by Cara Hoffman
Holly shut her phone and walked back toward the kitchen and Lauren followed her. She took a big white cake out of the walk-in cooler, cut a slice, poured mugs of coffee, adding a shot of Jameson’s to each, turned on the ceiling fan, and offered Lauren a cigarette. They leaned against the counter sipping the hot bitter drink in the glow of the warming light and eating cold Christmas cake. White butter-cream frosting and sparkly red sugar sprinkles sweet and salty in their mouths.
“So what were you doing over there?” Holly asked.
Lauren shrugged. “Hanging out,” she said.
Holly nodded respectfully. “Hanging out in a city or in like a desert place?”
“I was at a FOB outside an oil field.”
“What’s a FOB?”
“Forward operating base,” Lauren said.
“So is that like way in the middle of nowhere?”
“Kinda.”
“Do people live around there?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get to save anyone’s life?”
Lauren smiled. It was the opposite of what people wanted to ask when you came home, the opposite of what everyone thought.
She shook her head and then sipped her coffee to wash away the sugary taste. “I saved millions from the inconvenience of taking public transportation,” she said. “And I saved a bunch of fucking money in my own bank account.”
Holly said, “Well, the last part’s good, right?” She punched her in the arm. “The first part’s kinda good too.” Then she pointed to the door. “Who’s that skinny nerd?”
Shane walked into The Bag of Nails wearing a rain-spattered windbreaker and carrying a plastic Stop & Shop bag filled with mail, which he handed to his Uncle Gerry. The Patricks patted his shoulders and back like they were checking for weapons and the bartender put up a beer, but Shane turned to leave and that’s when he saw her and Holly looking at him and laughing. She put her hand out for him to come hold, but he hugged Holly first before taking it. The three of them stood together like no time had gone by and they weren’t just some castaways from eighth grade honors biology. Like Shane hadn’t become someone, and she and Holly hadn’t become two kinds of no one.
“Gerry’s this close to fighting Marty ’cause he called your girlfriend a dyke,” Holly told him.
“Lovely,” he said.
Lauren handed him her fork and he took several hasty bites of cake. Raised his eyebrows and nodded and then took another. He said, “Let’s get out of here,” with his mouth still full.
“To where?” she asked him. It was pointless. He was trying to stay ahead of the boredom and depression of being home, and even she knew that was futile.
His phone buzzed and he pulled it out and looked at it. Hesitated a moment before silencing it and putting it back in his jacket, then he shrugged. “Let’s go ice-skating. Let’s go get Danny and go ice-skating.”
A flicker of resentment passed over Holly’s face as he said it.
“We can drive up to the rink,” he said. “You want to come?”
Lauren shook her head at the casualness of his question, and Holly raised her eyebrows and smirked. “You want to cover my shift, college boy? So me and L can go?”
“I would,” he said. “Yeah.” Lauren knew he meant it and also that it was insulting. Like anyone could come in and do Holly’s job, like it wasn’t a real job.
“I’m just fucking with you,” Holly said. “Somebody’s gotta stay here, babysit your uncles.”
“Wait, we should wait until later and then we can bring Grace,” Lauren said.
Holly’s look softened and slid into guilt. “No. No, you go now with your boy. You just got home. I was just fucking with you, seriously.”
• • •
Lauren didn’t want to get in the car with him, was suddenly sick from the very idea of it. But there was nothing more to salvaging this day. She was not living side by side with the rest of them anymore. Something had propelled her into the future. She could see what people were thinking and what they were going to say before they said it. She’d been like this before she left for Iraq, but now it was excruciating the way she knew every little thing that would happen. The way she could see people thinking things about her they wouldn’t say. The filthiest secret of all is hiding in plain sight all over the world; they put up monuments to it and have parades. But when it’s just you, just one person alone in the same room with them, they stare, watch you like you’ll do something wrong now. Because deep down they knew you were doing something wrong in the first place. All that training was not for rescuing kittens from trees. She squared her shoulders. Soon she’d see Daryl again and be with someone who got it. Someone with whom she could be quiet.
Shane didn’t try to hug her or kiss her in the car, and she respected him for it. He smiled at her. He said, “I missed you.”
She nodded, said, “I just need to settle in, babe.” She wanted to tear his shirt open and bite him, wanted to pull his face down and shut his mouth with hers. But she sat looking at him, waiting patiently for him to say the exact thing he said:
“I’m kind of going nuts being here. I can’t believe I agreed to stay two weeks this time. My uncles are . . . I can’t even talk about it. I keep seeing people we went to high school with that still fucking live here. Live with their parents or whatever. It’s fucking crazy. It must be even weirder for you.”
She nodded, but it was irritating that he was talking about her and didn’t realize it. She was still there with nowhere to go and so was Holly. And most of the friends she served with had gone back to their hometowns too. She knew she just needed to leave it all for a while. She’d take it up with Daryl when she saw him. They’d both find good work up north. She could bring Danny with her to check things out. She had skills now and she didn’t need to take three steps back, follow a plan she’d set up before she’d ever been down range.
She said, “I’m going to walk home.”
