Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (26 page)

One of my doctors here asked me the other day if I worried about trying to find friends for Cameron. Yeah, no. I was worried about trying to find him food. I was worried about trying to keep him warm. I was worried about trying to prevent him from getting stolen or killed by some psycho. The doctor wanted to know how I felt about the idea that I was harboring a runaway and wasn’t allowing a child to go to school. I got all defensive because she made me sound like some selfish bitch—like I was some whack-job kidnapper who was treating Cameron like he was a pet.

I defended myself by saying that I brought him with me to the library all the time. We read together all the time. I taught him plenty, I really did. And it’s not as if people were lining up outside the igloo to care for him—or me. Finally I said to the doctor, “Sure, he was a runaway. But it’s not like anyone was looking for him. It’s not like anyone was looking for me.”

“People were looking for both of you,” she said.

I thought of the hours and hours we spent in the library or near
the boathouse by the lake or on the benches on Church Street. “Well, then, no one was looking very hard,” I told her.

This wasn’t a great thing to say, but I was pissed. And what I did those months? It’s all very hard to explain. I was just doing my best.

And given Cameron’s total refusal to come with me to the police station and go back into a foster home, sometimes it seemed to me I really had two choices. Either desert him or protect him. I chose to protect him. I knew it wasn’t going to be forever. Eventually, I knew, we’d have to come in from the cold. I guess I just thought it would be together.

Just for the record, when it got a little warm I did try to find Cameron some friends. I did try to find him some buddies. You’ll see.

In the middle of January, there was a huge protest march in Burlington against nuclear power. It began at the waterfront, not all that far from our igloo, and went up Main Street to the university, where there was going to be a big student rally and a bunch of speeches inside this massive chapel on the commons. The protesters lucked out: the skies were clear and there was a midwinter thaw. It must have been forty degrees that Saturday, and it felt even warmer because of the sun. Cameron and I watched the parade—the drummers and the people with placards about Cape Abenaki and Fukushima and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and some place I’d never heard of called Rocky Flats—from just outside Muddy Waters.

“Kind of like closing the barn door,” one older guy with white hair in a red check jacket said to us, his arms folded across his chest. I explained to Cameron what that meant—how the expression was
kind of a joke about bothering to close a barn door after the horses had left. Then I told Cameron—who knows why—to try and imagine the power of more than a million horses. That was how much power there was in a four-hundred-megawatt plant. (It’s just amazing the fun facts that stay with a girl when your mom and dad work for a power company.)

The fellow beside us looked at me and said, “You sure know your stuff.”

I shrugged and said, “Science class,” and then turned away. I was afraid I had already drawn too much attention to us.

It’s funny, but in the years before the Cape Abenaki meltdown, everyone in Vermont was arguing about wind power. People in favor of wind talked about how it would dial down our need for fossil fuel. People opposed said it would ruin the state’s natural beauty. Looking back, I bet people on both sides wish today that the state’s biggest problem was a couple of fucked-up ridgelines. They wish they could spend boatloads of time complaining about a line of wind turbines on the top of a mountain. It would mean they still had their homes. Me? I actually thought the turbines were kind of pretty in a
Star Wars
distant planet sort of way.

Really, I got almost no shit about nuclear power when my parents were alive. So I guess it’s both strange and somehow predictable that now the Shepard name is right up there with Satan.

Even when I was with Cameron, I hadn’t begun to think of what precisely my “endgame” would be. (I learned that term at a video store in the mall. They were showing a video of a popular TV detective drama, and one of the cops used it. I got right away what it meant. I liked it. It was so fatalistic.) But by late January I had the sense that this was all leading somewhere.

