by Cara Hoffman
“Uh, what else,” she said distractedly. “Right, she was a leader. That’s the other reason she was a big deal—she was a teenager and she led an army.”
“Like you,” he said proudly. “You were all about bossing people around too, right?”
Lauren was quiet. She did not want to think about the orders she had to give and struck the images from her head, unfortunately replacing them with images of her own teenage life: years doing laundry and getting Danny from school, making the same simple dinners with frozen things, sitting beside her father while he watched TV. She thought about falling asleep sometimes before Danny did, worrying, even as she fought to keep her eyes open, that he would get hurt with no one to watch him while she slept. She thought of the slur “combat support.” Because officially women weren’t in combat. They just support. It was the same fucking job as every soldier she served with, but with the added downgrade in title and pay. She thought about how she was a noncommissioned officer because she didn’t have the college behind her, how errors in thought metastasized, bred more errors in thought—another way the past swallowed the future.
“I’m not like Joan of Arc at all,” Lauren said simply. “I was kept in a woman’s prison.”
She pulled over to the side of the road abruptly, handed him the keys, and then walked around to the passenger side.
“You can drive home,” she said.
“To Watertown?”
“No, you bonehead, to the FOB.”
He slid behind the wheel. “Are we going to build a boat?”
“Are you nuts?” she asked him. “We don’t know how to build a boat.”
He looked confused for a minute and then brushed his hair out of his eyes, looked at the line of trees in the distance.
She said, “All you have to do is look straight ahead. Put it in drive. Right pedal is the gas, left pedal is the brake. It’s like driving bumper cars. But you have to keep your eye on the road and don’t go too fast.”
He put his foot on the gas and the car lurched forward and then he turned sharply to the right and she grabbed the wheel from him and straightened it out. He put on the brake and the car slid several yards on the snowy road and they were thrown forward and caught tight against their seatbelts.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s give that another try.”
On his second attempt he drove slowly, maybe seven miles an hour for about a hundred yards. Lauren sat beside him laughing, pretending to paddle a canoe.
“Okay,” she said. “Little faster.”
He picked it up to fifteen and then twenty miles an hour. She knew that video games didn’t prepare people for the real world of killing, and now she knew they didn’t prepare you for the real world of driving either.
His look of concentration was so funny she started laughing again.
“Shut up,” he said defensively. “Nobody learns how to drive in the fucking snow.”
“You do,” she said.
It was a straight shot with no traffic and, apart from the icy road, a good enough place to learn how to drive. She could feel his confidence growing. She could feel his mind working and was brought along in the vicarious joy of learning something new, the feeling of mobility and escape.
When they turned off onto the narrower extension that led to their camp, they heard a hollow beating rolling sound, and then in the distance she could see a blur of tan and gray amid the rising cloud of white.
Danny put on the brakes and she took out the binoculars, spotted the source of the roiling thunder, and handed them to him. A herd, dozens, maybe tens of dozens of deer, their bodies taking up a wide swath of the flat land below the ruined houses, were running up toward the road.
They watched in a kind of terrified wonder, a resigned horror, as the deer ran directly toward the car, unstoppable: the sound of their hooves on the ground getting louder, the rush and muscle of their bodies and the fluid rise and fall of their gait over the contours of the snow, like one animal, like a thing with one mind, about to engulf and trample them.
The first several animals in the herd saw the car and diverged around it, and suddenly they were in the center of the sound; they could see the deers’ labored breath pumping from their nostrils in the cold, and their eyes black as glass as they tore around the car, their narrow, bony powerful legs and hooves just missing or the staccato clang as they nicked the hood and the fenders. Then finally the rest of the herd ran past on one side and the anarchic drumming din faded back into the snow.
They stared at one another, their hearts racing, even as the land around them fell silent again.
Forty-one
WHEN HE CALLED their father from the Exxon station no one had picked up. Jack Clay didn’t have a cell, and because Danny didn’t have his own cell he couldn’t call their mother. The number was programmed into the phone and he’d never called it manually before or bothered to memorize it.
After working out she let him drive again. He was excited that with the car he could go where he wanted and do what he wanted. If something happened, if she got any stranger, he could get them out of there. He headed out past town onto a wider paved road that was better maintained and that he assumed was built for logging. For all his excitement at getting behind the wheel, he still drove slowly and cautiously. Braking often and looking constantly in the rearview mirror, which he hadn’t paid much attention to before.
