Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

  It was the next day that I would learn he was in intensive care. And he was in a coma.

  I couldn’t see him.

  I couldn’t even stay at the hospital.

  That’s how fast it had all gone to hell.

  I went there first thing in the morning. This time I went to the main entrance, which was a hell of a lot harder to find than the ER. Seriously. The place was huge and had three stories of glass windows, to give you a sense of just how massive it was. I could see people walking along the corridors two and three floors above me. It was weirdly airy and like the lobby of a nice hotel. I passed the gift shop and coffee kiosks and signs for every kind of outpatient surgery you can think of before I finally detoured, almost by accident, into reception and found a blond girl with a ponytail not much older than I was behind the counter. I told her I was here to visit a patient named Alex Bliss, and she looked him up on her computer and asked me, “Are you related to him?”

  “Yup. Sister. What room is he in?”

  She paused. “What’s your name?”

  “Abby Bliss.”

  She looked intently at her screen and then punched in a few letters. I feared she was typing my name.

  “I can find the room, no prob, if you just give me the number,” I went on. “I’ve been here before.”

  She didn’t nod or say anything. She just kept tapping and scrolling her mouse. “Printing me one of those visitor badges?” I asked hopefully.

  She ignored me. Didn’t even shrug.

  And that was when, once more, my gift of fear kicked in.

  The woman from DCF was my mom’s age, but her hair, which was starting to go from mousy brown to gray, was a beach hippie mess. She was wearing a bulky and unbelievably ugly fisherman’s cardigan sweater—it had pewter hooks instead of buttons—blue jeans, and Birkenstock sandals with these thick brown socks. (And I thought I was a fashion disaster some days.) But her eyes were a very deep green. She had that going for her. I was pretty sure it was the receptionist who had sounded the alarm, but it was still like this woman had come out of nowhere. One minute I was alone on my side of the counter, and the next there was this person right there beside me.

  “You’re Abby,” she said, and she extended her hand to me. In her other hand was a clipboard. “My name is Mary. Can we talk?”

  I didn’t nod. I looked behind her to make sure she was alone.

  “We can sit right over here,” she went on, and used her clipboard like a paddle to funnel me over to a couch. I almost tripped on the coffee table with magazines in front of it.

  “So, like I said, my name is Mary,” she repeated when we both were seated. “I’m with the DCF—Department for Children and Families.”

  “Is everything okay with my brother?”

  “Alex is in intensive care.”

  My stomach lurched like I was on a roller coaster and we had just gone straight downhill out of nowhere. “What? Is he dying?”

  Clearly I sounded frantic; she put her hand on my leg. “No. The coma is medically induced. That means the doctors put him into a coma on purpose to prevent his brain from swelling any further.”

  “His brain is swelling?”

  “Yes. There’s inflammation.”

  “Is he going to … get better?”

  “We hope so,” she answered, but she did not sound especially confident. In fact, she didn’t sound confident at all.

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “No. Your little brother is very, very sick.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “You can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “But I can see him when our parents get here from the Adirondacks, right?” I really asked that. Looking back, I don’t know whether I was bluffing or becoming a little deluded—like I honestly believed two grown-ups were going to materialize out of nowhere and save my ass.

  Mary took a deep breath and then tried to look me in the eye with one of those soulful I’m-here-for-you social worker gazes. (These days, I seem to get them all the time.) “We called that number you gave the hospital last night. It belongs to someone else. Someone named”—and here she looked briefly at her clipboard before staring back at me—“Camille. It does not belong to your parents. Maybe you gave us the wrong number by mistake. It happens. But maybe there’s something else going on here. Is there a reason you and your brother are … trying to avoid your parents? Tell me the truth, Abby: Is there a reason you two had to leave … home? Is your last name really Bliss?”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

  “Abby—”

  “I really do. I promise, I won’t leave.”

  But, of course, that is precisely what I did.

