Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

by Chris Bohjalian

  “I’d invite you in, but somehow I don’t think my parole officer would approve.”

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  “I kind of figured you would.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I should be insulted or flattered that he figured I was so street-smart I knew the drill about parole officers. But given how Cameron and I must have looked and all the stuff we had with us, it was sort of ridiculous to feel one way or the other. Our deal—who we were, what we were—was pretty clear.

  “You need a job?” he asked.

  Instantly I took a little step away from him. Looking back, I think it’s hilarious that a guy tells me he’s a felon and I only say, “Gotcha,” like I understand. But a guy tells me he has a job for me and immediately I assume he’s going to unzip his pants. God, I’m fucked up.

  “No.”

  “Okay. But if you decide you do, stop by Henry’s. You know Henry’s?”

  I did. It was a diner on Bank Street.

  “My brother’s the manager there. Been there forever. Started as a cook, like, twenty years ago. Now I’m one of his dishwashers. He got me the gig. They always seem to need waitresses there.”

  Ever since Camille had spotted me at the food court in the mall, it had crossed my mind that maybe, somehow, I could get a real job. A waitress, maybe. Or maybe I could score some hours at a Burger King or Taco Bell. But I had no experience and no references and no ID. Who was going to hire me? And I knew from my days in the posse there was no way in hell that a person could live alone anywhere in Burlington on minimum wage. Rents were crazy. You either needed a good job or you needed subsidies or you had to have roommates.

  But now I had Cameron and I’d promised him I’d find us a Plan B.

  “If I change my mind, who do I talk to?” I asked.

  “Well, you’re talking to me for starters. Drop off a résumé at the diner. I’ll tell my brother to keep an eye out for it. He does most of the hiring.”

  “A résumé.” Mostly I was just thinking out loud.

  “Yup. Piece of paper. Has your experience. Jobs. Where you live.” His sentence had started out kind of light and sarcastic, but he’d emphasized the last three words in a way I didn’t really like.

  “Got it,” I said simply. I think it was self-preservation that made me polite. My instinct was to show him just how mental I could be and say something snotty, but I was able to dial it down. “Thank you,” I even added.

  “Not a biggie,” he said. “You gonna be okay?”

  “Oh, we’re cool,” I reassured him. “Maybe I will drop off a résumé.” I put my hand on Cameron’s back and we hoisted our backpacks off the floor. He cradled his mummy bag the way he liked and I took his skateboard. Then I guided him to the stairs. “Thanks,” I said again, and Andy gave me this small salute.

  When Cameron and I were outside Andy’s place and a block and a half away from the building, I realized I had put my hand once again on Cameron’s back. It dawned on me that this was precisely the way my dad would guide me through crowds, and the realization made me at once both happy and sad. Suddenly my mind was filled with images that raced past like a Tumblr feed, me at different ages but my dad always looking pretty much the same, and in all of them my dad had his hand on my back and I was feeling either happy or safe or both. There we were in front of Snow White’s Scary Adventures smack-dab in the middle of the Magic Kingdom in Disney World, the sky almost the same blue as the Dorothy Gale gingham dress I was wearing. (You know they’ve closed that Snow White ride now, right? Why would they do that? Crazy and cruel, it seems to me. I get that it was kind of dated, but how could a kid not love that witch? I was terrified of her. I loved it!) That day was the first time I was allowed to go to a ladies’ room alone. I was five. My mom couldn’t take me because she was standing in line at some other part of the park at some other ride, getting the three of us Fast Passes. My dad later told me that he had waited outside that ladies’ room door scared to death that I’d been abducted. Maybe there were two entrances, and some madman was stealing me away and disappearing into the crowds through that other exit. My mom always thought my dad’s panic was kind of sweet when he told her about it. Other images I saw behind my eyes of my dad and me with his hand on my back? Walking to the school bus from the edge of our driveway the first day of kindergarten. (Once again, my backpack was way too big for my body.) Walking to a Brownie jamboree. Walking across our backyard with Maggie the puppy in my arms, her leash dangling behind her like her tail.

