Be Safe I Love You: A Novel Read online

  “Again,” he would say, placing his index finger on the hollow at the base of her throat.

  And she felt his touch still. Felt it now, cool and smooth as a stone.

  When the lesson was over she would stand and talk to him, tell him about boys or ramble about her classes. He’d listened to the things she said, but had no advice apart from how she should sing, how she should hold her head and shoulders and expression, how she should focus on solos; choir was not for her, would not give her what she needed. But choir was more beautiful, she’d said, and he’d insisted, “Not for you. Not for your voice.” The older she got the more she wanted to blend, to be transparent. To make it so she was singing as clear and silver a sound as possible, and yet be completely hidden, make it so no one could hear her voice, no one could know its sound alone.

  “You know,” he said. “You know, ah. I went to conservatory right after I got home.”

  She looked up at the ceiling. Of course she knew. Troy, fresh from the dull trial run of the real war from which she’d just returned, went to Oberlin when he got back in 1991. The myth of flight at the end of the tunnel, that led to fellowships and accompanying real opera singers and the Met and then one day, inexplicably, his own office in a church basement in his hometown upstate. Now that she’d done her own tour she could see a little bit of the war in him, his familiarity with silences, his drive, a reconciled sorrow that lifted the corners of his mouth in a kind of mocking self-abnegation. The weight of being alive, being a victim of the killing you’ve done. She smiled, thinking about the music they loved and how one day the government would pay for their funerals. They might even be buried in the same cemetery.

  Lauren handed back his mug without speaking and headed to the door that opened onto the blacktop, leaving Troy to his work. An abrupt exit wasn’t rude in his mind, and if she stayed she might start talking like she’d done when she was a girl, only this time about the war, and she didn’t want to do that. Didn’t need to measure the width of another gulf that had grown while she was gone, or glimpse more wreckage; some blackened sky, some keening sound that is far from sacred, some fire neither of them could put out.

  • • •

  Jack Clay had fallen asleep reading and the book was still open on his chest. For the first time in years, the rousing sound of the house phone did not constrict the world into a blinding knot, a concentrated moment of dread and sinking, flailing anticipation.

  He let it ring and knew his daughter was safe in her bed. He’d slept well because of it. Nothing mattered the way it had just two days before. He opened his eyes and gazed at the ceiling for a moment before rolling over and finding the phone tangled in the bedspread beneath some newspapers and a water-damaged issue of Harper’s he’d been using as a coaster.

  The voice said, “Hello, is Sergeant Lauren Clay there?”

  He sat up and swung his feet off the bed, found his slippers. He said, “Yeah, she is, can you hang on a minute?”

  The feeling of calling his daughter to the phone pleased him. He walked back to look into her bedroom, then went into the kitchen and found her note, picked up the downstairs extension.

  “Looks like she’s gone out to run some errands,” he said. “Can I take a message?”

  “Yes, thank you. This is Dr. Klein calling again. I’d like to go over a couple of things with her when she gets the chance.” There was no urgency in the woman’s voice, but she gave him three different phone numbers this time.

  “All right,” Jack said. “Sounds good. I’ll let her know, Dr. Klein. You take care.”

  He sat and looked at his daughter’s precise delicate handwriting on the paper, then folded up the note and put it in the pocket of his robe.

  He put water on for tea, opened the front door and got the newspaper off the porch. The air was lush with a bite and mist curled around the base of the crabapple tree in their neighbor’s yard. It felt like spring. He half expected the day to heat up, the sun to come out and burn off the fog and dry the streets.

  By the end of the week, he thought, the mist would lift and it would be sixty degrees out, warm enough for shirtsleeves. And the neighborhood would suddenly be alive with kids testing out their Christmas presents, playing basketball, and riding their bikes and scooters in the street. Danny and Lauren would be playing in the driveway, coming home with mud on their boots. He didn’t have to worry about either of them now. She’d be singing again. Danny’s face wouldn’t grow solemn when he thought Jack wasn’t looking. His children were home; for all the ways he had failed them, they were together now. Like some myth, Lauren’s return had uncurled April’s green tendrils in December.

