Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  But late one midwinter afternoon, there she was trudging along the rock-hard snow and ice along the waterfront. I recognized her right away from this long, black cashmere duster she used to wear, but I wasn’t going to call out to her because she was with some dude I didn’t recognize. Cameron and I were just coming back from the library and this little sandwich shop on Main Street where it was easy to pocket their premade egg salad sandwiches on white bread. (It’s like they knew the sandwiches sucked and would only be eaten by nine-year-old boys, so they were super easy to lift.)

  But Lexie called out to me and jogged over. She introduced me to the guy she was with. His name was Neal and she said he had also dropped out of UVM. I didn’t believe her for one second. The guy was a little runt who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. I was older than he was. But he seemed nice enough. He was shy. The two of them had planned to spend another night in that old coal plant, but the night before there had been some violence, and someone had gotten pounded pretty badly, and now they wanted a new place to sleep. There wasn’t much wind, but already the temperature was only a degree or two above zero, and there was going to be a full moon. We all knew a full moon meant the lakefront would become a freezer. So I invited them in. It wasn’t the best solution, but I didn’t want them to die out there. And, to be honest, I was a little proud of the fact that I had built an igloo that could squeeze in four people.

  Still, I wasn’t sure what I would have done if they had asked to spend a second night. Neal had that funky smell that seems to stick like Gorilla Glue to homeless men and teenage boys, and Lexie was covering her stink with a head shop’s worth of patchouli. Together it was kind of like poison gas. Besides, to make room for them and their backpacks, Cameron and I had wound up sleeping with our knees practically at our chests, two unborn twins in my tummy of an igloo. But Lexie and Neal didn’t want to stay another day. Or, if they did, they didn’t want to impose on us anymore. They got up with the sun and disappeared. We never saw them again.

  Another night, we let a girl crash with us. She was in her twenties and a refugee from someplace in Africa. In the morning, she showed me her foot when she woke up. I nearly threw up. I walked her to Battery Street and put her in a cab myself. I told the cabbie to take her to the hospital ER. Even I know that you don’t fuck around with gangrene.

  And one time I let in some scrawny woman whose snow jacket actually had patches on it from the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. It was light blue and it was antique and, it seemed to me, totally worthless against the cold. She was my mom’s age, but way too loopy to be maternal. She was a downwinder from Irasburg and seemed to go in and out of denial. One minute she was getting weepy about her cats and her llamas and her dog, all of whom, she worried, were dying of radiation sickness, and the next she was giggling and showing me these unbelievably crinkled and out-of-focus pictures of her little menagerie. It was kind of heartbreaking. I think she would have been way more intrigued by the fact I had a sidekick named Cameron with me if he’d been a tortoiseshell cat instead of a nine-year-old boy. When I told her about Maggie, the two of us practically lost it.

  That’s what I mean when I say that people came and went. But most of the time it really was just Cameron and me.

  The bus station was out by the airport, so you had to take a local bus from the downtown to get there. In fact, it was part of the airport. There was a little ticket counter right by the baggage carousels, and a few times a day a Greyhound would pull up right outside a pair of sliding glass doors. Fortunately, Andrea’s bus was late—now, there’s a surprise—and so she was still sitting on a blue pretend-leather bench inside those doors when I got there. This was back in early December, still a few weeks before I would leave the posse and find Cameron. Her knees were bouncing up and down, and I could see that she was pretty wired on something. She jumped up when she saw me, gave a little shriek, and then we wrapped our arms around each other.

  “I didn’t know whether I wanted you to come or not,” she said, and we both started crying.

  “I should fucking hate you for not saying good-bye,” I told her.

  We pulled apart and wiped at our eyes. She shook her head. “I didn’t say good-bye because I knew we would end up like this,” she sniffled, and she pointed at the way her mascara was starting to run. Her parka was unzipped, and I saw she had on what we considered the world’s ugliest red Christmas sweater. It was a family of reindeer on their hind legs like humans—a mom, a dad, a boy, and a girl—wearing Christmas caps and trimming a tree. The boy is on a ladder and about to string some lights on his dad’s antlers. Of course Dad has no idea. Seriously old school and seriously ugly. We both loved it, and I had promised her once that I was going to steal it from her while she was asleep—maybe even, I’d said, in a couple of weeks on Christmas Eve.

  “Why don’t you stay?” I suggested. “We’ll leave Poacher’s and find someplace else—someplace better. Someplace where your mom won’t find you.”

  It seemed that to get to New York City by bus you had to go through Boston, and so Andrea had changed her plan. Now she was only going to go as far as Boston. She didn’t know anyone in either place, she said, so what difference did it make? A city’s a city, right?

  “I have a better idea than you sticking around Burlington,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me to Massachusetts?”

  The notion had crossed my mind. But I was afraid. I was afraid that I really would wind up down the rabbit hole in a city like Boston or New York. I’d never get my shit together. I’d wind up OD’d on heroin. I’d wind up some crack-whore orphan. I’d wind up dead. I mean, six months earlier I had been waking up every day in a nice bedroom of my own with a dog that looked like a black Lab on the floor and a Disney glass unicorn on a shelf. I was going to a pretty elite high school. Sure, I’d keyed cars and gone to school drunk and been a part of this notorious rager at a sugarhouse. And, yeah, now I was doing truckers at a gas station and some days popping painkillers like they were M&M’s. I had this kind of gross habit with an X-Acto knife.

