Be Safe I Love You: A Novel Read online

  Danny wasn’t sure Patrick was using real words anymore. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He shook his head and felt for his phone in his pocket in case he needed to call 911. He understood Shane’s uncle was upset about Holly or about the fact that the place where he spent his entire life had burned down, but he sounded crazier than someone who was just upset.

  Patrick rubbed his face again. He had tears in his eyes and he looked very old and tired.

  He would not tell Lauren about this when she got back in the car, she’d be pissed the guy had even talked to him or that he’d rolled down the window. She’d had enough bullshit. He knew because she said just this morning when he was slow to wake up that she’d had enough bullshit. He didn’t want anything to upset her.

  Patrick put his hand firmly on Danny’s shoulder.

  He said, “Better be careful, little man.”

  Twenty-nine

  LAUREN WALKED OUT through the sliding doors and down the ramp past cars waiting near the emergency exit. She saw Shamus and Gerry sitting on the curb smoking and wondered if Shane had given them a ride over to visit. Just what Holly needed, barflies flocking to her aid. She raised a hand and nodded quickly at them as she got out her keys and sprinted across the parking lot.

  Danny was hunched down in his seat texting, and she slammed the door and quickly got back out on the highway.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “She looks great,” Lauren said. “They have her on oxygen and she has some burns but otherwise seems fine. Shane’s with her now. I guess Bridget was with her all night.”

  “What did she say about the fire?”

  “Not much,” Lauren told him.

  He put his phone away and messed with the radio a little.

  “How did you learn how to drive?” he asked her. He had really wished he could drive when Patrick had shown up.

  “PJ.”

  “Really? When did he teach you?”

  “Don’t you remember? When we were kids.”

  “I guess I do. Really?”

  “Really. Dad wouldn’t teach me so I asked PJ and he did. Over on Sullivan Street.

  “Did you tell Dad?”

  “Yeah. He was pissed. But what if something happened and we needed to go to the hospital or something happened to him and we were alone?”

  “Nothing like that ever happened,” Danny said.

  “But it could have, and then we’d’ve been screwed.”

  They passed along the Black River and saw how swollen it had become from the rain, flowing fast along the muddy, weedy embankment.

  “Let’s take the scenic route. Let’s take the bridge and go up and across Canada, stop at my buddy Daryl Green’s and then go down to Mom’s.”

  “For real?”

  “Hell yeah, kid. We have plenty of time, we can do whatever we want.”

  He smiled broadly. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, let’s do it!”

  Waiting to cross the Thousand Islands Bridge into Canada she thought of leaving Holly there alone, thought of what she was about to do and lost her resolve for a moment. Then put it all out of her mind and focused on the road.

  Just over the Canadian border the weather began to change rapidly. Thick wet clumps of snow hit the windshield. They got on to Highway 1 and drove along in steady snowfall. Something about it calmed her, made the road seem safer, the idea of IEDs more absurd. She hadn’t felt so calm driving in a year and she smiled, looking out at the dense wet blanket of white that clung to tree branches and hung from the eaves of buildings and tops of billboards. As they got farther on the snowflakes became smaller, swirled and swarmed like white bees toward them, and the bright sun pierced the pale gray clouds, revealing a wide swath of high blue sky. She put on her aviator glasses.

  In his sleep Danny looked like his baby self: his head back and lolling to the side, his skin still soft and cheeks round. He’d put the radio on some shitty hip-hop station, and she turned it off. She reached over and put her hand on his chest. Felt him breathing. Then she reached into the pocket of his cargo pants, gently pulled out his phone, rolled down the top of the window, and tossed it out onto the highway. She had to do it. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to take them out of this world.

  Part Two

  Thirty

  WHEN HE WOKE up a thick snow was falling and he watched it absently through the windshield for a moment before realizing the car was parked. There were tall pine trees visible all around in the distance, and the sky was bright and the afternoon sun was warm coming through the glass. There was a long low wooden building, a truck stop maybe or a diner. But his sister was not there. Then he heard the trunk slam and her boots crunching along in the snow next to the car. She opened the passenger-side door, handed him a large square box that said DANNER CANADIAN on it, and said, “Merry Christmas. Again.”

