Be Safe I Love You: A Novel

by Cara Hoffman

  Then for the first time since he was very small he remembered The Snow Queen, a book Lauren used to read to him. A story in which a speck of glass—a speck of broken mirror—causes all the trouble.

  That was definitely the story that made him want to see the North Pole. All these things seemed so tightly and minutely connected. It made him laugh out loud for a moment.

  He remembered he and Lauren built a cave of pillows and blankets and climbed inside. The book had a black cover with a photograph of dollhouse dolls—a little boy and girl—on the front. They were posed next to a miniature window box planted with red roses that looked like paper, had hair that looked like embroidery thread, and bright blue painted eyes. Drawings of snowflakes were superimposed over the photograph.

  There were devils in the story who made a distorted mirror that turned everything hideous and wrong, and it slipped from their hands and smashed into millions of pieces—nanoparticles, Danny thought now, excited that the book could be about something else, bacteria or viruses.

  The little boy and girl in the story were good friends. They played together in their garden and they watched the frost form on their windows when it got cold. He didn’t know how they did the ice in the photographs; maybe it was Styrofoam. He loved the ice and also how the dollhouse children looked three dimensional—not illustrations. It made you feel like you could walk around in their world. Talk to a crow or a reindeer.

  One day the little boy in the story felt something strike his eye; it was a piece of the broken mirror, and suddenly everything he saw was ugly.

  Then the Snow Queen came for him in her white sled and they left the little girl behind.

  The little girl goes looking everywhere and finally finds him in a frozen place drawing on ice with another shard of ice. He remembered the little dollhouse boy kneeling in the snow, and thinking how amazing it was that he could have survived all that cold, everything still, all life around him camouflaged in the absence of color. The boy didn’t even feel it. He didn’t even recognize his friend, but then she rushed to him and cried and her tears fell into his eyes and washed out the fragment of the devils’ mirror. And they went home and played in their garden again. He loved that book. It was the beginning of all his reading about the arctic, about animals like white rabbits and narwhals, foxes with snowy fur, tiny lemmings that make tunnels in the ice and nests out of other animals’ fur. But somehow it seemed he’d been interested in living in the arctic even before that. Those things had just reminded him of who he really was.

  Later, when he learned about expeditions to the North Pole, he thought they were some of the bravest people in the world. Until he read more, and then he thought they were also some of the stupidest. The first arctic explorers brought things with them like whole sets of silver and china, weighing themselves down, lumbering along with some imaginary tea party in mind at the end of the road. He liked to read to Lauren about all the failed expeditions, became obsessed with them because they were so strange and, in a sick way, funny. Like Salomon August Andrée, who tried to get to the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon and died from eating infected polar-bear meat.

  But other expeditions he really did admire and want to re-create. He wanted to be like Knud Rasmussen, who crossed the Northwest Passage on a dogsled, who grew up in Greenland hanging out with Inuit hunters, speaking their language. Danny had become obsessed with the idea of surviving in the cold. Treating hypothermia, frostbite. By the time he was seven he wanted to live at the North Pole. When he learned that people really do live in Antarctica as researchers it seemed too good to be true.

  He didn’t know what happened to his expedition plans. The desire to see the North Pole was still strong, but he didn’t imagine how to get there anymore, didn’t dream of dogsleds or talking with the Inuit or tireless, courageous wind-burned hikes over mountains of ice.

  Smaller things seemed more important now, a microscopic world beneath this one, beneath all worlds, inside your own body. There was no real way for a person to be alone, he thought. Every single person is a vast crowd of other living things, a universe.

  It was the grain of mirror that really mattered in the Snow Queen, and the drop of salt water that washed it away.

  Eighteen

  “WHY DOESN’T DANNY know how to drive a car?”

  Jack Clay tried not to look startled. She was sitting at the kitchen table directly in front of the door, her hands folded in front of her. He set his ratty briefcase down and kicked his shoes off, tossed the mail onto the counter, and slid into the threadbare slippers that lived by the back door.

  “Your brother’s only thirteen, Renny.”

  “So?” She raised her head defiantly. The last time he’d seen her like this was just before Meg left. Angry with him, disappointed, officious. If he hadn’t gotten sick he’d have been able to help her.

  He shook his head and smiled. “You’re my girl, you know that?” He lifted a thick manila envelope from the pile of mail and handed it to her. “You got something here from Philadelphia.”

  She frowned, and then he watched as a brief flash of excitement and relief played across her face. She took the package from him and began to open it, but her shoulders stiffened and she dropped it back down on the table without glancing at what was inside. “What does that have to do with Danny not playing sports and not being able to drive a car?”

  “Nothing,” he said with an amused smile. “I think it has to do with your studies.”

  She winced.

  Jack said, “Look, your brother is a different person than you. He has a different temperament. He’s a little more sensitive about things, not in a big hurry like you were.”

