Be Safe I Love You: A Novel

by Cara Hoffman

  “Oh my god.” She laughed. “I don’t remember any of that.”

  “All before you were born. But he was really a different guy.”

  “You hippies were a bad influence on him, I guess. Now he’s hugging everyone and eating vegetables and shit like that. He won’t do anything the army way now.”

  “You bet. You bet we influenced him.”

  “That’s just ’cause he was worn down,” she said, suddenly annoyed at her father’s ignorance, disgusted at how bad it must have been for Peej. The insufficient boot camp they gave people back then, getting sent over with a bunch of fucking unprepared civilians, coming back and having no job and being a criminal in your own heart at twenty.

  “It was harder for those guys back then,” she said. “They didn’t have the training we do. Different army. They were more susceptible to your bullshit. They weren’t as squared away as we are now.”

  He laughed, shrugged. “Yeah, maybe so,” he said. “I just want you to know if you need to talk I am right here, sweetheart. I really am.”

  She nodded at the sentiment. Looked at his guileless face.

  “PJ said there’s a group of folks that came home who meet over at his space in the Neighborhood House,” her father told her. “Couple times a week.”

  “That’s called AA, Dad.”

  He laughed. “Wise guy. You and your brother, the two of you, I swear. Seriously, Low. They seem like nice folks if you ever want to go over there.”

  He got up and kissed the top of her head, said, “I’ll see you in the morning.” But she held his hand and was frightened at the thought of falling asleep in her old bed.

  Jack sat back down beside her and didn’t say anything. She was afraid of insomnia or something worse. Her thoughts turned to Daryl up there in the cold, not being able to sleep either. Spending the night with visions of rising dust and black rigs in their heads. A shared dream viewed through crosshairs, heard through the sound of blood rushing in their ears.

  Her father patted her hand and said, “Everyone has jet lag after a long trip, babe. Everyone feels a little wired and out of sorts when there’s a transition.” He looked relieved to be sitting with her, so confident that it was really her, confident for both of them, and his words brought her back to herself for a second. So what if she dreamt, or laid awake? At least she knew what was happening, knew what it was called. The significance of nightmares was not lost on Lauren; she knew all about the scenes that repeat themselves, the feelings of “hypervigilance.” And that’s why none of it would get her. She knew what was coming and she knew how it would end. And, after all, hypervigilance was not such a bad thing. It helped you understand. You in your yellow room; you with your good grades, and your pretty voice, and your chores all done, you are not special. You are not inviolate.

  Lauren was familiar with vigilance because she’d felt it for most of her life; been gifted with the ability to read the air in a room, a hair out of place, a single sentence for the wealth of information beneath it. For the premonition it will give you. The sound of the lipstick case snapping shut, a bag being zipped, a throat being cleared, the clink of a light chain against the mirror at 4 A.M. These are just some of the little things that mean you might be a soldier one day.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, squeezing her father’s hand. And made herself believe it.

  • • •

  In the dream she was running with Danny in the snow. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the air was clear. Large snowflakes were falling, tall pine trees rose up all around them. Danny’s face was flushed and rosy, his breath visible in the cold pouring from his mouth and nostrils as he ran. His face made her smile. Made her remember his little hands and arms and shoulders, his baby fat, his happy face. She thought about how he talked so fast she had to tell him to slow down. Lauren looked past his shoulder into the distance, and powdery gusts of snow rose like dust on a road. Something was traveling toward them, fast and erratic. No, she said. She slapped herself in the face, Daryl and Walker weren’t there. It was just her and Danny. So it was a dream. But she could hear the sound of a helicopter.

  Just to be on the safe side she raised her rifle, made sure she could see the target clearly through the scope. She needed to do it differently this time so things would work out right. She took a breath, pointed the gun down at her feet, determined not to do it. But gusts of snow still rose. There was no way to know who was in the car. She couldn’t risk it, not with Danny there. In one perfect motion she raised her rifle, spotted the mark, pulled the trigger, and then before the pop and shatter, before the silence and the relentless empty din that rushed to fill it, she broke through the surface of the dream sweating, gasping.

