Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  Still, not hearing from my mom was what started to freak me out inside. I tried to keep it together, because I didn’t want to get as dramatic as those other girls, but it was hard. Supposedly, there was a flood at the plant and the power was off. Some people thought that meant there was nothing at all to worry about, while others were already talking meltdown. One boy whose dad worked at the plant was debating with one of our science teachers the difference between a meltdown and a melt-through, like this was just a regular, everyday physics class.

  But, in fact, none of us really knew anything. And us kids? We didn’t even know where we were going.

  I’m an only child of only children. It’s not as weird or as rare as you might think. My parents always said that they had loved being only children and, until Cape Abenaki, I don’t think it had any effect on me one way or another. (I mean, yes, I had what one therapist called “behavioral issues,” but they had nothing to do with being an only child. If they had to do with anything, they had to do with the hardwiring inside my head and the fact my parents hated Vermont, drank too much, and sometimes fought like fisher cats.) As a matter of fact, being an only child might have worked for me even after the reactor blew up. Who knows? Yeah, I was seriously alone afterward. But those first months when all hell was breaking loose? I was in no condition to take care of a younger sister or brother. If I’d found Cameron back then, in the early days? It wouldn’t have been pretty. I don’t know, maybe it would have been nice to have had an older brother or an older sister at the time. Or a twin. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a twin. But aunts or uncles or cousins were what I needed, I guess. I had two grandparents still alive. My mom’s mom and my dad’s dad. But my grandma was deep into the shadows of Alzheimer’s by then. The last time I had seen her had been about three months before the explosion. She lived in a place for people with Alzheimer’s in Hanover, New Hampshire, and she couldn’t even find her way out of the bathroom by the time I was in eleventh grade. And my grandpa lived in Phoenix, Arizona. That’s where my dad grew up. My grandpa had had a colostomy the year before and wasn’t coping real well with it. He was also in an assisted living place.

  Still, on some level I was also really angry in those months after the meltdown. Really pissed. Way more pissed than usual. That’s pretty clear. The truth was, I felt deserted. I felt unbelievably alone, but not in a playful “I’m nobody! Who are you?” sort of way. I just knew I had no one. Not a soul. Even my Maggie was gone. It didn’t matter that my parents hadn’t made a conscious decision to peace out on me. It’s not like they were at some spa in Montreal or Venice or someplace.

  And, of course, I was terrified. It was like the end of the world.

  About a month after the explosion, when things were starting to settle down for most of New England, I was watching TV at this bar on Main Street in Burlington. I wasn’t actually in the bar because I knew I smelled awful and I looked pretty sketchy. I was outside on the curb. But this was July, remember, and so this big awning was open and I could stand there on the sidewalk and look in at the TV behind the bartender—a pretty handsome dude in his mid-twenties. He had red hair, and it was pulled back in a ponytail with a blue rubber band. A lot of guys can’t make that look work, but he sure could.

  On the TV screen was a map of something the newswoman was calling the “Exclusion Zone.” She was explaining that nothing had been decided yet, but it looked like there was going to be an exclusion area around Cape Abenaki. It was more of an oval than a circle, because the wind had been blowing northeast, and the anchor said it might be as large as thirty square miles. There had been some sort of presidential decree, and the whole area was going to be under military control for a while. (Translation? Forever.) They said there were people’s pets—dogs and cats—left behind and running wild inside the zone, and of course I thought of Maggie. The truth is, I thought about Maggie a lot. Maybe I thought of her as often as I thought of my mom and dad. Sometimes, when I’d imagine her trapped inside our house, slowly starving to death, I’d get a little sick and hope for a miracle: Maybe my mom had let her out before she left for the plant. Maybe my friend Lisa’s mom had rescued her. Of course, even if Maggie was outside, that didn’t mean she was going to be okay. She still might starve to death. She still might die of radiation. She still might get eaten herself by a coyote or a wolf. A couple of times I considered texting Lisa to see if she knew if Maggie was okay, but what if she wasn’t? What, at that point, could anyone have done? Besides, I didn’t want anyone to know where I was. I wanted to remain anonymous.

