Then as I went into class, my math teacher stopped abruptly in the middle of his lecture and told the whole class to turn and look at me. He said that since I had disrupted the entire class with my tardiness I owed them all an apology and an explanation of why I was late, which, of course proved to be of great amusement to my fellow students. I would have liked to have pointed out to my teacher that the only reason there was a disruption of his class was because he stopped teaching in order to embarrass me but I knew how far that would get me. Probably to after-school detention.
Never believe things can’t get worse. At lunch I slipped on a slick of water in front of the whole cafeteria. My tray flew up in the air, and I ended up wearing most of my lunch. As was customary at Granite, everyone applauded. I ducked out of the lunchroom to clean the spaghetti sauce off my shirt. So not only did I get humiliated in front of the entire ninth grade but I didn’t have anything to eat either.
When I got home from school my mother was waiting to take Joel and me to see the dentist, who discovered three cavities in my molars, which prompted a ten-minute lecture on proper dental hygiene. We got home just in time for me to hop on my bike and ride to work.
When the universe has conspired to create the perfect, crappy day it only reasoned that I would be scheduled to work with Dean.
Around ten o’clock a wino stumbled in. Which, since the Queen was located just off State Street, was a fairly common occurrence. They usually just asked for a glass of water, grabbed a handful of soda crackers, then asked if we had any extra food lying around. Mr. Dick had made it very clear that we would be fired if we gave food to “hobos and other vagabonds.” “Give them food,” Mr. Dick said, “and those people will flock to the Queen like seagulls to a landfill.”
This man didn’t ask for anything. He was holding a brown bottle and staggering a little. I suppose he just wanted an audience. Dean and I had started closing. I was in the front wiping off counters while Dean mopped.
“Hey, buddy. You hear the news?” he said, a broad smile revealing gaps where his teeth were missing.
“What news?” Dean asked without looking up.
“This is the end.”
“The end of what?”
“Everything!” He began laughing as he stumbled back out the door.
“Bum,” Dean said.
Twenty minutes later Dean, still mopping, said, “Hey, corndog, doesn’t that skuzz bucket out there belong to you?”
I looked out. To my embarrassment, the Bee was in the parking lot. I walked to the door, wondering what it was doing here.
“Better tell your mom to move it. Dick told us to throw away all the trash in the parking lot.”
“Shut up,” I said.
My mother had climbed out of the van and was walking toward me. I unlocked the door and opened it, preferring to meet her away from Dean. She wore a grim expression.
“What’s up, Mom?”
“You need to come home.”
“I can’t. We’re not done yet.”
“It doesn’t matter, you need to come home. Now.” My first thought was that she’d found Grace.
“Have you heard the news?” she said.
I shook my head.
“I’ll tell you when we get home. Is there anyone else here?”
“Dean.”
She stepped inside. “Dean, I’m Eric’s mother. I’m taking Eric home with me. You need to go home too.”
Dean just held the mop handle and stared, not sure what to make of her. “We’re not done. We’ll get in trouble if we don’t finish.”
“Trust me, it doesn’t matter. Just get home as soon as you can.”
“What’s happening, Mom?”
“Just come.” I followed her out to the Bee. She wasn’t crying but she was close.
“I brought my bike…”
My mom drove around the side of the Queen, and we put my bike inside the van. On the way home she said, “I love you, Eric.” Something about the way she said it frightened me.
When I got home Joel was still up. Joel was never up past 8:30. He was sitting in the living room across from my father. Obviously whatever was happening was really bad. I was even more afraid.
My mother sat down between Joel and me. My dad began talking.
“Tonight, President Kennedy said on the television that the Russians have been sending atom bombs to Cuba. The Navy has been ordered to stop all Russian ships sailing to Cuba. What this means is, there could be a war.”
I looked back and forth between my parents. “You mean with atom bombs?” I asked.
My dad nodded. “It looks like it.”
Like all kids of our generation, we knew about atom bombs. We were practically experts on them. In school we watched black and white films of mushroom clouds and nuclear winds and pictures of smiling adults walking quickly and in an orderly fashion to fallout shelters. We had been religiously schooled in bomb drills, climbing under atom-bomb-resistant desks with our hands laced securely over the back of our necks. There were bomb shelters in every neighborhood. The possibility of a nuclear holocaust was just something we carried around in the back of our minds, like an overdue library book.
In a bizarre way, we thought atom bombs were kind of cool. They were a gift of modern technology, like color TV and frost-free refrigerators, and in those days anything modern was good. Even if it could kill you.
People would even drive to the Nevada desert to watch the underground bomb tests and would joke about who was the most radioactive. Looking back, we were just nuts. We were like toddlers playing with a grenade. I’m amazed civilization survived.
As my father spoke, Joel’s eyes grew wider and wider. Even he had seen pictures of explosions from atom bombs. He’d even seen films of hydrogen bomb explosions like the one at Bikini Island, which, by contrast, made the atom bomb look like a firecracker.