  The room was dark and still and Sebastian was curled beside her, tucked in behind her knees where he always slept. He looked better than when she’d left. His fur caught the dim light and she could see that he still had the soft brown undercoat he’d had as a puppy. His eyes were shining. Deep black and compassionate. So black the pupils looked lighter. It was a relief to see him, and she reached down to touch him. Let him lick her hand, then closed her eyes for a few more minutes while her heart beat against her chest.

  When she opened her eyes again it was to a yellow ceiling. The reading lamp was still on and she felt hungry. Got up and sat with her feet hanging off the side of the bed. The red numbers on the digital clock read 333 and she looked away in case it was a bad omen. She felt like crying and for a moment was gripped by a cold terror that Danny was lying in his room dead. The rain beat heavily down outside and she was frightened that she’d awakened again into another dream.

  Five

  EILEEN KLEIN SIGNED her name on Sergeant Clay’s Post Deployment Health Assessment, Form DD-2900, on the afternoon of December 23. The soldier had filled out the form online and Dr. Klein saw no red flags. Clay had not been concussed or injured or suffered an amputation. She had not been sexually assaulted or gotten pregnant on her tour, and she had no medically unexplained symptoms.

  Based on Clay’s answers on the form, Dr. Klein felt she was not at risk for major depressive disorder. She did not appear to have signs of PTSD or markers for addiction, suicide, or committing acts of domestic violence. Klein scheduled an in-office meeting to discuss factors related to combat and operational stress: normal stuff, expected issues for returning service members. And also so she could lay eyes on Clay, make sure the soldier understood that not reporting health problems meant practical concerns later, like not getting psychiatric health coverage or even getting routine counseling paid for.

  Lauren Clay was a model soldier. She described herself in the PDHA interview as a “returning warrior” and said she’d been well prepared for the stressors of command. She said Army Resilience Training for post deployment had helped her understand what to expect at home. Which is why she had plans to keep busy, including applying to school and a possible new job at a site in Canada with Daryl Green, one of the men in her command. Lauren was already stamped, sealed, and delivered back to Watertown when Dr. Klein came across Green’s name again, this time as she was assessing a medic on his third tour of duty who presented with ten specific risk factors, requested extensive counseling on base, a referral for someone specializing in combat-related psychiatric issues for home, and knew exactly what pills he’d need prescribed to get him through the next several months.

  Eileen Klein had made a mistake when she signed Lauren Clay’s Post Deployment Health Assessment Form. And she needed to correct it quickly, because, contrary to the folk wisdom of families and spouses and others who never make it down range, home is not always the safest place for a returning warrior.

  Six

  LAUREN WALKED ACROSS the hall to Danny’s room. A gray light washed over the walls, distorting the magazine cutouts that were taped there into a series of unfamiliar shapes. She stood and looked at him—the rise and fall of his breathing relaxed her. Then she sat on the bed beside him and put her hand on his back
. After some minutes he woke and gently smiled at her.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said.

  Danny moved part of the pillow out from beneath him and extended it to her, and she lay down beside him in his narrow bed, resting her head next to his. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she looked at the pictures.

  “It’s vacation now,” he told her, his voice heavy, coming from some warm deep place. “You don’t have to sleep.”

  She looked at the walls. He’d taped up more pictures while she was away. Right above them hung a series of frozen landscapes, a map showing William Parry’s expedition route; then icebergs and glaciers, one that looked like it was engulfed in a waterfall. She knew why he surrounded himself with these things. They were a comfort. Like knowing that one day the sun would explode. A comfort like the plans she’d made with Daryl for when they got home. She pointed to the photograph of rushing water.

  “Greenland,” he said. “I bet it’s much smaller now. Probably a quarter of that ice shelf is gone.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said.

