Chernobyl

In 1986, when I turned eight, my parents presented me with a laminated badge. It had a hole punched in its corner for a necklace to be threaded through, and contained my smiling photograph, our address in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the home and work telephone numbers for both my parents. Beneath this, in larger print, it said: “My name is Sara Meyers and I am a Liberated Child.”

We lived just beyond the borders of the District, on a side street near Georgia Avenue, and my school was about a mile away. When three o’clock rolled around, I walked home. My parents had rehearsed this walk with me several times during the summer before I started third grade; and soon enough I was doing it on my own, wholly without incident. Perhaps disappointingly so. The way was safely marked with sidewalks and crosswalks and well-functioning traffic lights and plenty of dependable-looking people out and about. It took twenty-five minutes, door to door. I’d pass by two barber shops, three Ethiopian restaurants, and a small shopping plaza where I was to be mindful of any circling cars; then I’d traverse a pedestrian bridge near Montgomery College, and, upon reaching the other side, on all but the rainiest days, I would immediately spot the green and white sign for Edgewood Lane, and home.

Few people spoke to me during these walks. Hardly anyone stared, either, and those who did seemed to gawk with curiosity, rather than suspicion or worry, as if encountering a particularly well-dressed dog. Perhaps the badge dangling over my chest made me look official, to the extent that an eight-year-old girl can. Though if you’d seen me and paused to take me in, with my prim, businesslike face, waiting for the walk-sign, you’d have thought to yourself: that kid knows what she’s doing.

My father was a self-styled civil rights lawyer. This meant that he took most any case that came through his door, but that the downtrodden were closest to his heart—perhaps because he counted himself among them. His business cards said: “Harold Meyers, Esq., CHAMPION for Civil Rights,” and he wore a laminated one conspicuously around his neck, in what I took to be a show of solidarity with me, but which was, in fact, his sole means of advertising. He rented a grim, one-room office in a stripmall where his neighbors were a pupusería and a palmreader; and on his train rides to work he brandished his card while repeating “Abogado, lawyer, abogado, lawyer” to a clientele as yet unaware of its grievances. My mother, a paralegal for the general counsel’s office at the Department of Agriculture, suffered from Crohn’s Disease. This meant that she was constantly either “on leave” or else devising strategies with my father for “taking leave,” phrases I thought unfitting for what she actually did, which was to remain, at all times, inside the house—in her bedroom, to be specific, with the television on, and the covers pulled high.

All of this is to say there were reasons for me having a badge and being, as they now call it, free-range. Not that I ranged all that freely. School, home, and the stretch of Georgia Avenue between the two— that was pretty much the extent of it, or very nearly so. Sometimes, you see, I ranged further. I’d turn off Georgia Avenue at Somerset Street and go to a park where there was a small playground, nondescript save for its particularly long and unblemished metal slide, and a swing set that sat on a steep slope, so that when you jumped off in mid-flight, you remained airborne for what seemed an astonishingly, almost agonizingly long interval. No one was ever there.

One afternoon in the warm May of that year, when I had no great wish to be home and was riding this swing in the Somerset park— pumping my way to a perilous and illicit height before letting go the clattering chain to sail off over the hill—I noticed...