by Cara Hoffman
She’d bought a SEAL pup knife for Danny. Now that she’d seen how much he’d grown she wished she’d gotten him the full-size knife. She also got him Swedish mittens with liners, a first-aid kit, six silver emergency survival blankets, waterproof matches, a box of twelve sure-pak MREs, a mess kit, a flask, a compass, and a crank flashlight that didn’t require batteries.
Danny was a scholar in disaster—the coming ice age, to be specific. Something he’d fallen in love with in third grade after watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel in the school library. It had been hilarious and beautiful to listen to him, a skinny, four-foot-tall kid lecturing on what happened to the woolly mammoth and what would inevitably happen to humanity. But even in third grade, the prevailing wisdom pointed to global warming, not ice age, and so Danny’s research on topics like hypothermia, treating frostbite, and snowshoeing gave way to reading about impending disaster from floods and droughts. Still, he was never as captivated by these things as he’d been with glaciers. Never stood in her doorway at one in the morning worried about a heat wave. Never rattled on the way he had back when mammoths roamed his imagination, and he was compelled to describe the creeping ice and the darkening sky. Or stand in the kitchen, his gaze distant and glassy, as he detailed William Parry’s fearless expedition to the North Pole.
• • •
She brought the armload of presents down to the living room and set them around the tree, then settled into the beat-up futon couch to eat.
Danny handed her a little box wrapped in glossy paper with a picture of a sea lion on it. Inside was a silver bracelet with a working compass for a charm. She laughed as she put it on and then handed him a brown paper bag, which he opened to find a red and black military compass attached to a lanyard. He put it around his neck and high-fived her.
“Great minds . . .” their father said, and he handed her a slim rectangle wrapped in white and covered with silver script reading PEACE ON EARTH.
She tore the paper: It was Robert Frost’s North of Boston; she flipped to the poem “Mending Wall,” her favorite, and smiled at her father, felt the book crack as she opened the stiff new binding and slumped lower on the couch to get lost in it again. Jack went to the closet, retrieved an old plaid blanket and put it over her lap, then handed her the mug from the table so she could drink and read. It was a gesture from so long ago, she didn’t know if it had ever happened before. A gesture from a ghost’s life.
“Open more presents!” she shouted, and she threw the green plastic bag covered with Arabic script to her father. He slid the kafiyah out, held up the checkered square of woven tasseled fabric, the tag still hanging from the side. She reached out and snapped off the cardboard sticker. He pretended not to notice. “Whoah!” her father smiled, “this is pretty cool.”
“Put it on!” she told him. “That’s going to look great with the red sweater.” And for a moment, when she saw her father’s smiling face she was happy like she’d never been down range.
Danny opened his pile of boxes and bags, laughing in delight and holding up each new thing for their father to see. He put on the mittens and then flipped the tops down so he could use his fingers to send a text message. Then he cranked the flashlight, waiting for his phone to buzz in reply. He sent another message and opened one of the silver blankets, putting it around his shoulders like a cape, studied his new knife.
After everything was opened they were content together around the tree, not saying much of anything. Their father sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch, his new head scarf wrapped around his neck and face. Danny opened one of the MREs and read the contents of the sealed packs: pork ribs, pound cake, and grape drink. He sent another text message. Lauren watched him, saw how his mannerisms had changed, saw how they fit now in his bigger body, how the culture of middle school, the urgency of connections had overtaken him. Even today with her home, sitting right in front of him.
“Well, Low,” her father said, “maybe we should sing some Christmas carols, huh?”
She smiled at him, shook her head no, then turned away before she had to see his disappointment.
Danny’s phone buzzed again and he flipped it open.
“Are you in chorus?” she asked Danny. It was obvious he wasn’t doing any sports, so maybe he was singing and hadn’t mentioned it in his dispatches.
“There is no chorus,” he said distractedly, still looking down at his phone.
“Really?”
“No chorus, no art classes,” Danny said.
And her father nodded in confirmation. “No budget, no tax base,” he said.
