But, still, my parents and I found all kinds of reasons to fight and sometimes my parents’ behavior completely sucked. Here is one memory that I think about a lot. And, in all fairness, I probably think about it because it was one of the moments when I really hadn’t done anything wrong. I have plenty where I’m the culprit, and they haunt me, too. I’ll get to some more of them, I promise. But this one? I’m just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was a Friday night and I was thirteen. I was in eighth grade and it was sometime in March. I had been at my friend Lisa Curran’s home, watching videos on YouTube (tons of movie previews, which for some reason we could watch for hours) with her and her mom and another friend of ours, a girl named Claire, and baking cookies. Lisa’s mom loved to bake. We didn’t always do such incredibly wholesome stuff as bake cookies, but we happened to that night. About eleven o’clock, Claire’s dad came to pick her up. I figured my dad was right behind him. When he’d dropped me off, I’d said, Please pick me up at eleven. But eleven became eleven-fifteen, and eleven-fifteen became eleven-thirty. I knew Lisa’s mom wanted to go to bed, so this was getting seriously awkward. So, I called my house and my mom answered the phone, which surprised me because usually she was out like a light by eleven-thirty. But I recognized the tone of her voice instantly: it was this low, controlled, throaty voice she used when she was trying not to appear drunk. I asked if she or Dad could come and pick me up, and she said she would be right over. She said she thought Claire’s dad was bringing me home, which was a total lie.
The Currans had a pretty short driveway. They lived about four miles from us in an old farmhouse that Lisa’s dad, the airline pilot, had restored when he was younger. But like a lot of farmhouses, it was pretty close to the road. And so we saw the brights of Mom’s Subaru as she was speeding down the road and then heard the brakes as she must have squashed the pedal to the floor and tried to make the turn into the driveway. She made it, barely. But she sideswiped the Currans’ metal mailbox, ripping it off the wooden post. It would be a few years before I’d key Philip’s mom’s Beemer, but I’d seen other cars keyed by then, and the passenger side of our car looked like some kid had keyed it in a parking lot somewhere. I wouldn’t see the full extent of the damage until the next day, but even at night we knew it was scratched and had a pretty impressive dent.
And we sure as hell all heard the brief, acidic metal-on-metal grunt of her hitting the mailbox in the first place. “Sounds like a robot just farted,” Lisa said, which was pretty funny—and pretty accurate.
Of course, Lisa’s mom didn’t think it was funny. She was worried and ran outside. My mom didn’t even have time to get out of the car before the three of us had sort of surrounded it: the Currans on the driver’s side and me on the passenger side. We were all wearing blue jeans and sweaters—actually, Lisa was wearing a Bruins hoodie—but my mom was in her nightgown. When I opened the passenger door to get in, the light went on and we could all see not only that my mom was wearing this ivory Lanz tent with little blue flowers on it, but that it was covered in red wine. I don’t know why we all knew instantly it was wine and not blood. I guess this would be a more dramatic memory if I pretended we thought it was blood. But none of us did. And I know that because Lisa and I would talk about this later. We knew it was wine.
But that still was pretty disturbing.
When I was that age, I had never talked to Lisa or her mom about the way my parents could drink and the way they would fight. I was embarrassed, ashamed, the whole deal. There had been nights when I would try and water down the vodka or the Scotch, pouring half an inch or an inch of alcohol down the sink and adding exactly that much water. I would study the label carefully to get a mark: a kilt, a ship, the letter S. A couple of the times after I did that, it made no real difference because my mom and dad had already figured out that they were drinking too much and told themselves they’d only drink wine for a while. But that didn’t improve things a whole lot, because then they would simply drink chardonnays or malbecs like the wines were different flavors of Gatorade. My mom leaned toward the white wines and my dad toward the reds. They were in one of their wine phases the night my mom came to get me at the Currans’. The fact her nightgown was sopping wet with red wine was a bad sign, because it was seriously unlikely she had been drinking red and spilled the glass on herself. In my mind, I saw my dad throwing a glass of his malbec on her like she was a campfire he was trying to douse.