“We’re going to have a family prayer, then I want you to go to bed,” my dad said.
“Can I sleep with you?” Joel asked my mother.
“Of course.” She looked at me. “Eric?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
We knelt down and prayed. Afterward my mother reminded us to brush our teeth, which, under the circumstances, seemed absurd but, in a way, hopeful. We hugged, then I brushed my teeth and went to my room alone. I turned off the light and crawled in bed waiting for my parents to go to bed so I could tell Grace. My mother came in and sat on the side of my bed. “Are you afraid?”
“Yeah, a little.”
She leaned over and kissed me. “President Kennedy will take care of us,” she said. “He has children too.”
As soon as my mother left and I heard her door shut I went to the bedroom window and climbed out. I ran to the clubhouse and knocked on the wall. “Grace.”
She turned on the light as I climbed in.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s really bad,” I said. “President Kennedy said on TV that the Russians have atom bombs in Cuba. There might be a nuclear war.”
She stared at me. “Is that for real?”
“Yeah. My mom and dad told us, and they looked really scared. Here, you can hear for yourself.” I turned on the radio. At first there was just a blast of static. I ran my finger over the plastic knob until I heard talking. A couple of men somberly discussed President Kennedy’s address. We listened for about five minutes. As they spoke, Grace looked more and more afraid. I turned it off. We were both quiet for some time.
Finally she said what we were both thinking. “I don’t want to die.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s so unfair. We didn’t do anything. We’re just kids and we might die because of something we have nothing to do with.”
We were both quiet and the only noise came from the heater.
“I don’t think we’re going to die,” I said. I didn’t sound very convincing. I wondered if it had been such a good idea to tell her. Maybe it would be better if none of us knew. There would just be a bi
g flash and before you could say, “What was that?,” you’d be gone. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
“If we do die tonight,” she said, “I don’t want to be alone.” She looked so frightened and vulnerable. “Will you hold me?”
I put my arms around her and she laid her head on my shoulder. After five minutes or so I turned off the light. The glow of the heater bathed the room in amber radiance. We lay back on her mattress and I held her until she fell asleep.
In the middle of the night I woke to her talking in her sleep. She was crying, “Please don’t, I don’t like that. That hurts.” Tears were streaming down her face.
I gently shook her. “Grace, it’s okay. You’re dreaming.”
She stopped and opened her eyes and for the longest while just looked at me. Then she snuggled her head into my chest and went back to sleep.
I don’t know how long it was that I just looked at her. She was so beautiful. I gently stroked the hair back from her forehead. Then I kissed her and pulled her into me as I fell back asleep.
I woke before Grace did. The dawn light was stealing through the cracks around the clubhouse door. It was another half hour before Grace’s eyes fluttered and opened. She looked at me, then brushed her hair from her face. “We’re still here,” she said.
“Yep.” Then I realized we were still here. “What if my mother’s looking for me? She’ll kill me.”
Grace lay her head back on my chest. “Just tell her the truth.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Not about me. Just tell her you slept in the clubhouse because you thought it might be safer.”
“But that’s stupid.”
“No mother would ever get mad at her kid for that.”
I don’t know how Grace knew these things but I figured she was right. She usually was. I kissed her on the forehead. A few minutes later I crawled out of the clubhouse and made my way back to the house.
CHAPTER Fourteen
We survived the night, but the news reports say that it’s not over.
It’s like taking a Band-Aid off slowly.
GRACE’S DIARY
TUESDAY, OCT. 23
Joel was in the bedroom getting dressed when I climbed back in through the window.
“You been out back?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Are Mom and Dad up?”
“Mom is.”
I walked out to the kitchen. I soon learned that the crisis wasn’t over. That morning Khrushchev had a message for President Kennedy. It was printed in large type in the morning newspaper:
I hope that the United States Government will
display wisdom and renounce the actions pursued
by you, which may lead to catastrophic
consequences for world peace.
With the fate of humanity lying in the balance we went to school. Maybe half the kids stayed home; even some of the teachers didn’t come. I suppose Joel and I went to school just because we always did. We had to do something. My mom still had to work. In fact the store was even busier than usual because people were stocking up on staples.
That night, Grace, Joel, and I listened to the radio and played Chinese checkers in the clubhouse.
CHAPTER Fifteen
I once caught a moth inside our house. I took it outside and
tried to release it into its natural habitat, but it didn’t want to
leave the box. Finally I shook the box until it fell out.
I wonder if that’s what death is like.
GRACE’S DIARY
WEDNESDAY, OCT. 24
Two days after Kennedy announced the blockade, two Soviet ships, flanked by a nuclear submarine, had moved within a few miles of the U.S. flotilla. It was a global game of chicken with the whole world watching and wondering who would turn first.
