The Warning

“WELL, THE TOWN doesn’t appear to be glowing.”

Mom kept her eyes on the road. The silence lingered until Charlie blurted out, “Crickets!”

I laughed and angled toward the back seat. “Where’d you get that from?”

“You, you big dummy!” Charlie cackled. He was six. “‘Awkward silence equals crickets,’ you said.”

I gave his knee a squeeze. Mom had traveled this route thousands of times but not in the past eleven months and never as part of a bumper-to-bumper convoy that stretched on for miles toward the outskirts of town. “I just don’t think it’s funny is all,” she said.

“I don’t, either,” I said. “I’m the one who was in the hospital.”

She shot me a glare, then returned her attention to the rear bumper of a black Toyota SUV with the number 80 affixed to its license plate. “Not from radiation, though.”

“That’s true,” I said. “The meltdown played no role in my accident.”

Mom gripped the steering wheel tighter. The accident was a sticky subject.

“It wasn’t a meltdown,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “It was an explosion at a nuclear plant that caused the evacuation of an entire population. Nothing to see here.”

“I didn’t hear a boom,” Charlie chimed in. “Explosions go boom.”

“I didn’t hear a boom, either,” I said. “We’ll have to ask Dad whether there was one.”

Dad worked for the Mount Hope Nuclear Power Plant and stayed there while we were relocated to a refugee camp.

Mount Hope, South Carolina, is tucked into a valley between two mountain ranges. It’s accessible only by two roads, one from the north and one from the south. Likewise, there were two refugee camps, the main one north of town and the so-called sick (code for radiation exposure) camp to the south. Mom, Charlie, and I were in the latter one, thanks to my accident. Most folks I knew—including almost every other kid—were in the healthy-people camp, though even they were quarantined.

And now we were all getting to go home at last.

“Dad says it’s not going to be safe to live in Chernobyl for twenty thousand years,” I said. “So we’ve got a 19,999-year jump on them.”

Mom wasn’t having it. “And I say this wasn’t Chernobyl. It was more like Three Mile Island, if you want to start comparing nuclear-plant incidents.”

“I was thinking The China Syndrome,” I said.

“This happened in China, too?” Charlie asked.

“How do you even know that movie?” Mom asked.

“I have my ways,” I said, detecting what, for the first time in a while, appeared to be the crack of a smile on my mom’s face.

She can’t help it. She’s amused that I drop references to movies from her era and before. People don’t realize there’s this thing called the internet—and YouTube and On Demand, for that matter.

Speaking of which, I checked my phone again. Still no signal.

At the camp, there was no cell-phone service, and our data was limited. We could send and receive emails—no attachments, of course—but getting onto a website? Fuggedaboutit.

“You know who says it’s safe?” Mom asked. “Your father.”

“Right. Dad,” I said. “I remember that guy.”

“Jordan, don’t.”

“No, it’ll be nice not to be in a single-parent household. Truly.”

Crickets.

“Will Daddy still have a sunburn?” Charlie asked.

“Good question,” I said. “Maybe he’s catching up to me on the shade scale.”

We were able to talk to Dad a couple times on the camp landline—he had clout enough to arrange that—and he told us about the radiation burns he’d received. Normally his skin was on the light-but-not-too-light side that would make people wonder whether he was Italian or Middle Eastern or even…black? Mom brought the darker cocoa to the mix, which explained why Tico liked to call me Latte.

Our beat-up Nissan sedan inched forward, with Mom keeping a healthy distance behind car No. 80. Our SUV was totaled in the accident.

The town alarms had sounded, and the evacuation was shifting into high gear. And so, apparently, was Hank Bradshaw’s Ford F-350. Mom was rushing to pick up Dad at the plant, not knowing that he wouldn’t be joining us after all. She certainly didn’t know that we’d sustain a direct hit to the passenger-side door and would all wind up in the hospital and then the so-called sick camp.

Her right leg got snapped like a wishbone, though now she not only was walking without a limp but had resumed her morning jogs. Charlie took some flying glass in his left arm and across his forehead but otherwise, miracle of miracles, was in tip-top shape. As for me, well…

Like I said, we were gone for eleven months. I remember ten of them. I was in pretty bad shape, or so they tell me. Mom tallied the surgeries for me: seven. Her tearstained face was what I saw when I finally came out of the coma-slash-delirium that the docs had me in. Being a mom isn’t the easiest job, and I admit I’m no walk in the park.

“How’s your head?” she asked now, eyes fixed on the road.

“Fine,” I replied, though it had been aching over the past few days. I reached up and touched the scar on the back of my scalp. I’d never been able to adjust the mirrors in the hospital or our trailer to get a full view, but my phone camera captured the spiderweb of pink scar tissue that contrasted brightly against my smoky skin.

My skull had been fractured in three places, though doctors said there had been zero lasting damage. I couldn’t say the same about my right arm, which had a zipper running lengthwise along its underside. It was full of pins and screws and always felt a little numb. My right knee had a neat circle drawn around the cap, and my chest wounds looked as if they were outlining pectoral muscles that I was just starting to develop. The four broken ribs on my right side hurt whenever I did anything athletic, which was going to be a problem when I tried out for football.

Mom breathed in and out through her mouth, in the shape of an “o,” then said, “What if our house was looted?”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” I laughed.

“It’s been sitting there for almost a year. You never know.”

She stretched an arm to the back-seat floor to grab a cigarette pack in her purse.

“No,” I said.

She’d quit smoking before I was born but started again after the evacuation. She went from smelling like lavender shampoo to stinking of stale smoke, but at least she smoked only outside. She knew better than to make Charlie and me suffer in the car.

“Sorry,” she said, dropping the pack back into her purse. “It’s just, they said at the camp that we shouldn’t get our hopes up that everything is going to be perfect. Why would they say that if there wasn’t going to be a lot of damage?”

“If someone messed with our house,” Charlie declared, “I’ll hunt them down and pop a cap in their ass!” Mom almost swerved off the road before shooting me an accusatory look.

“I might have been quoting Pulp Fiction to him again,” I muttered.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Charlie said. “I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.”

Mom’s right foot alternated between the gas and brake pedals. We were moving that slowly. But soon I saw the green sign that read WELCOME TO BOXSMITH COUNTY, and I knew we were close. Everything looked more familiar now, even the trees, which had grown especially lush since we left.

“Do you know when you’re going back to work?” I asked Mom.

“Doug emailed me that the bank may open as soon as tomorrow because people want to check on their money.”

The caravan meandered along the south road beside the Sweetbay River.

I checked my phone again. Still no signal.

Mom turned on the radio, and a deep, authoritative voice intoned, “…continue along your directed route. When you reach Mount Hope town limits, military police will direct you further. Please continue along your directed route…”

It was a loop. I punched the button for the classic-rock station, but the message was there, too. It was everywhere, up and down the dial, AM and FM. Mom turned it off.

“Do you think everything will look the same?” Charlie asked.

“We’ll know soon enough,” I replied.