Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (39 page)

I was drawn to my parents’ bedroom. Sometimes, I would just stare at the bed, which was still unmade because my mom had rushed out to the plant, and at their nightstands. I made a decision to respect their privacy and vowed I would never, ever go through their closets or drawers. My mom and dad were light-years from perfect, but I believed they had never, ever read my journals.

Still, I spent a lot of time in their room. I curled up on their bed and inhaled the traces of them that remained on their pillowcases and sheets.

It wasn’t until the day I decided to bike out to Newport and Cape Abenaki that I discovered I was not, in fact, alone. Far from it.

The hill down into Newport had tons of mud on the road, a result of the runoff from thawing snow and the ferocious, icy-cold rains that mark the end of winter in northern Vermont. In the dried mud, I saw more tire tracks—and, clearly, fresh ones—as I sped down the slope. The main street through the center of town had even more tracks, and here I could see they were going in both directions.

When I got to the shore of Lake Memphremagog, it dawned on me what was going on. And right on cue, I heard a third helicopter roaring up from the south and then hovering in the distance. It was just beyond the peninsula, and so while I couldn’t see what was beneath it, I knew as well as anyone in the world that below it were the remains of Cape Abenaki. It might take years and it might take decades … but they were actually trying to clean up the mess.

Chapter 21

I found a place
where I could wait and watch the trucks coming and going without being seen: one of the twin towers of the St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Church. It was on a hill overlooking the lake and the city, perfectly situated if I wanted to lurk. (Just so you know, I did not break into the church. I have limits. When everyone had raced away from the meltdown, someone had left one of the side doors unlocked. I was able to walk right in.) The towers allowed me a 360-degree view. I could look out at the peninsula, behind which sat whatever was left of the plant, and I could look down at the city itself and the roads that veered north to Cape Abenaki. Some of the trucks were from the National Guard, but others were from FEMA and the NRC. I could see through the vehicle windows that everyone inside was always wearing hazmat suits, which would have made me uneasy about the radiation around me if I wasn’t pretty sure I had already done myself in.

I still had not seen the plant itself because it was shielded by the trees on the peninsula, but every so often I would bike a little bit closer before turning around. And it was clear that soon there were going to be a lot fewer trees: workers were clearing the woods to the south to make room for massive silver and gray storage tanks. And I mean massive; this is not teen-speak hyperbole. They were the size of gymnasiums. At first I couldn’t figure out what they were for, but then that part of me that’s a nuclear engineer’s daughter kicked in and I got it: all that radioactive wastewater had to go
somewhere, and those tanks were the destination. It looked like they were making room for hundreds of them.

And always I would call for Maggie when there were no trucks nearby. I had given up hope, but I was seriously into that “magical thinking” routine once again. So long as I kept looking for Maggie, I convinced myself, she might still be alive.

I never did break into the supermarket in Newport. There seemed to be too many trucks coming and going through the small city, and I was afraid of being cornered inside there. One time I considered going at night, but for some reason I was afraid. I have no idea why. By now I knew there were no nuclear mutants or AMC zombies walking around. Just wild dogs and turkeys and deer.

It was warm now, and maybe that’s why my mind went “bear” when I heard the noise outside the sliding glass doors. The bears had come out of hibernation. I was eating a late dinner by candlelight on the floor—the Barbours’ vegetable soup and a couple of Luna bars I had found at the Furneys’—when I heard the animal outside. I guessed the flickering candlelight had attracted it, but I didn’t know enough about animals to know if that really made any sense. It didn’t matter, however, because a second later I heard the animal bark and I nearly tipped over the candles and set the house on fire when I leapt to my feet, because I knew instantly it was Maggie.

I threw open the glass door and what was left of the screen door, and there she was. She jumped at me, her paws almost on my shoulders, and she started licking my face and I was weeping and I think she was, too—at least as much as a dog can weep. But if she
was crying, it was, like me, with joy. She was freaky thin and she had nasty sores on her legs and her coat was a disaster: matted and filled with twigs and burrs. But she was alive and a thousand times healthier than I would have guessed. I got her a bottle of water and opened two cans of dog food, and she slept on the window seat in my bedroom that night like nothing in the world had changed.

For the next four days, I didn’t leave the yard. Maggie didn’t either. I didn’t want her out of my sight, and I don’t think she wanted me tooling around on Skylar’s bike. Besides, I didn’t need to look for her anymore. Here she was. I brushed out her coat little by little, sponging away the smell of stale swamp, and watched her eat and eat … and eat. I figured in a few days I would have to break into the Woodsons’ house and steal some of their dog food. But I wasn’t worried. Just as there were plenty of cans of creamed corn and vegetable soup in the Exclusion Zone for me, there was probably a lifetime supply of canned dog food for my Maggie. When I would smooth some Bacitracin onto her legs, I would rub some into my thighs, and it seemed as if we both were getting better.

I felt a bit like I had when I had gotten that job at the diner back in Burlington: the future had a little promise. Perhaps I was finally leaving behind the absolute suckage that my life had become.

It was a weekday when I finally biked so far that I could see the plant beyond the wastewater storage tanks they were building. Before Maggie had returned I had been inching a little closer on each journey.

I think there were a couple of reasons why I wanted to see it, but the big one was that it was where my mom and dad had died. Where I assumed their bodies still were. It was like visiting their
graves. (In a disturbing sort of way, “grave” is the right word. The remains of the Chernobyl reactor are encased in a massive concrete sarcophagus. The Fukushima ruins are, too. So, I figured a part of the cleanup in the Kingdom involved building a sarcophagus atop Reactor One.) A therapist here thinks it may also have had something to do with Cameron: I had tried to be his parent and fallen short, and these visits were about “identification.” I was bonding with my mom and dad. Maybe. But mostly I just wanted to say good-bye.

I had to close the sliding glass door at my house when I left because it seemed like otherwise Maggie was going to follow me. But I wanted the house and our yard to be her whole universe from now on, and I think she preferred it that way, too. She only wanted to come with me because she loved me and didn’t want to be alone. I couldn’t say I blamed her. But I figured nothing would happen to me and she’d be fine here alone.

Obviously, I was wrong. Something, I guess, was bound to happen.