The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [138]
“Your hair looks darling now that I’m getting used to it,” Marylou said to Caroline, which wasn’t the right thing to say, she realized as soon as she’d said it.
Caroline ignored her. “Dad!” Caroline said, all goggle-eyed, and rushed forward to hug him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m perfectly fine. I’m having a good time, in fact.”
“I’ve got your medications here.”
It was only then that Caroline looked at Marylou, glared really. Anyone could see that Caroline longed to flail at Marylou, claw her eyes out, but before she could Suzi came over to Marylou and hugged her. Then, after some fumbling and awkwardness, they all sat down, Wilson and Marylou side by side on the couch, with Suzi next to Marylou.
“Things are bad at home,” Vic told them, running his hand through his wild-looking hair. He sat in the padded rocking chair wearing lime green swimming trunks and a wrinkled, too-tight cotton oxford shirt and looked like he’d been driving all night with the windows down. Nobody had gotten enough sleep, and they had all, Wilson and Marylou included, been in the same clothes for a while, since none of them had packed for this crazy trip to Memphis.
“What’s the storm damage like?” Marylou asked him. “How’s Canterbury Hills?”
“The pond’s flooded,” Vic said. “Lots of trees down. Power outages all over the city. We went through some bad stretches coming back from the beach, didn’t we, Ava.”
“Scary,” Ava agreed. She sat in a straight-backed chair nearest the door.
“But when we finally got home,” Vic said, “that’s when we heard. The EPA came and got Otis’s shed.”
Vic told them how, even though the storm was in full swing, their neighbor John Kane saw their car pull up and came over and told them what had happened while he and Ava had been down at the beach and Caroline, Suzi, and Otis were on their way to Memphis. Earlier that afternoon, before the storm hit, a flatbed truck and a van had pulled in the Witherspoons’ drive and a handful of people got out of the van and donned white astronaut suits like something straight out of a science fiction movie.
Mr. Kane watched with some other neighbors as two spacemen went into their side yard and removed refuse from the old shed, dust billowing up around them. A burned, chemical smell hung in the air, making the bystanders choke. Three other spacemen wrestled a huge industrial-size vacuum cleaner over the Witherspoons’ front lawn. Mr. Kane finally got up his nerve and approached one, who he realized from looking through its plastic face mask was a woman wearing purple lipstick. She said, through an intercom device, that they were from the Environmental Protection Agency. No, there was nobody in the house. No, she couldn’t tell him anything. Nothing. Sir. Please. Step away. Keep back. Sir. The two vacuumers stopped their vacuuming and stared at him menacingly until he retreated to the sidelines.
The astronauts, John Kane said, must’ve vacuumed up every speck of dust and debris on every blade of grass and shrubbery, trampling the flower beds and smashing all the azalea bushes. Then they dumped the shed remains and whatever they’d vacuumed up into black steel drums. They loaded the black drums onto the flatbed truck and roared off for parts unknown.
“What was in that shed?” John Kane had asked Vic, and Vic could tell that John was scared to death but trying to be nice.
Vic told them he didn’t know. Technically, that was the truth.
But when Vic and Ava arrived in Memphis and told Otis what had happened, Otis had finally come clean and explained to his parents and siblings what he’d been up to.
“You were actually building a model reactor,” Wilson said now. “You actually followed my directions? I never thought you’d …” he trailed off, and