Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands: A Novel Hardback - 2014

Excerpt

Chapter 1

It was the middle of June, and we only had two days of school left. We had one more day of exams and then one day when most of us would either not show up or, if we did, the teachers were pretty chill and didn't mind what we did so long as we didn't get stoned in their face or do something ridiculous that would make them look bad or get ourselves killed. I was in eleventh grade. It was midmorning, and I had just taken my physics final. I did okay, I think, but who knows? Doesn't matter now and, to be honest, I really didn't care that much even then. Besides, I was going to be a poet and a novelist, if only because I figured poet and novelist was a career choice that meant little or no human interaction. I kind of understood at a young age that I didn't play well with most other kids in the sandbox. (Not all, of course. I mean, I had friends. Not many, but a few.) Anyway, I really believed I was going to write great books. I honestly thought like that. I was going to go to Amherst--the town, not the college, because there was no way I was getting into the college--and find out who Emily Dickinson actually was. You know, get the real dish. Discover things about her that no one else knew. Friends. Lovers. A secret society. Not kidding. I thought like that. We had the same first name, and her poems were as short as mine. Hers, of course, were better. But you see my point. There wasn't a lot of logic to the connection. Still, she wasn't hugely social, and we had that in common, too.

Dare you see a soul at the white heat?

Then crouch within the door.

Red is the fire's common tint;

But when the vivid ore

Has sated flame's conditions,

Its quivering substance plays

Without a color but the light

Of unanointed blaze.

Obviously this poem wasn't about a nuclear core. But it could be, right, if you didn't know it had been written in the 1860s? Also, Emily's pure hell on a computer's spell check--and this poem isn't anywhere near the grammatical nightmare that some of her other work is. I used to love that, too.

That day a bunch of kids in the tenth and eleventh grades were just hanging out on the side of the cafeteria with all the windows that looked out on the courtyard, watching it rain, when we heard the sirens from the fire station. The courtyard had a couple of concrete tables and benches where mostly seniors went, especially the smokers, but it had been raining for days--weeks, actually, since Memorial Day weekend--and so nobody was out there now. There were mushrooms growing up between the tiles outside, that's how wet it was. But the windows were open, and so even with the sound of the rain we could hear the sirens. Most of the seniors had peaced out by then because they were done with high school and knew what they were doing in September. A lot of us usually got out, you know. People outside the Kingdom think we're all dumb shits up here, and a lot of us are; but a lot of us aren't. I went to Reddington Academy, which is named after the town, and was built and funded years and years ago by a guy named James Howard Haverford. He fought in the Civil War and then made a fortune making sewing machines. Every kid in Newport and Reddington and Barton and Lowell goes to the Academy for free, like it's a public school, but it's also a pretty expensive boarding school and students from something like seventeen states and a couple of countries come here every year. There are about four hundred locals and about two hundred boarders. Or there were. The school is still closed and will be pretty much forever.

It was ten o'clock in the morning, so they weren't serving lunch yet. I was sitting on the table and kind of flirting with a boy named Ethan Gale, who was sitting on the bench. I was wearing pretty tight jeans and I had kicked off my sneakers, so I was barefoot. I don't know why, but being barefoot always made me feel very sexy. Think poet. We were talking about a couple of local girls who worked after school at this nearby fitness club and, looking back, being kind of snarky. But the two of them sort of didn't know what they were doing and just sat behind the front desk where gym members were supposed to sign in. If someone dropped a boatload of weights on his chest or something, he was completely screwed, because those girls sure as hell wouldn't have known what to do. I mean, they were perfectly nice, but what the hell they were doing working at a gym was completely beyond Ethan and me.

Ethan was a junior and, like me, he was a local. His dad was the Eye on the Sky--the meteorologist for Vermont Public Radio--which meant that Ethan was kind of a celebrity because his dad's voice was super well known. But it also meant that we gave Ethan cascades of shit because even a very good weatherman is wrong, like, half the time.