  Genetics, I thought. Genetics. We really can’t escape them, can we?

  I looked down at Cameron and wondered about the way he would just reach up and take my hand. I didn’t imagine a lot of nine-year-old boys would do that. So I asked him, “Did your mom like it when you held her hand?”

  I could literally feel him becoming self-conscious and realized this might have been a horrible question to ask him.

  And, of course, it turned out it was. We didn’t hold hands like that ever again until we were together in the emergency room.

  Chapter 17

  We went to Leunig’s, where Camille had told me she worked. Cameron stood just outside with our stuff while I went in. The place was between lunch and dinner, so except for the bar it was pretty quiet. And even at the bar everyone was drinking cappuccinos and espressos and super-expensive hot chocolates. It really was a very nice restaurant. The bartender said Camille wasn’t due for another hour, so I asked if I could leave her a note.

  “Yes, sure. But do you mind writing it over there?” he said, and he pointed at the dark corner of the bar near the curtains that went to the bathrooms. I guess I was kind of a check minus in the Project Runway department. I hadn’t been able to scare up passes for the Y in two days, and it must have showed. I nodded this was fine and kind of shrunk as much as I could.

  “You need a pen?” he asked. He was a pretty handsome dude with a Johnny Depp Vandyke on his chin. Maybe thirty years old and very tall and trim. The uniform at Leunig’s was a tight white shirt and a black tie.

  “That would be great,” I said. “And maybe something to write on.”

  He nodded and handed me a pen and one of the blank slips they used for bills.

  “Need something else?” This was the bartender again. I realized I hadn’t written a word yet because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. If Camille had been there, I was going to ask if Cameron and I could crash on the floor of her and her roommate’s place for a night. That’s all I was hoping for: a night. Suddenly I just needed to sleep and to be inside.

  “You know what?” I said to the bartender. He raised his eyebrows and waited. “I’ll come back in a couple of hours.”

  “Cool,” he said, and he nodded his head in the direction of the front door.

  Next we trudged two blocks to the Kinko’s on South Winooski. It was right by the day station for the homeless, so I knew it well. I had passed it dozens of times. And there I used six bucks from the little cash I had left and created a résumé for Andy’s brother at the diner. It was all made up, of course. If the dude chose to call any of my references, I was fucked. But I hadn’t much of a choice. I dug around inside my backpack, hoping I still had that little pink Post-it with Camille’s number, and fortunately I did. That was the phone number I was going to have to use as a contact.

  When I looked at the résumé after printing it out, I decided it didn’t look half bad. There was a diner I made up in Briarcliff and a few years babysitting and even an autumn as an after-school tutor. I mean, I would have hired me. I knew waitressing would be hard, but I have a good memory for everything but the periodic table. And I’d eaten at enough diners in my life and seen enough waitresses “slinging hash” on TV and in the movies that I was pretty sure I could figure it out. (I’ve always gotten a charge out of the expression “slinging hash.” It always makes me imagine a food fight.)

  Then the two of us walked back to Leunig’s. I considered dropping off the résumé at Henry’s Diner first, but
given the way the bartender had viewed me as a sort of stinky mongrel dog, I figured I should wait a day. I still believed that I—to use another phrase that always gives me the grins—cleaned up nice. Either I would shower at Camille’s or I would be able to cadge a day pass for the Y. But I’d be sure I was seriously presentable when I met Andy’s brother. After all, I had to for Cameron.

  Camille was amazing and said of course we could crash at her place for a night—even two or three if we needed to. She said her roommate would be cool. To this day I don’t know if Camille changed because she felt guilty for stealing my earrings and sort of running me out of the teen shelter or whether she just grew up and became a really good person—whether the counselors at the shelter got through to her and worked their magic. But she gave me the address and her key because her roommate would be working at Macy’s when we got there, and so we walked to the apartment and I went straight to the shower, where I could cut myself senseless and wash my hair. I felt almost human when I got out of the bathroom.

