Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (41 page)

I got a flashlight, but I didn’t turn it on, and I went to the top of the stairs and waited. Maggie, a little curious, stood beside me. Then we both sat down.

They didn’t ring the doorbell; they just came in. There were three of them, one entering through the sliding glass doors in the back and two through the front.

I turned on the flashlight so they would know where I was and held my breath like a shadow. Maggie and I were but landscape.

Or, I guess, Landscape.

Then the room was bathed in so much light that I had to squint. Their flashlights were like high beams on a car.

One of the dudes who had come in through the front spoke
to me first. “We don’t want to hurt you,” he called up to me. His microphone made him sound like a robotic character from an Xbox game.

“Way to ring the doorbell,” I said. “Way to knock.”

“We’re not here to harm you,” he reassured me, like I was really such a pinhead that I might have thought that’s why they were here.

So I said, “I know.” I would have rolled my eyes, but he wouldn’t have noticed.

“You need to come with us. We have a suit for you in the truck.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Little girl—”

“I am so far from being a little girl.”

He nodded. “Please come with us.”

“Maggie comes with me.”

“We thought you were alone. Who’s Maggie?”

“This is Maggie,” I answered, and I leaned over and scratched her neck where she liked it.

His body language screamed exasperation. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was annoyed. I knew the three of them were irritated as hell. “Your dog?”

“My dog.”

“It’s Emily, right?”

“Yes.”

“The dog is—”

“The dog has a name. I just told you. Her name is Maggie.”

“Fine. Maggie can come.”

“I want to bring a few things.”

“No. Everything here is tainted.”

Tainted
. I loved it. That was a word I would have expected Emily Dickinson to use, not this guy. He should have used “contaminated” or “radioactive.” I have no idea why he didn’t.

“Yes,” I said simply.

“Look: your clothes and—”

“My journals. I want to bring my journals and my notebooks. I don’t care about my clothes.”

He looked at the two other members of his—and please hear the sarcasm in my voice—
rescue party
and one of them seemed to shrug. It suddenly dawned on me that there might be a woman inside there.

“Where are they? We’ll get them. You shouldn’t be handling them.”

I laughed. “Yeah. Right. I’ll carry them.”

“Does your dog need a leash?”

“No.”

“Do you have one?”

“A leash? Somewhere.”

So it really wasn’t much of a standoff. They let me bring my journals and my dog. That was all I wanted.

It was indeed a woman in that suit, and her name was Jeannine. She helped pack me into a hazmat suit of my very own, although mine did not have a mic. Also, it’s worth sharing that they didn’t dress me in hazmat chic to protect me. I was already burnt toast. They put me into that hazmat suit to protect themselves and their precious van. I have a feeling that if they had bothered to turn their Geiger counters on me, they would have gone off like popcorn kernels in a microwave oven.

At one point I felt a little carsick and so I made sure I knew how to rip my mask and hood off if I thought I was going to vomit again, but it never got that bad. It seemed to me that this was all very barn-door-after-the-horses-have-left, and when I thought of that expression, I was reminded of the protest back in January and explaining what the phrase meant to Cameron. I really didn’t care that my suit didn’t have a mic, because I didn’t want to talk to them anymore. Maggie sat in the backseat with Jeannine and me, more or less content on the floor between us. She had always been
a pretty chill dog; she never minded the car. She let them drape a hazmat suit over her like it was a blanket because, like me, she was scarily contaminated.

They told me they were going to take me to a place where I could be scrubbed clean. If I had felt like speaking, I would have made one of my dad’s sardonic references to Silkwood showers. I knew what was coming. After that they said they were bringing me to a hospital. If I’d had the emotional energy to open my mouth or give a damn, I would have joked, “Mental or regular?” I figured in my case either would have made sense. But I just sat there. I gazed out the window on my side of the van and I watched the night world go by. “The carriage held but just ourselves …,” I thought, and I hummed it in my head to the tune of
Gilligan’s Island
. We passed through my neighborhood for the last time and we passed my old school for the last time. We passed the field of dead cows and we passed the gun shop. Then we passed through the checkpoint and the Exclusion Zone was behind us. Behind me. Inside my mask I silently said good-bye.

EPILOGUE

They tell me
I will get better. They tell me I am, in fact, getting better. They believe my hair will grow back. We’ll see. It seems to be coming back only in patches—in islands and clumps. Even if they hadn’t shaved me—all of me, eyebrows and legs and pubes—I gather a lot of it would have fallen out anyway. Gross. One more loss among the many.

For instance, I know I’ll never see my phone with Andrea’s texts again or get to wear her Christmas sweater. And even if someday I do get around to repiercing my ears, the earrings Camille gave me are gone. They were all taken away from me or I left them behind, which, I guess, is fine. What the hell. I guess they had to take them away; I guess they weren’t really worth going back for.