He looked at her like he had just woken up, like he realized he’d been talking to a stranger, and it was a relief to see, made that tight sick feeling in her chest go away. And for a moment it made her love him like she used to. How quick he was. How he could see the way she was gone.
There was no reason why he should know her anymore. Shane was depressed running into people from high school because of what it said about who he was and where he came from. Now Shane lived among people who read like he did or talked about books, who went to parties that weren’t in parking lots or half-burnt warehouses. He was grieving for having lived here now that he’d been found. But as far as she was concerned Watertown wasn’t a place at all.
Watertown was like some imaginary landscape in a movie she’d once seen and now she had to go visit the set. See how the buildings were just facades propped up with pieces of plywood. It wasn’t just her father that had been replaced. Shane was trying to act like Shane, but he hadn’t aged a second or changed his clothes. Holly seemed like she was in some kind of hostage situation, forced to work as a waitress so Asshole’s parents would help her out. The Patricks had clearly been that way forever. Cartoon construction workers chewing on fat cigars claiming they’d ever had a chance to leave, lying to themselves every day at the bar.
And the town looked wrong—all high definition but flat like she was watching it from somewhere inside herself. Like she had no eyes anymore, just a scope that she stood behind, not even searching or aiming but watching, seeing everything a few seconds off—seconds before it really happened—and that removed the feeling of surprise or empathy you’re supposed to have. It was as though she was living ten seconds in the future and could tell before anyone else that nothing mattered. She’d already read the fairy tale this life was based on and it ended badly, the birds eat your trail of bread crumbs, children are beheaded while peering into old trunks, idealistic suitors fertilize the roses on which they’re impaled with their blood.
The rain was falling heavily on the car now, and it sounded like they were being buried in gravel.
“Sit here awhile until this lets up,” he said. She held his hand and watched the empty street succumb to the deluge before them. It was like a summer thunderstorm in the middle of winter: bare trees and naked muddy concrete and no wind.
Shane looked strong and lost at the same time and he was about to say something to her, but she pressed her palm to his face and pushed her fingers into his mouth. Cupped her other hand over the front of his jeans. He sucked on her fingers as she undid his belt, then reached in with her warm wet hand and felt him. Put her mouth on his mouth and straddled him, pressing her body against him. His glasses fogged and she took them off and put them on the dashboard—his head was against her chest and he looked up at her and she kissed him while he put his hands in her hair, guided her face down to his and kissed her perfectly, hungrily. Her back was against the steering wheel and she kissed his neck while she stroked him. So familiar and so much better than familiar in its distant dislocated newness. She could feel how tense he was, pulled tight and lovely, blood straining against delicate skin and filling her hand. The hum of their intent filled the little space and she felt for a moment the happy rush of living alongside him, not watching from outside, not far away. She held firmly to his flesh and beating blood and slid her hand along him in the cramped car on that chilly empty street beneath the hammering rain, hoping that if he could not bring her back this way, he could at least make her disappear.
Nine
WHEN SHE WAS done she rested her forehead on his chest, her hand slick and limp against his sticky tender skin, the car thick with the smell of him. She felt like she’d woken up, felt sobered. He leaned his head back and breathed while she adjusted herself and stepped out of the car. Stood in the rain, stretched. When she came around to the driver’s side he put the window down, looked into her eyes. She watched him uneasily as he loved and studied her, then she leaned down and kissed him.
“What the fuck, baby?” he whispered against her mouth.
She stood again and looked at him. “Nice language,” she said.
“Seriously, girl,” he said, smiling.
“Don’t call me ‘girl.’ ”
“All right, bad lieutenant,” he said, his face confused, reconfiguring itself. “What d’you want me to call you now? ‘Sar’n Clay’?” He said it in a southern accent, and she saw again that thing college had done to him that she didn’t like at all.
“You want to fight outside The Bag of Nails like one of your fucking uncles?” she asked. She had none of the warm feelings she’d had for him thirty seconds before.
He looked at her in surprise and his eyes changed slowly, like land growing lighter after a cloud passes. He was naive, and it infuriated her the way he still possessed the luxury of disappointment.
“My intention was to take you ice-skating, not to have sex or fight,” he said.
“So you’ve not achieved your goal and accomplished two things you didn’t want. What does that feel like?”
“You’re asking me what that feels like?”
Shane laughed through his teeth but stopped abruptly as her hands shot through the open window. She grabbed the collar of his shirt roughly in one deft movement and he jerked his head back, shocked. He was weak, and she put a stop to his flailing immediately by putting the heel of her palm right beneath his nose and pressing up. He tried to turn but was forced to tilt his head back against the seat. She scrambled farther into the car and pressed her other forearm against his throat. Her face was close to his and the car still thick with the smell of sex. He made a sick sad grunt as he struggled to turn his head, a frightened echo of sounds he made when she was touching him or in his sleep. It turned her stomach. The cartilage in his nose began to give and it revulsed her, a sickening, enervating jolt ran through her joints. She dropped her hands as if her tendons had been cut, stepped back, and shoved them deep into her jacket pockets to keep him safe.
