Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (37 page)

Most of the yard was free of snow, but there was a line of small drifts where it had fallen off the eaves on the shady side of the house. The snow was crusted with crap from the roof.

I stared at my bedroom window. At the shade that was half up. At the edge of the curtains.

Neither of my parents was much of a gardener, but this was Vermont so we had flowers along the front walkway and a vegetable garden in the yard on the southern side of our house. We grew lots of tomatoes—mostly cherry and plum tomatoes—and the tomato
cages were still upright, but the dead plants draped from the metal like the tentacles on man o’ war jellyfish. The tomatoes had grown and ripened after everyone had left and then fallen to the ground and rotted. The flowers along the walkway had died and collapsed under the snow and now were nothing but mounds of decomposing daylilies and sedum and phlox.

For a minute or two I just stood there. Home. I was actually here, I had actually made it. I almost couldn’t believe it. Poacher and the posse and the truckers? A different lifetime. The Oxies? Forever ago. All that I’d done and all that I’d lost, all my blistering missteps and mistakes? That was before. This was after.

No, that wasn’t quite true. That wasn’t true at all. Some regrets can’t be undone. There was no “after” Cameron: My letting him get so sick and then leaving him behind? My running away once and for all? Unforgivable.

Still, I would be lying if I did not admit that I stared at the house experiencing all that we bring to one small, simple word:
home
.

Finally I took a deep breath, journeyed up the walkway, and tried the front door.

It was locked.

Of course.

The poetry of a nuclear disaster is weirdly beautiful. There is alliteration: rads and roentgens and rems. To a scientist, those are just units of measurement. To a poet? Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my.

And then there are the “iums.” Tellurium. Cesium. Strontium. And—I know this ruins the rule of three, but it is the mother of nuclear iums—plutonium.

Unfortunately, whenever I write those words down I instantly recall the dead cows and the dead moose and the dead birds, and the poems in my head turn to steam.

It might have been a schoolteacher who first said, “Close your eyes and hold hands.” And it might have been a police officer. It was back in December 2012, right after Adam Lanza had massacred all those little kids and teachers and the principal at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. After Lanza had killed himself, the grown-ups had to walk the surviving kids out of the school building, right past the bodies of their classmates who had been slaughtered. So, to keep the kids from seeing the corpses, either a teacher or one of the police officers instructed the children to close their eyes and hold hands.

I had been thinking of that moment and those words a lot since I had dropped off Cameron’s stuff at the hospital in Burlington and started back to the Kingdom. I had thought of it even more since I had passed into the Exclusion Zone. I never quite knew what I was going to see.

It seemed to me that if you didn’t know the context of those words, they were kind of pretty. They’re like those three
R
’s I just mentioned.
Close your eyes, hold hands
might, if you didn’t know the truth, sound life-affirming. I see the words on some dorky note card with the sun setting in the ocean, the sky streaked with red, and a couple on the beach with their backs to the camera holding hands. Maybe the woman has her head on the dude’s shoulder. The message, if you think about it this way, is all about taking chances because fate or destiny or God will protect you. Take a risk, have a little faith. It’s all about life, not death. It’s not about a bunch of small children who’ve been gunned down with a Bushmaster assault rifle.

Anyway, I recalled those instructions with serious dread in the pit of my stomach as I was walking around the side of my house, past the garden and the stone wall and the white tank with our LP gas that I had thought was a mini-submarine when I was a little
kid. My keys to the front door were long gone—I hadn’t seen them in months—and so I was going to have to break the windows in the sliding glass doors in the back. But as I was making my way there, it dawned on me: whatever was left of my Maggie was behind those walls. With no one around to let her out, she’d died of hunger or thirst. I had no idea which would have killed her first, but my sense was that either way it was a slow and horrible way to die. In my head I heard her barking for help, but by then everybody was gone and there was no one left to come rescue her.

Still, I couldn’t stand outside forever. I was going to have to smash those sliding glass doors to get in—sort of like the way someone before me had broken a window to get into the Academy—because one of the things I had come here to do was to bury my Maggie. She deserved that. And that would mean seeing her corpse.

The problem?

I could close my eyes all I wanted, but I still had no one to hold my hand.

So, I lifted a rock the size of a soccer ball from that stone wall, a little impressed that it was finally serving a purpose, and wandered past those disturbing tomato cages with the dead vines clinging to the wire and around the corner of the house. It took both arms to carry the rock, and it was going to take both hands to hurl it through the sliding glass door.