  Clearly the DCF was all over this now and I had, much to my utter shame and total regret, gotten Camille involved. She had been walking when I had returned from the hospital the night before, and I still hadn’t seen her to tell her what I had done. Now they were calling her phone and it was clear any second they were going to visit the apartment. They still hadn’t figured out that Abby was Emily and Alex was Cameron, but they would connect the dots pretty damn soon: as I was leaving the hospital—exiting via this underground parking garage I found so that Mary wouldn’t see me running away through those big cheerful windows—I saw a police car rolling in, and somehow I just knew that this had something (everything?) to do with me. Once again, I was shaking. I was as good as outed, and Camille and Dawn might be in trouble for letting Cameron hang there over the weekend.

  And I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Cameron was in a coma and it was my fault. I really wish you’d brought him in sooner.

  Yeah, me too. Well, fuck you, Dr. Know-It-All.

  And, while we’re at it, fuck you, Abby Bliss or Emily Shepard or whoever the fuck you are.

  As soon as I got to Camille and Dawn’s bathroom I threw up and then gouged out so much of my thigh that I wrecked one of Camille’s towels when I tried to stop the bleeding. Finally I was able to tape some gauze on the cuts and climb back into my jeans. Then I ran away. I knew I didn’t have much time before the police showed up at the apartment, and I wanted to round up as much of Cameron’s stuff as I could. My things? Screw it. The only reason I had risked going back to Camille’s at all was for the things Cameron would want when—if—he woke up.

  I was halfway down the block when I saw a police car, its lights flashing but no siren, speeding around a corner. I dove into the bushes, falling on top of Cameron’s mummy bag, hoping that they hadn’t seen me. Hoping that no one at all had seen me. I lay there for maybe a minute and a half, listening to the car stop outside of Camille’s. Listening to the cops exit, not slamming their doors, but shutting them pretty forcefully. Listening to them knocking on the metal storm door and then going inside. Only then did I peek through the bushes … and resume my trek up the hill.

  I tried to take some comfort in the idea that the doctors had “put” Cameron into a coma. But it was still a coma, and I still had no idea if he was even going to live.

  You know that expression “a chip off the old block”? Well, I decided, that was me. Just like my dad, I fucked things up. Maybe I should have named myself Apple instead of Abby or any of the hundreds of other choices out there. It wasn’t that I had any great love for Gwyneth Paltrow or Chris Martin or thought they were geniuses for naming their little kid Apple. I mean, I liked her movies and his band just fine. That moment I just thought I should be Apple because—to use another cliché—I sure as hell hadn’t fallen very far from the tree.

  And so that’s why I was going back. Going home. Going into the Exclusion Zone that was actually—to use one of those Xbox terms that Trevor and PJ liked so much—a Kill Zone.

  Why not?

  Fuck the world, I thought. I couldn’t do anything right. I didn’t belong. I had allowed Cameron to get sick, then I had betrayed him, and now I was deserting him.

  I would go back to Reddington to be with my dead parents and my dead dog. I would
go home, because home was the place where, when you have done absolutely everything wrong, they have to take you in. I would go home because everyone there was gone, which meant there was no one left I could disappoint or hurt. I could key all the cars I wanted, because now they were all radioactive and no one wanted them. I could get ripped in a sugarhouse museum, because now the maple syrup was radioactive and no one would eat it. I could smash my mom and dad’s wineglasses, because now they meant nothing. They were just radioactive crystal.

  I dropped off Cameron’s skateboard, his mummy bag, and his duct tape creations—that robot, the horse, a race car—at the hospital on my way out of town. I left them just inside that main entrance with a big note saying they belonged to “Alex/Cameron” in intensive care and to please, please, please be sure the little boy had them when he woke up.

  And this time I didn’t hear any of those “She’s Leaving Home” harps when I left—when I left the hospital, when I left Burlington, when I said good-bye to all I had known since Reactor One had blown up. After all, I wasn’t leaving home. I was, once and for all, going home.

