probably just playing around. End of story.”
Meredith is not convinced.
That weekend, her mother feels better, allowing for a trip to Folsom Dam. They know the kids love riding in their father’s little convertible Fiat. They pile into it, Meredith and her two siblings crammed in the tiny back seat, even though the tires are bald and the windshield fluid pump doesn’t work. Her father attaches a bottle of Windex to a tube that runs to the windshield sprayer. Her mother has to squeeze the bottle to clean the bugs off the windows.
Near Folsom Dam is Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant. On clear days, Meredith can see the twin cooling towers from her house, smoke pouring from their maws. They remind her of the steel jigger her father uses to measure his drinks.
“I heard they have a tour,” he says, and her mother asks if she wants to go. Because they sound so hopeful, Meredith says okay, and the three of them travel closer and closer to those cooling towers until they loom over the car, casting giant shadows on the alfalfa fields around them. There is a playground, but she doesn’t feel like swinging, and there are no parallel bars. Her father finds a telescope, puts in a quarter and points it at the top of the cooling towers. For a long time, she studies the wispy smoke pouring off and watches how it fades into the clouds. Her mother takes Shawn and Joy to the guard office to see about the tour.
“Meredith,” her father says, placing his hands on her shoulders, “is everything okay?”
“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “Everything’s fine.”
“School okay? Like your teachers?”
“It’s okay. I like Suzy. My teachers don’t do the duck ’n cover thing, but we all have to.”
“Guess it would be hard for them to crawl under the desk in their dress clothes,” he says.
“I have to do it in my school clothes, and anyway, Dad, won’t the teachers get burned up first?”
He doesn’t answer her last question and instead looks through the telescope. “The teachers have to remain on the lookout,” he says.
“For what?”
“For anything.”
Suzy invites Meredith to her house for dinner, and it is the first time she’s ever used chopsticks. They are strange in her hand, like trying to eat with her mother’s knitting needles, so Suzy’s father locates a plastic fork, still in its wrapper. In Suzy’s room afterward, the girls talk about how much they want red-and-white checkerboard Vans tennis shoes. Suzy sings a commercial from TV: “Vans are neat cuz they’re from Sporting Feet.” Meredith confesses that she’s never been to Sporting Feet even though she’s heard the song on the radio probably a hundred times; it’s a tune that she’ll recall throughout her life, whether she wants to or not. Her mother buys her shoes at Payless. Suzy pretends that it’s not a big deal that Meredith wears imitation Vans and asks what places she has been to, and Meredith says Folsom Dam, Rancho Seco.
“Rancho?” Suzy asks. “The power plant? That’s weird,” she says, and Meredith says, “No, it was cool.”
“What’s so cool about it?”
She runs to her backpack and takes out the sheet of stickers. “This,” she says, showing her the mylar stickers from Rancho Seco shaped like cooling towers, in 3-D flicker the words, “I’m naturally radioactive, and so are you!”
One day the SPs stop all the cars as Meredith and her mother are trying to leave the base. Meredith peeks behind at a long line of cars curving around the road like a railroad train.
“Oh, my God,” her mother says, and there they are: the missiles. Flatbeds laden with giant rockets painted camouflage green. They roll by the car, like a parade.
“Looks like May Day in Red Square,” she says.
May Day was yesterday, and on the news they’d shown tanks and missiles and marching soldiers in Moscow. All that red draping everything, and huge faces of men on the sides of buildings and the yellow hammer and sickle. Meredith thought the Russians seemed evil, the sickle and hammer like weapons and all that red like blood.
Passing fifty feet in front of their car is an intercontinental ballistic missile, but Meredith doesn’t know its name yet, wouldn’t know to call it an ICBM. She will learn the names later, but now all she knows is that these are nuclear missiles. It is quiet in the car as these sleek things mosey past. Her mother seems to hold her breath, her chest still, her hands gripping the steering wheel. Meredith looks at her fingernails, long but unpainted. She can see the ridges on the nails and wants to touch them, run her finger along the curve to feel their texture. But instead she pulls at a thread in the seat cushion. The last missile passes, a long sigh seems to move through the cars, and her mother steps on the gas.
