Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (9 page)

Of course, I also learned a lot of good things about parenting from my mom and dad. That’s a fact. I knew they loved me, even when—my opinion—they seriously screwed up.

So, I really was desperate to see them or hear from them those
first hours after the meltdown, especially since I knew in my heart that they were screwed (which meant I was screwed, too, but that honestly wasn’t what I was thinking at the time). Days and weeks later, when I saw the things people were saying about my dad in the news and online, I was devastated. People said crazy mean stuff about him. People said crazy mean stuff about both my parents. It wasn’t fair. I mean, they were—and I know this word because I once wrote an English paper about the Emily Dickinson poem “It dropped so low in my regard”—reviled. They were hated. That’s why I gave up on the Internet. That’s why I gave up on Facebook and Tumblr.

I think I did a good job with Cameron—and that’s thanks to my parents. And I don’t care what anyone says about
that
.

So, I ran from the college cafeteria into the woods. I didn’t run on the paved roads or the sidewalks around the campus, because I thought it would be easier for them to catch me if I did. Instead I ran straight down this grassy hill toward a line of trees. I fell once because the grass was like a Slip ’N Slide, which must have been when I lost my phone. I didn’t look back for a while because I figured people were following me. Nope. Not Lisa or Ethan or Ms. Gagne. When I finally allowed myself to catch my breath, I was hidden by a wall of scrubby brush and birch trees. I looked up at the buildings, including the modern brick one that housed the cafeteria, and I saw cars and buses coming and going, and police officers and guys who I think were campus security herding kids and families and old people inside. If anyone was going to come after me, they hadn’t started yet. Honestly, my feelings were a little hurt, which in hindsight is just crazy. I mean, there was a fucking nuclear meltdown going on and it was pouring outside. We’re talking monsoon, practically. All anyone could think about was radiation and fallout and the “plume.” Who had time to worry about little old me? And, for all I know, they did come after me. It just
took them a minute to rally or to decide,
Hmmm, I guess she isn’t just drama-queening out there and we better go get her
.

But by then I was off and running.

My plan was to try and find my parents. I actually thought I was going to go back to Newport and Reddington. Remember, I was kind of hysterical and, as I’ve told you, I’ve always had weird brain chemistry issues, and back then I wasn’t on any meds. (When I first got here, there was some talk about whether I should be taking antipsychotics. Seriously? One doctor brought up lithium. Yeah, not happening. I was on something for a few days, but I found I couldn’t write. The doctors said it was just my imagination. Wrong. When I was that medicated, I
had
no imagination.
That
was the problem. So, I try and stick to the antidepressants, and I am on a way lower dosage than I was when I was living with Poacher and downing painkillers like M&M’s.)

The woods weren’t super thick, and it couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile to get back to the main road, Route 100. I wanted to go north, but it was amazing what I saw: all traffic was going south. Route 100 is a main road in Vermont—it goes all the way from Canada to Massachusetts, I think—but this is still Vermont, so it’s only two lanes. And both lanes were being used to move people south, away from Newport and Reddington. And the lanes were packed. It was cars and trucks moving at a crawl as far as I could see. The people who had motorcycles or bicycles were weaving in and out and along the shoulders and making much better time than the vehicles. There were these two poor volunteer firefighters who were trying to direct traffic, and they were so out of their league. They couldn’t have been a whole lot older than me, and things had really gone to shit since our buses had arrived at the college a few hours earlier. People were screaming at the two guys, and some dudes were honking their horns (like that was going to make a difference). Between the wind and the rain and the occasional thunder and the horns and the drivers who were yelling out their windows, it was madness. Everyone was so scared they were batshit crazy. I saw that the back of one pickup truck was
filled with little kids—some were toddlers!—and there were two women who must have been my mom’s age watching them. They were trying to hold this blue tarp over the children, and some of the kids were just wailing. Who puts (what I guess was) some little preschool in the back of a pickup? People who are scared shitless and just not thinking straight, that’s who. I saw one station wagon that had a wooden desk with the drawers held shut with duct tape hitched to the top, and another that had four cat boxes—with cats in them!—strapped to the bars of a roof rack. There was one SUV after another filled with so much stuff that you couldn’t see inside. There were people trying to get away on tractors and on horseback, and I saw one Mini Cooper that looked like a clown car: I swear they must have wedged seven or eight people inside it. I suppose some of those people ended up among the walkers. Maybe they’d run out of gas eventually. That happened to lots of people, I understand.

So, I just started walking north against the traffic. And even on the side of the road, walking against the flow was really hard: think salmon. (And, yes, I was as wet as a fish. But I probably looked more like a wet cat.) I could tell that everyone thought I was a lunatic. People, usually moms and ladies who looked to me like grandmothers, would yell at me to stop, to turn around, to go the other way, and some folks even opened their car doors and asked me to get in. I ignored them all and finally started to run. I knew I couldn’t run or walk all the way back to Reddington, but I figured eventually I would find someone going in that direction.

And eventually I did.