  Chapter 19

  It really wasn’t all that hard to get inside the Exclusion Zone. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Why in the world would a normal person want to go there?

  I saw the roadblock up ahead and a pair of National Guardsmen, but I only had to walk a whopping three or four hundred yards around the perimeter before I found a spot in the woods where I could crawl under the fence. It was strung across a muddy channel that spring runoff had carved into the hill and maybe once upon a time the soldiers had filled it in, but now the melting snow and rain had once more scooped out a canal.

  I noticed the guards had been wearing masks but not full-on Star Wars hazmat suits. Not that I cared.

  I estimated I was about five miles from the village of Reddington. Another mile beyond that would be my house. And a few miles beyond that were Newport and the big lake and Cape Abenaki. I’d be home before dark.

  I was never much of a hiker. I liked sleeping out in a backyard tent once in a while and I liked skiing and snowboarding, but I’m sure as heck not some kind of back-to-nature dork or, as I think I told you, a Girl Scout. I mention this because I was kind of miserable walking through the muck in the woods. Pretty quickly my feet were soaked, and my blue jeans were covered in mud. The branches were dripping, and I kept getting spray in my hair and on my face. My fingers were freezing because I didn’t have any gloves. And I realized how easy it would be to get lost, especially once the sun had set and night fell. So I worked my way back to that road as quickly as I could.

  When I got back to the pavement, I discovered that I was no more than a hundred yards behind the roadblock. I’d been in the woods at least an hour and gotten no more than three hundred feet closer to my home. See what I mean about what kind of hiker I am? What kind of backpacker instincts I have? Yeah, none. So I crouched low and walked in the brush along the side of the pavement until the street curved and I could no longer see the guardsmen (and they could no longer see me), and then I returned to the road.

  And I saw that already it was falling apart. The spring frost heaves (a term that had given me the giggles one day, because suddenly I imagined the poet hurling into a metal trash can) had wrought havoc on the asphalt everywhere in the Northeast Kingdom, but this was different. Patches of the road were coated in pebbles and dirt from disuse, and some of the edges were collapsing into the embankment. There were downed tree branches and small limbs sometimes smack in the middle of the road, right on top of the double yellow line.

  It was desolate and beautiful.

  But it also wasn’t completely deserted. I had gone maybe a mile, just past a gun store that had always given me the creeps—it was in a small red barn beside the owner’s double-wide trailer, and it had padlocks and alarms and wrought-iron grills on the windows—when I noticed a set of tire tracks in one length of dirt on the street. I’m no detective, but I noted they were wide. A National Guard truck, I guessed. Maybe some kind of vehicle involved in some kind of cleanup. I told myself it had nothing to do with a cult of psychotic holdouts living illegally out here, ranging around in some monster pickup with big and stupid tires, but the alarm inside me was triggered. After all, how difficult had it been for me to get inside the Exclusion Zone? Not difficult at all. There could be lunatic survivalists and there could be looters and there could be all kinds of terrifying hybrid mutants. (When you’re a girl my age and you’re alone and you have brain chemistry issues, the mind travels pretty quickly to AMC and the latest zombie movie. When you’re a girl my age and you’re alone and you don’t have brain chemistry issues, I hope it goes to Love Actually.)

  I guess it’s a healthy sign that I was scared. If I was legit suicidal, I wouldn’t have been frightened, right? But maybe I just wanted to die on my own terms—after I got home. After I saw the plant where my parents had died. After I found whatever was left of my dog.

  Obviously I’d been thinking about Cameron as I had worked my way back to the Kingdom. I walked part of the way, but mostly I hitchhiked. I kept trying to reassure myself that once the swelling in his brain had gone down, the doctors would wake him up from his coma. It would be some real-life fairy-tale magic. Kiss the princess, and she opens her eyes. Pull an IV or whatever out of the little kid’s arm, and he sits up in bed. I told myself that everything would work out, and in weeks he’d be in a new home—a good home—and while he might still sleep in that mummy bag, the bag would be on a bed. He would find his friends and he would go to the skate park and he’d show off his crazy mad skills. It had to work out, right?

