And I was pretty clean when I was with Cameron. I did a bowl the weekend we finally came in from the cold, but that was it. Let’s face it, I had to have my head on straight. I was all that little guy had.
I years had been from home,
And now, before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before
Stare vacant into mine
This was one of my favorite poems Emily Dickinson wrote. It’s more about memory than it is about returning home and wondering what sort of welcome awaits. It’s more about change.
But when, nine months after Reactor One exploded, I struggled back home to Reddington—filled with self-loathing because of what happened to Cameron and having given up on my own life completely—I interpreted it both ways. It felt like years since I’d been there. And I wasn’t sure what face would greet me in the mirror in my own bedroom. (I wasn’t worried about who would greet me, because I knew the Exclusion Zone was—at least supposedly—deserted.)
Also: I promised you I would be honest. I promised myself I would be honest. If I am not going to be miserly with the truth, I should rewrite a sentence from that last paragraph. Here goes:
But when, nine months after Reactor One exploded, I struggled back home to Reddington—filled with self-loathing because of what I had done to Cameron and having given up on my own life completely—I interpreted it both ways.
Sometimes I just wish I could go back in time. God. I so really do.
Other times I do this: I try and imagine what’s going on in someone else’s life at the exact same moment that something is happening to me. Sometimes I focus on how unbelievably monumental shit is going down somewhere, at the same time that the rest of us are just going about our daily lives. I mean, think of all the people who were just grocery shopping in Concord, New Hampshire, or Austin, Texas, when Reactor One exploded. Some woman somewhere is putting a jar of pickles in her metal shopping cart at a Price Chopper at the exact same time that another woman—my mom—is being blown into who knows how many little pieces. (I will never know how many little pieces. But I do know they were all radioactive.) And sometimes it’s comparisons that are not quite that extreme.
But here is another one I think about: What was I doing at the precise moment when a seriously nasty dirtball named Bob Rouger took his hammy, middle-aged fist and popped it into a nine-year-old kid’s eye?
When I was first thinking I was going to tell you about Cameron’s foster dad, I started yet another poem I didn’t finish:
The G was hard as in rug,
Not soft as in rouge.
I didn’t finish it because suddenly I wasn’t sure if “rouge” would be considered a soft G. My bad. Anyway, Rouger’s name was pronounced “roux” as in something to do with cooking and “grrrrrr” as in batshit-rabid dog.
I ask you: What kind of bastard punches a nine-year-old kid? Seriously: Who does that?
And yet—for ten thousand reasons—Cameron would have been a lot better off if he hadn’t run away after his foster dad socked him. I wish he had gone to school the next day with that black eye, because I have to believe that some teacher would have said “Whoa!” and immediately called social services. And while all that would have meant for Cameron was another foster home, it would have meant that someone might have handed Rouger his ass on a plate. Maybe even jail. A girl can hope, right?
So, what was Cameron’s crime? He was taking a twenty out of Rouger’s wallet so he could go to the Montshire Museum on a class field trip and not have to be, once again, the usual, pathetic foster kid charity case. When he’d asked Dee Rouger, his foster mom, for the scratch, she’d said no, they didn’t have it—though, of course, they always had the money to pay for field trips for their three real kids. So, he thought he’d just take a twenty. And he got caught. Not good, I know. But, you have to admit, it has a little moral grayness to it. Besides, things had been pretty nasty all six months that Cameron had been there. Bob Rouger had slugged him before. Dee Rouger had slapped him before. And their real kids? They didn’t trust Cameron as far as they could have thrown him—and, according to Cameron, they couldn’t have thrown him more than a foot. Two prissy middle school girls and one six-year-old boy.
So, what was I doing the night Bob Rouger was trying to make a nine-year-old kid’s eye socket the width of his fist? What was I doing that very moment? Maybe it was the exact second when I was standing outside the Kappa Sig Something fraternity house on Main Street, blowing into my hands and wondering if I looked too skanky to fuck some UVM frat boy who was back on campus so he could drink and ski. It would mean a warm room, and I was freezing. But, in the end, I decided no frat boy who really was from a place like Briarcliff would want anything to do with me. I’d left Poacher’s by then and I was kind of a mess.
