Be Safe I Love You (16 page)

Thirty-one

I
N 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

I
T 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.

“Hey buddy, check this out.” She walked over and handed him the binoculars, and it distracted him as she’d hoped. “Don’t worry about the phone—we probably don’t have reception out here anyway. Just stop a minute, see where we are.”

He took the binoculars from her and looked down at the ring of houses.

“I thought we were stopping at Daryl’s,” he said. “Where are we?”

“We’re almost there. I think that over there is the John Dark Basin,” she said.

“The what?” He looked dazed and cold, and she reflexively pulled his hood up and tied it tightly at his chin.

“The Jeanne d’Arc Basin. The edge of the earth and the ice around here. Remember we were talking about maps? All this stuff around here broke apart, it used to be Pangaea, right? Now there are these faults and rifts and ocean and continents.”

The sky was already turning violet over the rounded tree-lined hillsides in the west. The place was more beautiful and distant than she’d hoped it would be, colder than it had felt in her dreams. As if sacred music had become a place, found a material form. She felt her heart pound with something other than the instinctual chemical flood of being a hunted, hunting animal, the grounded yet soaring feeling that comes from using your body to sing. She smiled and filled her lungs with the cold clean air. The things that take your breath, she thought, don’t have to take your life.

Danny stood beside her, transfixed. “It’s fucking amazing. It’s amazing!” he said, and her heart soared to hear him, so pleased with his reaction, so happy she’d taken him away. “Let’s go check it out down there.”

She got the sled out of the car and set it at the edge of the slope. Danny sat in the front and she sat behind him, rested her head on his back. She listened to his heartbeat. She resisted the urge to put her fingers on his wrist and feel his pulse.

“Wait,” he said, his eyes sparkling darkly. “Get Sebastian.”

“Oh,” she said, “here.” She leaned over and handed him a block of air. “Hold him in the front. Hold him tight or he’ll jump.”

Then she pushed them over the edge of the crest and down the slope.

•    •    •

The flimsy plastic sled flew and she leaned out over Danny’s shoulder so the icy snow would sting and whip her face. She held him tightly around the waist and they screamed together, racing down into the beautiful vespertine ruin.

They drifted to a stop near a circle of wood and stone houses and the scattered rubble of what had clearly been outbuildings or smaller bungalows. The doors were blown wide open, hanging on hinges. Roofs caved in or partially caved in. A whole building leaned precariously, frozen in midcollapse, a drunk in the midst of a slow-motion tumble. The structures looked empty but she needed to make sure no one else was down there. The sky was turning a deeper smoky purple in the west and the horizon glowed orange.

“You want to stay with the sled or clear these buildings with me?”

“Clear them from what?” Danny asked. “Dust?”

She squinted at him in annoyance, then went into the largest of the houses. The place was gutted. And also very familiar, a dreamlike slip in time into someone’s wrecked and vacant home, the landscape of soldiering, but frozen and free from the guilty terror of patrol. The remains of broken furniture piled in the stone fireplace. The floor was made of wide weathered planks that sloped toward the hearth as if the weight of the chimney was sinking the house. She walked briskly and quietly through the one-story building. The roof had caved in over the kitchen, and the room was filled with drifting snow that clung to long-disconnected light fixtures and switches. Perfect piles of luminous snow that had been shaped by wind, and curved like ripples in sand, or the subtle rise and hollow of a man’s chest, crested over the floors. In a small room off the kitchen a pile of ragged blankets and wooden crates lay strewn across the floor. An old gas refrigerator and a basin with a single faucet stood untouched beneath slanting and partially rotted cabinetry, the doors open, revealing faded shelf paper patterned with cherries and lemons. The house was a ruined palace of ice at once exhilarating and calming.

After walking through the first house, she made Danny come with her so she could show him the proper way to walk safely and with authority through a stranger’s broken home.

The rest of the houses were in a similar state, though one was littered with beer cans and the burnt-out remains of a fire in the center of the main room. The place was too remote to have become a hobo outpost, she thought, and probably served as a good resting spot for hunters or some variety of hermetic adventure seeker. December was not high season for this resort.

“I wish I had my phone to take pictures of this,” he said.

“You’ll just have to remember it.”

“We should come back here in the summer,” he said, “if we could ever find it again.”

“We can just stay until summer,” she said, opening the door of a pantry filled with dust and cobweb-covered Mason jars.

He picked up a brittle mold-darkened newspaper from a stack beside a collapsed fireplace, the print illegible, the headlines written in French.

• • •

She chose the building with the straightest chimney, its roof and walls still intact, and she brought the broken wood from the larger house and set it inside the hearth.

“We can stay here tonight,” she said.

