Be Safe I Love You (23 page)

Forty-six

S
EBASTIAN HUDDLED DOWN
and curled his small warm body beside her, and she slipped her numb fingers beneath his collar, rested her cheek against him. She could smell his wet fur. She could feel him trembling.

The lights of the rig burned and bled to white, and before she closed her eyes, she could see the desert and the dunes out in the distance. Placid and silent and stretching on forever. She opened her eyes again at the sound of the air above her reverberating as it was beaten by the blades of the medic’s chopper landing beside her. It was too bright. It was cold, not hot. There was no desert and the dog wasn’t moving anymore. She tried to hold him but she was being pulled, lifted.

Then she was a part of the sky and he was small and black against the snow. She was leaving him. People stood around the dog’s body, looking up. And even with her eyes shut, she knew that he was frozen. That he was gone.

Forty-seven

T
IME HAD CHANGED.
Seconds took any amount of time to pass, a week, a year. Scenes that repeated themselves did so without measure or meter. Visits lasted the duration of a remembered month. Holly and Shane stood beside her bed, their forms flickering beneath the bright fluorescent lights, talking like everything was normal but looking like they’d opened a drawer at the morgue. It made her laugh. That or whatever was in the drip. Shane bent down and kissed her mouth, and she put her damaged hands in his hair. Tasted him. He whispered something against her cheek.

People came and sat and left. At some point clocks began to measure time properly.

After a week when she could finally leave her room, she didn’t want to. The sanitized brutality of the place made her feel weak. They were all warehoused there, haunting their own forms: soldiers coming back from the heat of the desert and her with her frostbite. They looked at one another in the common room and talked about the places they’d left. The people they’d abandoned. Crimes that would never be called crimes.

Troy visited weekly. First he brought the CD of her final recital, then the copies of the jury comments from her All State and All Eastern competitions. Then the full folder of her repertoire. And finally some paperwork she’d never seen before; an enrollment deferral filed years earlier, and a schedule for a fifteen-minute audition. Reading it raised the hairs on her neck and made her face flush. She looked up at him in disbelief.

“You sign here”—he pointed—“and here and here. I’ll pick you up a week from Wednesday and they’ll jury the Donizetti piece the following Thursday. And you owe me one hundred and fifty dollars.”

He sat straight shouldered, pent up as always, with the pressure of whatever was coiled inside him dispassionately watching. He was wearing a frayed pink button-down shirt and jeans, and his hair had grown longer and unkempt. He bounced his knee as he sat in the fake leather chair, his pale blue eyes looking at her with amusement over his black-framed glasses. At the table beside them, a fit middle-aged man with a prosthetic arm was playing Scrabble with his young daughters.

“They won’t want me,” she said.

“Perhaps they won’t, perhaps they won’t now. But you don’t have a lot of other options as I see it.

“What are you going to do?” he asked her. “Live upstate? Work in a restaurant? Babysit? Have you entirely forgotten who you are?” He leaned forward now and looked straight into her face. “You worked in this ghastly hole your entire life for two untalented men and a structure made of wood, plastic siding, and cement. I don’t care how much you love your daddy and your little lookalike, that’s literally what you did. Then you went to another ghastly hole and you worked for hundreds of men who wanted you to drive things around, kill people, and give orders to drive things around and kill people. Let’s be very clear about the facts, otherwise it’s not possible to make a decision, right? Do you have one small thing to show for what you’ve done? I say no. I say no, you don’t. Nothing. Unless you count frostbite and windburn and months of your life wasted.”

He reached forward and rested his finger in the hollow at her throat. “There’s nowhere else to go from here, Lauren.”

She was quiet, looked out the window for some time. She wanted her fearlessness back. The enormous freedom of it. A secret strength that stilled her grief, that made anything possible. But she had to sit there now without it. She’d entered into fear so completely she was at its center. The calm at the eye of the storm. To step out in any direction could mean being swept away. She thought of the stations of the cross, a new stations of the cross: ornately colored stained glass showing the flipped car, the hole in the throat, the Madonna with a broken nose, the soldier with one eye blooming dark red, the missing lanyard, the face and head of the other soldier snapping back, then vanishing in flying fleshy parts revealing exposed bone and teeth, hinges and sockets. The boy thin and dying in her arms, not his mother’s, as he lay on the roadside. A narrow river of red. The still bodies and the falling bodies; the mother the son and the weight of the neverborn all pulling, blood pooling, toward the earth where Lauren stood armored, the color of desert dust, holding tight to the same kind of instrument that had cut them low.

