Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (28 page)

“Edgar, this is Abby and this is Cameron. Abby, this is Edgar. He doesn’t belong here, at least not when he’s like this.”

“I’m bleeding!”

“Of course you’re bleeding. What do you expect?”

“I have some Bactine,” I said.

All four of the grown-ups looked at me like I was a crazy person—which I guess I was. Cameron and I crawled back into the igloo to get it. When I reemerged, the men had let go of Edgar, and he was sitting down in the snow. After Patrice sprayed some of the antiseptic on his hand, the two men walked him back to the coal plant, and Cameron and I went back to bed. Apparently, Edgar could be violent. He had once gone to jail for knifing another homeless guy behind a bagel place on Church Street. And he wasn’t allowed anywhere near the men’s shelter because he was always picking fights. But Patrice didn’t believe he meant me or Cameron any harm. He was drunk and probably just wanted a place to get warm.

Still, I viewed this as a close call. I realized after that how I always needed to be on my guard.

One afternoon at Muddy Waters I ripped a flyer for some UVM garage band off the corkboard and wrote on the back,
You sense the clock is ticking
. I wrote more, some of which I remember, but it’s not worth sharing. I mention those six words, however, because I
knew I couldn’t go on like this. Eventually I was going to run out of time. Or stamina. Or food. Or warmth. Or, pure and simple, the will to live. That carriage was coming.

And while I had no conscious plan to go home to Reddington—God, I had no conscious plans at all—I found myself beginning to wonder what would happen if I did try and sneak back into the Exclusion Zone. That might, in fact, be my endgame. Some mornings, I would wake up so depressed that the only thing that kept me from leaving Burlington and doing exactly that was Cameron.

I found myself trying to imagine where the other Cape Abenaki families had gone. I figured they’d left Vermont and New Hampshire. They knew they weren’t wanted here. I thought a lot about where Eric Cunningham’s family had wound up. Eric was the engineer who had blown his brains out. I knew he had a wife. I knew he had a couple of kids younger than me.

But what was increasingly clear to me was that something had to give. The air felt weirdly electric, as if it was July and a storm was approaching. Something was coming; something had to change. I only had so much skin I could cut.

I remember explaining to Cameron very precisely why people wore camouflage clothes. He understood it pretty much already because two of his foster dads went deer hunting in November—and, of course, because he was a Vermonter. But I added what I knew about hunting blinds and deer stands (which wasn’t much) and how I guessed soldiers used camo gear. Camo clothes and camo tents and camo packs. Camo boots.

“I wouldn’t wear it to disguise myself,” he said.

“No?” I asked.

“No. It’s not like there’s anybody out there looking for me. And I think I’m pretty invisible anyway.”

I knew just what he meant.

Over lunch one day when Cameron and I were sitting on a ledge near the waterfront watching the airplanes bank over Lake Champlain and descend toward the airport, I asked him if he missed his friends. He’d told me a few names. There was an immigrant boy from the Sudan named Jean Paul. A kid named Kenny. Another boy named Finn. He said he didn’t know any of them all that well because he’d only been in the Burlington elementary school about four months.

“Do you think about them?” I asked.

He shrugged and took a bite of the energy bar. He chewed very carefully, like he wanted everything to last as long as possible. “I guess. Do you think about your friends?”

“Sure. But I’m not going back.”

“Me either.”

“Briarcliff is a lot farther away. Your friends are, like, right here. If you could see your friends, would you want to?”

“But I can’t.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you could just show up one afternoon at the skate park.”

“There was always a grown-up there. I’d get bagged.” By “bagged” he meant caught.

“We could say you were going to school in Shelburne now. We could say I was your new nanny,” I suggested.

“That like a babysitter?”

“Yup. Exactly.”

He seemed to think about this. As he did, I pointed at an Air Wisconsin regional jet in the skies above the western shore of the lake. It was just starting to dip its wing and begin its turn toward Vermont and the airport a few miles to our east. It was really pretty in the midday sun.

“Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice—I, just wear my Wings,”
I said. “I think of those lines sometimes when we watch the planes and the seagulls.” Cameron thought it was kind of random the way every once in a while I would just say aloud a line of poetry I liked. He was used to it by then, but he still thought I was insane.

“What’s a surplice?” he asked now.

“Honestly? I’m not sure. But I think it’s something a minister wears.”

“But the poet was just wearing wings.”

“Well, clothes, too.” I didn’t want him to imagine the poet was naked, because that wasn’t Emily Dickinson’s point.

“She was kind of overconfident.”

“You think?”

He finished his energy bar. “If she thought she was an angel, she was.”

“So, you want to see your buddies?”

“I don’t know. I’d need a skateboard.”