They were both dirty from days without a shower or hairbrush, putting their sweat-soaked long underwear back on after it dried from the fire. They were red cheeked from the cold, their skin chapped, and they shared a feral ambitious look, especially when smiling. Without electricity, they were not staying up long after dark these few days and they were rising early. The discipline of setting and maintaining fires and keeping warm and hydrated was a rewarding kind of obsession. And there were real consequences to screwing up. He thought it was like they were living on the underside of a flat earth she’d come to occupy as a soldier. She was comfortable with extremes now and this world was a counterpoint to the other, difficult and isolated and stark. But peaceful and safe.
She said, “There’s no one behind us, bud. Don’t worry about the mirrors now, just concentrate on what’s in front of you.”
The sky was bright and there was no wind. She gave him her aviator glasses and put the sun visor down to keep the glare from her eyes.
Danny gained confidence and picked up speed, and she cranked up the heat and rolled her window down to feel the cold coastal air on her face. She’d felt no fear when he was driving. Bad as he was, knowing that he was capable, that he was learning, made her feel at ease; the more dispensable she became, the lighter she felt.
The landscape was pristine: the glacial dome of the mountains, long limestone ridges that looked like chunks of the continent had been upended, and beyond that the promise of wide open land, an icy shoreline and glaciers and water with nothing to obstruct their gaze for miles. The legend of whales beneath floating ice in a warming black sea. It was waiting out there for them.
Her mother was right: She needed to go somewhere where she could relax. And that was nowhere with no one. Or almost nowhere with Danny. She would finish teaching him what he needed to know and then maybe he’d be safe enough to leave for a while. That was the whole idea after all coming from their neighborhood. A place where people lived side by side, day in and day out, with people they had abandoned. The idea was not to stick together, not to stick around, but to give someone everything they needed to be alone and strong. To never have to see you again.
Danny rolled down his window too and then began howling. Behind him Sebastian scratched excitedly at the glass. His fur blowing wildly in the wind, he held his face up majestically to the cold.
“What’s he doing?” Danny asked her.
“He’s just excited,” she said.
Danny laughed, picked up speed, and drove up a long rise. And now they were both howling, like some grave weight that once held them down had at last been
cut away. They could see the sky and nothing more in the distance, and felt the coast before them as they drove along the crest of the rise.
Then she told him to stop and they would walk the rest of the way for a bit. Better to see it without anything to get in the way, no noise of the car, no windshield to obscure the horizon.
He pulled over and they walked to the top, beneath the blue sky.
The complicated enormous mass of black metal towered before them like a witch’s floating castle off the coast. Four massive columns rose from the floor of the ocean lashed by cresting waves, making the base appear to rock. The rigs were tremendous things that dwarfed the world around them and caused Lauren’s knees to buckle. She fell, catching herself with her hands, and then stood mute. Hot tears in her eyes. Here it was. In the middle of all this beauty. The thing busily sucking the past up from the ground and melting the future, burning their lives before they could live them.
“I wanted you to see this,” she said, her voice shaking. And she did. She wanted him to know what it all looked like. That the thing she fought for was cold metal, and money, and absolutely nothing more. In the suffocating heat or in killing cold, these industrial castles looked the same. He’d seen the forest and the deer and the sky, and now he was seeing this. And she was seeing it too. Knew she could never work there. Never get near such a thing again.
He stood squinting beside her, licked his chapped lips. “What is it?”
Her eyes were dark and liquid and she didn’t look at him. But he could hear her voice clearly in his head the same way she used to say it, almost in a whisper, pointing to the page: “The Snow Queen’s Castle.”
• • •
Later that night he found himself wide awake, and the song played as clearly as if it were coming from a radio, like it was coming from the outside—not in his head at all. But there was no radio and he knew it was him and that he was hallucinating the worst song ever written by a band he hated more than any other band in the world. “We are the champions, my friends,” the song went, “and we’ll keep on fighting till the end.”
He started crying. It didn’t matter that he’d seen wild animals and driven a car and looked at a giant oil rig. Being stuck with little but his own mind and not even a piece of paper meant listening to Queen. Which meant that when there was nothing to entertain him, he was a shallow vessel torturing himself with things he’d mocked his whole life, not able to recall a single bar from a song he liked, or a line from a book he’d read. He was supposed to be quick and smart. But it was beginning to look like he was not quick and not smart, was actually a dumb fucking chump, hallucinating dead Freddie Mercury.
He woke her up, and he was alarmed when his own voice didn’t make the sound go away. It was bitter cold and dark, and the creepy falsetto refrain was a sarcastic taunt describing their sorry state.
“What is it?” She sat up instantly, and in the dim light of the fire he could see she was holding a gun tucked in close at her side. He closed his eyes and covered them with his hands. Maybe he was dreaming. It seemed very unlikely that he was sleeping on the floor of a ruined building with no locks and few windows in the middle of winter in front of a fire made from broken furniture and cedar shingles with his sister who was holding a gun and an internal soundtrack from a gay pride parade.