  “It is. People think maps don’t change, or they change just because of wars.” He sounded drowsy, like he was talking in his sleep.

  “Like Mesopotamia,” she said. Then turned on her side and closed her eyes.

  “Right,” Danny whispered, alive beside her. “But the land changes too, not just the name or the border. And when the land changes, then it’s for real.”

  • • •

  Their mother, Megan Clay, had always been good at seeing beautiful things. She could make plain or ugly surroundings sink beneath the weight of a single red-tipped leaf. You just had to look at things closely enough to make the rest of the world go away. Gasoline spilled in a shallow puddle by the self-serve pump formed a swirling metallic rainbow, a skin upon the water.

  “Look, look!” She would breathe excitedly, crouched by Lauren’s shoulder, her cheek against her daughter’s, trying to get low to see what she saw, to direct her gaze.

  “Right there.” She’d point. “There!”

  A baby bird or a snail or someone’s round-cheeked child, a place close to the bank of the Black River where a fish jumped and might jump again. She’d grab Lauren’s arm or nearly shove her suddenly. “Look! Someone let go of their balloon, look at how red it is against those clouds.”

  Lauren did look as they stood in the parking lot of the strip mall watching it until they couldn’t see it anymore, until it was part of the sky.

  “Do you sometimes feel like everything is really weird?” Lauren asked her mother, lying upside down on the couch in her Pokémon pajamas. “Like a word when you say it over and over and you don’t know what it means anymore and then you’re not sure it really is a word?”

  Meg nodded, preoccupied behind her book.

  “I mean like that but with the way things look,” Lauren said. “Or like other stuff, just the way things are. Like what the heck is a clock really? Who thought of making up something like that, they just made it up! And what did they do when there wasn’t one?” Lauren hung her head off the edge of the couch and looked at her teacup, upside down on the table.

  “Yeah,” Meg said, peering over her reading. “I do occasionally think everything is a little weird.” Piles of notes and other heavy books with library numbers on their spines were spread across the living room. Danny wasn’t born yet and her mother still wore octagonal-shaped glasses, and she carried everything anyone could need in a school backpack, including a Ziploc bag full of half-broken Crayola crayons. Meg took out her pen and drew two eyes on either side of Lauren’s chin while the girl lolled on the couch, then she started laughing, riffled through her pack for her compact mirror to show Lauren. It looked like her mouth was on upside down, like it belonged to another face. Lauren laughed so hard her stomach hurt. Every time she looked at her own face she started again. Tears rolled out of her eyes and into her hair. Meg smiled at her, picked her up while she was still humming with laughter, and her belly felt good.

  “Eight o’clock,” Meg said. “Bedtime.”

  “No. Wait wait wait,” Lauren protested, still giddy, her head resting on her mother’s shoulder. She could smell the perfume she wore, and linked her finger gently into the loop of her thin gold earring. “Wait,” Lauren said. “It can’t be bedtime. Clocks aren’t really real.”

  Meg laughed and headed up the stairs. She said, “I’m afraid they are, my dear. Tick. Tick. Tick.”

  • • •

  Danny was still asleep when Lauren woke again a few hours later. She went to her room to change, then sat in the kitchen for an hour drinking coffee. As it got lighter a pale mist rose from the ground and fog hung about the windows like the house was engulfed in a cloud. She stood and gazed out the back door into a thick bank of white air and then stepped out into the quiet yard.

  It should have been much colder. The rain-slicked driveway disappeared into nothing before her. She turned and squinted up at the windows of Danny’s room, the house at once exalted and shabby in the muted morning light. She went down to the end of the driveway and stood in the garage kicking little holes into the gravel floor, digging the toe of her boot into the dirt beneath it over and over. She picked up a handful of the small smooth gray stones and whipped them hard against the wall, then did it again. And again. And again. Hard enough for them to ricochet back and hit her. But not hard enough at all.

