Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

  The woods weren’t super thick, and it couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile to get back to the main road, Route 100. I wanted to go north, but it was amazing what I saw: all traffic was going south. Route 100 is a main road in Vermont—it goes all the way from Canada to Massachusetts, I think—but this is still Vermont, so it’s only two lanes. And both lanes were being used to move people south, away from Newport and Reddington. And the lanes were packed. It was cars and trucks moving at a crawl as far as I could see. The people who had motorcycles or bicycles were weaving in and out and along the shoulders and making much better time than the vehicles. There were these two poor volunteer firefighters who were trying to direct traffic, and they were so out of their league. They couldn’t have been a whole lot older than me, and things had really gone to shit since our buses had arrived at the college a few hours earlier. People were screaming at the two guys, and some dudes were honking their horns (like that was going to make a difference). Between the wind and the rain and the occasional thunder and the horns and the drivers who were yelling out their windows, it was madness. Everyone was so scared they were batshit crazy. I saw that the back of one pickup truck was filled with little kids—some were toddlers!—and there were two women who must have been my mom’s age watching them. They were trying to hold this blue tarp over the children, and some of the kids were just wailing. Who puts (what I guess was) some little preschool in the back of a pickup? People who are scared shitless and just not thinking straight, that’s who. I saw one station wagon that had a wooden desk with the drawers held shut with duct tape hitched to the top, and another that had four cat boxes—with cats in them!—strapped to the bars of a roof rack. There was one SUV after another filled with so much stuff that you couldn’t see inside. There were people trying to get away on tractors and on horseback, and I saw one Mini Cooper that looked like a clown car: I swear they must have wedged seven or eight people inside it. I suppose some of those people ended up among the walkers. Maybe they’d run out of gas eventually. That happened to lots of people, I understand.

  So, I just started walking north against the traffic. And even on the side of the road, walking against the flow was really hard: think salmon. (And, yes, I was as wet as a fish. But I probably looked more like a wet cat.) I could tell that everyone thought I was a lunatic. People, usually moms and ladies who looked to me like grandmothers, would yell at me to stop, to turn around, to go the other way, and some folks even opened their car doors and asked me to get in. I ignored them all and finally started to run. I knew I couldn’t run or walk all the way back to Reddington, but I figured eventually I would find someone going in that direction.

  And eventually I did.

  Not far from the college I saw a Johnson fire engine stopped at a gas station at an intersection. The driver was standing beside his door and talking on his cell phone. I could see someone else was sitting in the passenger seat. I stood just close enough to figure out that he was getting instructions: he was supposed to go to some staging point near Newport where he would be given more information on what to do, and someone was telling him what alternate road to take since he sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to buck the tide on Route 100. When he climbed back into the truck and shut his door, I jumped onto the metal back step and held on to the side rails. I had the kind of lightning-bolt thought that is completely inappropriate: I’m in a James Bond movie. But the thought passed, and there was really nothing crazy dangerous about what I was doing. The fire engine was going about five or ten miles an hour most of the time, and in fact I sat down on the corner of the back step and curled up against the rain and waited to see where we would go. I used a column of those orange traffic cones as a cushion. I had a feeling this staging area would be pretty close to Cape Abenaki or the village, and soon enough I would find out what had happened to my parents and what had happened at the plant.

  I was right about the proximity of the staging area to the power plant, but I was wrong about everything else.

  The way the teen shelter worked was pretty simple: If you were under eighteen, you had to have your parents’ permission to be there. Otherwise, the staff had to call family services, and you’d probably wind up in a foster home. So, I had been lying from the second I arrived. My name was Abby Bliss, I was eighteen, I was from Briarcliff, New York. When I showed up, I told them I’d lost my wallet with my driver’s license the night before when I’d been mugged. Given what I’d experienced on my way in from the Kingdom and the things people were saying about my family, the last person I wanted to be was me.

  In the morning, they kicked you out, usually by eight a.m. You couldn’t hang out there during the day, because they wanted you going to school or getting a GED or volunteering someplace where you could get job skills. They wanted you meeting with your counselors. They wanted you doing something.

  But they did have what they called the drop-in, which I don’t think was supposed to be some snarky reference to the reality that all of us were dropouts. But you could just “drop in” and chill for a while. Sit on the couches, which were kind of grungy and smelled like feet, or make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (My favorite place to crash was one of these two big easy chairs that were covered in plastic so they were easy to clean.) The drop-in was on the first floor of the building beside the shelter and only about a block from the northern end of Church Street. You can bet your ass the visiting leaf peepers gave that corner of Burlington a very wide berth.

  There were rules to hanging out there, the main ones being no drugs and no alcohol. And there were classes, which were important because they paid us to go to them. I am not shitting you. They paid us. For showing up for a week of classes we would get a MasterCard with fifty dollars on it. The card wouldn’t work if you tried to buy beer or cigarettes, but otherwise it was as good as cash. And the classes were on things like how to write a résumé or how to rent an apartment or how to open a bank account. The classes were about “life skills.” They usually lasted an hour, and other than fucking Montreal truckers, there’s not a whole lot a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl can do that pays that kind of scratch. So before I left the shelter, I went to them. Altogether, I went to five.