  Anyway, as big as thirty square miles sounded, it really didn’t look that huge on the map—and a part of it was Lake Memphremagog. Of course, it did include most of my world when I was a kid. All of Newport and Reddington were in the middle. The woman on TV said they were in the “black” zone. And Barton and Lowell were in something she was calling the red zone. But then there was the issue of the rivers. There were three of them, the Clyde, the Coburn, and the Black. In theory, they all flowed north into Lake Memphremagog. But it’s impossible for people outside of the Kingdom to look at a map of Memphremagog and not assume that all that water is flowing south. And so when people were talking about the Exclusion Zone in the beginning, they often talked about the plume and the rivers. In the end, it was mostly the plume that mattered. Besides, no one was going to fish in those rivers again: everyone figured the trout would all have three and four eyes and glow in the dark.

  As far as I know, the fish never did glow. But by the next spring there would be some super-scary, super-gross mutations. There were frogs with three legs. There were turtles with shells as soft as damp pastry dough. There were fish with strange, funky lumps. I saw the photos on the web and one day in a newspaper—which, you can bet your ass, I hid from Cameron.

  The word for the kind of window on my family’s woodstove was “Palladian.” I told you, I’d look it up.

  One night Andrea showed me her kit, and the first thing I thought was this was a really twisted version of my old babysitter’s bag. I didn’t watch her slice herself, at least not that night, but she showed me the cuts. I think she thought it would turn me on and then, maybe, I would cut myself, too. You know, join her or something. Which, I guess, I did.

  We were sitting on the mattress we shared on the floor at Poacher’s, and she was wearing nothing but her underwear and a T-shirt that said “War Is Over” and had one of the Beatles and his wife on it. She’d lifted it from the Urban Outfitters on Church Street the day before.

  “This is what you do,” she said, and she sounded like a very confident kindergarten teacher. Children, this is the way you clean up your blocks. This is how you do it. You know the tone of voice. She was sitting cross-legged, and she pointed to the insides of her thighs. It was like a cat had scratched her over and over, or maybe a much bigger animal with much bigger claws. Long, swollen red marks, some pretty new and some pretty well healed. There were some scars, too. Most were on her left leg because she was right-handed. One of the cuts was infected: it was straight like the others, but bloated and raw and there was a pretty gross discharge. Her kit had old-fashioned razor blades and an X-Acto knife and Band-Aids and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There was a roll of gauze. There was a tube of Bacitracin. There was a pair of scissors. She kept her tools in a very elegant Estée Lauder cosmetics bag she stole from Macy’s. That was her kit.

  I make it sound like we were always stealing stuff. I guess we were. Sometimes we stole things just because we wanted them, like that T-shirt with the Beatles guy on it, and sometimes we stole stuff because we had to. Either we hocked it for money for food or drugs or we hocked it for money for Poacher. Sometimes if we didn’t feel up to fucking the guys he brought over, he wouldn’t make us if we gave him roughly the same amount of cash. Then he’d have another girl do the john—you wouldn’t think Vermont guys are gross because the state is so “peace, love, and tie-dye,” but I’m telling you, they can be as gross here as anyplace
else—and he’d have twice the money to feed us and get us whatever drugs we wanted.

  Andrea’s mother and father used to deal out of their apartment in the North End until they were both arrested and sent to jail. She told me that when her mother was badly strung out, her dad would make her do seriously creepy stuff before he would give her a fix. Once he made her do another drug mom while he watched—just for kicks, he did that. Another time he brought her out to some physical therapy place and had her fuck his cousin. (At least that was for money.) Andrea had left home by the time the two of them were busted. Like everyone else, she had no idea that my dad was one of the engineers at Cape Abenaki who the NRC blamed for fucking up and helping to cause the meltdown.

  That night when she showed me her kit, I said to her something kind of ridiculous like, “Do you know how bad for you that is?” Obviously, she knew how bad for her it was. That’s one of the main reasons why she did it. “Do you really want to go through life with all those scars?” I asked.