  He could eat breakfast today without thoughts of where she was and what she was doing hollowing out his day. He could answer the phone. He could make dinner for his children. She was alive and he could live.

  • • •

  Outside the church she thought again of Shane and how many times she’d left there after lessons, had gone to his house before his mother got home, eager to touch him. She imagined his smile, his body, the smell of his skin. She used to love to lie on the couch with him, in that way that made everything right; the cheap, brown particle-board paneling became cozy and the water-stained drop ceiling looked like an antique map of the continents.

  The Murphys had always lived in that neighborhood, but you couldn’t tell from the way he was. She’d known him since fourth grade. He lived eight blocks away and played on her Little League team one year. But she hadn’t remembered that until high school, when he was in her geometry class and sat next to her in the back row by the windows. The first words she’d remembered him saying to her were, “I hate it here.”

  “Here in class?” she asked. “Or here here?”

  It was an important distinction, and if the answer was school she didn’t fucking care. Who didn’t hate school?

  He smirked, looked around and raised one eyebrow. He opened his mouth, about to say something, then stopped and looked back up at the blackboard, and she saw the interest return to his face. She felt at once like she’d known him forever and like she’d just discovered something entirely new. In that moment he became visible, not just a figure that walked the same route home every afternoon. He was like her. Nothing would make him belong there, and he was on his way through.

  She’d had that same feeling again last year when she met Daryl. But Daryl wore a ring.

  She thought about the vows people made and the claims laid upon bodies, then climbed over the chainlink fence at the edge of the playground, where rainwater filled the foot-dragged wells beneath the swings.

  Lauren opened her mouth and breathed. She opened her mouth to sing one clear note. But her throat closed and her eyes watered and she sat there waiting for some time, waiting for the low clouds, the white sky, the wet earth. Waiting for all of it to rise up and leave her behind.

  Dispatch #166

  Sistopher,

  Everything is fine, really, but I don’t want to tell Mom or PJ that I need a few bucks because they’ll make a big deal of it. I’ve pretty much outgrown everything I had in my closet. I’ve been borrowing jeans from Dylan but I’d like to get a pair that I can wear most of the week and maybe some shirts. Nothing special. I could go to Salvo. I can’t mention it to Dad because he’ll say it’s all his fault and you know how it goes from there, and if I tell Mom she’ll either make it into a thing or will forget about it. I’ll pay you back once I’m famous and you’re home from vacation. But seriously it’s not a big deal and I’m fine. PJ takes Dad shopping every week now and we have toothpaste and stuff so you don’t have to keep putting it in the packages. I just don’t want any bullshit about me to make anyone A) upset or B) talk to me. You know what I mean. I have a feeling Mrs. Princiato is going to say something to me at school by the way she looks at me. All “oh no, poor thing” or whatever.

  Be safe there in your hot tub or ski chalet or whatever five-star hotel you’re staying at. Things really are fine here, e
specially now that we’ve got the Internet. Mom’s paying for it so we can keep in touch. Everything’s fine.

  BSI♥U,

  Danny

  Eight

  THE PATRICKS DRANK the way animals will eat things that are slightly poisonous in order to purge their guts. The Patricks used one kind of spirit to release another and they were doing it now at three P.M. in The Bag of Nails.

  Lauren was there to see Holly, but as soon as she came in the Patricks shouted her over, had already ordered her a Guinness. They smelled like tobacco and beer and the stale sourness of work clothes that had not been washed for several days. Tony Bennett’s Christmas album was playing and white Christmas lights framed the mirror behind the bar. She rested her eyes on a corner of the beer cooler and let the whole place disappear.

  “Shane’ll be here,” his Uncle Shamus told her. Gerry and Patrick patted her on the back, drawing her into the room again, telegraphing varied states of crazy. She could feel something in them that envied the violence she’d come from, like they felt it on her and wanted to rub up against it.