  Inside was a pair of dark brown boots with thick wide black soles. They were solid and would last and he was sure they’d keep his feet warm. Even the laces seemed constructed of something indestructible. He’d never had anything like them. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Those are one hundred percent waterproof,” Lauren said. “They have six hundred grams of Thinsulate in the lining. You could prolly wear them with bare feet and still be warm.”

  He leaned over to lace them. Then he got out of the car and jumped up and down in the sturdy boots. They were so simple and so fancy at the same time. He ran across the parking lot and then back to the car.

  “We found winter!” he shouted. She laughed, happy, relieved. She opened the trunk again and got out one of the silver emergency blankets and put it in the back seat in case they needed it on the road, but he leaned in and took it, tied it around his neck like a cape.

  “Aw hell yeah, son! We’re on vacation!” He hugged her tight. “Thank you for the boots, Sistopher!”

  She waved it away. “They’re gonna keep you warm.”

  “Oh you bet, I’m going to be so fucking warm. I’m going to have to change my name to Toasty. I’m going to change my name to Adorable Little Bunny. Oh, you know what? I don’t remember why this was, but I was actually thinking about what would be a good name for a pet bunny. And I came up with Furious.”

  Danny loved it when people laughed but especially Lauren, because her voice was pretty and she always jerked her head back a little like she was startled. One time he made her laugh so hard tea came out her nose.

  He went on: “I’d be like, ‘Here’s my pet Furious. He looks real mellow but he’s going to tear your fucking face off.’ I’d be like, ‘I’m serious, why do you think I fucking named him that? You should be scared. He’s a fucking killer!’ And then the rabbit would just be hopping around, nibbling on grass or lying there sleeping. OH I know! I would get him a whole outfit of baby clothes! With a little hat that pushes his ears down on the sides of his head! And then I’d shave his body and get him covered in jailhouse tattoos, so under the baby suit he’d be a terrifying badass.” Danny started giggling and she looked at him, incredulous and weirdly proud.

  “And then you feed him with a baby bottle,” she said.

  “I’d feed him grain alcohol in the baby bottle.”

  “Then get some woman to bring him to The New Bag of Nails and pretend he’s the love child of one of the Patricks,” she said, and then lost it again, shook her head picturing the stupid shithole burned to the ground and the Patricks, gathered around like an Irish wake, staring at the wreckage.

  Danny said in a tearful falsetto: “Don’t you remember your own flesh and blood?”

  “And the family resemblance would be so great he couldn’t deny it,” she said.

  “And he’d be so dumb he’d have to keep paying child support for a shaved rabbit. No, you know what I’d really do, though?” Danny said, suddenly serious. “If I had a bunny I would just hold him a lot because they’re really soft.”

  She nodded in agreement. “Let’s get some chow, kid, what do you say?”

  A car
pulled into the parking lot. A middle-aged couple looked at them and then sat gazing out their windshield, saying things Lauren and Danny couldn’t hear, which also made them laugh.

  “You look nuts in that cape,” Lauren said to him.

  “I’m going to save their lives,” he said. “I’m going to go over and knock on the window and be like . . .”

  Danny stopped talking as the couple got out of the car, still looking at them. They smiled. The woman said, “I was just telling my husband I haven’t seen two people having such a good time in years.”

  “Look at my new boots!” Danny said to her, holding one foot up.

  “Not bad,” the man said.

  They were friendly and tender looking and short. The man was wearing a green Carhartt coat, and the woman was wearing a puffy down vest and a white knit hat.

  “We’re on vacation,” Lauren said.

  “With our dog,” Danny said, and he started cracking up again. The couple looked around for a dog, then he said, “That’s not true, he died last month, but he’d always wanted his ashes scattered in the Great Lakes.”