  The apartment was in a pretty run-down house a couple of blocks from the Kinko’s. It was on the second floor and didn’t have a whole lot of furniture, but it was nice and warm and there was this really long table a bit like the one my family had had in our kitchen in Reddington. It was made of the same wood, which I remembered was pumpkin pine. Immediately Cameron unrolled his mummy bag underneath it, and I joined him there in a T-shirt and a pair of ass-billboard sweatpants I’d lifted from Victoria’s Secret. We read our books for, like, ten minutes before we both fell sound asleep.

  Camille’s roommate got home about seven-thirty that night. Camille had already texted her that we’d be there. Her name was Dawn, and she was kind of a rarity: she was a girl who, I could tell, had no idea just how pretty she was. Normally, in my experience, a hot girl knows she’s hot. Even if they have the brains of a gerbil, beautiful girls usually know this one salient fact: they turn heads. But, I swear, Dawn was totally oblivious.

  Now, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the tanning bed. That was clear, too. But pretty or dumb, none of that mattered to me, because here was what she had going for her: she was very nice and she treated Cameron like a puppy. She didn’t treat him like a dog, which is an expression that means in reality you treat a person like crap. She treated him like he was the cutest thing she had ever seen—a puppy—and was constantly telling him how sweet he was and how adorable he was and what a buff little dude he’d soon be. Cameron endured it.

  And she didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass that he was a homeless kid who wasn’t in school at the moment. A lot of people just might have frowned on that. Not Dawn. Camille wouldn’t get home until around eleven that night because she was working until closing, and here was our entire exchange about Cameron’s and my sitch while we waited:

  DAWN: So he’s, like, your nephew?

  ME: Uh-huh. Our families lost our homes when the nuclear plant exploded and things kind of fell apart. But next week we’re taking the bus to Briarcliff, New York. We have family there who are going to take care of us.

  DAWN: God, the plant. That just sucks. The people who ran it? They were the worst, weren’t they?

  ME: Yup. They were the worst.

  DAWN: But Cameron, you are just too cute! This will all be fine, you know. You know that, right? You are just the most adorable little person I’ve ever seen!

  Then she hugged him. Again.

  Now, obviously the story I gave Dawn didn’t match the story I’d given Camille back in June at the shelter. But since—also obviously—Camille had figured out who I was, it didn’t matter. It just didn’t.

  Still, I had this feeling that I had seen Dawn somewhere before. It wasn’t at the shelter and it wasn’t at the library and it wasn’t at Muddy Waters. It sure as hell wasn’t down by the waterfront. But for most of the evening I just couldn’t figure out where. She had a beautiful heart-shaped face and very prominent brown eyes, and the only makeup she was wearing was a kind of dull lipstick. She pulled her hair straight back, which gave her a wide, high forehead. That look is hard to rock, but Dawn pulled it off. And then, when she fixed this massive collar on her turtleneck sweater, I got it. I knew instantly where I had seen her before. And I knew why she was so into Cameron.

  I’d seen her one day that winter on the street outside of a day care on King Street, when Cameron and I had been walking from the waterfront to the library.

  When she’d adjusted the collar on her sweater it was a lot like when she had pulled the collar of her jacket up and over the bottom of her face against the cold. She’d been behind this picket fence they had along the sidewalk to prevent the little kids from running from the playground into the street and getting themselves killed by a car, and she had been absolutely surrounded by rug rats. They were all in snowsuits that made them look like little Michelin men (and women), and I had no idea how they could move as fast as they did. All of the kids had been four and five and maybe six years old, so it’s not like Cameron belonged with them. But for some reason it had still made me sad for him. All those kids had each other, and all Cameron had was yours truly.

  “You don’t just work at Macy’s,” I said. “You also work at a day care, don’t you?”