  When she finally walked back out into the mist the great mass of the neighborhood was looming, closing in on her. Invisible but closing in.

  Winters were never like this when she was growing up. There were snow days and frozen mountains to play on. The sound of plows on the streets before daylight. The nights clear and star-filled shining down on the lots and yards made beautiful from the blanket of sparkling snow, pinpricks of icy light shining and flickering up from the white banks. Branches thick with it. Snowmen and forts in the front yards. Sledding down by the river. Ice-skating with Holly out at the park.

  She’d imagined all the things they would do on Danny’s Christmas break: sledding, maybe even camping somewhere outside in the snow, they could’ve built an igloo and she could’ve made a fire inside and they could’ve sat in there and drank tea.

  Everything was different now. As if the heat of Amarah reached through time and erased her childhood. The future she’d been destined to live had caused this somehow. Her future. Her decisions. It was nearly warm in Watertown on December 26 because of the things they were fighting for. The things they were unearthing that would see them all burn. It was hard not to think of oil as blood, real blood, not the trite symbol of soldier or civilian blood. But some deep blank coursing system, meaningless on its own. The cellular history of great bodies long devoured by the land and resurrected, an obsidian fat made from corpses. Winter had been stolen from the future. Like everything else, the past had risen up and taken it away.

  She wouldn’t let this happen to Danny. All his days inside on his computer staring into nothing. And outside, more nothing waiting for him. He needed to see things that were beautiful, feel the snow and cold instead of dreaming about it. Be able to leave his chair and run and leap and burst forward instead of living in a flat world. She could fix it. She’d fixed harder things. She had more than enough cold-weather gear for both of them. They could camp and trek and go to Hebron, go to Daryl’s. She could easily bring him along. Danny and Sebastian too.

  • • •

  Back in the kitchen she left her father a note, then set off in the blighted light to Our Lady of Lourdes, hoping the doors would be open. She called on the memory of Danny’s face and his baby-fine curly hair to keep her company on her walk. The image she’d been calling up for months to remember why she wanted to go home. His laughter. His round cheeks turning red.

  It must have been sometime just after the first Gulf War and Fort Drum was welcoming troops home. She was maybe nine or ten and there was a parade, there was music and people hugging and a big inflatable bouncy castle th
at was red and gray and had four corner towers with pointy roofs that shook and swayed from the ruckus inside. She didn’t know where her parents were that day. Maybe PJ had taken her and Danny to the parade, or maybe it was just the two of them, and someone dropped them off for a while.

  She held his hand and they watched other kids playing. He looked up at her, raised his eyebrows and laughed as the children inside bounced high like they were flying. Even some big kids almost her age were playing.

  She picked Danny up and walked over to a sturdy friendly guy in desert camo who’d been helping kids in and out of the castle. Someone’s dad maybe. She asked if it was okay, was Danny too little to go in? She set him down and he almost came up to her chest. Danny looked up at her and at the nice soldier with his big dark eyes. And the man smiled the way everyone smiled at Danny when he was a baby. She always thought he looked like an animal because his eyes were too big for his face and they were so shiny, so alert. It made you want to carry him around and read to him and build him forts. The man put his hands on his hips and stood in front of them nodding, with his eyebrows knit like he was making a big decision.

  “That is a good question, little gal. Whatderyer folks say?” He looked more awake than any adult she’d ever met. And his clothes fit the way clothes fit a mannequin. He smelled like soap and she noticed that his skin was very smooth. He had blond hair on his forearms and raised veins that snaked like rivers on a map across his hands. She wanted him to pick her up and hold her. She liked the light goofy sound of his voice. The way he talked seemed to imply that what her “folks said,” if in fact they were around to say anything at all, was just one opinion, something to weigh before taking matters into their own capable hands.

  She shrugged and then she watched him scan the crowd over her head for a moment. He gave her a couple of rough pats on the shoulder.