  Her eyes welled up with tears. She leaned her head back and took a breath, and he felt a knot in his stomach. When she finally spoke it was with such jarring menace and vehemence he barely recognized her voice.

  “I couldn’t afford to be fucking sensitive. I had to get things done.”

  He took a step closer, brushed her hair away from her face, and looked into her eyes. They were heavy lidded, bloodshot, focused on something in the middle distance.

  She looked like Peej had in ’69. He came back hating and it took months for them to really talk again. All he could do was be there and try not to say something stupid, make sure bad evenings didn’t become worse. Jack was there when PJ broke every piece of furniture in his apartment, talked out on the front stoop to the cops who’d been called about a disturbance of the peace. Jack had stood between Peej and people who “looked at him funny” or “were thinking bad things” on more than one occasion. Stood in front of oblivious strangers who were “asking for a beatdown.” It took months. But Peej finally made it home, understood how he’d been screwed, had been a victim of the war. Jack and Meg went with him to Washington when he threw his medals back. The day he really became a soldier.

  He held his daughter’s chin and looked into her eyes. Lauren was taking everything on herself like she always did. But he was well now, he told himself again. He’d seen this kind of thing before and he could help her.

  “Ah, sweetheart, it’s true you had to get things done. I’m sorry you had so much to do for all of us. But it’s really very different now.”

  She looked straight through him and he saw something else in her expression. Hunger, he realized, feeling a deep well of shame in his stomach. She’s hungry. At this he caught his breath and his eyes stung with tears and she turned her head away from him. He should have stayed home today and made sure she had three meals. This was her first day back and he’d left her all alone. He hadn’t fed his child. He wiped his face quickly and straightened up, filled the tea kettle and put it on the stove, and put two bags of Red Rose into the chipped yellow teapot. “I plan on teaching Danny to drive pretty soon,” he said casually, then asked, “What have you eaten today?”

  She took a deep breath, her expression unchanged. “A Guinness, a Jameson’s, and a piece of cake.”

  He opened the cupboard a
nd put a box of crackers on the table, went to the refrigerator and got out cheese and peanut butter and an apple, and began making her the kind of snack she used to eat when she was four. He sliced the apple up and put it on a small blue plate and then made her some cheese and crackers, handed them to her one by one, and she ate them.

  “You need a snack, Ren.”

  “I guess I do.”

  The kettle whistled and Jack poured the boiling water into the teapot and set it in the middle of the table. He was happy to see that it was just after four o’clock when they sat down. They’d had four o’clock tea since she was a baby. Her mother had even given it to her in a bottle, sweet and milky and a little bitter. It was one tradition that had survived the breakup.

  “Are you going to open that package from Curtis?” he asked gently, trying to bring her back to the present for a moment.

  “No. I am not.”

  He watched her take a long gulp of strong sweet tea. He had faith the taste would help restore some true and gentle way of being.

  “Everyone feels out of sorts after a long trip,” he said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” she asked him incredulously, the restrained rage returning to her voice. “I didn’t go on a long trip like some vacation to Costa Rica or something.”

  “No, you didn’t. But it’s important to remember your body is adjusting to the time zone and a different schedule and you’re getting used to not having to do the kind of work you were doing.”

  She laughed though her teeth.“Work? Are you fucking crazy?”

  “No,” he said carefully, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to call it. We haven’t really talked about it.”

  She shook her head at him and he handed her a peanut-butter cracker, then a slice of apple. She ate them automatically and her expression didn’t change.

  “You don’t know what to call it? What did PJ do?” she asked sarcastically. “Was he working hard out there in the jungle?”

  Jack sat down at the table beside her. “I know Uncle P was really unhappy when he got home, like I told you yesterday. Maybe you’d like to talk to him, go over to the Nabe.”

  At this she laughed out loud. Looked right at him, her eyes clear and focused. “I’m not PJ. Understand? I didn’t get drafted. I wasn’t some sitting-target chump with eight weeks of basic. I enlisted. I was educated. I had people under my command. And just like you . . . JUST like YOU I am a beneficiary of this war. You get it? Don’t think for a second I’m going to go sit at the Nabe with a group of fucking dipshits who think they’re the ones who suffered. We got paid. YOU got paid. Motherfucking Freddie Mac and Chase got paid. If you never make another dime I’ve still saved enough to put Danny through state school and pay his rent until he graduates. I’m alive and there’s not a scratch on my body. Does that sound like anything Uncle P went through?”

  Jack poured more tea into her mug and she paused in her revilement to drink it. Color was starting to come back into her face, and even as she was admonishing him she looked more herself.

  “Yeah, kinda,” Jack said easily. “He came home without a scratch too, you know.”

  She looked at him blankly, spooned more sugar into her tea, cooled it with some milk, then drank the whole mug in a few gulps and set it on the table.

