Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

The person behind me in line, a tall, thin dude in his late twenties with a green John Deere ball cap who was already seriously agitated, took my shoulder and spun me around to look at me. “It was your dad who did this?” he said, part question and part statement. For a second no one said a thing. Then, suddenly, everyone in line was screaming at once, at me and at each other. It was madness. This couple behind him, a man and a woman who were old enough to be my parents but were unbelievably skanky, each grabbed one of my arms, and the woman kind of leaned into me and said with the worst beer breath ever, “We’ve lost our house! Because of your fucking father, we’ve lost our house! What have you done?”

  Instinctively I wriggled free and looked at the sheriff, who was already trying to get between me and these two screwballs. He was pissed, I could tell, and at first I was relieved because I thought he was going to give these lunatics a piece of his mind. Nope. He was actually pissed at me. “Young lady, we’re going to need to talk to you. You’re going to have to come with me right now.”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “I didn’t say you did. But we need to know what happened. We need to know what you know. Come with me.”

  “Are you arresting me?”

  “Have you done something wrong?”

  Looking back, he was probably just being sarcastic, like, Why would we arrest you? It’s not like you’ve done something wrong. But the people in line were staring and yelling about how people were dead and more were going to die and they’d all lost their homes, and all I could hear were words like “cancer” and “ruined” and “meltdown.” Words like “your father.” These people didn’t know me or my father, but they hated us both. They hated me. And I thought about what I had overheard back at the staging area.

  Whole family: fucking despicable.

  There’ll be a cover-up. Blame the dead people.

  They had a daughter. They’ll make her testify. Talk about what an alcoholic her dad was.

  “No,” I answered the sheriff, “I haven’t done anything.” But I don’t know if what I said even registered with him, because the people behind him wanted to lynch me, and other people were streaming into the store to try and buy last-minute provisions and hoping there might be some water and bread left. The sheriff screamed at the owners, “I want these people gone now! And I want that door locked! Do you hear me?”

  And that’s when I ran. I took that second to escape. I didn’t know what was in store for me, but it was clear that everyone loathed me and everyone loathed my dad, and even if they didn’t arrest me, they were going to make me say horrible things about my family. When the sheriff tried to herd the mob away from me and get the owners to lock the door, I bolted. I didn’t look back when they were yelling at me to stop, and I didn’t dare turn around because even a millisecond might be all they’d need to catch me. I hopped on the seat of my bike and pedaled as hard and as fast as I could, weaving like a crazy person through the traffic jams. And I mean this: I didn’t look back until I had gone at least a couple of miles.

  Like I said, the biking was hard, especially when the adrenaline from my escape was gone. I knew a few boys at school who were serious bicyclists: they clipped into their pedals with those special shoes and wore yellow bike jerseys. Their bikes weighed as much as a fat cat or a small dog.

  The bike I stole wasn’t like that. It was a mountain bike. And I figured out pretty quickly that a mountain bike actually sucks if you are trying to bike up a mountain. They should only call them off-road bikes. Or, maybe, really flat-road bikes. But it had lots of gears and that helped. And when even in a granny gear I couldn’t muscle my way up a hill, I would just get off the bike and walk the damn thing. I tried to be happy that at least it wasn’t raining.

  Besides, there were some stretches during the first two hours when I couldn’t go very fast anyway. The roads were still packed with people trying to get away. It was so sad. Just these long lines of Vermonters who were terrified of the radiation or terrified that they were about to lose every single thing they owned. Sometimes people who were better bicyclists than I was would pass me, and sometimes people on motorcycles would pass me. Sometimes I would pass walkers. We would all just kind of grunt at each other. No one with a vehicle offered to give me a lift because often I was making better time than they were—which, as I said, still wasn’t all that fast. I would peek into the cars and trucks, and people’s faces said it all: numbness and horror and shock. I would glance at the things they thought were important and had chosen to bring: the computers—laptops and desktops—the paintings, the photo albums, the pillows, the quilts, the brown bags of groceries. The gallon jugs of water. Water and computers: it fascinated me. Lots of the people who weren’t driving were staring at their iPads and tablets for news.