  “It’s homecoming for you and Gerry both,” Shamus said, his eyes glassy, the whites darkened with a broken brocade of red. He smirked and gave her a quick wink. Gerry raised his glass. “Released yesterday morning,” Shamus explained, “picked up for breaking and entering, wunnit?”

  “For walking a dog,” Gerry said. “It was for walking a dog, let’s be honest here.”

  “For breaking into a nice little house on the northside, entering it, and walking a yuppie couple’s dog,” Patrick explained to Lauren.

  “Which they’d irresponsibly left alone for who-the-fuck knows how long, barking and whining,” Gerry said.

  “And when he was done with the walking,” Shamus continued, “he brought the dog back and watched some television. Which startled the young couple when they returned home.”

  “They were just paranoid,” Gerry said, laughing. “They could see I wasn’t doing nothing, they didn’t have to get so pissed off about it. I told them I was helping them out.”

  “And then he threatened them with a steak knife,” Shamus concluded.

  “All right, enough now!” Gerry said. “It wasn’t a steak knife. It was a steak-knife sharpener.”

  “Do they make such an item?” Patrick asked quietly.

  “And they were threatening me,” Gerry said, all his humor gone. “I took care of their animal and they were threatening me. I should’ve just taken him to my place. You don’t leave a dog whining like that.”

  Lauren had started disliking the Patricks the week she met them. She was a sophomore in high school and had watched Uncle Gerry eat a piece of glass on a fifty-dollar bet. The blood in his mouth. The sound of him chewing it. She was angry that the image had become a part of her memory, and by virtue of that memory part of herself. She would lie awake sometimes thinking about how to erase it. Probing the insides of her cheek with her tongue and succumbing to a breathless queasy feeling, the cut within the protected flesh of the mouth. She didn’t like it. And she didn’t like them. But the Patricks didn’t care. They were going to like her no matter what. And this she hated the most of all—that they seemed to possess some kind of wisdom, something tribal and suicidal tied tightly to the neighborhood, a kind of smirking anarchic spirit that would see them burn like monks to prove that nothing could touch what they were.

  “So,” she said, ignoring the dog story as if they’d never told it, “you guys expecting Shane?”

  “Fuck yes,” Patrick said, “and we haven’t yet got the quality time we would have liked with him.”

  She put money on the bar to pay for the beer but Shamus handed it back to her. His skin was bad, a fine web of capillaries blooming around his nose, but the unmistakable gleam of intelligence in his rheumy eyes. “Everybody in this fucking place owes you a drink,” he said. She stared blankly at him, then around the bar. She thought for one brief moment that she could buy The Bag of Nails with her combat pay and just have it torn down. Then, having had an idea worthy of toasting, she raised her glass to the Patricks and drank the smooth and bitter pint in several long gulps.

  “Everybody,” Shamus said again, and his brothers raised their glasses and looked menacingly at the small group of people who were spending the midafternoon of December 26 sitting in a bar. No one looked up. And it wouldn’t have mattered if they did. In her jeans and flannel no one else would understand where she had been. They wouldn’t take up the sentimentality the uncles wanted to see catch on, and that was fine. She wasn’t interested in being the idea they tried on for meaning, or righteousness, the new vessel into which they poured all the excuses for their intemperance.

  As she put down the glass she saw Holly coming out of the kitchen, wearing a white shirt with poofy shoulders, black polyester pants, and Converse sneakers. She was a short, slim-hipped, coltish woman with a long neck and broad shoulders. A body that had been made fun of in elementary school, at once stubby and blunt but long armed, fit.

  Holly took a breath, smiled, said nothing, and walked directly to her—as if she’d just seen her yesterday—put her arms around Lauren and squeezed her hard, rested her head on her friend’s shoulder. She smelled like fried food and Prell shampoo and coffee. They stood that way long enough for some drunk to call them dykes. Uncle Gerry turned and slapped the man hard in the face, pulled him by the shirt until he broke free and hunched his way to a back booth to sit with his drink. Had it been later in the afternoon the drunk’s response wouldn’t have been good enough and the uncles would have followed him to his seat to discuss it.

