Be Safe I Love You: A Novel

by Cara Hoffman

  She looked away from him, watched to see if Sebastian was still in the car. She knew why only she could see him. She knew why she had believed Daryl was home too. She knew what she was. A ghost and her dog, but somehow she’d forgotten that she had not returned at all. The woman she was supposed to be, was meant to be, would have been, could never exist at all now, and she was stuck dragging around this ruined version of herself. She owed it to the memory of her real self to get rid of this doppelganger that she was trapped inside, some false and foreign shadow that was no more alive than the dog.

  “You said you’d go when you came back from Iraq,” he said simply.

  “I would have,” she told him. “Believe me.”

  • • •

  Lauren had gone to the car while Danny walked to the back of the diner to wash up. Their father answered on the first ring and accepted the charges, said, “Thank God,” and was too emotional to speak. At first Danny thought he had hung up but then Jack Clay said, “Thank God” again. Then urgently: “How’s your sister?”

  “She’s good,” Danny said, pressing himself farther into the corner of the pay phone so people couldn’t hear him. “We’re camping outside a town called Hebron in Canada. Can you come and get us?”

  “We’ll have someone pick you up right now.”

  “No, no,” Danny said. “No. You come get us. I’ll hang up and I won’t call again.”

  Danny could hear PJ talking in the background, then his father said, “Okay, buddy, let’s talk about it for a minute. It’s not that easy.”

  “Yes it is,” Danny said. “We’re just on a little trip. Please! I lost my phone or we would have called. Please you do it, just you. I’ll try to come to breakfast every morning at the diner. There’s only one diner. And then you can just run into us. And we can go home.”

  “Where’s your sister right now?” His father’s voice was so kind and slow and clear it scared him.

  “She’s in the car, what’s the big deal?” Then, answering his own question, he said, “I have to go before she wonders where I am.”

  “Danny. Where outside of Hebron?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I have to go. There’s a motel connected to the diner and it has a blue sign with a moose on it. If you leave soon you can be here in the morning and we can all get breakfast.” Then he hung up before Jack Clay could ask him anything more that he couldn’t explain.

  • • •

  She shut the passenger-side door and slid down in the seat so she could only see the sky and the telephone wires from the window. It was just another day now. Nothing had changed. The plan had always been to join Daryl and she had managed to forget what that really meant. But she would not forget again.

  She let herself feel it one last time. The day she got the package from Curtis. How it gave her a sense of actually physically rising where she stood.

  She had raced on her bike to Troy’s office and the news had cracked his face open with such pride, and he had grabbed her and squeezed her tightly and kissed her on both cheeks, and she cried. She sat in the chair in his cramped office and she cried with relief. She could go, she could leave.

  He had been right about auditioning as a soloist, and about the repertoire he had chosen for her. A simple piece in English, one in French and German and Italian, and “Lucia’s Aria”—not required, but letting them know who she was, that she could do it.

  He had accompanied her, sat at the piano bench with the kind of grace and ease she’d never seen, as if he had finally brought her to his home, finally shown her where he was from, and it was not a place in this world. And she knew at last, the way he smiled, the way he looked past people when they spoke or squinted in confused amusement, he was looking at everything from this other place. He lived side by side with people but not among them. And now he had brought her here. He rolled his shoulders once and briefly rested his hands in his lap, then looked directly into her eyes so that she could tell him when to start; tell him without even nodding, without a gesture, just a thought that he could hear.

  She stood beside him and felt him anchoring her. With her next breath there was no longer any distinction between her body and her voice; she existed for the next thirty minutes as sound. Troy sat beside her easily, elegant. He had shown her how to do this. Agreed four years ago to bring her there, because he knew the day he met her this was where she was from. He knew the way home.

  She picked Danny up from after school and she twirled him around and around when they got out the door. They skipped along the sidewalk and she sang “Fair Robin I Love.” He knew it by heart. He sang it too in his little boy’s voice, a piping warbling chirp that made her laugh.

  That day she felt she could do anything. Knew she could.

  She could sink into the ground and open her lungs, she could use the weight of her body to release herself from the weight of her body. She could rise, escape. She could disappear.

  Lauren had two more weeks of knowing she could do anything before the first foreclosure notices came in the mail.

  Forty-four

  GRACE WAS SUCKING her thumb again. She’d quit a year ago but since the fire she had her thumb in her mouth and was sleeping in bed with Holly. Holly looked down at her daughter’s placid face. Her eyes shut, a white and yellow LEGO car clutched in one sleeping hand.

  Now that she had her head clear, now that she had some time to think, her only thought was that she had almost lost Grace—not her own life but Grace’s, being with Grace. Her daughter could have grown up without her.

  Holly lay on her side, stroking the girl’s fine hair as she slept. The Tinker Bell nightlight cast a blue-green glow about the room.