  And then there were all those animals, and every one of them made me think of my Maggie.

  It was like we were all trying to reach some seashore with an ark before everything fell completely apart.

  When I thought about anything other than my family or running away myself, I thought of how I had stolen the bike I was on. I’d never stolen anything before. I wasn’t even the kind of kid who would pocket a tube of Bubble Yum from the general store in Reddington. I guess the bike was the start of my whooshing down the slippery slope that eventually would have me stealing pretty much whatever I needed to survive.

  Was I more scared than everyone in those cars and trucks? I guess in some ways. I mean, unlike all of them I was positive that my parents had just died. And I was convinced that somehow my dad was responsible for this nightmare. Or at least partly responsible. And, yeah, I felt like a marked person. I felt like people were after me, too. Does that excuse my stealing a bike? Probably not. But it explains it. I really was on the edge of delirious. I may have looked like just another refugee on a bike, but I was close to the kind of emotional meltdown that would have made my outburst at the checkpoint look downright mild.

  Eventually, of course, the traffic opened up. While a lot of us were going west, we would hit different roads going south and cars would peel off. There was always a steady stream and it was always going in one direction (away, away), but it started to move. By now it was late afternoon, but this was June and so the sun wasn’t going to set for hours. There was a part of me that was beginning to wonder what I was going to do after dark: Should I stop? Should I sleep? Should I just keep going? And if I did stop, where? I had no idea if I was still getting dumped on by radiation, so I decided I would just forge ahead. Like everyone else, now I just wanted to get as far away from the Kingdom as I could.

  When I reached another hill at about five-thirty, I got off my bike again and started pushing it up the shoulder. I had gone maybe half a mile when a bread truck pulled up beside me and stopped. I didn’t really have the antennae for bad shit then that I do now, but fortunately it didn’t matter. The fellow driving it was wearing a brown jacket with both his name and the bakery’s on it. His name was Sandy and he looked about fifty-five or sixty, but he had thick white hair and the sort of deeply lined hands I always associated with the dairy farmers I knew.

  “Need a lift?” he asked me.

  I paused and he must have sensed my hesitation.

  “I don’t bite,” he said. “I understand if you don’t want to get in. But I have three granddaughters and a pair of grandsons. Some are in Jeffersonville and some are in Essex Junction. I promise you, I’m harmless.”

  Suddenly I was exhausted. All the air went out of me like a popped balloon. I was tired and hungry and thirsty. Unbelievably thirsty. It had been hours since I’d had even a sip of water. I nodded. “Yes. Thanks,” I muttered, my voice beaten and hoarse.

  He pulled off the road a few feet ahead of me so the cars behind him could pass and turned off the ignition. He jumped out, opened the back doors, and then lifted the bike into the back, leaning it between the racks of bread and English muffins and hamburger buns. When I got in the front of the truck beside him, he must have sense
d that I was in a bad way. Without asking me what I wanted, he reached into a little red Igloo cooler and pulled out a bottle of water for me. Then he reached behind him and grabbed a loaf of bread off the nearest rack. He unspooled the twist tie and handed me a couple of slices.

  “Obviously we’re not supposed to do this,” he said, and then he took a piece for himself. “But I don’t think today anyone’s going to care.”

  So, the robbery—the one where we almost wound up like Bonnie and Clyde’s gang in that very scary black-and-white photograph. It’s the one where a gang member is sitting in this field in his underwear with half his head shot off, but he’s still alive, and his wife is being dragged away from him by a guy in a necktie and another policeman. There are policemen everywhere in the photo, but Bonnie and Clyde have gotten away. I saw it on a special about the Clyde Barrow Gang I watched one afternoon with Ethan on the History Channel. How weird is that? There was actually a time in my life when I was watching the History Channel after school.

  Anyway, Missy pulled off her gloves with her teeth and was about to start trying to punch in the code to disarm the alarm at her aunt and uncle’s house with her fingers, but Trevor stopped her.