“Mira, you okay?” Lisa’s mom asked my mom, tapping on the window on the driver’s-side door. Lisa was jogging to the end of the driveway, seeing if she could find the mailbox. She did, even in the dark. There was a moon, so it really wasn’t that hard. I was standing with the passenger door open, unsure whether I should be getting in to go home or helping my friend retrieve whatever was left of her family’s mailbox. It was pretty uncomfortable.
My mom lowered her window and looked at Lisa’s mom. Her expression was vacant; it was like she was looking at a stack of junk mail. No remorse that she had just trashed the mailbox and dinged the car. No anger at herself. No awareness even that she was a pretty pathetic sight—and not just because the car smelled like a winery and her nightgown looked like she was trying to dress up as one of the “Walking Dead” for Halloween.
“Mira?” Lisa’s mom said again.
From the end of the driveway we heard Lisa yell, “Holy cow! The mailbox looks like a truck ran over it! It’s by the lilacs!”
“Why don’t I drive you and Emily home?” Lisa’s mom suggested. “Let me get my keys—”
There’s this joke in the Northeast Kingdom about the weather: “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” The point is that it can change fast here. Temperatures fall like stones in the lake some days in January. Thunderstorms roll in out of nowhere in July. That’s how my mom’s temper was. She never hit me—not once. My dad didn’t either. But the two of them sometimes went at it like prizefighters, usually because one or the other had touched exactly the wrong nerve: it was like they had stepped on a land mine. You’re making no effort, that’s why you have no friends! One minute, calm. The next? A shit-storm. I could do this fucking job in my sleep. Besides, I’ve only had a couple, so lay the fuck off. And when Lisa’s mom offered to drive my mom and me home, she hit one of those nerves.
“I’m fine!” my mom snapped, and now her expression was anything but vacant. She was pissed, one of those psycho chimpanzees that will claw your face off. And, of course, she was drunk. Now she wasn’t even going to try and pretend that she wasn’t. There would be none of those little shrugs where you innocently say, Oh, this little bit of wine on my nightgown? I’m such a klutz! Spilled a glass when I went for the phone. Silly me. “Don’t you judge me, Sally! Don’t even think of judging me!” she hissed at Lisa’s mom, and she grabbed the handle and was about to open the door and get out. I was already sliding into the car and pulling the seat belt across my chest, but I tried to dial down the madness.
“Let’s go, Mom,” I said. “I’m pretty tired.”
I was probably doomed to fail, but it didn’t help that right about then Lisa appeared outside the car window with the crushed mailbox in her hands. She didn’t say anything, but her mom did.
“Look, this isn’t a big deal, but you’re in no condition to drive, Mira—”
My mom shoved the door open, slamming it so hard into Lisa’s mom that she sent the woman stumbling backward onto the asphalt.
“Mom!” Lisa screamed, dropping the mailbox onto the driveway, where it bounced into the door. My mom nearly tripped over it when she staggered to her feet.
“I’m fine, honey,” Lisa’s mom said, but she was stunned and looking at the palm of her left hand like she didn’t recognize it. (The next day she would have a piece of gauze taped to it, but she insisted the cuts weren’t that big a deal.) Then she gazed up at my mom, who was looking down at her. Everything about my mom’s body language said, Get up and I will beat the living crap out of yo
u. “If you want, Emily can spend the night here,” she said to my mom. But I knew how well that idea would go over. And so I said, “Let’s go, Mom. Please, I just want to go home.” I was crying, but I was hoping she couldn’t tell from my voice.
And here’s what I mean about my mom and the weather. Something in my tone really did reach her. Something inside her head clicked when she heard that quaver in my voice; suddenly, she saw what she was doing. She saw outside herself.
She knelt on the ground and actually hugged Lisa’s mom. She murmured over and over, “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” and Lisa’s mom patted her shoulders and said to come inside for a cup of coffee.
Which my mom did. Lisa and I ate cookies and watched an episode of Gossip Girl.