  But I also knew in my heart that I wasn’t ready for cities as big as Boston or New York.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. Something. Get a job at a Dunkin’ Donuts, maybe.”

  “You’ll get fat.” I was teasing, of course. Weight was the least of Andrea’s problems.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “I know.”

  The glass doors slid open and people started ambling inside the airport. Outside, we could hear the low rumble of the idling bus. “I should go,” she said.

  I wanted to say No, please stay, I can’t lose anyone else! but I only nodded. She didn’t need to hear that. Then, all of a sudden, she took off her parka, let it fall onto the airport floor, and pulled that ridiculous Christmas sweater over her head. She was wearing a denim shirt that once had been Missy’s. “Here,” she said, handing me the sweater, “take it.”

  “I can’t! It’s too fucking stupid. Besides, you love it.”

  “It is too fucking stupid. But you love it, too.” She pushed the sweater into my hands and climbed back into her snow jacket. She hoisted her backpack over her shoulders and then hugged me tighter than anyone had ever hugged me in my life. I mean that: no one before and no one since has ever held me like that. Then in a minute she was on the bus. And a minute after that she was gone.

  I had that sweater until the day they took it away.

  I had Andrea’s texts until they took my phone away, too. Because we did text for a while. Even when the phone no longer worked, I held on to it because it had those texts.

  I don’t know where she is now. And she doesn’t know where I am. I guess she’s alive, but I could be wrong. People die all the time. Maybe she just disappeared. People do that, too.

  I’m going to stop now. The problem with writing all of this down for you? It just makes me tired and sad.

  Chapter 14

 
; When I was sleeping rough, I slept much better during the day. I think that’s because I felt safer. This was especially the case when I had Cameron with me. You know that expression “sleeping with one eye open?” I sort of did that most nights. Usually it didn’t matter, but it did at least twice. The first time was in the third week in January. I would tell you the exact date, because—as you know—I have a freakish memory for some dates. But not dates that January and February. When you live in an igloo made of trash bags, the days kind of run together. You wake up and lie in your quilt (or your mummy bag) until the library or the mall has opened, and then you go to the bathroom at one place or the other and try to make yourself presentable. You brush your teeth and wash yourself as best you can. You give yourself a little slash in the stall with your increasingly dull and useless X-Acto and press on a Band-Aid. You make your little buddy brush his teeth. You actually put on a little lipstick and eyeliner so people don’t think you’re homeless. You cadge some money if you see someone who looks promising. You lift a few energy bars and some vitamins from the Rite Aid on Cherry Street. You pocket a few muffins from the buffet at the nice hotel on Battery Street. You read and stay warm in a corner of the library. You doze.

  Some days the Salvation Army had a pretty awesome lunch for the homeless. So did some of the churches in the downtown and the shelter for adults—that day station I told you about. We ate really well when the Baptists had a potluck. I couldn’t risk bringing Cameron inside with me to these places because I just knew people would ask too many questions and he’d be taken away—which neither of us wanted—so he’d hide out in the library or the mall while I filled my pockets with things he liked or with things I insisted he eat. Like, for every brownie he ate, he had to eat a carrot. Things like that. That was sort of our deal.

  We took showers at the Y. I could get a pass from the adult shelter some days. I mention that so you don’t think we were disgusting. I mean we were disgusting, but I’ll bet we were never quite as bad as you’re imagining.

  Anyway, it was a weeknight in the third week in January, and Cameron was out like a light but I was half awake. Thank God. There were three of us who had set up igloos in that corner of the waterfront. (There were, of course, other stretches with other igloos. I’m just talking about my “neighborhood.”) One of the igloos belonged to another Iraqi war vet—I say “another” because of Poacher—and one belonged to a couple in their forties who were harmless but completely insane. They had a grocery cart filled with, among other crap, cat toys. Lots and lots of cat toys, including those wires that have teeny tubes of cardboard at the end. Whenever they saw a feral cat, the woman would play with it for hours and talk to it like the cat was a human being. She was, to be fair, kind of amazing: a feral cat whisperer. Her name was Patrice Thabault. Her partner—husband, boyfriend, brother, I could never figure it out—was named Rick. All three of the igloos were, obviously, off the beaten track. The police would have moved us on if we’d built our igloos anyplace where tourists or people who lived near the waterfront might see them. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t have blamed them. I really wouldn’t have. We were kind of eyesores. There’s a reason you don’t see garbage-bag igloos in Better Homes and Gardens. If I were to guess the time, it was somewhere between midnight and one in the morning. The thaw we’d had the previous weekend, the Saturday of that anti-nuke march, was over. It wasn’t the sort of cold that stung your face and made you a little scared you’d freeze to death in your sleep, but it was pretty brisk. Way below freezing. Outside I heard the sound of someone walking on the icy snow: their boots were cracking through the brittle skin at the surface or crunching where the snow was more solid. I knew it wasn’t a deer or a black bear or even a big dog, because we didn’t see animals down by the waterfront, except for the birds and the cats. We didn’t even see rats. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t a cop, but you never knew. It didn’t sound like a cop, because the person was moving pretty clumsily. He or she either had a limp or was a little wasted. I hoped it was someone looking for the war vet or the cat whisperer. I told myself it was nothing, but already my gift of fear was pretty well honed. I was getting that street-smart sixth sense.