And suddenly I wanted him to have a skateboard. I wanted him to have it more than anything. And while there are many things you can lift—such as hand warmers and energy bars—a skateboard is sort of impossible. It’s not just the size. Let’s face it, I had lifted gallons of detergent the previous autumn. It’s the cost. A skateboard is big
and
expensive. That’s a tough combination. But I desperately wanted my little buddy to have a skateboard. I desperately wanted him to see his friends. So, that night I convinced Patrice the feral cat whisperer to keep an eye on Cameron, and then I cleaned myself up at the Y and went out to the interstate exit. It had been a while, but I remembered instantly how gross the men were and the weird things they wanted you to say while they were inside you. At one point I had yet another one of those strange out-of-body moments when I looked up at the dude, a thin and gangly and greasy trucker from Rhode Island, but at least this time I didn’t wind up weeping in the fetal position. Instead I found myself thinking, what did I need to do to make absolutely sure that Cameron never, ever became … this?

But when I got back to the igloo, I had enough money for a
skateboard and some new clothes for us both. And the next day, when I was watching Cameron pick out a pretty sick board at the skate shop—it had a bunch of skeletons rubbing these magic lamps and all kinds of genies rising from them in blue fog and smoke—I was seriously happy because he was seriously happy. Finally he had something he liked as much as that mummy bag! Finally! He was a little apprehensive at first because he couldn’t understand why out of the blue I was so flush, and he kept saying we should save the money for food or an emergency or something. But I was pretty adamant: I knew what I wanted.

The next warm day we walked to the skate park, and Cameron did some pretty mad shit on that board. I was impressed. There was a boy he knew there, but not all that well. Still, the two of them had fun together. I stood there for a while chatting with some very nice mom who had recently arrived in Vermont from Syria. Her name was Nairi Shushan Checkosky (think Tchaikovsky) and she was half Armenian. She wanted to know how long I had been an au pair—her term for nanny—and why a smart girl like me wasn’t in college. I said I was earning money for college, and clearly she approved. She gave me her business card because she said she knew other families who might need an au pair. She had dark eyes and chestnut hair and was very beautiful. I gather she was a singer—or had been a singer until everything went to hell in Syria. Now she sold real estate. I think she must have spoken a hundred languages.

Cameron and I went back to the skate park maybe five or six times over the next two months. There was more snow and cold, but there were also times when we could feel the days getting longer and the warmth of spring. Some days we walked past crocuses, a flower that in Vermont has to have a death wish. You pop your head up out of the marshy ground, look around at the sun, and then get hammered with a foot and a half of snow.

But on our way back to the waterfront that first time, Cameron and I watched the sun set over the Adirondacks and it was gorgeous. Postcard perfect. It was one of those moments when, somehow, I was at once impossibly happy and unbelievably blue.

Chapter 15

The sugaring season came
early that spring. There were sugar runs by the middle of February, and some people were even blaming that on Cape Abenaki. Me? I blamed it on good old-fashioned global climate change. But for a week after Valentine’s Day, whenever Cameron and I would go to the library all of the people in the periodical room were chattering on and on about how much less maple syrup Vermont was now going to produce because so many of the sugarhouses were in the Exclusion Zone. Others were insisting that no one was going to buy Vermont maple syrup ever again, just like no one wanted Vermont milk and cheese anymore. This was, in their opinion, just one more reason to hate anyone who had ever had anything at all to do with the nuclear plant.

My family didn’t sugar, but I knew people who did. I even knew some people from the plant—including an engineer, as a matter of fact—who loved sugaring precisely because it was so freaking low-tech. And if you’re a kid (and he had kids), a sugarhouse is a pretty enchanted place, even if it’s actually a decrepit shed so small it can barely fit an evaporator the size of a pool table. It might be thirty-five or forty degrees outside, but chances are the heat from the wood fire and all that steam will make it feel like a sauna inside. There is the mouthwatering aroma of maple. And there is that whole fake fairy-tale vibe: a shack at the edge of the woods with a roaring, medieval fire inside and something magic and strange occurring in the roiling fluid above the flames—a vat of sap that can be stilled in a heartbeat by a dollop of butter or a
little drop of cream. Eventually all of that sap will thicken into ambrosia.

Of course, the first thing I thought of then and I think of now when I see a sugarhouse is the rager. Yeah, I was there. Of course. And I got into trouble. The problem wasn’t that we were partying in a sugarhouse: it was that we were partying in the Snowman Haverford Sugarhouse. Snowman was the son of James Howard Haverford, the sewing machine bazillionaire who founded the Academy. Snowman wasn’t his son’s real name, of course. I have no idea anymore what his real first name was. But he was nicknamed Snowman because he used to take photographs of snowflakes at the end of the nineteenth century with a dude from Jericho, Vermont, named Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley. And Snowman had a massive sugarhouse that was now a museum to sugarmaking and to those photos of snowflakes. In the spring they fired up the evaporator, but most of the time it was a destination for elementary school field trips. It wasn’t that far from the Academy, and we often saw a line of yellow school buses there with the names of school districts two and three hours away. And why not? They had the whole history of sugarmaking in there, and the kids always went home with samples of maple sugar candies.