Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (40 page)

I saw the carcass of a massive rubber berm that was supposed to protect Cape Abenaki from the flood. It was in a field between the river and the remains of Reactor One. It looked a little like a giant snake. Around it were hundreds—maybe thousands—of sandbags.

Like everything else, they were radioactive.

I guess on some level I understood that the closer I got to the plant, the worse the radiation was going to be. Even a mile away, the folks who were cementing the lake bed wherever Memphremagog met the northern swamps and streams were decked out like astronauts. Their outfits and masks made the hazmat suits I’d seen look like bikinis and swim goggles. I have no idea how they could
move. In addition to their masks, they were wearing yellow hard-hats. And while I only watched the concrete mixers and the chutes and the cranes for an hour, I saw a shift change. Maybe that was a coincidence, and maybe they were only allowed to work there for forty-five minutes or an hour at a time. I still don’t know.

The “containment vehicle”—I’ve always loved that term—for Reactor One also housed a spent-fuel pool. Delightful. Even from a distance I could see that the roof was demolished. A whole wall was gone, blown away, and in the charred sides I could see rows and rows of rebar spikes. I saw a grid of metal stanchions and scaffolding that looked like it had started to melt—and, in some cases, really had melted. There were three large cranes around the reactor, and I watched a pair of helicopters come and hover above it, and then fly away. While I was there, one of the choppers started to lower something through what I guessed was a hole in the roof, and as it descended I understood what it was: a robot. They were actually lowering robots into whatever was left of the reactor. Something had to clean up all those uranium pellets that had melted down, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be a human something.

I had pulled my bike off to the side of the road, but I was only on the edge of the grass. My bike—well, Skylar’s bike—was between my legs. I was at the entrance to the farthest corner of the employee parking lot. I had expected there would still be all the Subarus and pickups and Volvos of the people who once worked at the plant, but all the cars had been towed away or driven off and now were rotting wherever the country housed its radioactive fleet. Instead I saw only a few NRC trucks and a couple of long FEMA trailers. The asphalt had buckled here and there, a combination of frost heaves that no one had bothered to smooth out and the weight from the massive trucks that must have been coming and going since the meltdown.

For a while I gazed at where the offices and the control room
had been. Once there had been a building there. It was on the side where the wall of the containment vessel had blown apart. Now it was a gigantic concrete block. That’s where my parents had been when they’d died. I rolled around in my mind the idea that if the government had made the effort to get rid of all those cars, they had probably found a way to remove the dead bodies. Maybe the dead were somewhere in the midst of that concrete, but I wasn’t sure. I realized now that the dead might have been buried—my parents, of course, among them. And that left me vacillating between emptiness and relief: emptiness because I had wanted to say good-bye and was being denied even that, and relief that their bodies (or whatever was left of their bodies) might have been treated with respect and laid to rest … somewhere.

Behind me I heard another of those trucks rumbling down the road, and so I swung my leg over the top tube of the bike so I could carry it with me into the brush about twenty yards away. Instead, however, I tripped. It was one of those completely ridiculous tumbles that just happen, especially if you’re not all that practiced at hoisting a bicycle off the ground and trying to hide in the nearby bushes and weeds. So I stood up and started lifting the bike off the grass, but already it was too late. There was this FEMA truck rolling into the lot. The driver jammed on the brakes the moment he saw me.

My instinct was to just run like a madwoman into the brush. I figured that even in bike shoes with clips on the soles I could outrun a couple of middle-aged dudes in hazmat suits and little plastic booties on their feet. But I wanted that bike, and I figured that I could race past them before they could turn their truck around and motor after me.

So I took the bike and ran with it onto the asphalt and clipped in. They were yelling at me to stop, and even though their voices were muffled beneath their masks I got the 411 on what they were screaming. There were two of them and they tried to position themselves between me and the access road to the parking lot, but I was just a hair quicker than they were. They tried to herd me
toward each other, like I was a loose kitten or something. One of them almost made a grab for me—looking back, I think he might have if he wasn’t worried about ripping his suit if he fell—but he didn’t, and I was able to scoot between the two of them. If you didn’t know that the whole little world we were in was scarily toxic and nineteen people had died and thousands and thousands more had lost their homes and I was a fucking orphan and cutter, it would have been comic. Or not.

I don’t know. I really don’t. As you have no doubt figured out by now, judgment—and what we call
good
judgment—is not topmost in my skill set.

Anyway, I got away. I rode like I was sprinting in the Tour de France, pedaling as fast as I ever had. When I got home, I was exhausted. This was way beyond winded. This was way beyond tired. When I finally collapsed in the den, I discovered that I felt, pure and simple, shitty. I was nauseous and—and I hate to share this detail with you, but I promised I would always tell the truth—I had diarrhea. I was pretty sure I knew the problem: I’d finally gone and pulled an Icarus. I’d flown
way
too close to the sun. The parking lot of the plant? A very bad idea. Seriously radioactive. I told myself that maybe it was just a virus, but I didn’t really believe that.

