“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.