by Cara Hoffman
PJ nodded, stunned by the man’s indifference, his confident detachment. Then he shut off the lights.
Everyone had failed Lauren Clay, he thought as he was running across the slick asphalt to his car, even him. But no one, not even MIA Meg, had failed to love her, and you could see it, the way she rose to care for Danny, the gentle way she carried her family.
But Iraq had changed all that.
She’d finally learned enough of hate to fail herself.
• • •
Troy turned himself in at the end of the workday. There wasn’t time to waste when Lauren came home, so he would do this now. He watched the officers’ faces when he confessed. They all but smacked their foreheads and said “of course.” He smiled at them. It had been a long time since he’d been around men like this, and they were very interesting. He knew their ways. They liked tight things and padding and gadgets, they liked shiny things and hiding, hard sounds, consonants, knowing looks, pretend subtlety. They liked lies and also being close to lies, and they liked everything that caused pain, as though it was a monster they could actually fight with their magic blue suits and caps. He sometimes felt very bad for these kinds of men, but he loved the poor theater of their body language.
Things didn’t go so well when they wanted to talk to him though. Things never went well when people wanted to talk. He told them he was too drunk to remember exactly how he had set the fire.
When they asked more questions about it he found himself describing Operation Desert Storm and the day he was drenched in oil, and how his unit cleared land mines from around the burning wells. There were ten months of fire. Troy realized he wasn’t talking about The Bag of Nails at all and he chuckled to himself.
“You almost killed a girl, you think that’s funny?”
Troy cocked his head to the side and looked at the officer again. He was young and nervous. Troy hadn’t “almost” killed anyone. He’d helped to kill thousands and thousands, no “almost” about it. He was part of a meticulously planned campaign to kill, and he’d been working for the same company as these men at the time. What he was actually doing here today was saving a girl. Saving a thing that the girl embodied. Her bone structure, her weight, her ribs, the suppleness and strength of her form and the bellows of her belly. Her breath and the gleaming warmth of her voice big enough to cut an orchestra on its own. He was there to save something that lived in Lauren Clay, and he did not care at all if it lived curled right next to the thing that set that fire.
He shrugged.
“You are a fucking retard, you know that,” said the other officer. “A fucking retard.” Troy smiled at the man. He had pale skin and very dark hair on his arms, his slight paunch stuck out above his belt and he smelled slightly spicy, like nice shaving soap. It was delightful seeing him clearly all at once. He was someone’s husband. He was someone’s soft TV-watching husband. He probably grilled things on his porch and had a nice fluffy dog to pet and liked to snuggle with his wife and feel her smooth body and look at her pretty dresses. Someone made him dinners every night and bought his favorite lunch meats as though he were a child.
Troy smirked at the men. “Isn’t one of you supposed to pretend to be bad or tough or something? You’re both acting the same.”
The first cop slapped Troy hard in the face.
He straightened his head and looked directly into the man’s face.
“There you go,” he said.
Thirty-seven
THE PINE WOODS were dense and the trunks of the trees were dark and thick with branches, with knots and bowls made from hardened sap. Their height was staggering, disorienting. And the understory was a soft pine bed lightly dusted with snow, protected by the canopy. It smelled fresh and cold, and the sun flickered through the branches as they walked.
“You fall in line behind me,” she said. “We’ll have to go kinda slow to maneuver around in here, we’re just going to hop through—you know, bob and weave between the trees and try to keep up a good pace.”
“What about animals?” he asked.
“What about them?”
“What if they’re in here?”
“They are in here,” she said.
He looked like he might cry, like he was tired and trying to control his face. He stood still and surveyed the trees.
“Danny,” she said. “Hup to it, buddy. C’mon, we gotta get fast and strong so the animals don’t get us.” She made a small amused sound in her throat, then coughed.
He stood still, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his coat, and then he reached out and touched the branch of a tree, let the long needles slide through his red-mittened hand. Then he took his mittens off and felt them with his fingers. Pulled the pine bough to his face. His breath was visible, rising from his nostrils, and his cheeks were flushed. His eyes were lost in thought and black and flat with fear. Back home his whole room was papered in photographs of nature, of ancient trees and strange animals and glaciers. But just standing still in the woods had caught and hobbled whatever courage, whatever small sense of adventure he might have had.
“Dan. You can do it, buddy. It’s a forest. You’re not walking to the fucking electric chair.” She was disappointed and tried not to get angry. “We’re just going for a little run, man. That’s all. Turn around and look, you can see the open space from here.”
He put his mittens back on and then turned toward their little camp. She looked at her watch. They would run fifteen minutes in and fifteen minutes back. And tomorrow she’d up it to twenty-five.
“Why can’t we run on the road we came in on?”
“Because we’ve run on roads before. We haven’t run through the trees.”
“Shouldn’t we have some bread crumbs or pebbles or something to leave behind and mark our trail?”
“Daniel,” she said gravely. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Why can’t we walk along the edge and check it out first?”
She said, “Nope,” and began to jog in the narrow spaces between the trunks.