When he opened his eyes her hands were empty. But everything else was the same. “Would you sing something?”
“Danny, what the hell?”
“I’m hearing music.” He shook his hands around in front of him as if he were in pain, shook his head, he began crying. “Sing something!”
“I think you’re dreaming, bud.”
“I’m not.” He felt tears running down his face and struggled to keep his voice steady. “I’m not dreaming. I’ve read about these things happening when there’s no noise for a long time. People get songs trapped in their head and then they hear them. Could you please please sing something?”
She pulled her bag closer to his and put her arm around him.
“I don’t want anything stuck in my head,” he whispered.
She said, “I hear you, bud,” and he felt her rough mitten on his face, rubbing the tears from his cheeks. “But you’re okay, you’re okay. You just had a bad dream.”
He shook his head. He wanted to tell her what was happening but he was mute from fear that he had been hearing things that weren’t there, fear that she’d brought a gun on this trip and he hadn’t known it. Hadn’t known not to go anywhere with her because she was different now. There had to be a reason they were both losing it this way. A simple reason he was overlooking. He thought maybe they had eaten something poisonous. Maybe they were both sensory deprived, or it was confusion from the cold. Hypothermia. The thought sent a jolt through his stomach, constricted his breath. Or maybe it was all biological. Maybe their mother had left because she was going crazy and didn’t want to hurt them. Maybe their father had left them on their own in the house because he was crazy. Maybe the two of them would be homeless forever, living together in this shelter beside the sloping ghosts of other houses because of something in their blood. She saw the dog for real, he knew she did. And now this was happening to him. Maybe the deer hadn’t run by them at all. Maybe they had never left his room and the National Geographic pictures. Lauren had been the one person he was sure of, and now she was gone.
She began humming, something with no words at all, and he tried to relax, lay there looking up as the glow of flames cast shadows above them on the cracked ceiling.
He tried to breathe slowly and remember that he didn’t feel like this in the mornings. He felt fine, strong. Like he knew things other people didn’t know. Like he was becoming an explorer and that he was the only one who could really be with her because everyone else was shut out. She had some secret knowledge. That’s why she was so confident and able to live without a phone or a computer or her boyfriend. Feeling a part of her secret world, above all the rest, made him forget he’d no choice but to be with her, that he was trapped with her. It made him want the next thing that was going to happen no matter how strange or difficult, because it would make something of him, make him more than a waiting and watching kid. He would have stories of his own. He would know what she knew. They would survive anywhere.
She sang, quietly at first. Her voice seemed more real than anything he’d ever heard. Filled with friendship and older than memories. It was like a spell that made the house seem fine, boring even, and he could see how this could simply be an evening like any other, a new kind of evening. The smell of woodsmoke, his sister’s voice. Knowing that they were strong was all they had and all they needed.
“My heart’s in the highlands, my heart is not here,” she sang.
My heart’s in the highlands a-chasing the deer
A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;
My heart’s in the highlands, wherever I go.
Farewell to the highlands, farewell to the North
The birth place of valour, the country of worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the highlands for ever I love.
Farewell to the mountains high cover’d with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
My heart’s in the highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the highlands a-chasing the deer
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;
My heart’s in the highlands, wherever I go.
He could feel his own heart, feel it ease and slow as he remembered the power of the deer and the land around them. The song made it clear—the simple melody and the clear cool liquid sound of her voice. He and his sister shared some code that was twisted beyond repair and had long ago become its own new way of being. They’d been outside looking in for a long time. The world was the problem, t
he war that had taken her, the blank chatter-filled world he lived in alone in his room when she was gone. Maybe what they were doing was right. Even if it killed them, he thought, it was impossibly, imponderably right.
Forty-two
SHE WOKE EARLY and built up the fire and left Danny sleeping in the house, letting the car warm up while she took a quick run to the end of the road and back. Then she got out the map and found Daryl’s house, which was closer than she’d told him. She could be there and home before Danny woke up. Maybe bring Daryl and Camille and their kid over to play in the snow and look around. Or come back and get Danny and they would all hang out for a while—give him a chance to use their computer and watch TV and maybe look after the little kid while the grown-ups got caught up. And then she and Daryl could make some plans.
She put the map on the seat beside her, buckled up, and drove. The road to his house did not hug the coast but rather a small frozen lake, dotted with ice shacks, one small green pickup truck parked on its solid surface. She remembered the way he had talked about Hebron, the wilderness, how much he liked his father-in-law. But mostly she remembered how he talked about Camille. The things she did with their son, Roy. The food she made. Homecoming was hard the first week, everyone knew that. But Lauren was smart enough to plan a trip and keep in touch with friends. And her backup plan was foolproof.