Be Safe I Love You (4 page)

Five

E
ILEEN KLEIN SIGNED
her name on
Sergeant Clay’s Post Deployment Health Assessment, Form DD-2900, on the afternoon of
December 23. The soldier had filled out the form online and Dr. Klein saw no red
flags. Clay had not been concussed or injured or suffered an amputation. She had not
been sexually assaulted or gotten pregnant on her tour, and she had no medically
unexplained symptoms.

Based on Clay’s answers on the form, Dr. Klein felt she was not at risk
for major depressive disorder. She did not appear to have signs of PTSD or markers
for addiction, suicide, or committing acts of domestic violence. Klein scheduled an
in-office meeting to discuss factors related to combat and operational stress:
normal stuff, expected issues for returning service members. And also so she could
lay eyes on Clay, make sure the soldier understood that not reporting health
problems meant practical concerns later, like not getting psychiatric health
coverage or even getting routine counseling paid for.

Lauren Clay was a model soldier. She described herself in the PDHA
interview as a “returning warrior” and said she’d been well prepared for the
stressors of command. She said Army Resilience Training for post deployment had
helped her understand what to expect at home. Which is why she had plans to keep
busy, including applying to school and a possible new job at a site in Canada with
Daryl Green, one of the men in her command. Lauren was already stamped, sealed, and
delivered back to Watertown when Dr. Klein came across Green’s name again, this time
as she was assessing a medic on his third tour of duty who presented with ten
specific risk factors, requested extensive counseling on base, a referral for
someone specializing in combat-related psychiatric issues for home, and knew exactly
what pills he’d need prescribed to get him through the next several months.

Eileen Klein had made a mistake when she signed Lauren Clay’s Post
Deployment Health Assessment Form. And she needed to correct it quickly, because,
contrary to the folk wisdom of families and spouses and others who never make it
down range, home is not always the safest place for a returning warrior.

Six

L
AUREN WALKED ACROSS
the hall to
Danny’s room. A gray light washed over the walls, distorting the magazine cutouts
that were taped there into a series of unfamiliar shapes. She stood and looked at
him—the rise and fall of his breathing relaxed her. Then she sat on the bed beside
him and put her hand on his back. After some minutes he woke and gently smiled at
her.

“I can’t sleep,” she said.

Danny moved part of the pillow out from beneath him and extended it to
her, and she lay down beside him in his narrow bed, resting her head next to his.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she looked at the pictures.

“It’s vacation now,” he told her, his voice heavy, coming from some warm
deep place. “You don’t have to sleep.”

She looked at the walls. He’d taped up more pictures while she was away.
Right above them hung a series of frozen landscapes, a map showing William Parry’s
expedition route; then icebergs and glaciers, one that looked like it was engulfed
in a waterfall. She knew why he surrounded himself with these things. They were a
comfort. Like knowing that one day the sun would explode. A comfort like the plans
she’d made with Daryl for when they got home. She pointed to the photograph of
rushing water.

“Greenland,” he said. “I bet it’s much smaller now. Probably a quarter of
that ice shelf is gone.”

“It’s so beautiful,” she said.

“It is. People think maps don’t change, or they change just because of
wars.” He sounded drowsy, like he was talking in his sleep.

“Like Mesopotamia,” she said. Then turned on her side and closed her eyes.

“Right,” Danny whispered, alive beside her. “But the land changes too, not
just the name or the border. And when the land changes, then it’s for real.”

•    •    •

Their mother, Megan Clay, had always been good at seeing beautiful
things. She could make plain or ugly surroundings sink beneath the weight of a
single red-tipped leaf. You just had to look at things closely enough to make the
rest of the world go away. Gasoline spilled in a shallow puddle by the self-serve
pump formed a swirling metallic rainbow, a skin upon the water.

“Look, look!” She would breathe excitedly, crouched by Lauren’s shoulder,
her cheek against her daughter’s, trying to get low to see what she saw, to direct
her gaze.

“Right there.” She’d point. “There!”

A baby bird or a snail or someone’s round-cheeked child, a place close to
the bank of the Black River where a fish jumped and might jump again. She’d grab
Lauren’s arm or nearly shove her suddenly. “Look! Someone let go of their balloon,
look at how red it is against those clouds.”

Lauren did look as they stood in the parking lot of the strip mall
watching it until they couldn’t see it anymore, until it was part of the sky.