Not far from the college I saw a Johnson fire engine stopped at a gas station at an intersection. The driver was standing beside his door and talking on his cell phone. I could see someone else was sitting in the passenger seat. I stood just close enough to figure out that he was getting instructions: he was supposed to go to some staging point near Newport where he would be given more information on what to do, and someone was telling him what alternate road to take since he sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to buck
the tide on Route 100. When he climbed back into the truck and shut his door, I jumped onto the metal back step and held on to the side rails. I had the kind of lightning-bolt thought that is completely inappropriate:
I’m in a James Bond movie
. But the thought passed, and there was really nothing crazy dangerous about what I was doing. The fire engine was going about five or ten miles an hour most of the time, and in fact I sat down on the corner of the back step and curled up against the rain and waited to see where we would go. I used a column of those orange traffic cones as a cushion. I had a feeling this staging area would be pretty close to Cape Abenaki or the village, and soon enough I would find out what had happened to my parents and what had happened at the plant.

I was right about the proximity of the staging area to the power plant, but I was wrong about everything else.

The way the teen shelter worked was pretty simple: If you were under eighteen, you had to have your parents’ permission to be there. Otherwise, the staff had to call family services, and you’d probably wind up in a foster home. So, I had been lying from the second I arrived. My name was Abby Bliss, I was eighteen, I was from Briarcliff, New York. When I showed up, I told them I’d lost my wallet with my driver’s license the night before when I’d been mugged. Given what I’d experienced on my way in from the Kingdom and the things people were saying about my family, the last person I wanted to be was me.

In the morning, they kicked you out, usually by eight a.m. You couldn’t hang out there during the day, because they wanted you going to school or getting a GED or volunteering someplace where you could get job skills. They wanted you meeting with your counselors. They wanted you doing something.

But they did have what they called the drop-in, which I don’t think was supposed to be some snarky reference to the reality that all of us were dropouts. But you could just “drop in” and chill for a
while. Sit on the couches, which were kind of grungy and smelled like feet, or make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (My favorite place to crash was one of these two big easy chairs that were covered in plastic so they were easy to clean.) The drop-in was on the first floor of the building beside the shelter and only about a block from the northern end of Church Street. You can bet your ass the visiting leaf peepers gave that corner of Burlington a
very
wide berth.

There were rules to hanging out there, the main ones being no drugs and no alcohol. And there were classes, which were important because they paid us to go to them. I am not shitting you. They paid us. For showing up for a week of classes we would get a MasterCard with fifty dollars on it. The card wouldn’t work if you tried to buy beer or cigarettes, but otherwise it was as good as cash. And the classes were on things like how to write a résumé or how to rent an apartment or how to open a bank account. The classes were about “life skills.” They usually lasted an hour, and other than fucking Montreal truckers, there’s not a whole lot a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl can do that pays that kind of scratch. So before I left the shelter, I went to them. Altogether, I went to five.

And that’s where I met Andrea. She wasn’t living in the shelter by then. She wasn’t even welcome in the classes. The counselors had decided that she was kind of a lost cause. For a time she’d done okay. But by the time I met her she’d concluded that it was easier to sleep and do drugs and turn tricks than to stop and try something else. She had sort of given up on herself. She told me that once upon a time the shelter’s plan was to give her a shot at moving into one of the organization’s transitional living apartments. Make her quasi-independent. But that never happened. She relapsed, and I guess it was easier to stay “relapsed.” At first the staff tried to get her back, but it didn’t work. So finally they gave her bed at the shelter to another girl. You can’t save everybody, right? Andrea was built for anti-anxiety meds, and she was built for addiction. But she was so sweet. She really was. I loved that girl.

Anyway, she showed up at the class that day to try and get a
MasterCard, but she was kind of strung out and the staff was so on to her by that point. Even I could see she was in serious need of something that afternoon. She was pretty much busted before she had even sat down and started to cry. The woman who was teaching the class—it was about how to dress for an interview and what to say and what not to say and how to behave—knew Andrea and I could see her heart was breaking. The staff person’s name was Edith, which is a completely awful name, especially because the woman kind of had it going on: she was thirty with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes behind those nerd glasses that beautiful women can somehow pull off. She had us call her Edie, and she was, like me, tiny. My second day at the shelter, when I was still shell-shocked and thought this shelter thing might work, she suggested we check out a bunch of the petite clothes that some preppy store had just donated so that I would have some interview threads. It was a nice idea, but it never happened. I kind of let her down. (Obviously I kind of let a lot of people down. But I think often about letting down Edie because she was so frigging well intentioned.)

Andrea was tall and gangly, and her hair fell flat down the sides of her head like a greasy waterfall. It was naturally black, but it had streaks of purple and pink. She was wearing a beater T-shirt the white and brown of two-day-old snow by the side of the road, and blue jeans that were ripped everywhere. Knees. Thighs. Pockets. And she was pretty anxious. Back then I was so naïve I was thinking it was heroin. Nope. Just painkillers. Lots of painkillers. But she was needy and over time had probably violated every rule the shelter had. She was also pretty goth. Pierced nose. Pierced eyebrow. Lots of black mascara—which, as you’ll see, months later would start one of those event cascades that are only bad news.