  And that’s where I met Andrea. She wasn’t living in the shelter by then. She wasn’t even welcome in the classes. The counselors had decided that she was kind of a lost cause. For a time she’d done okay. But by the time I met her she’d concluded that it was easier to sleep and do drugs and turn tricks than to stop and try something else. She had sort of given up on herself. She told me that once upon a time the shelter’s plan was to give her a shot at moving into one of the organization’s transitional living apartments. Make her quasi-independent. But that never happened. She relapsed, and I guess it was easier to stay “relapsed.” At first the staff tried to get her back, but it didn’t work. So finally they gave her bed at the shelter to another girl. You can’t save everybody, right? Andrea was built for anti-anxiety meds, and she was built for addiction. But she was so sweet. She really was. I loved that girl.

  Anyway, she showed up at the class that day to try and get a MasterCard, but she was kind of strung out and the staff was so on to her by that point. Even I could see she was in serious need of something that afternoon. She was pretty much busted before she had even sat down and started to cry. The woman who was teaching the class—it was about how to dress for an interview and what to say and what not to say and how to behave—knew Andrea and I could see her heart was breaking. The staff person’s name was Edith, which is a completely awful name, especially because the woman kind of had it going on: she was thirty with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes behind those nerd glasses that beautiful women can somehow pull off. She had us call her Edie, and she was, like me, tiny. My second day at the shelter, when I was still shell-shocked and thought this shelter thing might work, she suggested we check out a bunch of the petite clothes that some preppy store had just donated so that I would have some intervie
w threads. It was a nice idea, but it never happened. I kind of let her down. (Obviously I kind of let a lot of people down. But I think often about letting down Edie because she was so frigging well intentioned.)

  Andrea was tall and gangly, and her hair fell flat down the sides of her head like a greasy waterfall. It was naturally black, but it had streaks of purple and pink. She was wearing a beater T-shirt the white and brown of two-day-old snow by the side of the road, and blue jeans that were ripped everywhere. Knees. Thighs. Pockets. And she was pretty anxious. Back then I was so naïve I was thinking it was heroin. Nope. Just painkillers. Lots of painkillers. But she was needy and over time had probably violated every rule the shelter had. She was also pretty goth. Pierced nose. Pierced eyebrow. Lots of black mascara—which, as you’ll see, months later would start one of those event cascades that are only bad news.

  As I said, I wasn’t giving people my real name; I’d learned my lesson. So, I was calling myself Abby Bliss, because that was the name of one of Emily Dickinson’s friends (yes, she had friends) and it’s pretty unforgettable. I came up with it on the spot in a bread truck, and I kind of liked it. In hindsight, unforgettable was a mistake. I should have chosen Susan Huntington, Emily’s sister-in-law. Or I should have stuck with Abby, which was the name that first came to me, but used her last name before she got married: Wood. Abby Wood is a name that does not draw attention to itself.

  After Edie told Andrea that she wasn’t going to get the MasterCard, she sat down on the couch next to me. Actually, she sort of collapsed. Her big long body was like a marionette’s after you snip the strings. It just goes limp. And that’s when I wondered how old she really was. I guess because she was pierced and four or five inches taller than me, I’d pegged her for nineteen or twenty. But maybe she had been lying all along about her age, too. When she sat on the couch, she brought her knees up to her chest, and I saw the ivy tattoo on her ankle. She was wearing flip-flops, but the bottoms of her feet were so dirty it was like she’d stepped in a fireplace after the logs were nothing but ash. She was pretty jittery: her legs were almost vibrating, and she kept playing with her earrings and her earlobes.

  “I’m Andrea,” she said, and I answered with my made-up name. There were nine or ten other kids there, some actually interested in getting help with job interview skills and some just after the fifty-buck MasterCard. Me? I was probably somewhere in between. I mean, I was seriously stressed out. And I was living this lie, and not just about who my parents were or what my name was. If the counselors had known I was a walker from the Kingdom, they would have turned me in to the Red Cross or one of the groups that was trying to help with the refugees from that corner of the state. And I wanted to disappear.

  I’m nobody! Who are you?

  Are you nobody, too?

  Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

  They’d banish us, you know.

  Yeah, that would be me. I had to be a nobody so I wouldn’t be banished. The counselors thought I was a runaway from the suburbs of New York City who’d wound up homeless. I picked Briarcliff because it was the town where I’d been a little kid: it was only a few miles from the nuclear power plant on the Hudson River where my dad had worked back then.

  “Bliss? Really?” she asked. “Rhymes with kiss.”

  “I know.”

  “Can you sing?”

  “Nope.”

  “Too bad. You’ve got a great name for a rock star.”

  I hadn’t thought of that, because in my head I always saw Abby Bliss in a bonnet and check dress that fell to her ankles. “I guess,” I agreed.