  “Oh,” the woman said, looking confused.

  The man started laughing. He said, “I think we got ourselves a couple of comedians here, Bobbi.”

  • • •

  The diner was big and the dark wooden tables were covered with red-and-white checked table cloths, the real kind made of linen. He loved it. Nearly every inch of wall space was hung with photographs of animals: moose, owls, wolves, bears, and otters, and with rectangular wooden signs sporting some of the stupidest stuff he’d ever read. Phrases like “Got beer?” And “Sometimes I wake up grumpy, other times I let him sleep.” “If it has tits or tires it’s gonna cost you money.” And also “Can I get a caller ID for the voices in my head?”

  The dessert case was flanked by a counter that held a wide variety of souvenirs. You could buy flags and pennants and little snow globes and bells and spoons, unidentifiable cartoon figurines and T-shirts that all said WAWEIG on them. Waweig! What did that even mean? It was ridiculous but also cool and foreign and remote. Like a planet in an Ursula Le Guin novel. They’d been gone just a few hours and already they had docked in Waweig.

  “I’ve got to take a picture of this,” he said to Lauren, reaching into his pocket for his phone. He experienced a moment of disorientation and anxiety when he couldn’t find it, looked on the floor beneath the table.

  She sat across from him—leaning back in her chair and reading the menu, sipping her coffee. She didn’t look worried about it, in fact she looked more relaxed than she had since she’d gotten home.

  “You must have left it in the car,” she said, glancing up absently. “Think maybe you should take the cape off now?”

  He had the urge to go find his phone right away but knew he should stay there. The tension was finally gone from her face and he didn’t want to bring it back by taking pictures and texting, which he knew bothered her but he didn’t know why. He honestly didn’t feel that much like doing it anyway—which was weird, but still the boots and the diner and all the snow needed to be documented so he could post it online.

  She said, “It’s okay, buddy, we’re going to get on the road soon, you can look in the car.” Then added, “They have milkshakes.”

  He picked up the menu. Remembered another story he wanted to tell her. Knocked his boots together under the table. He felt happy.

  “If you go to music school can I visit you there?” he asked. He could imagine driving around Philadelphia and seeing a big city and going to visit Shane with her. He’d have a place to be other than home. Shane said there were libraries at his school that had any book you’d ever want, and they showed good movies there all week long.

  She looked up, shocked. “Why would you think I’m going to go to music school?”

  He said, “Duh, what else are you going to do? Hey, have you ever heard of a Reeves’s muntjac? It’s a real animal. It’s like a deer but really small.”

  The muntjac was really interesting, and the history of how it got to the west from China was too. He also wanted to remember to tell her about how birds’ eyes make it possible for them to see in colors that are invisible to humans and other animals. He’d watched a lecture about it online because his biology teacher was kind of a tool when it came to explaining things. He’d show Lauren the site where you can watch all those lectures and also the video of crows placing nuts at a crosswalk so cars would run them over and crack them. And when they got to their mom’s they could also watch South Park because she had cable.

  He looked up and realized that from almost every window in the diner you could see snow-covered pine trees. This was the farthest from home he had ever been, and it felt amazing, like they could just keep going. They had broken free from some gravitational pull and could keep going forever. They could be weightless.

  Thirty-one

  IN A SPOTLESSLY clean, efficiently sized office with two beautiful leather chairs and a wide cherry desk, Dr. Eileen Klein told Captain Nash exactly what she wasn’t going to do. Which was nothing.

  She liked Nash, he was a good man and stable, and it wasn’t his fault some jackass screwed up the paper on his unit. He shook his head at her. Clamped his lips shut and breathed in through his nose. He was not happy with what she was saying and she knew she was making more work for him, but she was entirely fucking done with it.

  They’d lost one hundred and forty last week. Stateside. Here at fucking home. Most with firearms, then drowning, overdoses which couldn’t really be categorized accurately. And then the one gaining ever more popularity: suicide by cop. For enlisted overseas they were looking at one a day.

