Be Safe I Love You: A Novel

by Cara Hoffman

  Holly felt it then: how the song and all it contained fought off the world they came from and yet was made of it. She lay across the warm hood of the car and gazed up at the sky until she felt like she was floating, rising.

  Never before and never since had she felt that free.

  Fifteen

  SINCE GETTING HOME Lauren had been forced to weather her dreams, so filled with strange detail they made her nearly conscious of her sleeping self, her body, a thing in a trance, eyes speeding along blindly beneath their lids, stories that clutched her heart, made it thump against her breast, made her muscles jerk, but left her lying still and unable to wake. These dreams made her tired and they did not stop. Each one with its own inextricably sinister back story.

  They all began with her standing beneath a complicated tower of black metal that could have been a witch’s house. Thick white ashes floated down, each jaggedly cut into lace and hearts by small hands using blunt, round-tipped scissors. Sometimes the snow rose in the distance. Sometimes there was a little girl.

  The little girl who made the ashes. She was sick and Lauren had to take care of her. She was sick and there was a camera crew on-site and everyone loved the little girl because she’d been the star of the TV show Law and Order. Though she was still only four feet tall and very thin, she’d played a tough cop and everyone took her seriously. But now she was frail and ill.

  Lauren was holding her hand and kneeling before her and the girl told her what the doctors said. “I have crumbling lungs,” the girl said. “They also call it crumbling crown.” She could see then the girl had a tattered paper crown on her head, a thin, ragged, regal thing that trembled and curled at the edges. And her arms were covered from where she had drawn on herself with magic marker. The girl took a shaky breath and then began to sing.

  Lauren covered the girl’s mouth roughly with her whole hand, picked her up quickly and began walking away, but she was too big and gangly to carry very far. The camera crew followed them and wanted to ask questions about Law and Order. Lauren tried to leave but couldn’t see through the ashes. Finally she put the girl down and held her close, held her tightly by the shoulders and whispered through her teeth into the child’s ear.

  “I will do anything, anything, anything I can to make your pain go away,” she said. “I will do anything. But you are going to die. That’s just how it is. You are going to die if I have to see to it myself.”

  • • •

  She would wake feeling heavy and dehydrated, and grateful to be alert again. The significance of the nightmares was not lost on Lauren. The thoughts that repeat themselves suddenly and unexpectedly, the need to be vigilant. Some of these things she took with her to Iraq, did not gain over there, and she was not ignorant of their meanings nor the way they could be used to keep her sharp. It was, in fact, this sharpness she pointed to in conversations with herself that made her an exception now; her discipline, her ability to analyze what she was experiencing, these were the traits that got her home. The skills that had found her on a plane on Christmas Day instead of spending the next several weeks still outprocessing in some shithole base in Washington State, sitting around taking orders that she had no intention to ever do again.

  It was all about understanding the narrative. Knowing history and the facts and what you could expect. This allowed you to get what you needed. She would get the new narrative under control. She would stop dreaming these dreams. Just like she’d done before.

  The old narrative was a series of truths. A history that had to be rethought to the point of meaninglessness. At best it was a number of random events involving incompatible people and someone who never got a chance to go to college. At worst it was something else. Her father was too weak to make her mother stay, and her mother was worthless to want to leave two kids. The kind of woman who meticulously and continuously pointed out her husband’s flaws, made an airtight case for their lives being a living hell, and then saved only herself. Leaving Lauren and Danny with someone who could not get out of bed, who worked with all his might to open a can of soup in the evening without falling apart, who was visibly grateful for the end of “dinner” so he could leave them at the table and retreat to his room.

  But that was better than when their mother was still there. An eight-hour screaming argument that postpones lunch and dinner and makes bedtime impossible is not preferable to having two parents.

  When Danny was four their father and mother asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he was practical enough to ask for food. A bag of groceries to keep in his room. A week later he knocked on her door, wearing shorts, snowboots, mittens, and a tiger mask and asked her if she wanted to come over to Africa and eat a giraffe. He was holding two pieces of wheat bread from his personal stash and he pushed them toward her. She picked him up and slid the mask on to the top of his head and kissed him on the cheek. Something slammed in their parents’ room and the word “you” popped and burst into the air around them. She watched his shoulders hunch and eyes widen reflexively.