By that afternoon no Soviet ships had crossed the blockade but twenty-three missile sites in Cuba had become fully operational. An American U2 plane was shot down over Cuba and the pilot was killed. Fidel Castro seemed to be the loudest and brashest of the leaders involved in the conflict, not surprising since he held the littlest stick. The Soviets were eerily quiet.
Every time we heard a plane we looked up and hoped that it had wings.
In chess there are more than a trillion ways to play the first ten moves. I suppose there were even more possibilities of how the crisis would play out. The next days passed in a kind of surreal slow motion. Suddenly, everyone was an expert on nuclear armaments. People talked openly and knowledgeably about isotopes, point zero, radioactive fallout, and, in general, death.
America had about nine times as many bombs and missile warheads as the USSR: twenty-seven thousand to three thousand—enough bombs to kill the Russians thirty times over. The Soviet Union only had enough nuclear missiles to kill us all just once, which, frankly, wasn’t very comforting. The Soviet missiles weren’t as accurate as ours so to compensate for this they created bigger bombs like the Czar, a fifty-megaton monster that would swallow entire cities, the largest nuclear weapon ever exploded.
The one thing on everyone’s mind was whether this would be their last day alive. I suppose that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For once we didn’t worry much about the unimportant things—just family, friends, and God. And Grace.
Friday night, I asked Grace if she wanted to go home. Her eyes filled, but she replied, “No.”
CHAPTER Sixteen
I still believe in prayer.
GRACE’S DIARY
SUNDAY, OCT. 28
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. On Sunday, six days into the crisis, Americans flocked to churches. While our country was praying, President Kennedy and U.N. Secretary-General U Thant reached an agreement with the Soviets. Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missiles in Cuba in exchange for a no-invasion agreement and a secret removal of the Jupiter and Thor missiles in Turkey. The news flooded the airwaves and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief.
People celebrate in different ways. Some people lit firecrackers. Others honked their horns or clanged pans. Up and down our street there was no sign of life. It’s probably the one place on the planet that an atom bomb blast might have gone unnoticed.
CHAPTER Seventeen
Today I asked Eric to be my boyfriend.
I know it’s supposed to be the other way around,
but he’s shy and it would probably take a hundred years
otherwise and by then I might change my mind.
GRACE’S DIARY
MONDAY, OCT. 29
As intense as the last days had been, it was surprising how quickly everything returned to normal. It was like a near miss at a traffic intersection; everyone just keeps on driving.
As I was walking to my fourth period art class the principal’s voice blared over the school’s P.A. system.
“Attention, faculty and students, your attention, please. This is Principal Allen. We have a missing ninth-grade student. If you know anything concerning the whereabouts of Madeline Webb or have seen her in the last two weeks, please report immediately to my office. Thank you.”
I always thought that Principal Allen’s bass voice echoing down the school’s tile hallways sounded like the voice of God, but this time his words actually sent shivers through me. I felt as though I was wearing a T-shirt that said, I KNOW WHERE SHE IS. I avoided eye contact with everyone in the crowded hallway as I made my way to my next class.
Later that afternoon, Mrs. Waller started off Spanish class by saying, “This has been a trying time for all of us, and many of you missed class last week. Considering the nature of the crisis our country was facing, I think it’s understandable. As such, no one will be penalized for their absence.”
The class erupted, especially the basketball players on the back row who, for the most part, had taken the opportunity to skip school and were now slapping and ribbing their friends who had come.
Mrs. Waller loudly cleared her throat. “Back t
o order, class.” She waited until the classroom settled. “Thank you. Also, I’m sure you all heard Principal Allen’s announcement about one of your classmates, Madeline Webb. If anyone has seen Madeline or knows where she is, please see me after class.”
I’m sure it was my imagination, but it seemed like her gaze kept returning to me. I probably looked terrified or guilty or both.
“All right, let’s get back to work. Turn to page one hundred and seventeen in your text. Today we are studying the adverb where.” While I was frantically flipping through the pages of my textbook, Mrs. Waller walked from the blackboard to the center of the room near my desk. “¿Dónde estás, Eric?
I looked down at my book then back at her. “Uh, I’m here.”
A few students laughed.
“Yes, I can see that. Now please answer in Spanish.”
I blushed. “Sorry. Yo, aqui.”
“Muy bien. Eric, can you say, ‘Where is Madeline?’?”
After a moment I said, “I don’t know where she is, ma’am.”
This time everyone in the room laughed. “No, I want you to say in Spanish, ‘Where is Madeline. ¿Dónde está Madeline?”
“Oh.” I turned crimson. “¿Dónde está Madeline?”
“Muy bien.”
I was glad when the bell rang.
As soon as I got home I went straight to the clubhouse. Grace had been painting watercolor pictures of flowers. I had no idea where she had acquired the painting supplies, but I didn’t ask.
“Everyone at school’s looking for you,” I blurted out.
She looked at me calmly. “What do you mean, everyone?”
“Principal Allen made an announcement. Mrs. Waller even talked about you in class.”