Shane sat upright again, confused and disarranged, and looked at her. He was furious and hurt and didn’t realize those feelings served no purpose at all. Like everyone else, he simply had no idea of how easily he could be dispatched.
She was soaking wet and her tears were hot on her face, crying for what just happened to him. She hated all the intelligence behind his eyes, pitied him and was ashamed by his knowing look—as if he’d been studying up on her while she was gone. Now she was just doing what he expected, what they taught him about people like her at his smug liberal school. Thought he was seeing what war did but he had no fucking clue. Thought he was seeing trauma up close but he was seeing it from a remote distance, might as well have been seeing a glacier melting, an ocean dying, an oil field set on fire.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, looking steadily into her eyes. “I’m sorry I said that. But not because you tried to push my nose up into my brain.” She leaned down and he put his hand against her cheek, pushed her soaking hair back from her neck. Her clothes stuck to her body and she could feel their weight.
“I hate it here,” she said. And she did not mean the bar or the town or the country in which they lived.
Ten
SHANE WASN’T ANGRY until after she turned and walked away. She’d messed up his face and he could feel the heat of blood swelling in his nose and upper lip. He should not have apologized to her after she did that. She was not all right, and god only knew, in her house nothing would be done to help her and no one would say a thing. Lauren could breeze through her whole life, doted upon or ignored, left to figure it all out for everyone else. Even when they were in high school she kept things to herself, protected her father, pretended for her brother. Shane punched the steering wheel with the side of his fist. He touched his face where she had hurt him, the skin hot and sensitive, beginning to swell.
• • •
Holly smiled when he walked back in, then stopped abruptly when she saw his face. “That was a quick trip to the rink,” she said. “You okay?” She was standing too close to Patrick, and his other uncles were playing dice.
Patrick winked at him. “Lauren all right then?” he asked, pointing his chin in the direction of the door.
Shane shrugged, nodded.
“She didn’t look herself, did she?” Patrick asked, a knowing smirk spreading across his face.
“Oh for chrissakes,” Holly said. “She’s been home twelve hours. You don’t look yourself after a day of delivering that fake newspaper.”
“Sure I do,” Patrick said. “I look better than myself, got plenty of time to reflect while I’m driving around. I’d say I actually have one of the most relaxing jobs in town. Makes me feel fantastically myself. I get to take part in the life of the proletariat. I get to cruise around and think about what I’m reading or what I’m going to read next. You know what I’m going to read next?”
Shane and Holly said nothing, just looked patiently at one another.
“I’m reading Wilderness and the American Mind,” he said, answering his own question. “It’s next on my list.”
Shane looked up at him for a minute and Patrick nodded. “That’s right,” he said.
Shane didn’t want to hear his drunk, delivery-boy uncle say intelligent things because all he could picture was the man borrowing money from his mother. Borrowing money after she’d worked all day and cooked dinner for three grown men who were perfectly capable of feeding themselves or getting real jobs. It made him want to elbow Patrick hard in the face. He wondered why he was so short tempered today, then clenched his teeth thinking about the force with which Lauren had grabbed him. Recognized how eager he was to pass that treatment on to someone else. Someone who deserved it.
His mother had gone to college for two years, had Shane, and then went to one year of professional school—secretary school, they called it then—and she was supporting all of them, happily. As if her brothers’ sweet faces still shone for her. She still saw them as boys, ignored or denied the things they had done, took on the weight of survival for their family name or some hereditary poe
tic tendency that was carried on a coffin ship and made it alive, only to be delivered this century to The Bag of Nails, the department of social services, and the Jefferson County jail. In fact Shane wanted to hit Patrick hard in the face just for standing there, for just looking at him. He wanted to break something, to clear the bar with a baseball bat. But instead he nodded at his uncle. Said, “It’s a good book, though dated.”
“Though dated,” his uncle repeated, winking at Holly and laughing, then he reached out and put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder—shaking him back and forth a bit. “All right, easy there, take it easy, boy. Think I can’t read your mind but I can.” He looked at Holly and grinned. “I can read yours too,” he said. Then he turned his attention to his brothers who were shaking dice inside a plastic dessert cup and spilling them upon the tacky grime-darkened wood of the bar.
The bartender put up a beer for Shane and he stood and drank it this time. He had another week in Watertown. Every bit of it was worse than he remembered, and the way Lauren had blown back in from nowhere was tearing down everything he’d built. He was spent and sticky from her touch, snared by the relief and grief of seeing her. Inhabited by her even as she seemed disembodied herself.
He drank the pint and ordered another, and Holly watched him from a booth across from the bar where she sat sending texts and rolling silverware into paper napkins. She smiled at him and then pointed to the seat across from her. When he brought his drink over he said nothing, touched his nose lightly to feel if it was swelling. His phone buzzed and he looked at it guiltily, then hit SILENCE again.
“I guess this throws a wrench in your Swarthmore romances, huh?”
“I’ve seen her twice in three years,” he said of Lauren. “But once I get around her I can’t think of anyone else, or I can’t even fucking think.”
He shook his head and smiled sadly, looked up into his friend’s wise, wry face.
“What happened out there?” she asked. “She mad at you? Why’s your nose all red, you been crying?”