The damnedest thing was the way everyone went ballistic over my cutting. As if that was my biggest problem. Please. I—to use one of their favorite words—used to “manifest” and “act out” in ways that were lights-out crazy compared to a little cutting. I mean, my therapists know about Poacher and the Oxies and my igloo, but I don’t bore the dermatologists and gastroenterologists with those little details. I didn’t sit down with the oncologists—who mostly just wanted to run tests on me so they have baselines to look at when the inevitable happens someday—and say, “Yes, the food here is kind of a fiasco and I’m not wild about the plastic utensils they want me to use. But it sure beats doing a trucker at a gas station so you can score a crap egg salad sandwich and pay an Iraqi war vet so he’ll let you crash on his mattress.”

They say I did most of this to myself that day I finally rode all the way out to the plant. I would have gotten sick eventually even if I hadn’t, but there were still whole clouds of radioactive dust floating around the parking lot. And—oh, by the way—there was a hot spot pretty close to where I had been standing with my bike. They had bulldozed all kinds of crap under the dirt along that side of the parking lot. My mind started to spin when they were talking about rems and BEIR. (FYI, BEIR is an antonym of beer. We’re not talking homonym. Beer is mostly good, unless you’re watching your weight. BEIR just sucks. It stands for the biological effects of ionizing radiation. It seems I got walloped by a boatload of rems, which was why we were even having this conversation about BEIR.)

I still don’t spend much time on the web these days. I spend a little, but I’m careful. Besides, I don’t have the energy. I know if I spent too much time online, I would look up all of the things that I am afraid would set me back emotionally. I would look up my parents and read more about what people had said about them. I would investigate which cancers are most likely to kill me and when the hot particles will lead to hard tumors. (“The bone that has no marrow,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “What ultimate for that?” In my case? Maybe someday leukemia.) I would discover the news stories about me, as well as the ones about me and Cameron that implied I was a complete Looney Tune. And I am not a complete Looney Tune. I am only a quasi–Looney Tune.

And all of that would just depress me. Correction: all of that would just depress me even more.

So, I guess I didn’t last very long as the Belle of Reddington. But I have logged some pretty serious time here as the Belle of Ward Six. (No, that’s not a cheeky reference to Chekhov. My wing really is called Ward Six by the nurses. Officially it’s named for some benefactor, but her name is unpronounceable and very many syllables. So everyone just calls it Ward Six.) And here I get to wear all the white I could ever want, which is only a drag when my nose does that thing where it bleeds like a fire hose or I have
one of my coughing jags. Don’t ask about what those are like and what comes up. I get squeamish just thinking about it, and I’m a girl who has thighs that look like someone (well, me) got medieval on them. Lines of long puffy scar tissue, some a little pink, some an eggshell white.

In a few days, they said, they would take me out for an airing, if I want. They’ve offered to show Maggie and me where my parents are buried. You might not think that would be the first place I would want to go, but it kind of is. If I went anywhere, I’d go there. Their bodies are in lead-lined coffins in a special cemetery where all the victims from the disaster have been laid to rest. It’s not open to the public.

Maggie is living with the Currans because she can’t live here, but they have played fast and loose with the rules and categorized her as a “service dog” so she is allowed inside the hospital. They’ve done this to be nice. They also shaved her, too. Not kidding. Like me, her hair seems only to be growing back in spots. It looks like doggie hair plugs. We’re quite a pair.

Apparently, not everyone hates me just because my last name is Shepard. And while they’ve asked me lots of questions about my dad, I’m never going to have to testify about anything or get hammered by reporters. They’ve promised. It seems a lot of people just want to give me some space.

So, Lisa and Lisa’s mom bring my Maggie to me almost every day. I know she’s well cared for and has a good home. The plan is that I’m also going to live with the Currans when everyone decides I’m not a total basket case. We’ll see. Lisa’s mom had been looking for me most of those nine months I was hiding, posting things online that I would have seen that day in the Burlington library if I’d spent maybe another five minutes surfing around Facebook or the sites where my name appeared.

These days, I still steer clear of what they call the social networks. It’s not that I’m antisocial. I’m just not ready for a reunion—even a digital one. I’m not ready for most of my friends, and I’m not sure they’re ready for me. Lisa answers my questions when I ask
about Ethan or Dina or Claire. She doesn’t tell me much about the other Cape Abenaki families, and I don’t inquire. As I suspected, a lot of them have moved far away. Of course, none of the ones who’ve remained have tried to visit. It’s all just too awkward. And they have their own problems, right?

I have not seen Cameron either. They don’t put it quite this way, but the implication is that they don’t want me to see him. They don’t think it would be good for him, and I can tell they’re a little afraid I would try and kidnap him or something. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. Some days I can barely get out of bed. But he’s alive. He’s alive and he’s healthy. I didn’t accidentally kill him. They say that—finally—he is with a seriously awesome foster family, but they won’t tell me anything more.