Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (33 page)

The other day I spied this note my therapist had written about me. “Welcomes seclusion. Not precisely antisocial, but reclusive. Aspirationally Dickinson?” Note the question mark she put after “Dickinson,” as if she’s wondering if I have a girl crush on the Belle of Amherst. Well, duh. If I’d had a pen when I saw that, I think I would have scratched out the hook above the dot and scribbled something like
Watch out, Sigmund Freud
. Honestly, I’m not sure how much of my crush focused on her poetry and how much focused on the mysteriousness of her life. Why did she retreat inside her home—and did she even consider it a retreat? How much of her life was about her daddy issues? Did the child whose father urged her to be “one of the best little girls” in Amherst ever unleash the passion that filled her poetry with one (or more!) of her gentleman friends? There was a novel I read about her in tenth grade that had all kinds of intriguing innuendo. In it she sleeps with a guy with tats. There was one biography that implied she had a wild side.

When I was ten years old, I visited her house for the first time with my grandmother. When I was fourteen years old, I went again with my parents. As I think I told you, I had posters from the Homestead on the walls of my bedroom—framed posters. (My favorite is a painting of her in a long-sleeved white dress looking at herself at the edge of a very still pond.)

I read one essay that suggested Emily Dickinson had a modernist approach to poetry as a writer—she had a contemporary sensibility. Why? Because elements of her work were short enough to tweet. I remember thinking that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever read. Just because something is 140 characters or less doesn’t mean it’s modern. God, think of all the ancient Japanese haiku about cherry blossoms and clouds. Are those modern? No, they’re just short.

I don’t know, maybe I just wanted to be alone. Maybe I just didn’t want to be social because antisocial people have a whole lot less to lose.

Chapter 18

I only ended up
working at Henry’s Diner for two days. That’s it. I got the tips I had earned those two shifts, but I never even got a paycheck. I wasn’t able to stick around long enough.

That’s what I mean about how, maybe, I was never destined to turn things around.

When I went back to the diner the next day right after lunch to get trained, Andy’s brother sent me home. I was, in his opinion, way too sick to work at a restaurant. He was probably right, but I needed to get cash fast because I wasn’t sure how long I could impose on Camille and Dawn. (In all fairness, I think I could have imposed on them for a very long time, especially if I was making money and could have helped with the rent. They really didn’t seem to mind that I slept on the couch for a couple of nights and Cameron had made a cave out of the one table in their apartment. Who knows? We might have become a new posse—a posse with actual jobs that wasn’t breaking into people’s houses and mistaking Oxies for vitamins.) So the day after I was sent home I doubled down on the DayQuil dosage: I felt like shit because I really did have one monster of a cold and because doubling down on DayQuil gets you kind of light-headed and high—and not a good high. But my nose? It was solid. They let me work right up until the place closed for the night, around nine p.m. And I liked the uniform: it had this retro Kat Dennings sort of vibe. I was the youngest girl there; in fact, I was the only waitress you might call a girl. The next youngest waitress was a mom whose name tag said
Shari and who was probably thirty or thirty-five. She wore her hair in this Rosie the Riveter sort of updo and kept it back with a scarf. There was also a really lovely lady named Gail Arnoff with the most incredible hazel eyes; I recognized her from somewhere and wasn’t sure where, but then she told me she volunteered at the library when she wasn’t working at the diner and I got it.

The platters were heavy and half the time I was terrified that I was going to spill gravy and milk and ice-cream scoops of mashed potatoes, but I never did. The cooks were two old guys who seemed to be barking at me all the time, but I figured out pretty quickly that most of the time they weren’t actually mad. As one of my therapists here would put it, they just communicated by yelling. And Andy was (Warning: SAT Word Fast Approaching) avuncular. He sometimes told the cooks to cut me some slack. He chided them about the unfinished food I’d cart back into the kitchen.

When I returned to Camille’s, I was exhausted, but I had nearly forty-five dollars in tips in my pocket.

Unfortunately, any happiness that I had earned some real money without begging or sucking some trucker’s dick evaporated within seconds of my closing the front door to the apartment. Cameron was way sicker than he had been at lunchtime when I’d left. Way sicker. And he was way sicker than I was. We didn’t have a thermometer, but it felt to me like Cameron was burning up. He was rag-doll weak, his head was throbbing, and he said he ached everywhere. His nose was a disaster. So I gave him some NyQuil and convinced him to eat a few spoonfuls of chicken soup–flavored ramen noodles.

My heart hurt for him.

That night Camille surprised me. As I was tossing a sheet back on the couch and getting ready to go to sleep, she said she had
something for me and handed me a small, square box. It was the perfect size for a pair of earrings.

“Open it,” Camille said, when I stared at it for a couple of seconds. “I swear, whatever’s in there won’t bite. It’s not like I hid a scorpion in there or something.”

And so I untied the ribbon and opened it. Sure enough, silver earrings with a little blue stone in each. “It’s a tanzanite,” she said.