  She went over it again, who was there. Who left. When it started. She was certain at first it was her fault for tossing cigarettes off the back porch, but no, not with all that rain. She’d never seen Troy at The Bag of Nails in her life. Now the news was saying he was an alcoholic, trying to make him out as some kind of gay drug addict from the big city who once played at the Met. The phrase “played at the Met” was in almost every story. It was ridiculous. He was just some guy like the rest of them, just some guy that had fucked up and was living with it. She began to cry silently, curled herself closer to Grace and held her, smelled her skin, her baby shampoo. The tears streamed down her face and into her daughter’s fine damp hair, and a deep hollow horror rose in the pit of her stomach.

  She hoped Lauren and Danny were okay. Hoped that Lauren had not run away because of the fire. She was grateful for the check and she wanted her to be home and that was all. A vast sadness seized her when she thought about Lauren and she felt suddenly entirely alone. It was one thing for Holly to be fucked up, to have made some mistakes, be dealing with setbacks. It was another thing entirely for Lauren to be having trouble, changing her plans when she was finally free and could pick up where she left off. Lauren’s successes had been hers too. Knowing that someone who was so much like her could achieve things, could sing, could break out of the shitty neighborhood and make money, not get stuck. Having Grace had made her like a lot of girls in the neighborhood, girls she never thought she’d understood or cared about. But she’d still been an honor student. She was still friends with Lauren Clay, which meant she could do what she wanted, even taking care of a kid. Lauren hitting Shane, taking off with Danny, lying to everyone was a thing she never saw coming and it shook her confidence, made her feel like a failure and like she’d failed as a friend, like leaving had never really been an option. She was simply there to stay. Another new year in the same place.

  She kissed Gracie and listened to her wistful murmuring; her voice still carried something that felt like it came from Holly’s body.

  It was too much, knowing what she knew. The sense of betrayal and then feeling ashamed at her own stupidity. How could she have missed what people were saying all along? What Shane was saying, what Lauren herself had told her?

  And she was ashamed that she was still there like a school
girl. In her childhood room with her child, her mother sleeping down the hall. She couldn’t take another night of going over it all, not another night of crying. This was the worst part about having no work. Nine o’clock was not her bedtime; it guaranteed her five hours of lying awake realizing exactly what had become of her life. Every little detail she had missed while she was working or playing with Gracie.

  Finally she got up and walked into her mother’s room.

  Bridget was reading in bed. She looked up and stretched out her arms, and Holly came over and lay her head on her mother’s chest.

  “You look so pretty with that haircut, Toots,” Bridget said, placing her hand on her daughter’s cheek. “You look smart.”

  Holly lay there quietly.

  “Gracie sleeping?” Bridget asked.

  Holly nodded. “I need to get out for a while,” she told her mother. “I wanna go for a drive.”

  “I guess I need some errands run, now that you mention it.” She picked up the box of Newports on her nightstand and rattled it.

  “I won’t be gone long, can you check on her?”

  Bridget said, “That’s what I’m here for, babe.”

  • • •

  She climbed the stairs feeling what had become of her lungs and rapped on the door of the tiny efficiency on Arsenal Street. There was nowhere else he could be now. When he opened it his face lit immediately with joy and she had to control the reflex to smile back, to hug him. He was wearing a green flannel shirt and cut-off shorts with long underwear beneath them. She smelled the liquor on his breath and the stale odor of laundry and cigarettes wafting out from the dark space behind him. Before she could say anything he swept her up in his arms and put his face against her neck and started sobbing.

  She stiffened against him, waited for him to calm down.

  He sniffed, his voice was tight, when he said, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry, come in.” He put his hand over his mouth and stepped aside so she could. “I thought you weren’t going to call. I thought you were mad I didn’t visit.”

  She took off her windbreaker. She was wearing a wife-beater T-shirt, sweatpants and rain boots; her left arm from shoulder to knuckles was bandaged with gauze and surgical tape. He looked at her body and began to cry again.

  Still she felt nothing. She looked at the books piled around the little twin mattress where he slept on the floor, where he’d read to her and she’d told him her plans. His place was like some odd museum with things from boyhood, his baseball glove, a framed picture of his debate team. A little fleet of toy boats lined up on the windowsill above his mattress. It had been a sanctuary for her; providing a few stolen moments between the bar and going home to sleeping Grace when she could read or lie beside him or listen to his stories. She saw the postcards of philosophers he’d thumb-tacked around the room, the framed and graying wedding photo of his parents that sat on his makeshift card-table desk along with a notebook filled with numbers that he’d alternately told her was his “work refuting Wittgenstein’s Tractatus” or his work “analyzing chess moves,” then finally and more likely the notebook where he “kept track of bets.” He watched her looking around the room and braved a charming crooked smile. That roguish smile Holly knew so well, she felt it upon her own face. It was the way he acknowledged that they both loved his eccentricity, that she got him, knew a great secret; a world-class scholar was tucked away in a rooming house somewhere in the north country, deconstructing the whole false world while everyone else languished in their delusions. The joke was on all those sheep, the two of them were free.

  “Why?” she asked.

  The smile faded and he sat down on the mattress. She let the silence do its work.

  He said, “I couldn’t be beholden anymore. I just couldn’t do it. You and me, we’re not weak, babe. We had to show them. I don’t need some captive audience. Some place in the material world.”