That night when Meredith goes to bed, she begins what will become a habit. She prays to God, in whom she’s not even sure she believes. Her father says her mother is silly for believing in God and that he’s just a made-up thing like Santa Claus. Last year, her mother showed her the stash of presents for Christmas, the wrapping paper and the candy canes that she had pretended came from Santa Claus. But Suzy, who goes to church every Sunday in a nice dress and patent-leather pumps, says God controls everything in the universe, so Meredith prays. Please don’t let there be a nuclear war, she says to him, silently in her head where Suzy says he can hear her just fine.
After school the next day, she takes her route along the creek again because she figured out a new way to get down the hill without falling. On the other side of the creek, hidden by bushes, is a path over large boulders, leading to the water. Then she walks down the creek where there are enough protruding rocks to cross the creek without getting wet. She knows by instinct already which rocks are slippery, which ones safe. The playground is behind a cluster of trees.
The spy boy is there. She knew he would be. It is up to her to catch him now since no one will believe her. If she can get his camera and show her parents all the pictures of the bombers and the radars and the important buildings, they will know he’s a spy. Casually, she steps over the wood chips under the jungle gym, keeping her eyes on the boy. He is standing at the top of the rocket slide again, not wearing suspenders but a sweater on a day that’s too warm for sweaters. He points his camera at the airfield. She starts up the steps. Should she confront him? Or snatch the camera and go? His back is to her. She comes up behind him, then stops. He turns, the camera in one hand. She wrests it away from him, slides down with it in her arms, and runs. Faster than she’s ever run before, straight home, no gentle Sacajewa-walking this time; she nearly slips on the pine needles. There’s her house, a pale green house with white trim, her father’s name and rank above the door, she pushes through that door, startling her mother.
“I have it!” she yells, holding up the camera.
“Meredith! What in God’s name—”
“It’s the spy’s camera. I told you so! Look at it!”
She walks over to Meredith, biting on her bottom lip. She had been hanging curtains, new daisy-printed curtains that droop half-on, half-off the rod. She holds the camera up to her eyes, turns it around in her hands.
“Meredith,” she says, putting her hand to her mouth like she’s trying not to laugh.
“These are binoculars,” she says. “New ones, from Germany. Your father was right.”
“Germany?”
“Yes.”
“There aren’t any pictures?”
“No.”
Meredith runs to her room and flings herself on her bed. The pink and lime-green checks of her bedspread looked so much better in her old room, she thinks. Holly Hobbie stares at her, so stupidly serene, the same look on her face no matter where the Air Force sends her. Meredith punches Holly Hobbie’s face. “Stupid, stupid,” she says, and then she is crying, and her chest tightens, and her mother is there rubbing her back saying, “Sh, it’s okay, sh. Here’s your inhaler.”
But Meredith doesn’t want to use it, hates to have to use it, and pushes her mother’s hand away.
“Everything will be all right, my girl,” she says, and Meredith lets he
r stroke her hair; this calms her down; her chest loosens a bit. Meredith feels sorry for the little boy whose binoculars she stole and wonders if his parents have called the SPs.
“Am I in big trouble?” she asks.
“We’ll have to give that poor boy back his binoculars,” her mother says with a wry grin. “Don’t worry so much all the time, all right?” She hugs Meredith close. “My silly daughter,” she says, laughing a little. “Who told you it was your job to save the world from spies?”
“I don’t want there to be a nuclear war,” Meredith says, through heavy sobs and wheezing.
Her mother hugs her, tucks her into bed. She strokes Meredith’s hair until she falls asleep so exhausted she forgets to pray.
About the Author
Lisa Brunette is an Air Force brat. She spent her fifth grade year in three different schools and has lived all over the U.S. but never overseas. She’s the author of the novel Cat in the Flock and the recipient of numerous grants and awards for her writing, including a Michener Fellowship from the University of Miami.
Read her blog at www.catintheflock.com
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