Free Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen Page A

don’t say anything at all. When I finally start my period, my motheracknowledges the occasion with an incomprehensible pink booklet on my dresser about sperm and eggs.
    K URT CELEBRATES his third birthday and we all share a sticky-sweet chocolate cake. My father misses our gathering, as he often does, spending the evening at his office. When he comes home later that night, the house is quiet. I sit in the living room, reading, listening for him. We barely speak. His hours are odd and he spends little time at home, but when he’s there, his presence is heavy and I always know where he is in the house. Often he sits brooding in his recliner in the den with the lights out, a big square bottle of bourbon tucked just out of sight.
    “Hi, Kris,” he says. This night his voice is hoarse. “What’s for dinner?”
    “I don’t know,” I say. Dinner was over long ago; the question is strictly rhetorical.
    “How’s school?” he asks. His shirt is rumpled. His fingers, long and slender, are stained yellow at the tips from smoking. His mind is always on something else. My mind is busy, too, reading every cue and signal, keeping track of all the things that cannot be discussed, that must not be remembered, that have to be erased.
    But the scent of tobacco that clings to my father’s clothes and skin is familiar and, in a way, comforting.
    “Fine,” I reply. He doesn’t want details. I close my book.
The Carpetbaggers
. A book my mother wouldn’t allow me to read that I swiped from under her bed. For hours I’ve watched a steady glow on the horizon, the lights that burn every night, all night long, against the dark mountain range. They’re as predictable as the stars in the sky. “What is that, Dad?” I ask.
    He turns and looks out the window. “What?”
    “Those lights.”
    “Oh.” He lights a cigarette. “That,” he says brusquely but with pride, “is Rocky Flats. The defense of our country.”
    Y EARS LATER , when Kristen Haag is eleven, she comes home with a bump on her knee. Like other children in the neighborhood, she rideshorses across the windswept fields, swims in Standley Lake, and plays in her backyard. Bumps and scrapes are common. But this bump won’t heal. In May, doctors discover a malignancy and the leg is amputated. By Christmas the cancer has killed her.
    Rex Haag is devastated. Small items have begun to appear in the press about Rocky Flats, and a few neighbors quietly express distrust of government assurances that the plant is completely safe. Rex thinks back to the fire in 1969, just about the time he built a new sandbox in the backyard. He wonders what’s in the soil and the air. He wonders about the drainage from Rocky Flats that feeds directly into Standley Lake and local streams and ditches. He starts talking about a lawsuit.
    The neighbors whisper: It’s a terrible thing when a child dies, but looking for a scapegoat won’t ease the family’s grief.
    Besides, my parents agree, the government would tell us if there was any real danger.
    After the funeral, Kristen’s ashes are sent to be analyzed by three separate labs: a university in New York; a laboratory in Richmond, California; and a primary contractor for Rockwell International, the current operator of the plant. The California lab reports a high level of plutonium-239 in Kristen’s ashes, the type of plutonium used in nuclear bombs and routinely released by Rocky Flats. The university in New York—curiously—never performs the analysis.The contracting laboratory for Rockwell International sends back inconclusive results that indicate the presence of plutonium, but at a level within the margin of error for their particular testing procedure.
    Kristen’s parents do not file a lawsuit. It would be almost impossible to prove a direct connection between Rocky Flats and Kristen’s death, and the cost to sue the U.S. government is mind-boggling.Ultimately, Rex comes to believe that matters of life and death are in the hands of