  “You’re staying here?” she asked, and she motioned with her head upstairs to where the bedrooms were. We each had a bedroom of our own. They were small, but the counselors had figured out we were territorial and we needed our privacy. (Amazing, isn’t it? The boarders at Reddington Academy paid $45,000 a year to go there, and they lived in doubles and triples. Us? We were homeless, paid nothing, and each got a little room of our own.) There was a bed and a chest of drawers for each girl. The nights I was there, most of us needed no more than a drawer for our stuff. But not all of us. There were two girls at the shelter who were over-the-top hoarders. Wouldn’t part with anything. One of them had stacks and stacks of Burlington’s free weekly newspaper. (She liked reading the sexy personals in the back.) The other collected those elastic Livestrong and friendship bracelets. She must have had a thousand of them.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “I used to live here. But I needed more room. I needed more space.”

  “What do you do?”

  She shrugged. “This and that. You know.”

  I didn’t know. She pulled her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and checked a text. It made me miss my phone.

  “Anything new from Cape Abenaki?” I asked.

  “What a fucking nightmare that is,” she said. “I just can’t believe it, can you? All those animals that are going to die? They say no one will be able to live in the Kingdom for, like, ten thousand years. Ten thousand years! They say the radiation—”

  “Is there anything new about the plant operators?”

  “You mean that guy who they think was drunk? The engineer who screwed up those condenser thingies?”

  “Yeah … that guy.”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at the news. I really don’t look at the news. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” I lied. “You?”

  “Eighteen.” Then she said, “I like your hair.” She reached over and pushed a lock behind my ears.

  “It’s kind of dirty,” I said. I wanted to lie and say I liked her hair, too, but I didn’t think I would sound convincing. I liked Edie’s hair a lot more.

  “If my hair was like yours, I wouldn’t color it. I always wanted to be a blonde. My grandfather was an ad guy: ‘Blondes have more fun.’ He produced TV commercials. I think that was one of the slogans from one of his ads.”

  “Are you from New York?” I asked.

  “No, but my grandparents were.”

  “Until I came here, I lived in Briarcliff,” I said, which actually was only a lie if you interpreted the word “here” to mean the drop-in or Burlington.

  “I’ve heard of it,” she said, and then she leaned in close to me and whispered, “Look, everyone here is crazy righteous. Crazy. Righteous. We’re talking super do-gooders. If you ever need someone to really talk to, call me.”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  Her eyes went a little wide. “You don’t have a phone?”

  I shook my head. “I lost it.”

  “Okay, I know someone who can fix that for you.”

  “How?”

  “Leave that to me. In the meantime, if you need me, sometimes I hang out on Church Street. I like the benches by that statue of the kids playing leapfrog. And sometimes you can find me at Muddy Waters—the coffee place on Main Street.”

  It was right about then that Edie and another staffer, a young guy in his twenties named Bret, came over and stood over us. I thought Edie was going to cry when she looked at Andrea. But the dude? Way too tough. He looked more like a Marine than the sort of crunchy granola types who usually tried to help us. Practically a buzz cut and serious guns for arms. He was wearing a black T-shirt and it was almost a second skin.

  “Hello, Andrea,” Edie said.

  “Hey,” she murmured, and she looked down at her phone, instead of making eye contact with the social worker. She pretended to be very focused on a text.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Why do you think I’m here?” she answered. “Life skills. That’s what it’s all about, right?”

  “Where are you living?” the guy with Edie asked.

  “I have a place,” she answered.

  He folded his arms across his chest. “Where?”

  “Girl’s gotta have a little privacy,” she mumbled.

  “Are you clean?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Woul
dn’t be here if I weren’t, right? Isn’t that the rule?”

  Edie leaned in to get a closer look at Andrea’s face. I guess she wanted to scope out Andrea’s pupils. But Andrea jumped up from the couch and swiped Edie out of her way, knocking the social worker off balance and sending her to her knees. Somehow, the girl also sent her phone flying onto the hard wooden floor of the drop-in. It slid like a hockey puck into the baseboard radiators. Edie and Bret froze, and everyone in the room just went silent—except Andrea.

  “My phone!” she shrieked. “Goddamit, my phone!” She ran to the radiator and picked it up and immediately started checking to see if it still worked. Then she turned back to the two staffers and hissed at them, “You could have broken it. You know that, right? You could have broken it!”

  I expected one of them to say something to her. Maybe point out to her the detail that they hadn’t done anything. She was the one who had accidentally hurled her phone across the floor like a skipping stone. But Edie just got back on her feet and stood there next to Bret, taking it all in. Totally chill. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when Andrea finally broke.

  “I don’t need your sympathy!” she said, and she started to cry. “Stop looking at me! I don’t want your fucking help. I can take care of myself! Besides, you don’t want to help me. You don’t want to help anybody. You say you do, but you’re like everybody else. So, fuck you! Fuck you all!” She was sobbing suddenly, the mascara running down her cheeks like raindrops on glass. “I need money and if you don’t want to help me, then fuck you! Fuck you all!”