Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (36 page)

I saw wisps of green at the tips of the maples. Spring.

Halfway between the roadblock and my old school I came across a hillside with nothing but the bones and carcasses of cows. There must have been fifty or sixty of them. Maybe more. On the ridge atop another meadow I saw three living horses with luxurious-looking long winter coats. One was buckskin and two were bay. The bays had white stocking feet. I waved when I saw they were watching me, and then I nickered, hoping they would come to the street. Instead they turned and galloped away. Later I saw barn cats in the window of a hayloft. I saw deer. I saw a pair of mostly—but not entirely—eaten dead moose. And I saw a pack of big dogs that now had gone wild. I wondered if they were the animals that were eating the moose. It was possible. But it might also have been coyotes. I assumed that the cows had died of radiation sickness; they’d drunk from the wrong stream or grazed on contaminated grass. But one of the doctors here said maybe not. Maybe they had just succumbed to the cold or, because they were trapped in that field, run out of pasture and starved to death. I reminded him that they were still dead because of Cape Abenaki.

I remember when I first saw the hill of dead cows I made a mental note that I’d find some bottled water and drink only that.

Or not.

The corn had continued to grow throughout the previous summer, but had never been harvested. There were whole fields with acres and acres of dead stalks—tasseled, their ears drooping like a submissive bunny’s—that had been bent but not toppled by the snow.

While I was standing before the first of the many fields of dead corn, a helicopter passed overhead.

An hour later, I saw high in the sky the white trails of what I supposed was a passenger jet.

Other than the occasional aircraft, I realized that the Exclusion Zone was going to be very, very quiet.

The first place I stopped was the Academy. Someone had locked the doors, but someone else had hurled a concrete block through a first-floor window. After the place had been abandoned last year, weeds had grown through the cracks in the front walkway, and now the long, dead strands lay there like clumps of flat hair. I crawled in through the window and saw that I was in Ms. Francis’s office. Ms. Francis was the guidance counselor I was always disappointing. There were still pictures of her two kids and her husband on a credenza and a couple of folders with my classmates’ names on her desk. There was a coffee mug with unbelievably disgusting fungus in the bottom.

I figured what the hell and opened a few filing cabinet drawers until I found her folder with my name on it. I brought it to her desk and sat down in her chair. In it I found my PSATs and my SATs and
the slips showing all of the times I’d been disciplined. I read my report cards. There was nothing she herself had written about me, and nothing I hadn’t seen before. Still, it left me kind of breathless to read all in one place things like “Emily’s work has certainly been adequate, but we all know she is capable of much, much more.” Or, “It’s discouraging to see her utter unwillingness to apply herself. She is coasting. She should be soaring.” Or this one: “I’m frustrated. We all are. We all know how gifted Emily is, but so far nothing at all seems to interest her.” (That last one caused me to prickle a little bit: Writing interested me. Some teachers knew that. Poetry interested me. Okay, fine, I wasn’t into your environmental chemistry class. I’m sorry. Shoot me.)

One teacher asked rhetorically where the little girl had gone who had been such an enthusiastic middle schooler. She hinted that she was worried there might be problems at home, a comment that I remembered had made my mom go ballistic.

Still, when I put the folder back, my eyes were welling up. I shouldn’t have looked. It reminded me of what a disappointment I was. It reminded me of the ways I just blew everything apart.

My feet echoed along the corridors, and I realized I could really make some noise if I wanted. I considered screaming “Hello!” as if I were at the edge of a long cave and listening to the sound bounce around the walls, but I was actually a little creeped out. There was no electricity and it was already three o’clock, so the sun was falling, which meant there were whole parts of the Academy—such as the bathrooms, which had tiny windows, and the auditorium, which had none—that were almost pitch-black when I opened the doors. I wanted to leave the school by three-thirty so I could be home by five-thirty. That was my plan. I didn’t think it would take anywhere near two hours to walk home, because my house was only three miles away, but who knew what might distract me or
slow me down along the way. I had usually taken the bus over the years, but I had walked to or from school a couple of times, too, and it had never taken more than an hour and five or ten minutes.

Among the rooms I visited that seemed to be getting the most light that time of day was my old biology classroom. The black microscopes were almost white with dust. So were the rows of textbooks on the shelves and the computer screens on the counters along the rear wall. I hadn’t set foot in there in nearly three years now, and I’m not sure what I expected. But I know I hadn’t planned on practically vomiting from the smell. This wasn’t just some Proustian nightmare—some benign opposite of those tasty little madeleines. This would have made anyone nauseous. The ninth graders had been dissecting crayfish when we were evacuated, and on all of the tables were the trays and the pails and the remains of the animals. The stench was unbearable, and so I slammed shut the door and ran away.

My dad sometimes made jokes about the ways small animals could shut down or nearly shut down a nuclear power plant. One time in Virginia a pelican flew into an overhead power cable and shorted out the connection between the plant and the off-site power grid. A bunch of jellyfish in Florida once blocked the filters at an intake station, nearly cutting off the water the plant had to have. And a few years ago a rat gnawed away the insulation around an electrical cable at a French plant, shorting out the whole cooling system. My dad had other stories. Those are just the ones I remember. His point? It doesn’t take a tsunami to raise holy hell.

Later, when I had caught my breath in Ms. Gagne’s classroom, I guessed it was the crayfish that made me think of the crazy little wildlife tales my dad sometimes shared.

In Ms. Gagne’s room, I sat in my chair at my old desk. Then I sat on top of her desk. Then I wandered aimlessly around the room, wiping the dust—which I figured was probably radioactive—off
the novels we read and the filing cabinets and the Smart Board. I thought about how, here, the world had just stopped. Everyone had dropped what they were doing and run away as fast as they could. My mind roamed to the rest of Reddington, and I imagined kitchen tables with mice nibbling the toast people had left on their plates. I envisioned washing machines and dryers filled with clothes. I saw shopping carts overflowing with diapers and juice and plastic gallons of milk, now all alone in line at the grocery store registers, and dolls and blocks and little wooden trucks on the floors of the nurseries and day cares.

I wondered where Ms. Gagne—Cecile—was now. I touched the desks where Ethan Gale and Lisa Curran and Dina Ramsey had sat.

Then I went to the old-fashioned blackboard and took a piece of chalk and started writing. Most of what I wrote I erased, but not these five words. This is what I wrote:

Close your eyes, hold hands
.

Someday I figured someone would see it. They’d make of it whatever they wanted. Maybe they’d think it was random. Maybe they’d just be confused.

Chapter 20

Our mailbox was still
standing when I got to my house. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was white with a red flag, but now that white was more the color of a ratty old T-shirt. The pavement on our driveway was finally fading from asphalt black to a more seasoned salt and pepper. There was that ridiculous stone wall running along the edge of our lawn.

Our house—that meadow mansion that didn’t belong—was a yellow clapboard colonial. There was a bay window. There were shutters made of something called “architectural grade” vinyl siding, and they were evergreen. (It mattered to my mother that the vinyl was “architectural grade,” because she didn’t approve of vinyl siding. But my dad didn’t want to have to constantly take down and repaint wooden shutters. Shutters, I gather, are a boatload of work. So when I was in fourth grade, we had the wooden shutters replaced with those vinyl ones.)