Danny put his phone away and then looked through the MREs again with a satisfied grin.
“Those things have a ten-year shelf life!” Lauren told him excitedly. “The vegetarian lasagna is actually pretty good.”
Then he looked right at her. “This is what I always wanted,” he said, entirely serious.
“That’s why I got them.”
Danny cut the pound cake with his new knife and handed a piece to his father, who lowered the scarf to take a bite, and then they heard PJ’s voice calling from the kitchen.
“I didn’t even hear the door,” Danny mumbled through a mouthful of cake.
“Oh, he’s stealthy,” Lauren whispered sarcastically.
“Peej,” Jack called. “We got a surprise.”
They heard his boots in the hall and then he ducked his head around the corner and raised his eyebrows, looking at all of them sitting together happy, relaxed. He was genuinely shocked to see Lauren, started laughing hard, then held out his arms to her. His beard was nearly white, and the sides of his uneven afro had gone smoky gray and almost silver. He smelled like coffee. She stood and hugged him, and rested her cheek against his chest until the sound of his heartbeat made her step back.
“Yeah! Oh yeah! This is our soldier,” he said, clapping her on the back. “Boom. There she is. Just. Like. That. That’s right.” He looked down at Jack Clay, who again had tears in his eyes, and nodded. “That’s all right. Good time to cry. This is what we humans do.”
Then he squeezed Lauren’s shoulder, leaned down to speak quietly into her ear. “Please tell me you got that head rag from somebody still breathing.”
She laughed for real for the first time since she’d landed, and her father asked PJ, “What do you think of our girl?”
“What I always think,” he said. “Beautiful. Needs her hair combed.” Then, “What’s all this? C rations? Oh shit. That brings me back.”
“They’re MREs,” Danny corrected him.
“Nah, we had the C rats,” PJ said. “What’s that, a SEAL?”
“SEAL pup,” Danny told him, brandishing his new knife. “Wait, check this out.” He shined the flashlight in PJ’s face and PJ squinted, put up his hand.
“Yeah! Okay, I can see it. Sister’s making sure everybody safe and prepared,” he said. “That’s cool.”
“It’s chill,” Danny corrected him.
“Nah,” PJ said, “it’s cool. Just like you got MREs and we got C rats.” He sat down on the futon and folded his hands behind his head. Jack passed him a piece of military-issue pound cake and he ate it, nodding at Lauren. “When d’you get Stateside, baby G?” he asked her with a mouth full of cake.
“Couple of days ago,” she said.
He furrowed his brow for a second, then looked at her and nodded. “Now, you need to worry about stop-loss or what? They gonna send you right back or are you good to go?”
“No sir. I am on terminal leave.” She smiled as she said it. “Got outprocessed at Lewis. I’m telling you I could not wait to get that shit done. I was so ready to hand my stuff over. I got in and out of the PDHA in less than two hours, man, packed up my gear, and that’s that.” She laughed. “That is fucking that.”
“What’s ‘PDHA’?” Danny asked.
“You get a physical and they ask you a bunch of questions,” she said.
“Like what?”
“A bunch
of screwy shit.”
“Like, are you going to go to the mall and shoot people when you get home? Do you plan on becoming a drug addict and robbing pharmacies? Have you ever eaten a baby?” Her father and PJ gave Danny a look but she laughed.
“Yeah. Yeah,” she said, in a quick deadpan, “stuff like that.”
“You tell me all about it later,” PJ said, and she nodded, but that was the last thing she would be doing. She would not be wasting one more second talking about acts that shouldn’t be described and couldn’t be undone.
“We’ll go out for coffee,” he said. “Don’t want to bore the old man.”
Jack laughed. “Would you listen to this guy, two years older than me, and he’s calling me ‘the old man.’ ”
The phone rang and Danny jumped up to answer it, the silver emergency blanket still wrapped around his shoulders. She heard him telling a joke, then talking about her being home, and then he called to her. “Lauren, Mom!”
“Who?”