The Rouger household was Cameron’s fourth foster home. After Bob Rouger got medieval on his face, Cameron had had enough. As I said, we didn’t see each other later that night, but we were both camped out in that empty coal plant down by the waterfront. I came there from outside the fraternity house, and he came there from the Rougers’. It was the next day that I would see him and learn all about his duct tape art and his precious mummy bag—and realize that for all his swagger, the kid was in at least as much trouble as I was.
Cameron was nine and Maggie was nine, but they didn’t have the same birthday. Just an observation. And, obviously, Maggie was something like sixty-three years old in dog years.
When I told Cameron that I had a dog his age, I choked on the words and had to tell him that I had a tickle in my throat.
One time when I was in New York City with my mom and dad, we passed a homeless guy with his homeless dog outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was a German shepherd and seemed very sweet. Bony, of course, which combined with its very pointy ears made it look like something straight from The Hobbit. The guy’s little handwritten cardboard sign asking for dough said the dog was named Smokey and they were both very hungry. My dad said they might really be homeless, but they probably made an okay living. My mom wasn’t so sure.
I know I’ve been through a lot, but sometimes I’m not sure I can think of anything sadder than a homeless person with a homeless dog.
Chapter 11
I sometimes hear people talking about how normal things are now, compared to those first weeks after Reactor One exploded. It’s true. There is the Exclusion Zone, and it must suck to be a Vermont dairy farmer because no one wants Vermont milk or cheese anymore. But for most of the world—for most of Vermont—the Cape Abenaki meltdown is just another bit of old news. Tsunamis. School shootings. Syria. We watch it, we read about it, and then we move on. As a species, we’re either very resilient or super callous. I don’t know which.
But those days in late June and early July? The nuclear power plant was pretty much on everyone’s mind, even when they weren’t talking about it. People tried to do their jobs, but everyone’s head was someplace else. I think that was clearly the case with Edie, my counselor at the shelter. Edie knew what she was doing. I think she was a great social worker, I really do. But it was probably a little harder than usual for her to focus. I’m kind of amazed that airplanes weren’t falling out of the skies because pilots were thinking about Cape Abenaki when they were supposed to be flying their 787s. I’m a little surprised that anyone survived brain surgery back then.
My point? I think Edie would have been on to me right away if she hadn’t been a little preoccupied. I was able to buy time at the shelter because I insisted I was eighteen, which meant that I didn’t need my parents’ permission to be there. And I got a little more time with the weekend, because schools and agencies were closed. But by day five, I could see things were starting to unravel. In theory, my parents were back from the cruise now, and I could see that Edie was losing patience with my insistence that there was some deep, dark secret why I didn’t want them to know where I was.
“Briarcliff High School, right?” she said
a little too casually to me on Monday morning, and I knew that she was going to call them and ask about this person named Abby Bliss. And while the school might have been in the chaos of finals or getting ready for graduation, someone there was going to pick up the phone and look up some records and tell this social worker from Vermont that no one named Abby Bliss had ever been enrolled there.
So, to postpone the inevitable, I told Edie that my mom was coming to Vermont on Wednesday and they could actually meet and talk about my situation. The dialogue went pretty much like this:
EDIE: You spoke to her?
ME: Uh-huh.
EDIE: When?
ME: Maybe an hour ago. The boat had just gotten back to land. Fort Lauderdale.
EDIE: So you’re telling me you called her.
ME: Yes.
EDIE: I thought you lost your phone.
ME: I borrowed one.