  “No!” he hollered at her, and batted her arm down. “Fingerprints!”

  She screamed that the code was gone, just gone, meaning gone from her head, but by then it was too late anyway. It went off, a car alarm but it seemed a lot louder: the horn was on the front porch, so it was practically over our heads. It was deafening and I know I screamed. Andrea did, too.

  And, of course, this also meant that right that second the local police were being notified automatically.

  Trevor picked up Missy’s gloves off the floor of the hallway and then dragged us all into the kitchen. I expected we would run back to the Miata, but I guess his instinct was only to escape that screeching bleat, which meant running in the opposite direction. In the kitchen the sound was muffled, but still plenty loud. We all still had to yell to be heard.

  “Look, we should get out of here,” PJ was saying, and I remember I was nodding like crazy.

  But Trevor shook his head and said, “We still have a few minutes before the police get here, right? We give ourselves sixty seconds and grab all we can and then—”

  And then the phone rang, and it was on the wall right beside me and I jumped. Trevor looked at the number and name on the screen and saw that it was the alarm system company.

  “I guess they call to see if we set off the alarm by accident,” Missy said, sniffling and wiping at her nose. It suddenly dawned on me that we hadn’t broken any law. I wondered what would happen if Missy answered the phone and told the company that she had come home to get something and just forgotten the code. Merely a false alarm, no biggie. Then we could all drive back to Poacher’s, get stoned, and try some other house some other night.

  But the answering machine picked up before I could say a word, and the company didn’t bother to leave a message. There was no turning back now.

  “Okay, people, let’s do it: sixty seconds!” Trevor said, and I followed Andrea into the dining room so we could steal the silver, and Missy ran upstairs to grab as much of her aunt’s jewelry as she could find (and, supposedly, her aunt had some serious ice). Trevor and PJ started pulling the plugs from the Blu-ray player and the flat-screen TV in the living room, though how the hell they thought they were going to fit a TV almost the size of a pool table into the back of a Miata was beyond me. But they were male, and so they had to at least try, right? (Me? I would have just unplugged the Xbox and called it a day.)

  Andrea and I had these cloth laundry bags with string ties, and we just started throwing candlesticks and silverware and these oil lamps that were probably pewter and not silver into them. It was hard to focus with that off-the-hook-crazy alarm coming at us, but it’s not like what we were doing was brain surgery. We had been at it maybe half a minute, shoveling knives and forks and spoons from this sideboard into our bags, when suddenly Andrea dropped her bag and swore.

  “Shit!” she said. “My eye!” Then she ran into the bathroom on the first floor beside the stairs. I followed her.

  “Something’s wrong with my eye! It’s like there’s glass in there!” she was saying, and while she had turned on the water, she was staring at her eye in the mirror. It was her left eye, and I could see it was vampire red. And I could see something that looked like a dollop of green goo at the edge near her nose when she turned to face me. “What the fuck?” she shrieked. “It hurts so fucking much!”

  I heard Missy pounding her way down the stairs, and she paused when she saw me standing in the doorway to the bathroom. “What happened?” she asked.

  “My eye!” Andrea wailed. “Something’s gone wrong with my eye! It hurts and I can’t see out of it!”

  “You can’t see out of your eye?” Missy said.

  And before Andrea answered, Trevor and PJ came up behind Missy and me. “Let’s roll,” Trevor said. “Done and done.” He was holding a coffee table and PJ had a vase. I guess they had given up on the TV and felt they had to steal something to earn their keep. Still, that coffee table had as much chance of making it into the Miata as the TV.

  “I can’t see!” Andrea screamed at all of us. “Don’t you fuckers get it? I can’t see! Something’s happened!”

  I knew Andrea was capable of losing it; I’d witnessed one of her tantrums the day we had met at the shelter. (Let’s face it: All of us, as our therapists liked to say, were a little too impulsive and a little too emotional for our own good. We ratcheted up the drama. We talked some serious shit.) But this was bad, and it didn’t help when first Missy chastised Andrea, saying, “I told you, you can’t sleep with your eyeliner on!” and then Trevor yelled at her for taking her gloves off. He pushed between Missy and me and turned off the faucet and started wiping down the sink with his gloved hands.