  Holly stepped back and smiled. “You look good,” she said simply. Lauren grinned and admired the spaces between Holly’s teeth and the one twisted incisor that she’d wanted for herself when they were girls. A smile that was pretty and messed up at the same time.

  “Thanks.”

  “You here to meet your boy?”

  She shook her head. “I came to see you. How’s Grace?”

  “She’s over at Asshole’s parents’. I’m picking her up in a coupla hours. I seen Danny walking the other day—from the back I thought it was you for a minute, he’s so tall now.”

  Lauren smiled proudly. “I know it. Boy’s a champion.”

  “How’s your dad?” Holly asked.

  “He’s been replaced by an impostor while I was gone,” she said, and for a hundredth of a second felt it might be true. There was nothing about the way her father behaved in the last day that she could recognize.

  “Prolly should get a blood sample.”

  “That might be hard—he gets up and does stuff now. You’d have to catch him first.”

  Holly’s mouth twisted into that crooked smile. She shook her head, trying to stifle a laugh, and hunched forward a little. “Shouldn’t joke about it,” she said. “Your father’s a good man.” Then she looked into Lauren’s eyes and laughed. “He still wearing that robe all day?”

  “No, I’m telling you!” she said. “The robe’s gone, he apparently has an office over at the Nabe with PJ, it’s weird. He’s all doing laundry and shit. How’s Gracie?”

  “She’s good, she’s good. She’s real good.” Holly put one hand on her hip and turned her foot out to the side, lost in thoughts about her daughter. She nodded to herself. “Asshole’s paying for her to take some karate lessons, so . . . that’s one thing. I got her signed up for soccer comin’ up this year. You’d be proud of her, Ren.”

  She pulled out her phone and opened it, scrolled to a picture of Grace.

  “No way!” Lauren shouted at the screen.

  “Way!” Holly said, smiling with reluctant pride, rolling her eyes. “She tore right into everything at four in the morning. She woke up at three and came in to tell me Santa’d been there and I managed to keep her in bed a little longer. Course, I’d gotten back from here around midnight. God knows Shamus and Gerry and Patrick gotta have somewhere to spend their fucking Christmas Eve, right?” she yelled over to the bar.<
br />
  “You want to ruin a sacred tradition?” Gerry asked her.

  Lauren laughed again at the picture.

  “Let’s see it, now.” Shamus turned and gestured for her to bring the phone over to the bar and then they all peered at Grace on the tiny screen, exhausted in her footie pajamas, clutching red Christmas ribbon, struggling to keep her eyes open.

  Holly laughed again. “She was so tired by the time the sun came out she could barely keep her head up. By the time Mom and Dave finished making the pancakes she was out.”

  “Ah,” Patrick said. “Look at her, she looks like yer mother.”

  “Now that was a beauty queen if ever there was one,” said Shamus.

  Holly smiled and flipped through more pictures, and they all stooped eagerly around her, quietly watching Grace’s Christmas morning unfold.

  “You got your Aunt Jean’s looks,” Patrick said, giving Holly a little squeeze, and she smirked so he gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “That’s a compliment,” he said. Lauren watched the soft way he looked at her friend, the quiet comfortable way he talked to her. “You didn’t know her in high school. You think we all looked like we do now? We didn’t. We were just like you,” he said. “I was just like Shane. I was handsome like Shane. I was taller ’n Shane. I tell you what, I got better grades ’n Shane, and that’s a fact.”

  “And you worked,” Gerry reminded him.

  “And I worked,” Patrick said.

  “National merit scholar,” Shamus said, putting up his empty to be refilled.

  “And you served this country in the armed forces,” Gerry said.

  “Just like little Lauren Clay.” Patrick laid a hand on her shoulder until she shrugged it off. There was nothing about Patrick that was just like her. His Gulf War was not hers.

  “But the real thing is I had civic pride,” Patrick said. “Which noneayuh have.”

  “Noneayuh,” Shamus said in disgust.