“Do you sometimes feel like everything is really weird?” Lauren asked her
mother, lying upside down on the couch in her Pokémon pajamas. “Like a word when you
say it over and over and you don’t know what it means anymore and then you’re not
sure it really is a word?”

Meg nodded, preoccupied behind her book.

“I mean like that but with the way things look,” Lauren said. “Or like
other stuff, just the way things are. Like what the heck is a clock really? Who
thought of making up something like that, they just made it up! And what did they do
when there wasn’t one?” Lauren hung her head off the edge of the couch and looked at
her teacup, upside down on the table.

“Yeah,” Meg said, peering over her reading. “I do occasionally think
everything is a little weird.” Piles of notes and other heavy books with library
numbers on their spines were spread across the living room. Danny wasn’t born yet
and her mother still wore octagonal-shaped glasses, and she carried everything
anyone could need in a school backpack, including a Ziploc bag full of half-broken
Crayola crayons. Meg took out her pen and drew two eyes on either side of Lauren’s
chin while the girl lolled on the couch, then she started laughing, riffled through
her pack for her compact mirror to show Lauren. It looked like her mouth was on
upside down, like it belonged to another face. Lauren laughed so hard her stomach
hurt. Every time she looked at her own face she started again. Tears rolled out of
her eyes and into her hair. Meg smiled at her, picked her up while she was still
humming with laughter, and her belly felt good.

“Eight o’clock,” Meg said. “Bedtime.”

“No. Wait wait wait,” Lauren protested, still giddy, her head resting on
her mother’s shoulder. She could smell the perfume she wore, and linked her finger
gently into the loop of her thin gold earring. “Wait,” Lauren said. “It can’t be
bedtime. Clocks aren’t really real.”

Meg laughed and headed up the stairs. She said, “I’m afraid they are, my
dear. Tick. Tick. Tick.”

•    •    •

Danny was still asleep when Lauren woke again a few hours later. She went
to her room to change, then sat in the kitchen for an hour drinking coffee. As it
got lighter a pale mist rose from the ground and fog hung about the windows like the
house was engulfed in a cloud. She stood and gazed out the back door into a thick
bank of white air and then stepped out into the quiet yard.

It should have been much colder. The rain-slicked driveway disappeared
into nothing before her. She turned and squinted up at the windows of Danny’s room,
the house at once exalted and shabby in the muted morning light. She went down to
the end of the driveway and stood in the garage kicking little holes into the gravel
floor, digging the toe of her boot into the dirt beneath it over and over. She
picked up a handful of the small smooth gray stones and whipped them hard against
the wall, then did it again. And again. And again. Hard enough for them to ricochet
back and hit her. But not hard enough at all.

When she finally walked back out into the mist the great mass of the
neighborhood was looming, closing in on her. Invisible but closing in.

Winters were never like this when she was growing up. There were snow days
and frozen mountains to play on. The sound of plows on the streets before daylight.
The nights clear and star-filled shining down on the lots and yards made beautiful
from the blanket of sparkling snow, pinpricks of icy light shining and flickering up
from the white banks. Branches thick with it. Snowmen and forts in the front yards.
Sledding down by the river. Ice-skating with Holly out at the park.

She’d imagined all the things they would do on Danny’s Christmas break:
sledding, maybe even camping somewhere outside in the snow, they could’ve built an
igloo and she could’ve made a fire inside and they could’ve sat in there and drank
tea.

Everything was different now. As if the heat of Amarah reached through
time and erased her childhood. The future she’d been destined to live had caused
this somehow. Her future. Her decisions. It was nearly warm in Watertown on December
26 because of the things they were fighting for. The things they were unearthing
that would see them all burn. It was hard not to think of oil as blood, real blood,
not the trite symbol of soldier or civilian blood. But some deep blank coursing
system, meaningless on its own. The cellular history of great bodies long devoured
by the land and resurrected, an obsidian fat made from corpses. Winter had been
stolen from the future. Like everything else, the past had risen up and taken it
away.

She wouldn’t let this happen to Danny. All his days inside on his computer
staring into nothing. And outside, more nothing waiting for him. He needed to see
things that were beautiful, feel the snow and cold instead of dreaming about it. Be
able to leave his chair and run and leap and burst forward instead of living in a
flat world. She could fix it. She’d fixed harder things. She had more than enough
cold-weather gear for both of them. They could camp and trek and go to Hebron, go to
Daryl’s. She could easily bring him along. Danny and Sebastian too.