  She tried to hand me a razor blade in its little cardboard folder, but I wouldn’t take it. “Let me show you how,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Why? Because it will hurt?”

  “Yeah, for starters,” I told her. But she pulled the blade from its packet and dropped it into my hand. I thought the metal was very pretty in an engineered sort of way. I’d never held one like it before. All my razors were plastic and pink. They all sounded like sex toys. Venus Vibrance. Close Curves. Bikini Trimmer.

  “It will only hurt for a second. And then you’ll feel great. Besides …”

  “Besides what?”

  “Even the pain is, I don’t know, cool. It’s out-of-body. You’ll get a rush, I promise.”

  “Not interested.”

  “Try it!”

  The fact was, I had already tried a lot of shit and nothing really worked. So why not try this, too?

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Take off your pajamas.”

  “No, I’m not wearing underwear.”

  “Since when did you get all modest on me?”

  I shrugged and pulled off my pajama pants. Maybe I was scuba diving for the bottom of the sea. Still, I scooted an extra foot away from her so I’d have a little privacy. I pressed the razor blade on the inside of my thigh, pretty high up—close to where my underpants would have been. I’d figured out that the point was to cut yourself where no one would see. But I only pushed it against my flesh, and I didn’t quite break the skin. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So, Andrea did it for me. Before I could stop her, she took my wrist and the back of my hand and in one almost instantaneous motion yanked my fingers down toward the mattress. She moved so fast, I couldn’t stop her. It stung—not a huge surprise, I know—and I yelped. I pushed her away, and then together we peered down at the pencil-thin line about two inches long. For a second I didn’t understand why it had hurt so much because I didn’t seem to be bleeding. Then, like a creek bed filling with water after a summer storm, the narrow little gash started to swell. As if we had never before seen a cut bleed, which of course we both had (though she a lot more often than me), we stared at it. We watched some blood trickle down my thigh onto the mattress. I wondered how long it would bleed if I did nothing. I wondered how big the stain would be on the mattress.

  Andrea spoke first. “You won’t need any hydrogen peroxide,” she said. “That was a brand-new blade.”

  “Just a Band-Aid?”

  “Yup.” Before she gave me a Band-Aid, however, she took the scissors and cut off a square of gauze. She pressed it very tenderly against the cut, and I was so stunned that I had let her do this whole thing in the first place that I didn’t stop her, despite how close she was to the edge of my pubic hair. After a minute she took her fingers away and handed me a Band-Aid. The pad wasn’t as long as my cut, but it would do.

  “Feel any better?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, which was the truth. I mean, I knew I felt ashamed. But that would pass. By then I did all kinds of crap that left me feeling ashamed. I just didn’t know if I felt—to use her word—better. Maybe I did. Maybe I hated myself a little bit less.

  When I was a little girl and we still lived just outside of New York City, my parents said I would punish myself. When I misbehaved as a toddler, they had a “time-out” chair for me. It was a little wooden ladder-back chair, meant for a two- or three-year-old. I guess it had once belonged to my grandfather—my mom’s dad, not my dad’s. We kept it in a corner of the dining room. But my parents said they almost never had to put me there. I would put myself there. Most of the time, they had no idea what I worried I had done wrong. I was a very well-behaved tyke. At least they thought I was. Apparently, I thought differently.

  So who knows? Maybe all along I was ripe for cutting. Anyway, that was the first time.

  Did you know that the little kids in Syria who have been fucked by the civil war only want to color with red crayons? They almost always draw people with some kind of bullet wound or stab wound or injury from a grenade or a mortar. I can’t remember where I read that, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

  Chapter 3

  One time I keyed a boy’s mother’s car. I got in pretty serious trouble for that one, but I am going to plead extenuating circumstances. (My parents had a friend who was a public defender, and one time when she was at our house for dinner, she said that a lot of her clients’ stories began, “It’s a long story.” She said nothing good ever comes from “a tale of woe”—her expression—that begins, “It’s a long story.”)