My dad sometimes joked about that. "What a great job," he would say. "Imagine if pilots only had to be right half the time. Or doctors. Or architects. But the guys who try and forecast the weather? We sure cut them a lot of slack. And no matter how many times they're wrong, we still tune in." See what I mean about my dad? We used to have some very impressive fights--not nearly the shouting matches I used to have with my mom, but still pretty gnarly--but he really was kind of funny.

And, of course, he was very smart. I agree with him about the weather. With all the satellites and stuff we have orbiting the earth, I have no idea how you could ever get the weather wrong. Really, I don't. And doesn't the weather usually just move from west to east? Frankly, I'd think you could just call some town a few hours away in New York or Ontario and ask what the hell was going on outside the window. But technology is what it is. It doesn't always work. Exhibit A? A nuclear reactor, apparently.

I always figured Ethan was going places. Maybe he still is. Maybe, like me, he kind of gave up. I should make a note to see if he's anywhere on Facebook. I should make a note to see if lots of people are anywhere on Facebook. I haven't been super social the last year--even less than before the meltdown, if that's possible. I know Ethan's dad is no longer on the radio; they have a new Eye on the Sky. But that might only be because VPR doesn't broadcast from the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury anymore. St. J. isn't in the Exclusion Zone, but it's close. Lots of people left, most of the town, they tell me.

Anyway, I knew instantly what the sirens were, but I figured it was just a drill. We'd had one a couple of years earlier. A pretend evacuation. Still, even those "this was just a drill" moments on the radio that the FCC requires could always make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I remember Ethan looked in the general direction of the firehouse and then in the direction of the plant.

"What do you think that's about?" he asked.

The sirens were loud, but not so loud that we had to raise our voices or anything. We could still hear three serious overachievers from out of state freaking out about physics and a couple of drama geeks making a very big deal about some summer musical in Stowe one of them was in. Everyone stopped talking for maybe a second or two when the sirens started and looked around, and then went right on with their conversations.

It was only when Mr. Pettitt, a history teacher, came into the cafeteria and clapped his hands to get our attention that we shut up. Most kids liked Mr. Pettitt, and a lot of them even called him Brandon--his first name. I wouldn't. I wouldn't call him anything. He kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I thought he was totally bogus. He was in his early thirties, and he had a cute wife and twin baby boys. He had curly blond hair, and I know there were girls who had a crush on him, but obviously I wasn't one of them. Two things happened at almost the same time when he clapped. First, everyone looked at him and then, once he said there might be a problem at the nuclear power plant, everyone looked at me. Second, Ethan handed me my sneakers.

"You better put them on," he said.

"You think?"

"Yeah," he said. "I think."

By then, of course, the crisis at the plant had been going on for roughly two and a half hours. I'm sure someone caught some serious shit for waiting so long to sound the alarm.



The Northeast Kingdom got its name a long time ago from a Vermont governor. It was, I think, a way to promote tourism. It's the northeast corner of the state and, even by the standards of Vermont, crazy rural. But there are a couple of ski resorts and Lake Memphremagog, which is nowhere near as big as Lake Champlain. Not long after one Vermont governor nicknamed this part of the state the Northeast Kingdom, another one convinced the state legislature that Memphremagog was the perfect spot for a nuclear power plant, especially if it was built beside one of the rivers that fed the lake. Some people had been talking about constructing a plant on Lake Champlain, about ten miles south of Burlington. Can you imagine what kind of cluster fuck disaster this would have been if the plant had been built there and had the same accident? God. People actually live in Burlington. Hundreds of thousands of people must live in Chittenden County and around Lake Champlain. Fortunately--there's a weird word for me to use--they chose Memphremagog instead. It was just big enough, and the river current was just powerful enough for a nuclear power plant, especially after they built a special dam.

And you know what? None of us really cared that we had a nuclear power plant. I mean, there were some folks who made a little noise after Fukushima. A few politicians and a few do--gooders with nothing better to do asked for a study of the evacuation plan and an investigation into the state of the reactors because they were pretty old. (How old? The plant was designed in the 1960s with slide rules--yup, slide rules--and built in the early 1970s.) But it was really no big deal. And it sure wasn't our local politicians or our local do-gooders. I mean this: None of us cared.