  But Andrea just turned it on again and stamped her foot and then collapsed on the tile floor against the toilet. She curled up her legs against her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees. She was sobbing and repeating over and over that she was in agony and she was going blind and no one cared. I leaned over, half hugging her and half trying to get her on her feet. But I really didn’t accomplish either. Andrea was taller than me and seriously stubborn when she wanted. We’re talking unmovable object.

  “Andrea, we need to go,” I begged and my mind was racing as I tried to think of what to say. It didn’t help that the family’s asinine alarm was flipping all our brains sideways. “We’ll take you to the emergency room,” I added, which at the time I thought was inspired. In hindsight, of course, it really wasn’t all that brilliant. It was only what a normal person would have suggested, right? “We have to get you to the hospital.”

  She looked at me—and her eyeball, I saw, really was disgusting—and I could tell that I had gotten through to her. Something had clicked. She put one hand on the floor and one on the toilet and pushed herself to her feet.

  “Okay, let’s get out of here,” Trevor said, and we all raced through the house and piled into the Miata. I grabbed Andrea’s sack, so I was carrying two, and Missy had hers, but we left that ridiculous coffee table behind on the front steps. PJ was clinging to that vase like a little kid with a teddy bear. He really did look like a five-year-old.

  Missy was driving because it was her car, and Trevor was in the seat beside her. Once again, Andrea and PJ and I were wedged into the backseat, which was fine with me, even though I wound up in the middle. I held Andrea’s hand and told her she was going to be fine, she was going to be okay, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, Well, that’s why God gave us two eyes. So if we sleep in our eyeliner and go blind in one, we have a backup. But I didn’t say that.

  Missy had just put the car in reverse when we saw the flashing blue lights racing down the road and turning toward the driveway. The driveway was maybe a hundred yards long, and it was lined on both sides with pine trees six and seven feet tall. T
his was a pretty new meadow mansion. So what kind of a badass was Missy? Without saying a word to any of us, she turned off the headlights and gunned the car straight ahead and off the driveway, roaring into the side yard and then racing over the patch of ground where her aunt had what she called an Italian garden in the summer. Tomatoes, basil, peppers. Stuff like that. But there were still those wire tomato cages, empty now like pieces of broken chain-link fencing, and Missy plowed right through them. In the moonlight they made me think of the debris in some postapocalyptic zombie movie, which then made me think of Cape Abenaki, and what it must have been like those days inside the Exclusion Zone.

  Meanwhile, Trevor and PJ were whooping like rodeo cowboys. They thought this was hilarious. The Great Escape and all. Then Missy drove through the next-door neighbor’s yard, dinging some little kid’s metal swing set. It wasn’t that late, and so there were still lights on at that house—and at the next one. But even if it had been two in the morning, I have to believe the burglar alarm would have gotten the neighbors out of bed. (Further proof that Missy could have been one heck of a serious criminal, if she’d wanted: she had the instincts to keep the headlights off as we raced across people’s property.) We must have rock-and-rolled through half a dozen yards, and some were obstacle courses. Think The Amazing Race. In addition to the gardens and that swing set, there were long piles of logs and prefabricated metal tool sheds and lawn tractors and birdbaths and a picnic table with those attached benches. There were Adirondack chairs. There was a plastic playhouse. There was a gazebo. We dinged that, too, because we were trying not to run over a sandbox Missy saw in the dark at the very last second.

  But then we reached someone’s driveway, and she turned the car hard to the left and for a second it felt like we were only on two wheels and were going to flip over—which would have really put a damper on the evening, because none of us were wearing seat belts and the convertible top was, of course, down. I think we were probably only going forty or fifty miles an hour, but that’s fast if you’re driving at night without headlights through the backyards of rich people’s meadow mansions.