  It was a Saturday evening and I was fifteen. I had just spent the day in New Hampshire at Story Land, which is sort of like Disneyland except it’s a million times smaller and still in the 1950s. But it has a few cool rides, and it was always fun to watch the little kids who didn’t care that Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage had an engine as loud as a snowmobile and the paint on the metal horses was seriously chipped. I had gone there with a seventeen-year-old boy named Philip Christiansen, and it was kind of like a first date. His family was from New Jersey. It was the summer before his senior year and the summer before my junior year. His dad was like forty-five, but already retired. Not kidding. He had been some kind of hedge fund manager—I honestly have no idea what a hedge fund is, except that it’s clear if you run one you wind up with more money than Jay Z, and supposedly Jay Z has crazy money—and the family had moved to northern Vermont so he could ski and ride his bike most of the time. Not all of the time. Sometimes he would fly to Tampa or Phoenix or New York to meet with people about “the fund.” And they still had that house in New Jersey and an apartment in New York City. When they were deciding where to chill in New England, they chose Reddington because of the Academy.

  Philip and I had had a pretty good time that day at Story Land. Definitely promising, I thought. But then I blew it.

  The two of us parked his Prius in the driveway beside his mom’s Beemer SUV and his dad’s Mercedes. (That’s what I mean about how loaded they were. They also had a pickup truck to bring their garbage and recycling to the transfer station and a tractor for who knows what.) Then we went inside for sodas because we were parched from the two-hour drive back to Reddington. His family’s Vermont place was a farmhouse they had transformed into something that looked like a museum home with velvet ropes and signs that said a president had slept in one of the beds. His mom was in the kitchen when we got there, and she was bent out of shape. I don’t know why, but she seemed pretty PO’ed at the world. So Philip whispered to me that we should just split. But his mom pulled me aside.

  “Have you given my son the gas money?” she asked.

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Gas money? I was all, what the fuck? Who does that? But I didn’t say anything.

  “Mom, I didn’t even ask her,” Philip said. Then he kind of shrunk a little and mumbled, “Yet.”

  Here they are with Gringotts Goblin Bank piles of money, and his mom is pressing me fo
r a few bucks for gas. “It’s a hundred miles from here to Story Land,” she said. “I checked.” And she was standing there with her arms folded across her chest, leaning against this stainless steel refrigerator big enough for a moose.

  “I don’t think I have any left,” I mumbled. I had brought money, of course, but I’d spent it already. I had maybe a crumpled-up dollar bill on me somewhere. So, you can see how awkward this was. But I can deal with awkward. What I can’t deal with is getting hissed at for being “inconsiderate” and trying “to take advantage” of her son. Her precious Philip. I was embarrassed and I didn’t get why. And I was royally pissed—way more PO’ed by the time we left than Philip’s mom.

  Now, a normal girl would probably have just gotten in Philip’s car and gone home. A normal girl would probably have just steered clear of that whole whack-job family. Not yours truly. As part of the celebration a few weeks earlier when I had gotten my learner’s permit, my dad had made me a set of keys to our car. So, I had them on me. As we walked past his mom’s robin’s-egg blue Beemer SUV, I stopped and said to Philip, “I think I’m going to owe your mom for a little more than gas.” Then, right there in their driveway, I took my car key and keyed in the letters FU on the passenger door and scratched away as much of the paint as I could before Philip stopped me.

  I think I’d made my point. But my parents took away my keys for a while and my phone for a week, and I was grounded for almost the rest of the summer. And Philip and I never went on a second date, and we totally avoided each other when school started again in September.

  Still, see what I mean about extenuating circumstances? I was a jerk, but so was Philip’s mom.

  I knew the school buses were driving southwest. I knew we were on Route 100. I wondered how far away they were going to take us. Some of the kids were stunned and super quiet, and some of the kids were going on and on about what they were reading about the disaster on their phones. I was seated against a window, which was filthy because of the rain, and I was glad Ethan was on the aisle between me and the next kid. Still, I had a girl named Sara from my history class in the seat behind me, and she knew my dad worked at the plant. She knew my mom and my dad both worked at the plant. It was why we had moved to Reddington when I was four. And she kept pestering me, asking me questions, and was even getting a little hysterical.