And then I saw something that caused me to stop where I was. I stood perfectly still and stared, my mind racing as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. I dropped the rock right where I was. The sliding glass door was open. And the screen door had a massive hole ripped in it.

Make no mistake, I didn’t necessarily believe that Maggie was alive. Still, I couldn’t help but get my hopes up that she was. There was absolutely no sign of her anywhere in the house.

Here is what I told myself might have happened. My mom had opened the glass door to let some fresh air in and then, when she went to the plant to be with my dad and see what the hell was really going on, she had left it open for Maggie. Maggie loved to sniff the outside air through the big screen. She would sit up on her dog bed when the glass door was first opened, and her nose would go a little crazy. It was adorable. At some point, either crazed with hunger or boredom or thirst, she had ripped that hole in the screen and gotten out. Thank God. She might be long dead, but at least she hadn’t died trapped and alone in the house.

When I couldn’t find her or her remains anywhere inside, I went outside and started calling her name. I wondered if the animals thought it was strange to suddenly hear a human voice. It had probably been a long time. I guessed a lot had never heard one. I walked around our yard and the edge of the woods, yelling, “Maggie! C’mon, girl. Maggie, I’m home!” I must have done that for ten minutes, and my voice was growing hoarse.

Finally, when Maggie didn’t come racing out of the evergreens, I went back inside and inspected the house a little more carefully. I wanted to see what we had in the way of canned food and bottled water or juice. My plan was to live there. I would write my poems. I would keep my journals. I would become the Belle of Reddington.

I slid shut the glass door so animals wouldn’t join me in the night and went upstairs to my bedroom. It was freezing cold, but otherwise exactly as I had left it. There were the jeans on the floor I had chosen not to wear on the morning that Cape Abenaki had melted down, and there was the shirt that I had tossed on my desk when I decided it made my arms look fat. There was the earring I had left on my dresser when I couldn’t find its matching partner. There was my armoire, open as always, and there on the top of my bookcase were my journals. The only thing in my room I ever kept
neat was the top of the bookcase with my journals. And there they were, lined up between the two brass unicorn bookends.

I was tempted to start reading them right then, but it could wait. I was exhausted. And I figured I had nothing but time.

I took off my clothes, which I realized now were revolting, sponged myself off with water from a Saratoga bottle I found in the pantry, and climbed into my favorite red check pajamas. Dorky beyond belief.

And then I went to sleep in my very own bed. I pulled the quilt over my head and didn’t wake up until close to nine-thirty the next morning.

The next day I began to clean. Maggie may have gone out through the screen door, but a lot of animals had since used it to come in. I guessed there had been squirrels and raccoons and fisher cats inside the house. The hole wasn’t so big that a bear could have wandered in, but the rug in the den and the tile in the kitchen were spotted with mud and animal tracks. The bag with Maggie’s dry kibbles, which we kept in a pantry closet, was empty and the heavy paper had been gnawed into little pieces. That might have been Maggie because the pantry door was partway open, but it might also have been wild animals. Also, all of the cereal boxes we’d opened had been destroyed and the wax bags inside them licked clean. Wind had blown rain into the den and the couch was moldy and damp. I found piles of scat in the living room—which, they would tell me later, had probably been seriously radioactive. Lovely, right?

I was never big into vacuuming, but I would have vacuumed now if there had been any electricity. There wasn’t. So the first thing I did was drag the couch through the glass doors and out into the sun in the yard. I thought I might dry it out during the day and drag it back inside at night. Maybe in a few days it would be okay. If not, I would leave it in the garage. Both of my parents’ cars were
gone, parked in the lot at Cape Abenaki, I guessed. So why not store the couch there? Then I got the broom and a dustpan and a bucket and a mop, and I started to clean. I used a little Windex on the glass on the framed poster of my parents and me on the Christmas mornings when I’d been a kid. I went through a whole roll of paper towels as I dusted.

And I ate. Everything in the refrigerator was unbelievably gross, and I just tossed it all into a pair of black garbage bags. The most grotesque thing I found was what I think in another era might have been chicken breasts. I would have poured the liquids that hadn’t completely evaporated down the sink, but I didn’t have running water, so those cartons and bottles and jars went into the trash bags, too.