  I had draped an apron I had lifted from a store called Kiss the Cook across the entrance. I folded it over twice and then tucked it in between two of the garbage bags. It was a very nice flap, if I do say so myself. I usually weighted it down at the bottom with Cameron’s and my library books. We could crawl in pretty easily, but it kept the worst of the wind and the cold out. When it was new, the apron was yellow like my bedroom wallpaper, which was why I had stolen it from all the choices I had, but now it was that awful sand brown that snow always gets when it sits too long by the side of the road.

  I didn’t want to wake Cameron or scare him, especially if it was nothing. And I didn’t want whoever was out there to know I was awake. But I wanted to get my X-Acto, just in case, and so I had to reach over and with just one hand lift my backpack over him. (It wasn’t easy, and from then on I slept with my X-Acto under the headrest from some junked car I was using as a pillow.) I pulled off the cap and held it in my hand the way people in old movies always hold ice picks. Whoever was out there stopped just outside our igloo. He was wheezing, and he crouched or knelt down on just the other side of the apron. I could smell serious alcohol on his breath. And then I waited to see what he’d do.

  I don’t know how long I waited like that. Half a minute? A minute? Two? I wasn’t holding my breath, but I was breathing without making a sound. I couldn’t let him know that I was awake because the only thing I had going for me was surprise. Finally, just when I thought he might leave, he poked his right hand through the side of the entrance, pushing aside the apron. So I stabbed him. I stabbed him hard. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and I poked the X-Acto straight into the soft spot between his thumb and his forefinger and then pulled it out. He yanked his hand back, bellowing like I had never heard a man bellow. Cameron instantly woke up, but with my left hand I pushed him behind me, back deep against the inside of our igloo and into this grungy Tonka Truck we had found in the trash that he had tricked out with duct tape.

  “What the fuck?” the fellow outside started screaming, “What the fuck?” I climbed up onto my toes and squatted like a baseball catcher. I didn’t say anything, but I was totally ready to stab him again. I was ready to pounce. “What the fuck! I just wanna get warm!”

  My heart was going like bongo drums in my head and I was sweating. I know, that doesn’t seem possible, but I swear it’s true: I was sweating. I kept seeing his hand in my head and this weird detail that he bit his nails—which was disgusting because his hand was filthy. And I thought about what he had said: I just wanna get warm. A part of me started to feel a little guilty, like I had violated some Homeless People of the World doctrine to love one another or keep one another warm. But there really was no such doctrine. There was no such code. Sometimes we helped each other and sometimes we didn’t.

  But any remorse I was feeling for stabbing the dude evaporated quickly when he barked at me, “I’m gonna blow your goddamn house down! And then I am going to fucking kill you!” I thought of that hand and decided he wasn’t that big. His hand was dirty, but it was kind of girlish. Now, maybe when I started to tell you what happened after Cape Abenaki and how I got here, I made it sound like it’s easy to build an igloo. But it isn’t. It’s hard work. And since this guy wasn’t that big—at least that’s what I told myself—I decided to attack. He was not going to wreck my igloo, he was not going to “fucking” kill me or Cameron. So I dove through the apron screaming back at him.

  See what I mean about my impulsiveness? Brain chemistry. It’s everything.

  I wrapped myself around his legs and started trying to stab his thighs with my X-Acto, but it suddenly seemed really dull: I’m not sure it was even slashing a hole in his blue jeans. A part of my mind had registered that the guy really wasn’t much taller than me. He was heavier, but a part of that just might have been
his layers of clothes. Still, he probably could have killed me if he’d wanted to or if he’d had the chance. But suddenly I wasn’t alone with him: the Iraqi war veteran and Patrice the cat whisperer and Rick were out there, too. Everyone had been woken up by his screaming. The two men were grabbing the guy’s arms and lifting him away from me.

  “Edgar, have you lost your damn mind?” This was Patrice, and despite her words, her tone was as maternal and kind as it was with the stray cats she played with. I let go of the guy’s legs and stood up. I took a step back and saw that Cameron was crawling through the apron and emerging from the igloo. He rubbed his eyes and then came over to me and nestled against me, wrapping his arms around my waist. He wasn’t wearing his coat, and he was still warm like a puppy from his mummy bag.

  “Where did she bite you?” Patrice asked him, and she looked over at me and smiled the tiniest bit. She slept in very feminine blue pajamas with white silhouettes of cats on them, a man’s gray tweed overcoat, and the ski hat with pom-pom ties she wore during the day. I guess I should have expected she slept in that hat and pj’s with cats on them.

  “I should kill her,” he said, and he glared at me and raised his arm for Patrice like he was that lion with a thorn in its paw.

  “You stuck your hand in,” I told him. “I was defending myself.”