  “Used to work at a day care. No more. How did you know?”

  “I once saw you in the yard with a bunch of the kids.”

  “I loved that job,” she told me, and her voice got a little sad.

  “How come you’re not there anymore?”

  “I made kind of a bad choice one day, you know?”

  I didn’t know, so I waited.

  “One of the little boys was crazy energetic. Maybe a little mental. And he’d never nap, which was bad for everyone. He’d just keep all the kids in the day care awake. So one afternoon I gave him some cough syrup to knock him out. And maybe I gave him a little too much or maybe it just worked too well. I don’t know. But it was really hard to wake him up—the woman who runs the day care almost called 911—and when we finally got him on his feet, he was still super groggy. He was still super groggy when his mom came to pick him up. So, I was kind of fired.”

  “Cameron is a great sleeper,” I told her. It was a reflex. And, fortunately, it was true. Still, I wanted to be sure she understood that he didn’t need any help in the shut-eye department. I didn’t want to take any chances.

  You have no idea how amazing it is to sleep on a couch when you have been sleeping burrowed inside a quilt in a trash bag igloo for nearly two months.

  Even though I had napped that afternoon with Cameron under the pumpkin pine table, I was out like a light about fifteen minutes after Camille got back from the restaurant and didn’t wake up until noon the next day. Dawn had already left for Macy’s, but Camille was playing checkers with Cameron. It seems Dawn had made a mad dash to the Salvation Army store as soon as she’d woken up and bought five board games for five bucks. It made me feel a little guilty that I hadn’t thought of that—and it made me think a little more highly of Dawn. Maybe she was the Queen of the Antihistamines, but the board games were a good call.

  Since Camille and Cameron seemed to be getting along just fine, I went to Henry’s and dropped off my résumé. The lunch rush was ending and I met Andy’s brother. He was a burly guy, like Andy, and he was pretty curt. All business. But Andy came out from the kitchen and said hello. His brother actually hired me on the spot because I had diner experience and because one of his waitresses had walked out on him that morning, leaving “smack dab” in the middle of the breakfast rush. He wanted me to start the next day. I was supposed to come in at two, when business slowed after lunch, to get trained for a few hours before dinner.

  I was pretty jazzed. I spent about an hour on Church Street and panhandled about thirteen bucks before a police officer moved me on, and then I started back to Camille’s. I wanted to be sure I was there before she had to leave for work at the restaurant.

  Anyway, I was kind of feeling that things were looking up. I really was.
You’re probably thinking that, too. We couldn’t stay at Camille’s forever, of course, but just coming in out of the cold and seeing how Camille had turned it around was seriously inspiring. And it had cleared my head. I had to find a place where Cameron and I could live on diner wages and tips—which was not going to be easy—and at some point I was going to have to figure out what to do about my little buddy. He needed to be in school. He needed grown-ups. He needed a real home. That’s what I mean about how a night on a couch in a heated apartment had started me focusing again almost like a normal person.

  And who knows? Maybe things really would have turned themselves around if I hadn’t felt a cold coming on. I felt a tingle in the back of my throat and I started to feel achy. My nose was starting to run. I considered detouring back to the Rite Aid to lift some Airborne or something, but I was only a block from Camille’s. I told myself that she or Dawn—God, especially Dawn—might have something I could take. The key was not to get Cameron sick.

  But, of course, Cameron already was sick. When I got back to Camille’s, she was grateful because she was about to leave for work and wasn’t wild about the idea of leaving Cameron alone.

  “He’s been sneezing,” she said to me, and pointed under the pumpkin pine table. The night before he’d taken a bedsheet and draped it over half the table, turning it into a cave. The other half had some notebooks and textbooks from Camille’s classes at CCV. But there was still enough light from the undraped side for Cameron to read one of his classic comic book novels. This one, I saw, was The War of the Worlds.

  I crouched on the floor and peered in. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “I feel okay,” he said, and then wiped at his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Getting a cold?”