•    •    •

Back in the kitchen she left her father a note, then set off in the
blighted light to Our Lady of Lourdes, hoping the doors would be open. She called on
the memory of Danny’s face and his baby-fine curly hair to keep her company on her
walk. The image she’d been calling up for months to remember why she wanted to go
home. His laughter. His round cheeks turning red.

It must have been sometime just after the first Gulf War and Fort Drum was
welcoming troops home. She was maybe nine or ten and there was a parade, there was
music and people hugging and a big inflatable bouncy castle that was red and gray
and had four corner towers with pointy roofs that shook and swayed from the ruckus
inside. She didn’t know where her parents were that day. Maybe PJ had taken her and
Danny to the parade, or maybe it was just the two of them, and someone dropped them
off for a while.

She held his hand and they watched other kids playing. He looked up at
her, raised his eyebrows and laughed as the children inside bounced high like they
were flying. Even some big kids almost her age were playing.

She picked Danny up and walked over to a sturdy friendly guy in desert
camo who’d been helping kids in and out of the castle. Someone’s dad maybe. She
asked if it was okay, was Danny too little to go in? She set him down and he almost
came up to her chest. Danny looked up at her and at the nice soldier with his big
dark eyes. And the man smiled the way everyone smiled at Danny when he was a baby.
She always thought he looked like an animal because his eyes were too big for his
face and they were so shiny, so alert. It made you want to carry him around and read
to him and build him forts. The man put his hands on his hips and stood in front of
them nodding, with his eyebrows knit like he was making a big decision.

“That is a good question, little gal. Whatderyer folks say?” He looked
more awake than any adult she’d ever met. And his clothes fit the way clothes fit a
mannequin. He smelled like soap and she noticed that his skin was very smooth. He
had blond hair on his forearms and raised veins that snaked like rivers on a map
across his hands. She wanted him to pick her up and hold her. She liked the light
goofy sound of his voice. The way he talked seemed to imply that what her “folks
said,” if in fact they were around to say anything at all, was just one opinion,
something to weigh before taking matters into their own capable hands.

She shrugged and then she watched him scan the crowd over her head for a
moment. He gave her a couple of rough pats on the shoulder.

“Don’t you want to go in there and play too?”

“I have to watch Danny,” she said.

“Gotcha,” he said, and he gave her a quick nod. “You’re in charge.”

She took off Danny’s shoes and the soldier picked him up and said, “All
right, little dude! Let’s see how high you can jump.” Then he set him inside the
castle.

Danny put his arms out at his sides, took a couple of tentative steps,
fell over, and was immediately tossed into the air from the impact of a heavier kid
landing next to him. He squealed and started laughing, a throaty belly laugh. Stood
up and looked back at her, grinning so wide she could see his gums, rocking on the
taut inflated plastic, his hands balled into fists in front of his narrow chest. His
eyes so bright and excited, and she felt her face mirroring his.

He hopped, fell on his knees, bounced in the air, and then flopped flat on
his back, his curly hair light about his face. Two little kids in jeans and T-shirts
bumped into each other and fell on top of him and he started laughing again, his
head back, his face red. They all struggled to get up, a scrambling tangle of limbs,
socked feet slipping against the shaky foundation. Danny made his way to the middle
of the castle by scooting on his knees, stood and jumped over and over, threw
himself down on his stomach, flopped over on his back, giggling. She hunched and
dodged where she stood on the pavement as other children knocked into him. If she
had seen anyone as happy as he was right then she couldn’t remember it. He
staggered, dizzily elated, his light body flew and landed, he rolled and struggled
and convulsed with laughter, and she could feel how it must be to be so small and
soaring inside a safe cocoon. She hadn’t ever played in a bouncy castle like that,
but watching him she could feel how it must be. The pleasure of falling and rising.
His face made her laugh, his eyes made her laugh, everything about his tiny body
made her laugh, and she stood transfixed. Danny’s smile, Danny’s face, the way his
eyes lit as he was lost in a fit of absurdity. A cord of joy was tied so tightly
between them, all she had to do was see his tiny square teeth and she felt it, felt
the world order itself in the sound of his voice, his throaty baby laugh.

This was the thought she called upon in training, in transport, in the
emptiness of waiting that would never again be called boredom. It was with her the
whole time, that sound. And there was no way she would have come home without it. No
place outside that sound where she could live. No home, no country, no body to
inhabit. It was the last breath of music she still felt in her belly, a little fire
that she needed to stoke and carry.