I had no idea what a tanzanite was, but that didn’t matter. They were pretty.

“I couldn’t afford moonstones,” Camille went on. “I went back to the pawnshop, but your earrings were long gone. I’m really sorry.”

“These are beautiful,” I told her, and I meant it. “Thank you.” I started to put one on, but discovered the holes in my ears had closed up.

“We’ll fix that this week,” she said.

I looked at the earring in the palm of my hand. I focused on how vibrant the blue was and nodded. But I didn’t say anything because suddenly I was afraid to speak.

I went to work the next day, too, as did Camille and Dawn. I felt like the worst mother in the world leaving Cameron in his mummy bag beneath the pumpkin pine table—he’d actually been moaning in his sleep the night before—but what else could I do? When I left, Camille and Dawn were still at the apartment, but I knew they might both be gone by the time Cameron finally woke up.

It was a Saturday and it was beautiful out. It felt like spring. One of the grown-up waitresses at Henry’s said she had seen a robin on the way in to work.

I was working all the way through the lunch shift that day because Henry’s closed at three o’clock on Saturdays, and so I was
back at Camille’s by about three-thirty. She had already left for Leunig’s and Dawn was at Macy’s, so Cameron was alone. He was curled up in a small ball in his mummy bag, asleep, and I didn’t wake him. But he was sweating, and when I touched his forehead I was shocked at how warm he still was—and a little worried. I was getting better. He wasn’t. It dawned on me that maybe we didn’t have the same cold. Maybe he didn’t have a cold at all.

I hadn’t smoked any weed since I’d left Poacher’s, but I did that night. Camille and I shared a bowl when she returned from the restaurant. Dawn was seriously DTF—okay, maybe not literally down to fuck, but at least in the mood for a hookup—and had gone to some club on Main Street where she could party and get some. I insisted that Camille and I smoke in her and Dawn’s bedroom so Cameron didn’t have to breathe any in while he shivered and sweat in his mummy bag on the living room floor. She sat on her little bed and I sat on Dawn’s. I hadn’t noticed it before, but Camille had this stuffed panda bear the size of a little dog. I thought she was going to use it as a pillow. Instead she sat it on her lap like it was a baby.

“You know,” she murmured, “someday you are going to have to bring him to the police.”

“He wouldn’t go,” I said. “He’d just run away again.”

“But he’s, like, nine.”

“He’s not
like
nine. He is nine.”

She held a lit Bic over the bowl, and I watched the dope glow as she inhaled. It always looked like a night sky with lots of stars to me when someone did that. “You can’t do this forever,” she said, after she’d exhaled. I knew exactly what she meant by “this.” I thought it was pretty interesting that Camille of all people should be trying to get into my head as the voice of reason. “It’s more than a little dodgy. The little dude really should be in school.
You
should be in school.”

I shrugged. “It’s whatever.”

“You must have been good in school.”

“Never as good as people thought I should be.”

“You’re an only child?”

“Uh-huh.”

She leaned off her bed and passed me the pipe, and I breathed in the smoke and held it. God, it felt good.

“Still. There’s something else going on here,” she said. “It’s not just that he’s like this little brother you never had.”

“I really like him.”

“I get it. I like him, too. Did you see the way he duct taped the checkers pieces? Most colorful checkers set I’ve ever seen. But there are lots of things I like that I can’t have.”

“He doesn’t have anyone else.”

“And neither do you. Is that it?”

When I didn’t say anything, she went on: “Have you googled your name? Your real name?”

This was the first time she’d officially acknowledged she knew who I was since she had told me in the food court that she’d deleted the numbers I’d called from her old phone.

“I did. Once. It made me a little sick.”

“So you know what’s out there—what people are saying?”

“Mostly. But I kind of steer clear of computers and the news.”

“There must be people looking for you.”

“It seemed to me they stopped a month or so after they started. I didn’t see anything about me after July.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. It just means you weren’t in the papers.”

“Maybe. But after what they were saying about my dad, I don’t want to be found. I don’t want to have to testify.”

“Because of the shit they’re trying to sell about him?”

I must have winced, because her face fell like she had just said the wrong thing. “He wasn’t drunk that day,” I told her. “Sometimes he drank too much, but he hadn’t the night before. And there’s no way he was drinking that morning at the plant.”

“Even if he was drunk, he’s not you. You were never to blame. You’re just a kid. It’s not like people were ever going to lynch you.”

“Those first days, it sure felt like they were. You should have heard the stuff people said to me the day of the meltdown. It was really scary.”

“Maybe back then people were a little crazy. They’re not anymore. That was a long time ago.”

“Nine months.”

“Yeah. That’s what I mean. That’s a long time.”

It was, especially now. Even I know that a lot more happens in nine months these days than when my parents were kids. These days, did anyone outside of New England ever even think about Cape Abenaki? Did anyone think about the way only a year ago people were ice-fishing with the reactor a quick skate away? Skiing at Jay Peak? Taking French at Reddington Academy?