  She tore a piece of bread and put it in her mouth.

  “This giraffe meat is good,” she said. “But you’re not dangerous, are you?”

  “Not to other tigers,” he explained matter-of-factly, waving his hand.

  “Oh, right,” she said. She sat him on her bed and then went to her desk and took out her eyeliner, leaned in toward the mirror to draw whiskers on her cheeks. “There.”

  She looked in her drawers for something else befitting a tiger, found a black and white long-sleeved T-shirt and put it on. Danny nodded solemnly at her, his mouth full, clutching the remaining crust of giraffe in his mitten.

  She sat on the floor beside the bed and growled and he growled too and offered her another bite.

  A whole sentence Lauren did not want to hear or understand rang clearly through the wall. Followed by several more.

  “It’s a loud jungle tonight,” Danny said.

  She looked at him, the big boots hanging off the edge of the bed and his little bare knees. It was a loud jungle every night. And they needed it to be quiet. She picked Danny up again and carried him across the narrow hallway, knocked on their parents’ door. She would ask nicely for them to stop and they would see how cute Danny was in his tiger costume and they would stop.

  “Butt out!” her mother yelled at her without opening the door. Lauren knocked again. “Butt out!” her mother screamed, throwing the door open. “What are you doing? Why would you bring your little brother in here? What a manipulator! Look at this. Get out! Take him out of here!”

  Her father stood to the side in the dim room, still wearing his work clothes, his arms folded across his chest looking at the floor; they’d been at this since four.

  “Stop yelling!” Lauren shouted at her mother, her eyes narrowed, her face almost comical with the eyeliner whiskers, much shorter than both of her parents as she glared up into their faces, holding Danny on her hip. She’d wanted to ask politely, to talk quietly. But as soon as she saw them just standing there doing nothing, not even caring that they said the same things over and over and over, while Danny had to pretend they were animal noises, she felt sad and weak. And if she didn’t yell at them she’d be crying, and that would be just more bad noise, more confusion for Danny. “Both of you. Shut up!” she snapped. “This isn’t good for us.”

  Danny pulled his mask down over his face and held on to her hair and his bread with one mitten. He patted her back gently with the other. “Lowen,” he whispered into her ear. “Let’s be tigers.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake,” her mother screamed. “Listen to this. Guess what? People fight. You’re not a fragile little thing. That’s the way it is. It’s not going to kill you.” Her eyes were red and she raised her chin defiantly at Lauren, smirking at her. “Now you’ll have something to talk about. Now you’ll have an interesting life!”

  “Meg.” Her father reached for her mother’s arm, but she shook it off.

  Her mother looked angry and exha
usted, and Lauren wanted her to stop and hold her arms out to her children. The whole thing could stop if her mother would just hold them, or turn and smile at her father. Lauren loved her. Loved the turtleneck sweaters she wore. Loved the shape of her face and the way she smelled and her thin gold hoop earrings. She even loved it when her mother was sarcastic or mean or wanted to be alone, because it meant she was really thinking about things, like she always said, not some little housewife. Maybe if they stood there long enough their mother would say something funny. She would see the absurdity of yelling at two children dressed as tigers and she would laugh and hold them. Forgive them whatever it was. Lauren stood mutely holding Danny, and Meg took a deep breath and then made a low, frustrated sound in her throat. In one second she could change everything. She could make everything right.

  “All of you!” her mother shouted, a tight fury in her throat, damning them with something more that remained unspoken.

  Sixteen

  “WHERE’S DAD?”

  He looked confused for a minute like he hadn’t heard her and then said, “At work.”

  “Where?” She stood in his doorway with her head to the side, toweling off her long hair. Her sopping clothes were in the dryer; the scratch and click of the buttons hitting the sides as they spun was audible from the vent in Danny’s room. She’d changed into sweats and her olive army T-shirt.

  “Work,” he said loudly. “It’s Monday. He’s got a couple clients Monday and Wednesday.”

  “It’s the day after Christmas.”