Then my mom and I left.
Incidentally, the ride home really wasn’t all that terrifying. My mom drove like seventeen miles an hour.
It was a real shocker for me the first time Poacher had Andrea and me steal big bottles of Tide. That’s right: Tide. The laundry detergent. He wanted us to walk into the supermarkets all around town—the Grand Unions and the Price Choppers and the Hannafords and even the Walmart out in Williston—and then just stroll out with one or two of those humongous 150-ounce jugs of the stuff. He said no cashier was going to bother us at the supermarkets. And at Walmart, one of us should simply talk up the geriatric greeter while the other one of us left the store with the Tide.
I figured the soap was going to be an ingredient in some kind of drug that either he or someone he knew was going to cook. So I said, “You want the powder, right?” But he said no, the liquid was fine. All that mattered was that we come home with the biggest jugs we could carry.
Altogether, we ended up lifting thirty-two of them, or nearly $600 worth of detergent. He was absolutely right; no one stopped us.
And he was telling me the truth when he said the detergent really wasn’t an ingredient in some new kind of meth. He resold all that Tide to these two little groceries in the North End and one on the way out to Malletts Bay for ten bucks a jug—or a net profit of $320.
“People just love their Tide,” he said to Andrea and me. “It’s the damnedest thing.” And that night we didn’t have to fuck anyone we didn’t want to fuck. It was all good and I didn’t cry myself to sleep or need any chemical interventions.
Chapter 7
The worst cold was the night in the igloo when it was twenty-seven degrees below zero and the wind coming off the lake seemed as loud as a chain saw. But I had stolen a bunch of those disposable hand warmers and toe warmers from the ski shop on Main Street that afternoon. Each one lasts an hour or two once you expose it to air, and I just kept handing them to Cameron or—after he fell asleep—pushing them into his mummy bag. I would only let him put his head outside the igloo when he wore his wool mask. It covered everything but his eyes and his mouth, and that’s important when it’s that cold out. It’s essential to cover every bit of your skin that you can.
The next day, I stole a small folding Sterno stove, but that didn’t do all that much to keep us warm. Maybe it would have been great if we felt like cooking, but it was too cold outside to cook. Mostly we ate energy bars and fruit and cheese sticks, which are all easy to steal. I wanted to be sure that Cameron got plenty of calcium and fruit.
There were times when I was a totally unfit guardian (I almost wrote “big sister”), but not those nights. I was homesick and sad—and you don’t know homesick until you think you will never, ever see your home again. But sometimes I think I was at my best when the world seemed to be at its worst.
When I left the staging area, my plan was to bike north on Route 5 through Coventry and try to get home. Even if my parents were dead, there was still my dog. And I wanted her. I was afraid for her. And so I was going to return to Reddington to rescue Maggie.
In hindsight, this plan was completely bonkers. But I wasn’t thinking straight. (As a matter of fact, I was so not thinking straight that I was fantasizing I would run into my mom and dad on the road in Mom’s Subaru. I really was. There they would be, driving the other way and trying to catch up with the kids from the Academy, and Maggie would be in the backseat. I was actually scanning the roads for our car. How is that for crazy?) I was no more than two miles from the staging area when I got to the very first checkpoint. There was a pair of guardsmen in those hazmat suits standing there, and there was a line of orange traffic cones in the right lane. One of the guardsmen was windmilling his arm so the vehicles leaving the Kingdom would keep moving, while the other stood before all those cones with his rifle slung over his shoulder like a sentry. I would describe the dudes for you, but mostly I would be making it up. You don’t get a lot of detail through the mask of a hazmat suit. But I had the sense they were young and tough and pumped up by the importance of their work. I guess if you’re an adrenaline junkie stuck in Vermont, it doesn’t get much better than a nuclear meltdown.
“Whoa, other way, young lady!” the one with the gun told me when I reached him and stepped off the pedals of the bike. You don’t sound like Darth Vader through those masks, but your voice does sound muffled. He had to shout and his breath would fog up the visor.