Danny laughed because he thought she was joking and she laughed because she wasn’t, and it would be funny when he figured that out. But when he looked at her with sudden panic, it hurt to know she’d caused his fear.

“I thought we were going to visit your friend,” he said.

“We are,” Lauren told him. “But not tonight. We better hike up and get the ponchos and MREs before it gets dark—oh, and the sleeping bags, and we’ll bring that pile of papers from the other house.”

He looked shocked.

“I got two subzero sleeping bags in case we’d need them,” she told him.

“Why would we need subzero sleeping bags at Mom’s?” he asked.

She said, “I dunno, bud. Sometimes you need stuff. It’s always better to be prepared. It’s a good thing I brought them, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to stay here. The bags are high tech but the poncho liner would be good even if we were in Siberia.”

He stared at her, his eyes narrowing in confusion, a flicker of the kind of tantrum a younger kid might throw.

She turned away from him, held the sled on top of her head, began walking up the hillside, and he followed her. There was nothing else he could do. The temperature was falling and they were lucky there wasn’t much wind. She’d bring down as much gear as they could carry. Make sure they stayed warm.

It was silent and the snow beneath their boots was deep, a crisp powder over several layers of freeze. They crunched along and she felt elevated. Relieved to be away, where it was desolate. But no risk of insurgents, no IEDs, no heat, no sand, no dust, and the air so cold and clean. The white slope played tricks of perspective with their eyes, an Escher drawing headed up or headed down. Looking straight on you could see it either way.

Danny helped her pile their supplies on the sled, and then they walked down holding it between them, sturdy and efficient on the slope in new boots. Above the sky was a vast, deepening blue. Snow stretched out around them flat and white, and behind them to the west lay a tall pine woods, with snow-covered trees. She was sure they were near the coast. She would take him out there, to the pristine and rocky edge of the continent. And show him what he needed to see.

•    •    •

The house she chose for setting up camp was made of cobblestone and was at the center of the ring of crumbling buildings. She built a fire, then collected snow, melted it in a small aluminum pot, boiled it and put in two tea bags. Lauren poured the tea into the mugs she’d brought and they sat close together on the floor in front of the fire, warming their mittened hands and sipping it, bundled side by side in hooded sweatshirts and coats, wrapped in sleeping bags and silver poncho liners that reflected the glow of the flames. She thought for one brief moment about The Bag of Nails, pleased to imagine it swallowed up, gone.

“Snow tea,” Danny said, his voice a tentative tremulous noise between excited and afraid. She was happy to give him something completely new. Bring him to a place where he’d have to be brave. Have to learn to be on his own. He walked cautiously around the building, looked out the windows at the dimming sky.

“Are we going to freeze to death?” he asked, suddenly entirely scared again.

“No way, dude. Are you kidding? We got a nice fire going and we have the right gear and know how to use it. We are not even going to be cold.”

It was cold, though. It was freezing.

“I don’t know how to use any of it,” he said.

“Yes you do, Bud, you read about it, and you’re smart. You’re gonna pick this stuff up in a hurry. Besides, you’re the arctic expert. Right, Shackleton?”

He looked at her blankly. She wondered if his fingers were numb inside his gloves, took out two gel handwarmers, popped them to activate the chemicals, and slipped them inside the top of his Swedish mittens.

“People are stronger than you think,” she told him. “We’ll look for a motel tomorrow if we need to. But I’m sure we can do this. Maybe we’ll like it a lot. We’re probably so badass we don’t need a motel.”

He shivered and brought his mittens up to his face and held them there. She moved closer and put her arm around him, sipped her tea. “There are dozens of handwarmers in the trunk,” she said. “If you were in danger of freezing—which you will not be, because we also have dozens of lighters and a place to make a fire, but if you were . . .”

“I know what to do for hypothermia,” Danny said, impatiently. “The problem is, when hypothermia starts you don’t know what to do anymore because it affects your brain.”

He shook his head. “I can’t believe we’re here.” He sounded truly astonished. He had the tense and tentative look of a boy trying not to show fear and discomfort that she had seen so often. She respected this. There was strength there and strength to be gained in watching a person cope. Getting used to something real when all there had been before was the dream of it—the imaginary you in the imaginary place. Here they were, alone and far away at night in the snow, with just the things they brought. So many feelings rush in to fill the silences in times like these, bump up against the desire for old habits and diversions.

She remembered the sensation well. The fact of your animal being is exposed when you are solitary, unsure, terrified. It’s almost a cellular desire, a surge in every aspect of your being to live no matter what that living was going to be like. She wanted to regain that feeling, the instinct to stay alive at all costs.

He was quiet in the firelight, the world they knew receding.