  He shrugged. “People are poor and crazy all year long,” he said. “They don’t get holidays off.”

  Something about that information was disorienting and she felt she was about to lose her temper, what little of it she still had hold of. While she’d been wandering around town in the rain her father had gone to work and just left Danny in front of his computer. She sat down on the floor and rested her back against his bed and listened to the ping of instant messages and concentrated on her breathing the way they tell you to. But concentrating on a thing you can do that your friends can’t anymore is some pretty fucking bad advice.

  He laughed to himself periodically and typed rapidly. “Who are you IM-ing?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer right away but laughed again and then shouted, “Scott accidentally texted his mom this picture he took last week of us peeing on this last little pile of snow over by the 7-Eleven on Hoard Street!” Lauren realized he was wearing earbud headphones. “She’s so pissed. Oh!” He shook his head, laughed at what he’d just said. “Why would anyone be mad about that? It’s so insignificant.”

  “What are you listening to?”

  He took the headphones out. “David Bowie.”

  “Put it on speaker.”

  “I don’t have speakers for the computer—just these.”

  “We should put the album on downstairs.”

  “The turntable’s broken.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, like for almost a year. The belt or something.”

  He sat on the floor next to her and put one of the buds in her ear and one in his, rested his shoulder against hers.

  “I’m going to get a tattoo too,” he told her.

  She grinned. “Oh yeah, what?”

  “Sebastian eating some underwear. And I’ll be all like—What? That’s right, bring it! You gonna fuck with me?? Here’s a dog eating some underwear! How fucking badass must I be if I got this fucking tattoo of a little dog eating some tighty whities? People will be, like, terrified.” He broke into his goofy laugh.

  “He has to have the face,” she said.

  Danny did the face of Bad Sebastian, evil mixed with guilt and confusion.

  She laughed so hard her sides hurt, and she lay on the floor and covered her mouth.

  “Yeah!” Danny shouted again, “What now? Imma motherfucking schipperke, motherfucker! Imma save you from the Nazis and lead your horse down the Erie Canal, and balance on a beach ball! But first I gotta eat some underwear. Bring it!”

  He giggled to himself, then said, “Oh wait, I got to show you . . .” He stood up and went to the computer. She’d forgotten about his wired way, had made him softer in her mind while she was gone.

  “Here’s the YouTube thing of that ice shelf,” he said. He made it full screen and sat back down next to her. She was still laughing a little—then he pointed to the image: the glacier crumbling, a flood of white water rushing into a black sea. They were quiet and stunned and then Danny pointed at it and made the Bad Sebastian face again and they started laughing, ashamed that it was so funny, which made them laugh harder. He lay down on the ground and just wheezed out the last of his mirth. Every time she looked at him she started again. Her face hurt from smiling and she was out of breath.

  “God, you’re fucked up,” she told him tremulously.

  “Yeah. I’m going to get a tattoo of Sebastian stranded on an iceberg like a polar bear, not funny, right?” He nodded vigorously. “Because that shit’s really happening, that’s why it will be so badass. A little underwear-eating American housedog stranded on a iceberg. Oh my god what does that even mean, it’s so fucking brilliant!? Then like, ‘Thug Life’ or ‘Everyday I’m Hustling’ written under it in calligraphy.”

  “Both those phrases would be completely appropriate,” she said.

  “I know! Not as captions for him, though—but for me. Especially if I get some kind of corporate job. If I was a banker with, like, stranded Sebastian drawn on me, eating underwear.

  “Thug Life,” he said and laughed again. “But if it was a caption for him it would have to be just ‘help!’ ” Then he broke into his officious NPR voice: “Scientists have not yet uncovered the mystery of where these dogs came from, or to where they might be floating. But Lauren Clay, deployed with the Tenth Armored Infantry Division, has come here for answers.” He made a shhhh-ing noise like a waterfall and then held an invisible microphone out to his sister. “And she won’t leave until she gets them.”