I started out pretty calm when I answered him. I was trying to be super reasonable. “I’m really sorry,” I began. “I’ll be fast. My dog is at home and I think my parents are gone. I need to rescue her.”
“Not happening,” he said. “No one’s allowed through.”
“I understand,” I said. “I will be really fast. I know the danger. That’s why—”
“Look, you need to turn around, little girl. That’s an order!”
It was probably the word “order” that set me off. As most of the counselors and therapists I’ve had over the years have been only too happy to tell anyone who asks, I don’t respond well to commands. And so I snapped at him. “Just forget it!” I said. “Okay? Fine! Let my dog die back there!” And then I stood up on the bike like I was going to do what he said, but instead of turning around, I tried to ride past him and continue on my way home. What was he going to do, shoot me?
Well, he didn’t shoot me. But he was fast, and he grabbed the back of my shirt before I had pedaled more than six feet and gotten going. And when he pulled back on the cotton, he spun me around and I wiped out. He stumbled, too, but he didn’t wind up on the shoulder of the road the way I did.
“What the hell, girl!” he said, looking down at me. “I said you can’t go back there! Have you lost your mind?”
“No! I just want—”
“I know, you just want your dog, I get it,” he said. “But no one’s allowed back in there. God, everyone’s trying to get out!”
I remember I started to say something about Maggie, and just verbalizing her name suddenly had me weeping. I was bawling that I wanted my dog and I wanted my parents and I wanted to go home.
“What’s your name?” he asked me. “Where do you think your mom and dad are?”
Before I could answer, that other dude, the one who had been directing traffic, shouted, “We don’t have time for this, Rick! Put her in a car going south—any goddamn car—right now!”
This Rick guy’s eyes and mine met for a split second, and then he dropped his rifle and started trying to lift me up. He was using his hands like a forklift, jamming them under my arms, and it hurt like hell. It was partly a reflex against the pain, but I lashed out and kind of karate-chopped him in the elbows. Maybe he was afraid I was going to reach for his gun, which hadn’t crossed my mind, but he crabbed his way over to it. And I used that moment to lift my bike and take off. I knew I wouldn’t get far if I tried to pedal north, back toward my home in Reddington, so I went south. I figured they were too busy to bother chasing me if I was heading away from the meltdown like everyone else—which was the case. They didn’t go after me.
I told myself I would find another way back in, another road, I would rescue my Maggie. But I knew in my heart that wasn’t going to happen. There was no way back
in. I was leaving Maggie behind and there was nothing I could do. I was leaving like everyone else. And so I pedaled and cried and pedaled and cried and kept saying out loud, as if she could hear me, I am sorry, Maggie, I am so, so sorry.
Maybe because I’d stolen the bike, I parked it just outside the front door to this convenience store five or six miles away from the checkpoint so I could keep an eye on it while I went inside. People were kind of desperate, and I didn’t want someone else to steal it from me. The store owners were closing because they were supposed to evacuate, too. But they were torn between safety and greed. I wasn’t the only person hoping to buy something quick. There were five of us in line when the sheriff came in, and all of the others had what looked to be the last of the store’s water and Gatorade in their arms. I had, I discovered, two bucks on me, which was just enough for a Tiger’s Milk bar.
The sheriff was a paunchy guy, and he was wearing a breathing mask. The rest of us, of course, were just sucking in plain old radiation air. But he pulled the mask down so it was hanging around his neck when he said to the man and woman behind the counter, “You need to close up shop now. Let these people buy what they want, but no one else comes in. I want this place locked and you folks on your way in two minutes.”
They nodded and the woman, who I guess owned the place with her husband, said to me, “What’s your name?” when I was handing her my two dollars. She was in her fifties and just trying to be maternal.
“Emily Shepard,” I said. It was a reflex.
“Shepard. I just heard that name on the radio,” the man beside her told me, trying to recall the context. He snapped his fingers and went on, “Your father—your parents—” And then abruptly he stopped. Just shut up mid-sentence.