One crazy cold night Lexie and some dude I’d never met appeared down by the waterfront. Lexie was a friend of Missy’s, and once in a while she would show up at Poacher’s in the months I was there. The first time I’d heard her name, I thought it was some joke about Oxies. I imagined her swallowing whole handfuls of them—
lots of Oxies
—and somehow “lots of Oxies” was transformed into “Loxie,” which eventually became “Lexie.” I thought it was a nickname. Nope. Her real name was Alexandra, and, like Missy, she had grown up near Boston and come from serious scratch. She had dropped out of UVM and was older than most of us. But she was very slight. I’m not sure she was five feet tall. A lot of nights—maybe most nights—she crashed with people she still knew at the university. She only came to Poacher’s when she needed to flip a little candy and didn’t want to wind up passed out underneath three scummy frat boys. (You know you’re a hot mess when you go to Poacher’s because it’s the “safer” alternative.) She seemed nice enough, but I really didn’t hang with her. I had Andrea.

But late one midwinter afternoon, there she was trudging along the rock-hard snow and ice along the waterfront. I recognized her right away from this long, black cashmere duster she used to wear, but I wasn’t going to call out to her because she was with some dude I didn’t recognize. Cameron and I were just coming back from the library and this little sandwich shop on Main Street where it was easy to pocket their premade egg salad sandwiches on white bread. (It’s like they knew the sandwiches sucked and would only be eaten by nine-year-old boys, so they were super easy to lift.)

But Lexie called out to me and jogged over. She introduced me to the guy she was with. His name was Neal and she said he had also dropped out of UVM. I didn’t believe her for one second. The guy was a little runt who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. I was older than he was. But he seemed nice enough. He was shy. The two of them had planned to spend another night in that old coal plant, but the night before there had been some violence, and someone had gotten pounded pretty badly, and now
they wanted a new place to sleep. There wasn’t much wind, but already the temperature was only a degree or two above zero, and there was going to be a full moon. We all knew a full moon meant the lakefront would become a freezer. So I invited them in. It wasn’t the best solution, but I didn’t want them to die out there. And, to be honest, I was a little proud of the fact that I had built an igloo that could squeeze in four people.

Still, I wasn’t sure what I would have done if they had asked to spend a second night. Neal had that funky smell that seems to stick like Gorilla Glue to homeless men and teenage boys, and Lexie was covering her stink with a head shop’s worth of patchouli. Together it was kind of like poison gas. Besides, to make room for them and their backpacks, Cameron and I had wound up sleeping with our knees practically at our chests, two unborn twins in my tummy of an igloo. But Lexie and Neal didn’t want to stay another day. Or, if they did, they didn’t want to impose on us anymore. They got up with the sun and disappeared. We never saw them again.

Another night, we let a girl crash with us. She was in her twenties and a refugee from someplace in Africa. In the morning, she showed me her foot when she woke up. I nearly threw up. I walked her to Battery Street and put her in a cab myself. I told the cabbie to take her to the hospital ER. Even I know that you don’t fuck around with gangrene.

And one time I let in some scrawny woman whose snow jacket actually had patches on it from the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. It was light blue and it was antique and, it seemed to me, totally worthless against the cold. She was my mom’s age, but way too loopy to be maternal. She was a downwinder from Irasburg and seemed to go in and out of denial. One minute she was getting weepy about her cats and her llamas and her dog, all of whom, she worried, were dying of radiation sickness, and the next she was giggling and showing me these unbelievably crinkled and out-of-focus pictures of her little menagerie. It was kind of heartbreaking. I think she would have been way more intrigued by the fact I had a sidekick named Cameron with me if he’d been
a tortoiseshell cat instead of a nine-year-old boy. When I told her about Maggie, the two of us practically lost it.

That’s what I mean when I say that people came and went. But most of the time it really was just Cameron and me.

The bus station was out by the airport, so you had to take a local bus from the downtown to get there. In fact, it was part of the airport. There was a little ticket counter right by the baggage carousels, and a few times a day a Greyhound would pull up right outside a pair of sliding glass doors. Fortunately, Andrea’s bus was late—now, there’s a surprise—and so she was still sitting on a blue pretend-leather bench inside those doors when I got there. This was back in early December, still a few weeks before I would leave the posse and find Cameron. Her knees were bouncing up and down, and I could see that she was pretty wired on something. She jumped up when she saw me, gave a little shriek, and then we wrapped our arms around each other.