  “I’m sorry I yelled,” she said, the look of tired resignation returning to her face. Something in her had given up again, her moods shifting before he could adjust, before he could really respond to anything she’d said, but they were talking now and it was going to be all right.

  He said, “It’s okay, Low, there’s a lot to yell about.”

  She just needed a snack and to be heard. He’d make dinner tonight and they would all be together. She was smart and strong and she was going to be fine. She was right, she’d been in a better position than Peej, he knew she would work through this. He was well and could see what was going on and he could help her now.

  “Where did you get this thing?” she said, finally picking up the manila envelope and tearing it all the way open. She glanced over the glossy cover page of the booklet and then let it fall back on the table.

  “Someone jammed it in the mailbox,” he said simply. “Looks like Curtis knows you’re home. You been over to talk with your teacher?”

  She looked at him with an expression somewhere between contempt and pity. Then got up abruptly and left the kitchen.

  • • •

  In her room Lauren thought about Meg. How Meg would get it about benefitting from war about making sacrifices about leaving people behind. She remembered how they would go for walks together after dinner in the neighborhood beneath the yellow streetlamps surrounded by fluttering night insects and they’d step over cracks in the sidewalk, arm in arm talking about things, about books like Stuart Little or Cricket in Times Square. They looked into the lighted windows of their neighbors’ houses as they passed. Sometimes they’d walk far out to the blast wall. No. That wasn’t right. There were no blast walls. Blast walls are in places at risk for shelling. Blast walls surround the FOB. And the perimeter of the rig. Why had she pictured it there at the outskirt of the neighborhood where it wasn’t, where it would never be? They would walk far out until they could see the old paper mill. And they would skip back home, shoes scuffing on the sidewalk, singing songs that they played all the time on the radio. Her mother smelled like perfume from the drug store. She would talk about how she wanted to go to college and the boyfriends she had in high school. She was exciting to be around. Her mother was like someone young. Like a girl. Someone who needed a friend.

  Lauren went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. When the dog came in she shut her eyes so she could pretend he wasn’t there, leaned over and drank mouthfuls of cool water from the tap, and found herself wishing something that would have been inconceivable just days ago: wishing she had guard duty tonight. Wishing with all her might that she was back at Garryowen.

  Nineteen

  DARYL GREEN WAS familiar to Lauren from the minute she met him on base. Green was not a complainer. He was a quiet, respectful and very funny man. The two of them were late to the party, he and Lauren. They’d each spent time Stateside taking courses and they occasionally got shit about it, her more than Daryl. But they weren’t rich kids, weren’t from the Citadel, nobody had pulled any strings for them; that’s just the way it worked because of timing and training and for Lauren twice getting placed with a unit that was rotating back.

  It was also about skill. You had a particular aptitude, you got sent to a particular school. She was glad for it. Lauren was an NCO at twenty-one, a fine shot, on track for career if she wanted it, making significantly more money than when she enlisted. And Green could speak Arabic and Farsi.

  He was good and sharp and reading every second of downtime he had. By the time she met him he was on his second tour, had subscriptions to Dissent, The Nation, Counterpunch, Foreign Affairs, and was talking about moving to Canada to live with his wife’s family, getting a good job up north and then applying to law school when he got out. He was a far cry from the good old boy his parents had raised, but the accent and the love of guns remained.

  It was the surge that changed things for Daryl. And it was the surge that he talked about, sometimes all he could talk about during their long nights on the FOB. Listening to him break things down was refreshing. She had no arguments with his ideas and kept the things he said to herself. He was glad to be there at Garryowen. Creeping the streets of someone else’s destroyed city was not a thing he wanted to do. Getting out and going after the people who came up with that strategy was. Daryl was a warrior. And as far as justice and protecting his fellow soldiers was concerned, he had long-term plans.

  “You fucking Green?” Godwin had asked her one evening when she got back from guard duty.

  “Daryl’s married,” she said simply.

  “Not my question,” Godwin said. “That boy is so fine. You don’t want beauty like that to go to waste, do you?”
>
  She hadn’t thought about it. He was short, broad shouldered, all his features like straight lines. Thin lips, square jaw, eyebrows flat above his almond-shaped eyes. A roman nose. Everything about him even and level.

  Lauren shrugged.

  “You guys got some secret,” Godwin said. “Everyone can see it.”

  Twenty

  THE SMELL OF coffee and the thick smoky overlay of bacon grease greeted Lauren as she stepped into Holly’s house. Grace was sitting on the living-room floor in front of the television, cutting pieces of leftover wrapping paper into strips and taping them to the table legs. She was wearing pink footie pajamas. Holly’s mother, Bridget, was so happy to see Lauren she got up and squeezed her tight, rocking her back and forth in her arms. Lauren smiled and put her arms around Bridget, rested her head on her bony shoulder.