The plant existed along a spit of land covered with pine trees called Cape Abenaki (that was, as a matter of fact, the official name of the plant), where the Coburn River met the lake. The plant was a quarter mile downstream from the dam. You couldn't even see it from Newport or Reddington, unless you were out in the middle of the lake or almost over onto the Canadian side of the water. And then, when you did see it, it was just a part of the shoreline. People used to ice-fish within maybe three hundred yards of the two long lines of cooling towers. People used to kayak within a stone's throw of the two big rectangular blocks that housed the reactors themselves. I swear, no one thought about it until the meltdown. It was like the prison. We didn't think about that either. They both gave people jobs. So, we boated and swam and fished in the lake, sometimes noticing the plant and sometimes not. We figured it was perfectly safe.

Or, if it wasn't perfectly safe, it was safe enough.



My mom, who had always been in public relations, thought the name of the plant was really pretty and really exploitive. "It speaks to the proud heritage of the Native Americans in the United States and Canada," she would say publicly, and then add (but only in private), "and the way we screwed them in every way possible." That's because nuclear power might be clean (except for when it's spewing radioactivity like a Roman candle), but uranium mining is seriously toxic. I don't know precisely how it poisons the water, but it does. One night I saw my mom looking at an article on the computer in the den about the way the uranium mines have fucked the Crow, the Odawa, the Algonquin, and the Sioux.

"What's that?" I asked her.

"Propaganda."

"Oh."

"But it's really not."

I waited.

"It's our bargain with Mephistopheles. Unfortunately, radioactivity lasts as long as the soul." I really didn't know what she was talking about until I shared this memory with one of the doctors here, and he told me the story of Faust.



A couple of months after the meltdown, when I was living in Burlington, I almost told Poacher who I was. He just thought I was one of the walkers who had streamed into the city. I think I wanted to see what he'd do if I told him. Would he freak out the way I always suspected the girls in the shelter would have, or would he be chill? Instead, at the last second, I told him that my dad was Ethan's dad. You know, just lied. I said my dad had once been the Eye on the Sky.

"Emily," he murmured, flat on his back on the mattress on the floor, "you are a revelation." Poacher was long and lean with thick dark hair he combed straight back off his forehead. His eyes were a little narrow, but otherwise he could have been an over-the-hill movie star--one of those dudes who was a leading man once but had managed to drink and party himself into early retirement and now only got work on TV shows like Celebrity Apprentice. He had sideburns that somehow didn't look ridiculous and a goatee and mustache that were just this side of creepy. He had a tattoo on each biceps: barbed wire on his left arm and a marijuana leaf on his right. He had a leather vest that he was very--and I mean very--fond of.

He was staring up at the ceiling when he said I was a revelation, stoned off his ass, and he thought I was stoned, too. I wasn't. But he sure did use that word a lot. Revelation. It was one of about half a dozen words that peppered his vocabulary and seemed unexpected until you got to know him and realized what a total creep he was and why he used them. "Why are you not more fucked up?" he asked me. He meant generally--not why wasn't I as baked as he was right that moment.

Media reviews

Praise for Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands:

"I have a new favorite Chris Bohjalian novel.  Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is a book I wish I'd been smart enough to write:  a masterpiece of narrative voice, of emotion, and of how – as Emily Dickinson might say – the sparest of words can hold a wealth of pain. If you need any proof that fiction can scare us, move us, and break our hearts simultaneously – look no further." – Jodi Picoult

“Wrenching... Emily’s voice is a compelling one… and hers is a journey readers will avidly follow.” – Kirkus

“In his sixteenth novel, the versatile Bohjalian has Emily tell her harrowing, tragic story retrospectively . . . [A] brave saga.” – Booklist

"Emily's story is both heartbreaking and frightening. . . The book rings with poetry and truth." – Jeanne Bogino, Library Journal

“Bohjalian’s impressive 16th novel charts the life of a teenage girl after a nuclear disaster . . . Through her first-person narration, readers become intimately familiar with Emily . . . Her admiration for kindred spirit Emily Dickinson serves to humanize her plight, as does an epiphany in the books’ bittersweet conclusion.” – Publishers Weekly