He didn’t back out, he ran with her, kept pace either because of anxiety or because it was slow going. In the thickness of the trees she couldn’t look back to see how he was doing, but she could hear his boots on the crisp snow and brittle brush of the forest floor. Soon she heard him laughing behind her.
Fifteen minutes in she stopped. They were warm, surrounded entirely by the weight of the forest and the snow, and Danny was sweating. He took off his hat. His face was red from the cold and exertion.
The forest was so still and enclosed and slow. The height of the trees were generations of human lives, and it was a comfort.
She watched him as he let his head fall back and gazed straight up into the towering canopy of green and black branches. Inside the tall woods they were at last the right size. Small and insignificant, moving unseen by anyone.
Danny said, almost to himself, “I don’t know how to get back from here.”
• • •
When they emerged from the woods the sun was blinding on the bright sloping expanse of snow, and they covered their eyes.
Back in the unrelieved empty cold of the house, she let Danny start the fire. Knelt beside him and showed him how to stack the wood in a pyramid, placing the lighter, drier kindling in the center. When the fire caught with a little roaring whoosh, he jumped back quickly and gave a little shout of delight. She suspected he’d be a natural at these kinds of things, and it was a good fire.
They would need to change out of their sweaty clothes before they became chilled.
“What time is it?” he asked.
She said, “Ten after ten,” then smiled at the look of surprise on his face.
“How long will it take us to get to Mom’s from here?”
“More than a day. More like two or three.”
“Fuck! You’re fucking kidding!”
“I’m not.”
“When are we going to go?”
“I think we should get out
to the coast first and see if we can see any glaciers melting. I want to check things out around here, see if it might be a good place to live.” She was refreshed, animated after the run. “There’s certainly a lot of stuff for you to study, right, William Parry? After we meet up with Daryl, I’ll have a better idea of what kind of work there is for me out here.”
He looked confused. “I don’t think there’s anything melting in this cold,” he said. Then he asked her again: “When are we going to go to Mom’s?”
She ignored him, stood in front of the fire and took off her sweaty thermal underwear, set the pieces down on the floor by the hearth to dry. The tattoos made her look like some kind of strange warrior from a different time. He looked at the black bands, wide blank rings of ink encircling either arm just below her shoulders. Her back was turned, and he could see the ripple of muscles. It was then that he realized they were black armbands. Permanent mourning, a part of her skin. There were three of them.
She didn’t even shiver as she stood in her bare feet on the plank floor, then she put on a dry pair of socks, took another pair of dry wool socks out of her pack and threw them in his direction and put her other layers back on.
He went out and collected snow in the pot and set it beside the fire to melt, and then he stood staring into the fire for several minutes with his arms folded across his chest. He thought of the footage of The Bag of Nails engulfed in those tall flames, the tree beside the building. He looked at her, watched her organizing her gear. She had closed herself off to him, now when he needed to see her, needed to know her most of all.
“If you don’t take your long underwear off and dry it, you’ll catch a chill,” she told him.
“I’ll catch a chill because we’re in the middle of fucking arctic nowhere,” he said.
“Right,” she said. “That’s why if you don’t get out of your sweaty clothes you’ll get even colder.”
She was glad he was angry instead of scared. Something about it, maybe the familiarity, made her feel relaxed. Anger is the active part of fear, not its opposite. Anger and fear were two sides of the same counterfeit coin that was the currency of war. But anger is what gets things done.
“Low, if Dad isn’t worried by now I’m sure Mom is.”
“I doubt she’s worried,” she said.
“I doubt she isn’t!”
“Why would you care if she’s worried?”
“What? That’s such a stupid question,” he said, genuinely disgusted.
He shivered, and she could tell the wet clothes were bringing his body temperature down.
She said, “Take your fucking sweaty socks and long johns off, dogbody.”
“Don’t tell me what to do! I’m not a soldier and you’re not even in the army anymore.”
“You’re not going to last long out here if you get cold,” she said simply.
“I don’t want to last long out here,” he said. “I want to go to Buffalo.”
“Buffalo is a shithole.”
“Yeah. So what? I don’t think people are supposed to camp in the middle of winter in an abandoned building with only army rations and sleeping bags, burying their shit in the snow.” He shivered again, and she was proud of his stubbornness.
“Suck it up,” she told him.
“No! This is fucking stupid, Low. There’s something wrong. You think Mom and Dad are like they were before. They’re not. Nobody’s the same. You’re not the same at all,” he said, his voice breaking. “There’s something wrong.”
She dropped him quickly with a kick to the back of his knee and then grabbed his hand and turned it down hard, pressing his fingers toward the inside of his wrist and holding his elbow in place. He winced in pain and shock. Then she let go, shoving him away hard as she did.
He stood up angry, his eyes watering. “Where’s my phone?” he demanded.
She laughed and effortlessly dropped him again with a sharp kick to the back of his other leg. “Not a video game, is it?” she said.
He stood up and she dropped him again. She could do that all day if she needed to.