  Of course it didn’t have to. I knew that. With every step I took I was reminded that things sure as hell hadn’t worked out in the past. Every time I sat myself down in whatever car or truck had picked me up and was taking me farther and farther away from the hospital, an image of Cameron on the emergency room gurney would flash behind my eyes. Sometimes I could blink the image away, but other times it would linger.

  I was with people for a lot of the time, because I clocked most of the miles back in somebody’s vehicle, but I felt as lonely as I had in my last days in the posse—those days after Andrea had left. I once read a short story about these four guys who’ve survived a shipwreck and are now in this open boat, and they can see the shore and people on the shore can see them, but the people on the shore don’t realize these four dudes are exhausted and in serious trouble because they can’t reach the beach. The “inshore rollers” (I loved that phrase because it sounded like the name for a rock band) are too strong. The guys in the boat are in danger of drowning, and the morons on the beach are waving at them. That’s sort of how I felt when I would sit beside each person who brought me ten or fifteen miles closer to the Exclusion Zone: I was out at sea in this little boat and probably going to drown, and they had no idea. No idea at all.

  Which was fine.

  Part of the way there I was in a beige Prius with a very nice old lady who lectured me about the dangers of hitchhiking. Part of the way there I was in a red Subaru with the pastor for a church in Underhill who seemed unbelievably chill and put me at ease by talking about the kind of season he hoped the Red Sox would have. And part of the way there I was with an unbelievably annoying town clerk who drove a PT Cruiser she thought was a trash can. I had to push piles of empty McDonald’s bags and gum wrappers and Styrofoam coffee cups off the seat before I could get in, and the floor was a sticky mess from all the soda she’d spilled over time. But she wasn’t annoying because she was a car slob. She was annoying because she was volunteering all this stuff about what a cadbury her son was, though of course she didn’t use that word. She just said he was a drunk. He had lost his driver’s license the week before because of a DUI. Obviously unaware of who I was, she told me about the ways alcohol could ruin your career or your marriage or your reputation. Her son was a newlywed guy who had a silkscreen T-shirt company, and already his wife was pissed at him big-time.
So was his partner in their little start-up. “No good comes from drinking too much,” she said, shaking her head. “Just look at that engineer from the nuclear plant. Look what he did. Look. What. He. Did.”

  I saw a convenience store up ahead and said that was where I wanted to get out. She didn’t seem happy about this change of plan, but she dealt.

  I wondered at one point if I would see Sandy the bread guy. I had liked him and his daughter and the whole Thomas clan. I figured I wouldn’t see him, but you never know. One thing I’ve learned is that six degrees of separation always trumps million-to-one odds. It really does. But he never passed me, and I never even noticed any trucks from his bakery.

  I saw wisps of green at the tips of the maples. Spring.

  Halfway between the roadblock and my old school I came across a hillside with nothing but the bones and carcasses of cows. There must have been fifty or sixty of them. Maybe more. On the ridge atop another meadow I saw three living horses with luxurious-looking long winter coats. One was buckskin and two were bay. The bays had white stocking feet. I waved when I saw they were watching me, and then I nickered, hoping they would come to the street. Instead they turned and galloped away. Later I saw barn cats in the window of a hayloft. I saw deer. I saw a pair of mostly—but not entirely—eaten dead moose. And I saw a pack of big dogs that now had gone wild. I wondered if they were the animals that were eating the moose. It was possible. But it might also have been coyotes. I assumed that the cows had died of radiation sickness; they’d drunk from the wrong stream or grazed on contaminated grass. But one of the doctors here said maybe not. Maybe they had just succumbed to the cold or, because they were trapped in that field, run out of pasture and starved to death. I reminded him that they were still dead because of Cape Abenaki.