The cathedral in her head shone with this iconography. Light passed through these three silent bodies and also the faces and eyes of the medics, the illuminated stream of red that a mother brought forth to save the failing hope of a remaining child.

What sacred song could pass through her lips now? What choir could shield her from the sound of her own voice?

“I did terrible things,” she said.

“Of course you did,” Troy said calmly. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Epilogue

Dispatch #217

Dear Sistopher,

I opened the link you sent where you’re all dressed in black trying to smash everyone’s glasses with your voice. There should be a superhero called Coloratura. When faced with danger she could shatter the glasses of her enemies. The video made Dad cry and I’m sure if Sebastian were here it would have made him howl. But seriously, Low, it made Dad cry, he was totally amazed. Then I was like, Chin up old man, it’s not like she’s out dying in the snow by some shitty oil rig or stuck at the VA hospital looney bin. That got him really pissed. I thought he was going to actually raise his voice.

Dad and I and Peej and Mom will be there Thursday to see your recital. You probably heard already but Mom got offered a position at St. Lawrence—a real one with medical coverage and stuff like that—and she’s moving back this way. She’s got a boyfriend who as far as I can tell does some kind of research on post-colonial-interlinguistic-sumarian-cryptographic-recursion theory as an aspect of primate finger painting. Not a thing he says makes sense and I’m pretty sure he’s legally blind without his glasses. Dad and Peej have been helping Mom look for an apartment and she’s been helping Dad paint the crappy upstairs hall, it looks good. She said she’d drive me to visit you whenever they can’t but I have a feeling those cheapskates will be carpooling. All they need is a Volkswagen bus and to grow their hair out again and they’ll look like the geriatric Mod Squad. It’s hilarious, Low. You wouldn’t believe the stories these nerds keep telling me about each other. And they play the same Jefferson Airplane album every time they’re all here in the house.

School is fine. Boring but fine. I was so bored I joined track. I was so bored I learned how to build a radio. It is much much easier than you think. If I want to work in Antarctica I have to learn how to do practical things.

Dad wants to eat at that Indian place when we get to Philadelphia but I said we’d rather find a nice motel and have some MREs. And at that point he was so pissed he called me “Daniel.” “What’s wrong with you, Daniel? How can you laugh about these things?” And I’m like, ’Cause crying only gets you halfway there, duh. ’Cause my sister’s a badass and she’s alive. WTF?

Anyway, I can’t wait to see you. I can’t wait to hear you sing. I can’t wait for us all to be there.

Low, we’re safe now.

I love you.

She folded his letter and tucked it into her libretto and made her way down Locust Street to Rittenhouse Square, striding in her low heels beneath the brick, slate-roofed buildings and the gleaming sunlit steeples of downtown Philadelphia. The gutters were just beginning to fill with orange and yellow leaves. Her hair was pulled up into a bun, she wore a black sleeveless dress, carried PJ’s watchcap in her little olive day pack out of habit. Soon she would be in the echoing hall and a rush of instruments and murmurs and warming voices would greet her.

She would sing her benediction, and the sound for which she was a vessel would be at last entirely clear; filling her mouth, liquid and shining, and black as the end of night. Like a cold glass bell, like a stone worn smooth. A voice like ice ready to be set alight, rising from her throat in a silent ancient refrain:

I sing now with the air I have taken from your lungs.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my brothers Noah and John, and our loving parents John and Kaye and Nick.

I want to thank my friends Marc Lepson, Emily Goldman, Jamie Newman, Ann Godwin, Susan Godwin, Alexis Kahn, Rebecca Friedman, Ella Meital, Sarah Knight, Kate Steciw, Karestan Koenen, Molly Lindley, Lauren Wolfe, Derek Owens, John Bryant, Joe Schmidbauer, Kelly Caragee, Franklin Crawford, Merry Whitney, Sonia Simeoni, Tommy Fritz, Liz Hand, Barb Borelli, Steve Borelli, Rachel Pollack, Ellen Klein, Annie Campbell, Harley Campbell, Johnny Fuchs, Michelle Novak, Ellen Cusick, Xan Underhill, Bianca Shannon, Selena Shannon, Marco Shannon, Sebastian Shannon, Jon Frankel, Jan Clausen, Clint Swank, Charles Hale, Rob Bass, Joe Ricker, Mitchell Sunderland, Tiffany Viruet, Will Fertman, Jacob Bennett, Erin Kelly.