  “Who were you showing? Who is there to show? Look at what you did to me. This is my body.” She began to raise her voice but it became too hoarse to speak. She stood before him, her arms hanging limply at her sides, and he did look at her for a long time, obediently. She watched the play of emotion on his face. The longer he looked the more it seemed he admired the scar, as if it was something she’d acquired for both of them. As if it was actually a symbol of their love and sacrifice and not her flesh.

  “You’re a soldier now.” He said it reverently and was about to say something else but she cut him off.

  “Hey,” she said quietly. “Motherfucker. Guess what? I’m not a soldier. I’m a fucking waitress. And you’re a delivery man.”

  He made a face, shook his head.

  “Don’t shake your head at me.” She laughed bitterly, kicked a pile of his books to the floor. “I know you. I took care of you. I licked your wounds! I loved you! You made me feel like I could hold my head up. Like I could live here and work in a bar and still become something great. That I could be proud of this town, like coming from nowhere makes you smarter than other people, like things falling apart are really majestic. I looked up to you, Paddy. But all you wanted was someone to drag down with you!” She took one of his toy boats and clutched it angrily, then smashed it against the wall.

  “You almost killed me, Patrick! You let another man take the blame! Your fucking war isn’t our fault. It’s over. It’s not mine to clean up or Troy’s to sit in jail for. Look at yourself, you’re hiding here behind a pile of books you can barely comprehend and garbage you won’t throw out and toys you were too selfish to have ever outgrown. All because you’re too drunk or too tired or too lazy or too broken to have ever really lived your life.”

  Tears streamed down his face and he shook his head, still smiling at her, the lines in his face deep and telling, his shoulders slumped. “None of that is true,” he wept. “None of it. Baby, that is not me you’re describing. That is not me!”

  “It is, though,” she said simply. “It is.”

  Forty-five

  SHE CHECKED THEM in under the name Daryl Green.

  The room was small and dark and stiflingly hot and stagnant after having been in the open frozen house. There was a large TV and two double beds with thick ugly floral bedspreads. The floor was covered in low brown carpeting, and the place smelled like Lysol and room deodorizer.

  He sat on the bed, and even though it felt good, the room was somehow far dingier than their camp with the crisp air and warm fire and smell of woodsmoke.

  “Are we going to go for a run today?”

  She said, “If we get separated, call Dad.”

  “Why would we get separated?”

  “You gotta come up with contingency plans, man.” She took her wallet out of her pocket and handed him four hundred dollars. “Hey, you can take a shower at least, huh? That’s a good thing,” she said. She was distracted, talking to him like he was a soldier, not someone she knew.

  “It doesn’t matter about the oil rigs,” he told her desperately, a horrible feeling spreading in his belly.

  She was still silent.

  “There’s nothing you could personally do about them,” he said.

  She snapped off the light on the side table and sat across from him on the other bed. “I agree with you there,” she said.

  • • •

  It wasn’t quiet that night because of the hum of electrical transformers across the road. Once she was asleep he went out to the car and found the map but not the gun. He knew there was a gun. He hadn’t dreamed it. He opened the trunk and went through everything and at last found it tucked in the well with the spare. He slid it into his belt, went back in the room, and watched her sleep. Then he lay down. He’d stay awake all night and in the morning their father would meet them for breakfast and they would all go home together and they could listen to some David Bowie instead of some imaginary bullshit and he’d have good stories to tell at school, and then she’d go to Curtis and he could visit her there.

  She screamed in her sleep. He jumped, wa
s rattled as he looked over at her still body lying fully clothed, her boots still on. She looked like a corpse, a casualty from the desert transported somehow to these dingy and familiar surroundings. After a while he relaxed, turned on the TV, keeping the sound off, and watched a parade of color and garish garbage play across the screen. He flipped through channels and settled on the Cartoon Network.

  When next he looked over it was because he had heard a click and she was gone. Pale light shimmered through the curtains and he leapt to his feet, crying her name.

  • • •

  He put on his boots and grabbed his coat and ran out to the parking lot calling for her, ran past the diner in time to see their car driving slowly, normally, just passing a green light at the only four-way intersection in town.

  He screamed again. The diner was not yet open and there were still stars visible in the pale pink sky. While he was running back to the motel a blue SUV pulled up, a car he’d never seen before, an airport rental, and PJ was driving it.

  “She’s gone,” he said, the second his father opened the passenger-side door. Jack Clay’s face, brightened by relief for one brief moment, became a mask of fear and sorrow. He went to embrace his son but Danny brushed it off. “She just left,” he said, walking toward their car. “Let’s go!”

  “Now wait a second,” his father said. Danny stared at him in disbelief.

  PJ said, “Hang on, little man, we’re going to head after her.” He took out his cell phone and handed it to Jack, told him to call the police, then got out of the car, stretched his legs.

  “Let’s go, we’ve got to fucking go!” Danny shouted at them.

  Jack walked away a few steps with the phone and began describing the situation to the 911 dispatcher and PJ was droning to him that at this point they needed more than just the three of them. Danny waited the eternity of five more seconds before he dropped PJ with a sharp kick to the knee. His father looked up in alarm and held up his hand, screaming, “Daniel, no!”