note, but I didn’t know if it was supposed to be a suicide note or a thank-you note. I guess since I had brought all the clothes that I could and my X-Acto, I was hoping more to live than to die. I’m still here, right? But who knows how my mind works. I sure don’t.

I remember I heard a harp in my head and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I got it: it was the harp from that Beatles song Poacher liked about the runaway girl. “She’s Leaving Home.”

Nope, I thought. I am not leaving home. I am just … leaving.

A.C.