Thanks also to my students in the Bronx for their hard work and good humor, and to the Saint George Choral Society, a source of pure joy in my life. Soprano Angela Leson and Artistic Director Matthew Lewis were particularly helpful with early drafts of this  manuscript.

While I studied voice when I was young, any real understanding I may have of music came from my friend and stepbrother Matthew Borelli, who was magic.

Reading Group Guide

Be Safe I Love You

Cara Hoffman

Introduction

Returning to her upstate New York hometown after serving in Iraq, Lauren Clay is haunted by emotional battle scars and has trouble adjusting to civilian life. She struggles to reconnect with family and friends before setting out with her younger brother on a winter road trip to visit Canada’s remote wilderness—a journey that will determine her future, for better or for worse.
Be Safe I Love You
is a poignant, impassioned novel about the devastating effects of war, both on the front lines and at home.

Topics and Questions for Discussion

1. “She was back but didn’t feel so far away from Iraq,” Lauren admits. How does she see her family and friends in a new light since returning from the war zone? How do they, in turn, view her? Why are they so quick to believe that Lauren is fine or, in Jack’s case, that he can help her simply by offering snacks and a willing ear?

2. How do Lauren’s roles as soldier and caregiver become intertwined? Why does she find it so difficult to relinquish her position as a commanding officer when she returns to civilian life?

3. Lauren confides in Holly that it seems as if Jack Clay was “replaced by an imposter” while she was gone. Why isn’t she happier to see her father working and taking care of Danny? How does his recovery affect not only her postmilitary plans but also her identity as her brother’s surrogate parent?

4. What is your opinion of Jack and Meg Clay as parents? Meg says to Lauren that, although she loved her children, “Sometimes leaving makes the most sense, does the least damage. Sometimes it’s the better option.” Do you agree with Meg’s reasoning about why she left? Why or why not?

5. For two weeks after Lauren received an acceptance from Curtis Institute, she felt as if “she could do anything before the first foreclosure notices came in the mail.” What, if anything, might she have done other than join the military? What would you have done if you were in her situation?

6. Of the soldiers in her unit, why was it Daryl with whom Lauren developed a close friendship? “Daryl got it,” she claims, while Shane “she wasn’t so sure about.” When she compares Shane to Daryl, why does Shane come up lacking?

7. Why does Lauren have such conflicted feelings for Shane? Why did she stop communicating with him while she was in Iraq and yet seek him out as soon as she arrived home? Discuss the divergent paths they took and their motivations for doing so—Lauren joining the military and Shane attending college. How does each one view the other’s decision?

8. Lauren found comfort inside the church building while she took vocal training with Troy. How has she viewed the stations of the cross (reverential depictions of the final hours of Jesus) differently since returning from Iraq? Share your thoughts on her religious views, including why she believes “battlefield baptism” was among the worst things she saw while in Iraq.

9. Most of the townspeople’s perception of Troy differs from reality. In what ways is he a role model to Lauren and the parental figure she didn’t have? After her return, why does Lauren refuse when Troy or others ask her to sing?

10. When Danny was a child, Lauren read him Hans Christian Andersen’s
The Snow Queen
. Why is Danny so fascinated by this fairy tale? How do the events in
The Snow Queen
parallel what takes place in his and Lauren’s own lives?

11. Despite the fact that Jack is adequately caring for Danny, why does Lauren proceed with her plan to take her brother away from Watertown? Is she doing it more for Danny, as she claims, or for herself?

12. Why does Lauren believe she was “kept in a woman’s prison” while serving in the military? How does she equate it with the years she spent keeping house and caring for her father and Danny? Why is Lauren upset when Danny tells her that their father’s crippling depression was alleviated in a matter of weeks with medication?

13. How does the author build and sustain suspense throughout the story? Were you surprised when the truth was revealed about Daryl? Why or why not? Looking back, what clues do you see along the way?

14.
Be Safe I Love You
illuminates the personal cost of war to each individual soldier and to their families. In addition, how does the novel illustrate the broader issues associated with war, including politics and corporate interests?

15. Do you agree with the author that there is a cultural tendency to romanticize war? Why or why not? When Lauren confides in Troy that she did terrible things, he says to her, “Of course you did. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Why does he offer her this advice?