He stood up and tried to block her but she dropped him again. He looked bewildered for a moment and then suddenly fascinated. And she raised her eyebrows and nodded at him. She could count on Danny to be himself, to be the boy she raised.
He stood up and she didn’t do anything. “Take off your wet clothes,” she said.
When he said no, she dropped him back down to the ground, and this time he laughed.
She folded her arms and looked down at him.
“Show me how to do that,” he said.
By late afternoon he could awkwardly execute several moves from combatives, knew how to protect his neck and how to kill someone with a rolled-up piece of cardboard. They sparred by the firelight. When they finally stopped, exhausted, she made them dinner and then fell asleep before him making fitful noises, startling him horribly by yelling the word “Fuck!” and “Stand down, stand down!” even as she lay motionless, zipped in her sleeping bag.
Danny’s heart was racing from the sound of her shouting. He lay bundled near the fire, sobered by sadness at the things she must have seen or done. Sleep didn’t want him so he puttered in the cold, got up and put more broken furniture on the fire, moved closer to her and then pulled the poncho liner over both of their bags. Her face was calm now and she was breathing steadily.
Images of their house and his room flickered through his thoughts, the pictures of strange animals and nature and landscapes, his computer, the narrow dingy hallway. The tone his computer made when he turned it on bloomed almost audibly around him, and then another stupid song was beginning to replay in his head. He didn’t want to wake her up and ask her to sing, which might make her mad, and she needed her sleep so they could drive to Buffalo tomorrow.
He’d miscalculated. Driving away with Lauren was not a good idea. He saw how she was really looking at something these last few days when they talked about the dog. And she had never hit him before, not even joking around. The ease with which she had knocked him over was astonishing, actually frightening. He needed to get to a phone. Their father was better now but he was still totally capable of spacing out and not realizing how long they’d been gone. Maybe he could get her to drive back into one of the towns they’d passed on their way here. If he could only get a map. It seemed like she knew where they were, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was making it up as she went, didn’t want to be in any known place at all.
This time the song in his head was Madonna’s “Borderline”: Borderline feels like I’m going to lose my mind. You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline. It was because of the silence, he thought. Silence like this can mess you up. There was just the hiss and occasional pop of the fire and now Madonna. He caught himself whispering the words “keep pushing me, keep pushing me.” He hated pop music. He was afraid the next song would be something by Queen, which would probably prove he was gay or that he had lost his mind or had the onset of hypothermia.
He couldn’t sleep even though he was tired and his body was sore from working out and running and getting knocked down. He’d never done those things and he had to admit he liked them. A lot. They kept him warm and occupied instead of freaking out, and it was amazing the kind of stuff Lauren knew how to do.
This whole thing was crazy. But he did feel more alert in general and strong, and the land was beautiful, beyond joking kind of beautiful. Lauren was undeniably a badass, and no one he knew had done anything close to what they’d been doing for the last few days. It was kind of amazing for a vacation. If she had some problems from the war this was a good way to deal with it; training him to be strong, going to places they were interested in instead of watching them on the Internet. Making fires. She was right that people are tougher than they know. If he came back to school able to survive in the wilderness and having seen real animals—hopefully not up too close but close enough—he would be a badass too. The desire to leave and the desire to be alone wit
h her, to learn, to make her happy, to keep going frustrated him to the point of tears. He wanted so badly to see her smile, to have her know that he was good—those were the things that pushed away the loneliness before he got his computer: her room across the hall, her laugh, her listening to his stories, being a part of her plans, being her helper.
But the whole time he was writing to her in Iraq she’d never written back telling him what she was doing or what was going on and he never asked. She wrote about his life, asked him questions, talked about books he should read or joked around. That was how they were. She’d slipped away from him more than a year ago and he hadn’t noticed. Her world, the things she thought about herself and their family, had always been only her own. Unopened, unexpressed, waiting. He knew her life as it pertained to him and nothing more. He knew she loved him. He knew who she was when she left. And he realized now with a hollow terror that he did not know this person sleeping near the fire.
He did not know this person who returned at all.
Thirty-eight
HOLLY’S SHORT HAIR became her. The scar was something she’d have to grow used to. Numb and raw and ugly, it was still seeping beneath the bandages. When she delicately peeled them back to clean the wound, it looked like her flesh had melted; thank god Bridget was a nurse. The skin was thin, dark purple, and brick red, and it hurt when exposed to the air, when she touched anything. She wore long sleeves but her left hand looked like it belonged to some kind of devil.
Grace and she had just settled on the couch in their pajamas to watch cartoons when Shane came over. The room hummed with the air purifier and humidifier, and Holly’s inhaler and prescription bottles sat on the coffee table within reach. She couldn’t stay long in the hospital because she wasn’t on Bridget’s insurance anymore, but it didn’t matter because she was happy to be home.
Holly saw him through the top window of the door and waved him in. He slid his shoes off, leaving them on the plastic mat by Grace’s green rain boots. Then he came over to the couch, leaned down to kiss Holly on the cheek, and picked up Gracie, hoisting her onto his shoulders.