  “You can make this a problem for Clay or you can let it go,” Nash said. “You gonna start tracking everybody who’s got an inconsistency on their debrief, Eileen?”

  “Not everyone, no. But this one for sure.”

  “This shit’s above your pay grade,” he said, using a cliché she was getting very tired of hearing, an excuse worthy of Eichmann.

  “Next you’ll be telling me a funeral is cheaper than medical treatment.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not interested in calling this person AWOL no matter what she filled out or told you, even if she misses the thing on the twenty-ninth. This soldier is home and not our problem.”

  “She told me she and her family are going to be staying with Daryl Green,” Klein said.

  Nash took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose.

  “I’m sorry, Eileen. Even if I back you on this one you know it’s going to be a fucking shitshow.”

  She nodded. Took her glasses off and put them on her desk, then rested her head in her hands for a moment.

  “Clay’s a good NCO,” Nash said. “She presided over an accident, everything’s been signed and put away, really. It’s that simple. She’s not going to do anything. And even if she does, what the hell can we do about it?”

  Thirty-two

  IT WAS A full twelve hours of driving after they left the diner. After dark she pulled over somewhere on route ON-137 to rest her eyes, tucked the silver emergency blankets around herself and Danny, and ended up sleeping for hours. It was December 29. The windows were frosted over when she woke, and a bright morning light shone into the car. She ate a Clif bar and got back on the road.

  Danny was fitful and not quite awake when they passed a sign for Hebron and then another sign giving their proximity to the Jeanne d’Arc Basin. It was thrilling to see the name and know she was finally closing in on her plan. Would be able to show Danny this place, this hollow edge of land like a scar from where the continent was torn apart. To stand with him in a place where the earth had changed.

  She turned off the highway and drove on a smaller sloping road for another few hours. It had been plowed but there was no traffic. The roads down into the valley were impassable in the little Nissan, even with the snow tires. She drove as far as she could, then parked on an overlook, a good vantage point
to see the white-topped mountain ranges as they cut into the blue sky and to look down into the hollow landscape below. The world was a bleached pearly frozen blue, filled with pines and maples.

  Out there off the coast, beneath the ocean, out of sight was the White Rose oil field. A place Daryl had talked about incessantly the last weeks of his tour. The region was filled with offshore rigs, but you couldn’t tell from the majestic emptiness of the landscape. If they could get work there, Daryl strategized, offshore, they could make what they were making in combat, maybe double it, sock it away so his kid Roy and Danny didn’t have to go through what they went through. Otherwise it was temping or carpentry and ten dollars an hour and back to nowhere fast. Once they’d made enough money they could do what they wanted. Once they knew the rigs their options changed considerably. She looked again at the pristine landscape. It was as if she’d walked out of Amarah last week and into a parallel universe. Sand and high blazing sun transformed to snow and the thick shelter of forest.

  No footprints or tire tracks marked the snow, but there were deer, or maybe caribou tracks, and she noticed, close to where she’d parked, paw prints from some small animal.

  The air was bitter as she got out of the car, a startling, awakening kind of cold. Lauren looked down the edge of the slope, in the late-afternoon light. Below them a cluster of low, crumbling stone and shingled houses, some with caved-in roofs, leaned in a semicircle around a pile of bricks and cobblestones. She got out her binoculars and surveyed the buildings more closely. They appeared abandoned, looked at least a century old. An old hunting camp maybe, or the remaining houses from some remote village left behind by progress. From where she stood she could see no tracks around the buildings, apart from a single narrow deer trail. The place looked still and placid, and she wondered how close they were to the coast. It could have been a fishing and trapping outpost. Woods and thick stands of trees had been common sights on the trip, but this place below them looked more open and flat, absent of visitors and inhospitable to significant vegetation. She took a few more moments with the binoculars while Danny woke up, and began searching again for his phone.