She stared at me pretty intensely, probably trying to figure out if I was lying. My biology teacher once talked about how body language and facial expressions are great ways to see if someone can be trusted, so I tried to look real calm and innocent. I stood as still as I could and tried to meet her eyes, but I was also scanning the room to see who wasn’t there. If she asked me whose phone I’d borrowed, I was going to be sure and answer with the name of someone who wasn’t around that second, so I could get to them first and tell them to back me up—to be sure and say that I’d used their phone. But Edie never asked. See what I mean about people being off their game?
EDIE: Okay, Abby: here’s the thing I began to wonder about this weekend.
I waited.
EDIE: Why did your parents even go on a cruise this week?
ME: They like cruises. They go on them a lot.
EDIE: No, I mean now. You left home, you dropped out of school. I would think most parents would be freaking out. They’d cancel their plans.
ME: I left after they left.
EDIE: So they thought you were home all this time.
ME: That’s it.
EDIE: And now they’re back in time for your graduation.
I nodded, though there was more than a little sarcasm in her tone.
EDIE: How come you changed your mind about telling them where you were? I thought you didn’t want them to know you were here.
ME: I have you.
My saying that was kind of a reflex. It was pretty cheesy. So I added really quickly, “And I have the shelter.” But Edie raised a single eyebrow and just watched me, and I thought of this hymn we sang one of the only times my family ever went to church in Reddington when it wasn’t Christmas or Easter. There was a line in it, “Let us live transparently,” and it became this running joke between my parents. They would tease each other and say, “Yup, I can see right through you.” I had the sense that moment that Edie could see right through me. But there was nothing else to do but try and ride this moment out and figure out my Plan B.
You know what I wish? I wish I could raise a single eyebrow the way Edie could. I think if I were able to do that, I would have said and done way less stupid shit over the years.
And, of course, my need for Plan B came way sooner than I expected. I figured I had until Wednesday or Thursday. Nope.
That Monday my exciting day involved going to a class to learn about staying safe from STDs, and mostly we put rubbers on food: bananas, though one boy who knew what was coming showed up with a cucumber. It was one more step toward a fifty-buck MasterCard. After the class, I thought about walking down to the waterfront because it was really pretty outside, but that would mean passing the tents and the walkers and I knew I couldn’t bear that. I just couldn’t. So I disappeared once more into the second floor of the library. A little later I looked at clothes in the stores on Church Street and in the mall. See what I mean about what a weird time it was? Once you were sixty or seventy miles away from Cape Abenaki, people could sort of forget about it, at least for a few minutes. Girls were buying underwear and boys were buying caps and grown-ups were buying whatever. Shoes. Chocolate. Blue jeans. In Los Angeles, did people even care that a nuclear plant had blown up in Vermont? Yeah, I overheard people discussing it. Worrying about radiation. Complaining about the refugees. Talking shit about my dad. But for a lot of people it was just news. Maybe an inconvenience because their electricity bills might go up, but not the freaking fiasco it was for some of us.
I got back to the shelter about six-thirty and went right upstairs to my room. Camille was already there and she strolled in and sat down on my bed. She was acting pretty casual, but I had the sense right away that I was fucked. She wasn’t wearing my earrings and I wondered why: she had been wearing them ever since she had bullied them off my ears. She liked them, but she also knew that it really got under my skin when I saw them dangling from her lobes.
“What do you want?” I asked. Our rooms didn’t have chairs and I didn’t want to sit down next to her on the bed, so I leaned against the dresser. I knew there was at least one other girl already checked in for the night—the girl who hoarded the free newspapers. But she was kind of a recluse and kind of mousy: she wasn’t going to take my side in whatever was about to go down.
Camille looked away from me, out the window. “Just chillin’,” she said. “No need to get all crazy.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I don’t know. Your voice sounded a little touchy. I keep telling you: I want us to be friends.”
“Okay.”
“So,” she said. “You hear anything new about the meltdown?”
I shook my head.
“It’s awful. They say the fires are out. Of course, those poor fuckers who put the fires out are all going to die. Not today, not tomorrow. But they say they’re all going to get cancer someday. They’re heroes. But they’re all as good as dead.”