Moreover, it crossed my mind that I had outed myself and the jig might be up. People had spotted me—and no good could come from that. I knew what people thought of my family. And, of course, I knew what I had done. I knew
all
the things that I had done. I thought of my little buddy I had deserted back in Burlington—a boy who, for all I knew, might have died because I’d lacked the common sense to bring him to a doctor. I think I would have been in no-holds-barred panic mode if I had felt even a little bit better.

That evening I curled up with Maggie on the living room rug after dinner and watched a candle burn down in a hurricane lamp that in the old days we’d kept outside on the porch for summer
nights. I tried to think through carefully what had occurred. I tried to decide how long it would take for someone to figure out that the girl they had seen on the bike was the missing daughter of a dead Cape Abenaki engineer. Probably not very. Not all the world was filled with morons.

And when someone did make that leap—which really wasn’t all that great—then they would come look for me here at my house. It was kind of natural, right?

So, I was seriously pissed at myself. I didn’t want to leave my home. This was where I planned to live out my life and, I presumed, die of radiation sickness or cancer. I didn’t know if that was five months or five years in the distance. (And, given how I felt that night, I thought it might even be five days.) It’s weird, but the greatest desire I had was to outlive Maggie. That’s all I wanted that moment. I never again wanted my Maggie to have to fend for herself in the wild.

I would have left that night—
I should have left that night
—but I was just too fucking sick. So I decided that the two of us would leave the next day. Hopefully I hadn’t fatally nuked myself and I’d feel better. I wasn’t sure where Maggie and I would go, but the hazmat police—or whatever—weren’t about to search the whole Exclusion Zone. Who had time for that? And there was nothing but empty houses. I could take my pick of meadow mansions and Victorians and farmhouses and Georgians and colonials. I could live in trailers and double-wides and the grocery store if I wanted. I could go to my home away from home as a kid—Lisa Curran’s family’s place. Lisa’s bedroom would even be packed with clothes I could wear. So, that was in fact what I decided: I’d take my journals and Skylar’s bike, and in the morning Maggie and I would leave for the Currans’ old place.

But, like a lot of my plans, it didn’t quite work out that way. They came for me in the night.

There could have been a big chase scene.

It could have been like
E.T
., with people in hazmat suits pursuing me on my bike, my Maggie running along beside me.

But there was no full moon.

And, in the end, there was no race through the woods.

There was only my shock when I realized that Maggie and I were trapped on the second floor of my house. I had just thrown up into a wastebasket by my bed—I knew not to use the toilet since I couldn’t flush it—so I was already awake. I heard the sound of the van and went to the window that faced the driveway and the street. Already they were at the front door. Already I saw someone else stomping like a moonwalker around the side of the house, past those spooky tomato cages, to the back. Maybe we still could have run, but I didn’t want that for my Maggie. Maybe I didn’t want that for me anymore. I was sick now—whatever it was (and, as I said, I was pretty sure it was radiation) had come on fast—and so maybe I was just done. I’m not even sure I was capable of running. Or, for that matter, biking.

But I also wasn’t prepared to face whatever was next. It had been months, but some things, such as the words people said to me in the hours after the meltdown, you never forget:

We’ve lost our house! Because of your fucking father, we’ve lost our house! What have you done?

They had a daughter. You watch, they’ll make her testify or something. Talk about what an alcoholic her dad was. Make it clear this was all the fault of one idiot drunk
.

Young lady, we’re going to need to talk to you. You’re going to have to come with me right now
.

And yet while it looked like there was just nothing I could do—it was over, stick a fork in me—I also knew that someone like Missy would not have gone quietly. In my head I saw her once more racing her Miata in the dark around the swing sets and the gazebo. I saw Cameron throwing his duct tape and pajamas into a garbage bag, his eye black and blue, and leaving the Rougers. And,
yes, I saw my mom and dad and the other engineers in the control room at the plant, trying to do what they could to stop a nuclear reactor from exploding. Say what you will about my dad and what he did or didn’t do, he fought till the bitter—loud and violent and deadly and bitter—end.

I was shivering, but I didn’t know whether it was because I was cornered or sick. I tried to think about where in the house we might hide, places that were big enough for both Maggie and me. I thought of the closets. I thought of the dryer. I thought of the boxes in the attic.

But eventually the hazmat police would go there. The evidence that I was living here was everywhere. It wasn’t just my bike. It was everything. It might take them ten minutes and it might take them an hour. But this was a contemporary meadow mansion; there were no secret passageways and walls that spun like revolving doors. There was no back stairway. They would find me. I had run and I had fought as long as I could, but this was it: this was, I realized, my own bitter end. I wrapped my arms around Maggie’s neck and allowed myself, one last time, to cry.