He laughed. But she sat and took another bite of her sandwich. Did not get up to get the phone. PJ and Jack looked at her expectantly.
“Lauren,” Danny called again from the kitchen.
“Tell her I’ll call when I get settled in,” she said. But she knew she wouldn’t.
She could hear the soothing sound of rain, a relentless hushing on concrete and quick hollow taps against the windows and metal gutters. The glow of the Christmas lights played over the walls and ceiling. She snapped on the lamp beside the couch and sank beneath the rough wool blanket that smelled faintly of dog, opened her new book, and began to read, shielding her face from scrutiny behind the cover.
She’d made it home. If things could have gone differently, if she could have had any other life she wanted no reminding now. Her mother’s voice was the last sound she wanted to hear.
Dispatch #134
Dear Sistopher,
How’s your vacation in Desertown going? I’ve been trying to get a second to write you, but our Internet connection is unreliable out here in the middle of Watertown, and I have to keep morale up, otherwise I won’t be able to rely on Sebastian to bring you this message. When he gets there please feed him some socks and send him home. My class is planting a hydroponic victory garden, which should help some with all the rationing. Pip-pip, what? We’re growing sugar cane, and tobacco, and whiskey, and ladies stockings, and other things that have been hard to get. Like intelligent conversation.
You must be really sick of all the surfing and sailing and guy supermodels by now. Maybe you could come home or I could come visit you and get a little bit of the good life.
Dad seems okay. (This part is serious. He really does.) He’s talking about getting an office in PJ’s building and he’s gotten a few calls for clients. (I’m not kidding, people are actually calling him to get help with their problems.) OMG, WTF, LOL, ETC . . . ETC . . .
Don’t wear yourself out at the spa.
Be safe I love you,
Daniel Clay
Four
THE BOOKS WERE there but it was like someone else’s room. Some girl she could barely remember. A girl who had painted everything yellow, including the ceiling. Who had hung blue curtains. What seemed like a sophisticated idea when she was seventeen now felt claustrophobic. Childish. The shelves that were not filled with books housed trophies and pictures. A photograph of Danny as a baby wrapped in a blanket in her arms, while she looked eagerly up into the camera. A picture of her and Holly before prom. They’d bought their dresses together at T.J. Maxx. Holly’s was yellow and shiny, and Holly’s mother babysat that night so they could go out. Holly didn’t drink because she was still nursing, but Lauren and Shane had a bottle of schnapps and Uncle Patrick’s station wagon—which was still filled with newspapers Patrick hadn’t delivered. They sat in the parking lot behind the gym and drank quickly right from the bottle. The air was warm, and she remembered the sweet burning feeling in her throat from the liquor. Holly laughing at them, showing them a new picture of Grace. They stooped over her flip phone as it glowed in the clear night, squinting at her standing up in her crib, four tiny white teeth visible in a smile that took up her entire face. It was just the three of them together at prom because Asshole had already broken up with Holly. But they were happy and they drank to getting out of school.
They shared Shane for the slow dances and watched the girls from their neighborhood leaning drunkenly against boys from Fort Drum whom they’d brought as their dates, boys who’d already graduated high school back in their hometowns and looked interchangeable in their high and tight crew cuts. They were fun and good dancers, had fine bodies and exchanged ironic knowing grins. She remembered how much she loved Shane’s way in contrast to them. How proud she was of him that night. He’d just heard from Swarthmore and they were paying for part of it and for the rest he took loans. Lauren would be finding out within the next week about school too, and they were exuberant that night. It was their last party and you could see it in the photograph. You could see how happy they were, because they were almost gone.
Lauren looked at the other pictures in the room. More unsettling proof. A face she’d once had and would not be getting back. Here is what you were and what you won’t be again. Here are people you loved in funny clothes and different-fitting skin; there she was at graduation with Danny wearing her cap. And there as a little girl standing on her father’s shoulders at a music festival, tents in the background, trees and a long green lawn—flowers painted on her cheeks, one of her front teeth missing and the one beside it half grown in. In the photograph Jack looked relaxed. Happy. His wavy unruly hair down to his shoulders and a string of green, black and yellow beads hanging around his neck. He looked younger than she could remember him ever looking.