  “Thank you, Carl,” she said in an exaggerated southern drawl. “We’ve been tracking these motherfucking canine ice monkeys now, for, oh . . . more’n a month and I think we’re close to smoking ’em out. You see, you haveta understan’ these creatures don’t see the world like you and me do, no sir. They’ll give up five, six—hell, ten thousand possibly ten million of their kind for every one of us. They’ll give up their whole genus and species, essentially, is what we’ve found.”

  “Why do you think that is?” Carl from NPR asked southern radio Lauren.

  “Well, ’cause really, they don’t have any weapons and they can’t read or write or strategize. These knuckleheads just sit around all day long like a bunch of fucking faggots in a dick tree . . . so . . . our jobs are pretty straightforward. We’ve got a clear mission to remove this insurgency by heating up the whole goddamn world so ah . . . so their little snow ships melt.”

  After a while the giddiness subsided and they stared at the computer again. The ice and the force of the waterfall in the video, the tinny sound of David Bowie still singing quietly from the headphones on the floor. She felt so good from laughing, loose and tired like after a long run.

  “I got a good friend who lives close to some glaciers,” she told him.

  “Really?” His tone changed to real interest, back to his sweet nerdy self.

  “Yeah, I do. A buddy a mine from Amarah. We could go visit him.”

  “Does he live in Greenland?”

  “No,” she said. “His wife’s from Canada, and they’re back there now.”

  When the phone rang she thought it might be her dad—something might have gone wrong and he’d need her to pick him up or run some errand. She ran downstairs, grabbed the receiver, and froze when she heard Eileen Klein’s voice.

  “Hi, Lauren, this is Dr. Klein, I’m glad I was able to reach you. I’ve been looking over this 15-6 and some other paperwork that I just received from Captain Nash and I realized that during your PDHA w
e didn’t have an opportunity to talk about some things. I want to make sure we’re compliant with the terms under which you are ending your enlistment.”

  Lauren’s blood turned to ice. “I went over everything with you to the best of my knowledge, ma’am, and as far as I understand I’m on terminal leave. Unless I get arrested for something, or get unlucky with stop-loss, I’m all squared away.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about Daryl Green. I understand the two of you made a lot of plans for when you got back to the north country.”

  “Yes ma’am, we did, but I believe if I had anything else to say about Specialist Green’s performance I said it to Captain Nash during the 15-6.”

  Dr. Klein said, “Soldier, I’ve scheduled an appointment for you with a colleague of mine at Fort Drum for 1:30 P.M. on December twenty-ninth. I suggest you make that appointment or be in contact with them twenty-four hours in advance to reschedule it. Otherwise you risk breaching the conditions of your terminal leave.”

  Lauren said, yes ma’am, thank you for your call. Because there was nothing else to say.

  She went back upstairs and stood in Danny’s doorway. Now he was laughing at a YouTube video, stop-motion animation of Santa talking to some toy-making elves. When he saw her in the doorway he handed her the headphones so she could hear. The audio was from Full Metal Jacket, the drill sergeant yelling at new recruits. She laughed but it annoyed her that he found it funny. He had no right to find it funny.

  He wasn’t himself. He was still quick but he was different. She’d left him in the care of these people and now he didn’t read books anymore, didn’t paint or study or make collages with music playing in the whole house—just sat silently with his head stuffed full of sounds no one else could hear.

  The sooner they left the better.

  Seventeen

  HE PUT BOWIE back on when she left the room, found more footage of glaciers, texted Scott and riffled through his closet for a rain jacket even though he had no plans to go outside. On the floor near a pile of sneakers that no longer fit he came across a stash of beef jerky with an expiration date that was fast approaching, so he opened it and ate it while watching videos of the ice shelf melting, the frozen world turning to water and vapor. Then he looked up the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Website and followed links that eventually led to an article about oil-eating bacteria. It had been developed by a guy named Ananda Chakrabarty in the 1970s, and the scientific name for the stuff was multiplasmid hydrocarbon-degrading pseudomonas. He said it out loud a few times to make sure he had it right, then read about another bacteria that eats plastic, thinking about how little things can take enormous things apart, or can grow to immense proportions. Seeds and cells, objects and organisms measured in nanometers. The component parts of the world lose their power when separated. He thought about how literally everything could be magnified until it seemed like a universe. A drop of water a whole ecosystem.