Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (38 page)

But there was still plenty to eat in the pantry. I opened a can of Campbell’s cheddar cheese soup, the stuff that was the key ingredient in my mom’s mac and cheese, and ate cold spoonfuls of it. I polished off a bottle of Diet Snapple and a can of V-8. (I’m not a big fan of V-8, but I used to drink it because it wasn’t hugely caloric and you got some vegetables.) I ate a can of creamed corn.

And when I ran out of the food in my house? I figured I’d wander to our neighbors’. I’d take a walk to the general store in Reddington. I’d throw a rock through the windows of the supermarket in Newport. It seemed to me that I would die years before the Exclusion Zone ran out of food.

Every hour or so I would go outside and call for Maggie.

One day I walked to the home of Skylar Furney to steal his bike. Skylar was one of four Furney kids, but I only knew him because he was the one closest to my age. He was a year behind me at the Academy. His two brothers and his sister were even younger; they were all in middle school. But I remembered that Skylar was one of those manic bicyclists, and I figured I might as well use
his bike since he wasn’t. I wanted to use it to look for Maggie. I wanted to expand my search area.

The tires were flat, but he had a pump hanging on the wall in the garage. See what I mean about what a bike guy he was?

And this was a much nicer bike than the one I had ridden partway to Burlington the previous June. It was very light. It had those clips that fit into the bottom of bike shoes, and at first I feared I was kind of screwed. Obviously I didn’t have bike shoes. But then it dawned on me: Skylar did. Duh. If I was going to steal his bike, I might as well steal his shoes. What’s that expression? In for a nickel, in for a dime. I wasn’t wild about rooting around his bedroom, but I was prepared to. Fortunately, I didn’t even have to trudge upstairs: I found his bike shoes in the mudroom right off the garage. And while his feet were bigger than mine, it didn’t matter once I clipped in. I was fine.

Well, I was fine after an hour. I fell about sixty times that first hour, and my beginning spills were all on his driveway. It was after about the tenth tumble that it dawned on me: a smart chick would try to learn to ride in clips on the lawn. So that’s what I did. If you’re going to be a turtle on its back in its shell—that’s sort of what it’s like to topple over on a bicycle when you’re clipped into the pedals—do it on grass, not pavement. There were still patches of snow, but mostly they were in the shade. I even ran over or smashed a few blue and pink crocuses as I practiced.

One of the doctors here asked me, “Weren’t you a little grossed out when you were wearing that strange boy’s smelly shoes?”

I looked at her. “Really?” I said. “Really?” Over the last year I had been living in an igloo made of trash bags. I had been sexing down truckers in the cabs of their eighteen-wheelers. I had been carving up my thighs with an X-Acto knife. And now she thinks it’s going to freak me out to wear some teenage boy’s bike shoes? Hello?

You know what? Skylar Furney’s male teenage stinkfoot had never even crossed my mind.

It was the day after that, when I was passing our little white submarine of LP gas, that it clicked: I could light the stove and heat up my creamed corn and cheddar cheese soup if I wanted—at least until the gas in the tank ran out. I would use one of our fireplace matches the way my mom did whenever we had a blackout in a snowstorm. You just turned the knob and put a lit match near the burner.

The first time I tried it, I was a little tentative: I think I was afraid I was going to blow up the whole house. But it was really kind of idiot-proof. The burner caught instantly.

Son-of-a-bitch, I remember thinking. You can cook. Not shabby.

And so I lived like that for three weeks. Maybe three and a half. And then, of course, it all came crashing down. (I know my therapist would quibble with “crashing down.” Her spin would be a little different. We would have one of those debates about the “passive voice” and how I need to take responsibility for my actions.)

But until then, I continued to clean and eat canned soups and canned vegetables—sometimes cold, but mostly hot—and polish off all of our jugs of water and bottles of juice. I started to pillage the food at our nearest neighbors’ house, the Barbours, figuring when their food was gone I’d simply move on to the next family’s. Other than the occasional airplanes and a second helicopter that thwumped overhead on day six or day seven, I was completely alone. I no longer wondered about the wide tire tracks I’d seen soon after returning to the area. I wrote. I wrote poems and I wrote in my journals.

One day I thought I would dress only in white. But then I worried
I was getting into a weird area and climbed back into a tan and black dress I had gotten from Free People that I had always liked.

My journals went back years. I still had my first Hello Kitty diary. I had my Barbie Rapunzel notebook from second grade. I had my Disney princess pink and purple and yellow notepads, one each for Cinderella and Jasmine and Belle. There were all the salt-and-pepper composition books from my middle school phase. And there were the leather-bound journals I had started to keep in ninth grade. There were six of them, or about two a year. I tended to fill one every six months.

I was fascinated by my penmanship after so long away from them. I had forgotten I had written in only pink gel pens in fourth and fifth grade. I had forgotten I had a phase in ninth grade when I kept trying (and failing) to write villanelles. Nineteen lines. Five tercets and a quatrain. Refrains and repeating rhymes. Supposedly Elizabeth Bishop spent eighteen years on one villanelle before she decided she had gotten it right. Obviously my parents knew about my poems, but few of my friends did. I didn’t want people to know. They were … mine. How many of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime? Ten between 1850 and 1866. One in a book in 1878. That was it. Did she want more? Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact is that most of her work, especially the reams and reams of papers that her sister found after her death, never saw the light of day in her lifetime. In one parent-teacher fiasco that was supposed to be a “conference,” my mom revealed that I had all this writing I never shared with anyone. She was trying to argue that I had talent. Mad skills as a writer. I wasn’t a total loss. My reaction? Vesuvius. I felt betrayed and kind of wigged out.

When I was reconciled with all my journals that spring, I told myself that cutting had replaced writing, but now that I was home I would write. I threw the X-Acto away.

And, instead, a few days later I simply used a sharp little paring
knife that I found in the kitchen. After that I used a pair of nail scissors that turned out to be unexpectedly sharp.

So, now I was cutting and writing.

But, in truth, mostly writing.

My mom and dad had put a beautiful leather journal from Italy in my Easter basket my junior year, and that was the journal I used to begin this story.

I wrote most of the time in my bedroom, just as I had when my parents had been alive, even though I had nothing but privacy. I could have written at the kitchen table, if I’d wanted. I could have written completely naked in the middle of the lawn, if it had been a little warmer. But instead I sat in my window seat, the sun on my back, just as I had a year and two and three years earlier. I would sometimes drape my hand where Maggie had once slept. I would have deep pangs of sadness when I came across a few strands of her fur.

I didn’t mind the fact there was no electricity. After half a winter in an igloo, my life felt movie-star luxurious. Besides, I had candles and batteries for a couple of flashlights.

If I had come across a cell phone that still had a charge, I would have called the hospital to make sure that Cameron really had gotten better. I wanted him to awake from his coma. I would have called Camille to see if she and Dawn were okay. But I never found a phone with a charge.

I figured for sure that people were looking for me, but I doubted they’d ever look here.

Besides: the world still had much bigger problems than me. No one was going to look very hard.

I got used to a world without music.

I got used to a world with dead animals and wild animals and sick animals. I would see a lot of the dead and the wild and the sick as I biked around the Exclusion Zone.