Somehow at this moment the idea of keeping or even taking photographs seemed to her grotesque and clinical, like evidence gathering.
She sat on the bed and let her focus soften, blur. Rain was hitting the bedroom window, and downstairs the refrigerator hummed. From across the hall she could hear the staccato tones of Danny’s phone receiving and sending text messages and the bright ping of incoming chat on his computer. Every sound seemed heightened, an annoying intrusion on her concentration, though she had no idea what she was concentrating on. When Danny was little he used to fall asleep singing to himself, songs from the radio or songs he’d heard her practicing. Now the house was filled with sharp noises and distracting unnerving clicks, not the languid sounds of living.
She unpacked the rest of her gear, setting it on the bed. Opened a fake leather box and looked at the cheap metal chunk inside, the ribbon, the pin like a trinket from Claire’s Boutique at the mall. Everyone likes jewelry. But no one likes to think about what the army has in common with a group of middle-school girls. If Sebastian were alive she would have pinned it to his collar. She snapped the box shut and put it in the bottom of her top drawer, took out her cosmetic bag, took out her pistol, wrapped it up in a T-shirt, and stowed it under her pillow. Finally she turned the duffel upside down and let whatever was left fall to the floor. Socks, pens, an envelope full of paperwork signed by Captain Parker when the 15-6 happened back at the FOB, and a single sheet of lined paper with the words Daryl Green written on it, and beneath that Camille Bartolette, 2149 Lake Darling Road, Hebron, Canada. She held the paper and it made the world quiet. Her thumbs on either side of his firmly printed script. “This is where we’ll be for sure,” he said. “We’ll go out ice fishing when you come. We’ll get good work out there. We can build a motherfucking snow skyscraper and then knock it down with remote-control planes.”
The phone rang and stopped and then her father called her name.
“I’m not home,” she yelled. Then pressed her fingers into her ears in case he had something else to tell her.
• • •
She didn’t remember taking a shower and coming back to the room, but she must have because she was lying on her back now wearing an olive tank top and swea
ts. Her hair was wet; the soapy smell of her own clean skin hovered around her. Jack was at her door, dressed in pajama pants, his hair whiter than it should have been. He smiled and sat on the edge of her bed. If he was alarmed by the number of tattoos she’d gotten in Iraq he didn’t show it. Only a deep calm kindness, a patience and respect radiated from him. It was, right then, as if he was her dad from the picture. The dad who could carry her weight on his shoulders.
“I’m just taking the laundry down. You need any done?”
“No thanks.”
“That was someone named Dr. Klein who called earlier,” he said.
“What did she want?” It felt hot in the room, and her clothes were uncomfortable, itchy.
“She wanted you to give her a call,” he said. “I left the number by the phone. You still don’t have a cell?”
She shook her head. “Nah, I’m an analog gal, you know that.” Cell phones were expensive and she’d rather save the money or spend it on Danny.
He held her chin and smiled, his eyes clear and calm. She turned to the side, worried he’d start crying if he looked at her long enough. But he didn’t. He just smiled.
“Uncle P.’s really happy you’re home. Said he’s got someone to talk to now.”
“Like PJ ever had trouble talking,” she said.
“Oh, I know it,” Jack said. “More trouble to get him to stop. But I remember when PJ came home. It was hard for him. He had a tough time hanging out again. Wouldn’t take off his jump boots, for one thing. He wore those damn boots everywhere. That fool would wear them swimming. He’d be there in his American flag bathing suit and army boots. I mean, come on.”
She laughed.
“Believe it,” Jack said, nodding. “There was a time when he was walking around—I should say stalking around the neighborhood like some kind of angry, I don’t know what you’d call it, angry . . . one of those guys from a kung fu movie. He wore the boots and he always wore this black headband and Wayfarer glasses. Ridiculous.”