“Yeah, it’s bad,” I agreed. Really, what else was I supposed to say?
“Already nineteen people are dead.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And all because the operators were dopes. You know, the engineers? Totally screwed the pooch. And they killed nineteen people.”
“It’s bad,” I said. An understatement, obviously. I was just trying not to say the wrong thing, whatever that was.
“And, you know, people won’t be able to live in the Northeast Kingdom for, like, forever,” she said. “I once went to that water park at Jay Peak. You ever hear of Jay Peak where you grew up? That Briar-place outside of New York City?”
“Yeah. I’ve heard of Jay Peak. Ski resort.”
“Before you came here, had you ever heard of the power plant? Cape Abenaki?”
“No.”
She reached into the back pocket of her blue jeans and pulled out her phone. She held it out like it was a knife, pointing it at me, and looked up. I tried to meet her eyes, but couldn’t.
“Abby,” she murmured, but it wasn’t like she was starting to say something to me. She was just trying out my name on her tongue. Seeing what it sounded like. Then: “I went to the library today. Didn’t see you there. But I guess I wouldn’t, right, because you’re always upstairs with the books?”
“The novels. The poetry. I get it: I’m kind of dorky.”
She ignored me and went on: “Me? I was using the computers. You know, looking shit up.”
It crossed my mind that second that I should just get the hell out. Walk away. Walk downstairs. I mean, I could see where this was going. But I didn’t have my Plan B yet. So I just stood there. It was, looking back, a seriously pathetic choice.
“I was looking up names,” she said.
“That’s cool.”
“Ya think?”
I shrugged, waiting.
She swiped the screen of her phone, turning it on, and gazed down at it. “I like the name Abby. I think I like it way more than you like Camille.”
“I like Camille, I told you that.”
“Nah. But I’m good with it. I like it, and that’s all that matters.”
“Right.”
“Do you like the name Mira?”
As soon as she asked if I liked my mom’s name, I knew it was over. She might not know my name, but she knew I was Bill and Mira Shepard’s daughter. Even if I could come up with some remotely plausible reason for why I was calling people named Bill and Mira Shepard—and I couldn’t, my mind was toast—she wasn’t going to believe it. She wasn’t going to believe me.
Still, I said, “Camille, there’s a—”
But she cut me off. “Know anyone named Bill Shepard, Abby? Wasn’t that the name of the dude who blew up the reactor in Newport? What a coincidence. And who is this Mira Shepard? Seems there was a Mira Shepard who worked there, too. Married to Bill. Was always saying how safe nuclear power was and how safe that plant was. Guess she was wrong. I guess—”
I didn’t listen anymore. I couldn’t. I did what I should have done the minute she started talking. I left. I didn’t even try and empty the few pieces of clothing I had in the drawers or grab my toothbrush and toothpaste. I mean, why bother? I just turned and raced down the stairs, past the dude who was staffing the desk, and out into the summer evening. Camille yelled down the staircase at me, “I pawned the earrings, bitch! I pawned ’em!”
The guy at the desk called after me to stop, but I didn’t listen. I was out the door and on the sidewalk. I was running, I was running as fast as I could. I didn’t slow down until I had turned the corner onto Church Street, that outdoor pedestrian mall, and the only reason I went from sprinting to jogging was because it was too crowded to run like a crazy person on the bricks. I went past the restaurants and bars where people were eating and drinking like it was just another night at the end of June, but nothing was really registering. I had no idea what I was going to do. But then I thought of Andrea. I remembered the statue of the kids playing leapfrog and figured it would be a miracle if she was actually sitting on the bench beside it at that exact moment, but it was still light out so you never knew. And I didn’t have anyplace else to go. So I continued down Church Street and, miracle of miracles, there she was. She was sitting on the bench by the statue and sharing a cigarette with a guy who I’d learn in a couple of minutes was called PJ. Poacher Junior.