He opened the door, and flicked on the light. Wooden stairs led to a dirt floor in a four-by-five room. Caden reached around me and put his hands on a vase sitting on a set-in shelf. He yanked it, and the wall slid to the side, revealing a mosaic floral floor and dark wood bar stacked high with cardboard boxes.
“Chez Columbus,” he said, smiling. “1925-1933.”
Amazing. An actual speakeasy with a stairway to the hidden alley on the side of the house, hidden rooms, and lastly, behind the laundry room, a big wall safe. He opened it, then pushed away the wall behind it to yet another room with cylindrical holes in the concrete.
“The bottle room,” he said. “This was where I hid when… you know.”
“When you were scared.”
“When I should have been stopping him from beating her.”
“I’m going to get you out of the habit of blaming yourself.”
“Good luck.” He held out his hand, moving the subject away from the abuse of his mother as he always did. “Come on. It’s cold in here.”
The steps to the bedroom seemed like an eternal climb, but we wound up racing to the top. It didn’t matter who won. We both landed on the bed.
We held each other tight, and I felt safe starting a new life with him.
* * *
That night, with the whoosh of cars outside and a police siren whining far away, he woke with a grunt and a command. “Stop!”
I reached for my revolver, but it was locked away in a strange closet, in the strange bedroom, in a city that was a sea of stone.
But he was there, the street light blue on his cheek, and all was well as long as he was next to me.
“Caden? Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He rolled over to face me. “Sorry.”
“What was it?”
“Dream. Nothing.”
PTSD was as real as the war itself, and I had to know if he was reliving it in his sleep. “Caden. Can you tell me?”
“Pieces of me were breaking off.”
“Were you in Iraq? In the dream?”
“No.” His denial was barely a whisper.
I took it for a normal nightmare and joined him in sleep.
Chapter Two
Caden
Greyson was back, and like good news when nothing’s going right or a seat by the radiator after a day in the snow, she brought relief to pain I forgot I was feeling.
As soon as she agreed to marry me, while I was still deployed, I started getting the house ready. I met with an architect and contractor on a short leave, and again on the way back from our wedding in California. I was barely off the plane before I started furnishing the house. I had an attending position waiting at Mt. Sinai, but she had nothing and I needed to give her everything.
The house had been unoccupied since I left. Dad’s office was a wreck. I’d had it ripped down to the studs. Had the shitty memories scraped out of the plaster and sanded off the wood. When I resigned my commission and returned, it was all details and new furniture.
That was when the dreams started.
Or more accurately, the dream. They were all the same dream, the way a woman was the same woman from all angles, naked or dressed. Same person, only time and situations changed.
I was somewhere in the house. The windows were painted over. I was in tremendous dream pain. Meaning I was terrified to the point of pain, but I couldn’t physically feel my body being torn in two.
Obviously. It was just a dream. I never felt pain in my dreams.
The dreams weren’t long. They came in the middle of the night, and I woke enraged, because I wasn’t just coming apart. Something was taking me apart. It had to be stopped.
But when I woke to Greyson’s voice, I wasn’t pissed off at the dream thing. I was fine, and I went back to sleep. It hadn’t come back in two nights.
“It’s nice to not have to rush through surgery,” I said, swinging my racquet at the tiny blue ball. It popped off the front wall, made it past the receiving line, and took off for the back wall.
Danny thought he was in an action movie, again, and tried to climb the wall to get it, managing to just get it back into play. I slammed it to the other side of the court while he was recovering.
“How about not getting shot at? Is that an improvement?” Danny said as I helped him up. He was a buddy from my residency at NYU Medical. Pediatric surgery, but he floated into general pediatrics when he didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to cut into children.
“No one was shooting at me.” I snapped up the ball and got ready for my serve. “It was easy.”
“I still think it was stupid,” he said. “But you lived, so whatever. They were your years to waste.”
“Wouldn’t have met Greyson.”
I served. He was better set up this time and won the point.
“Yes! One more and drinks are on you, Private.”
“Captain.”
“You’re nothing out here, buddy. What’s Greyson? A major? That higher than captain?”
“Yes, but we’re nothing here.”
“Your woman still ranks you.”
“Trash talk won’t win you the point.” I bounced the ball, setting up a serve that wouldn’t overpower him, which he’d be ready for, but one to surprise him.
“That’s right. I forgot you were unshakable.”
I served. He was off guard, recovering enough to return but not win. Two points later, I had the game.
* * *
The club’s lounge wasn’t crowded on weekdays. Out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the rooftops of Manhattan were laid out like a fallen dresser with drawers pulled out randomly. Water towers, HVAC units, greenhouses, and patios dotted the rooftops, and through the slit of Second Avenue, I saw the southern tip of the island.
Danny placed our drinks on the table by the window and threw himself into the chair. Guy couldn’t sit straight to save his life. I hadn’t noticed that until I got back from my second deployment. Sloppiness had always bothered me, but slouching never had. All kinds of new things bugged me now, but more things seemed petty and unimportant. Status symbols. Expensive things. A woman everyone else wanted. None of that was interesting anymore.
“Sit up straight, would you?” I said. “You look like a rag doll.”
“I’m entitled to sit like this today.”
I tipped the Perrier bottle into the glass. The ice clicked. When it settled, I took a sip. “You blow one too many noses?”
“I had to refer a kid, thirteen… he was thirteen. Had to refer his parents to an oncologist they’ll go broke paying. And it was hopeless. There was no… ah, never mind.”
“Sorry, that’s… well, it’s part of the job. But sorry.”
“Asshole.” He crossed ankle over knee and drank his beer. He was a redhead and, in the ultimate irritating cliché, had a temper to match.
“I am an asshole.”
“That some kind of opening for another war story?”
It hadn’t been an opening any more than Dan’s snide comments were actual insults. My friend was making a request. He’d lost his brother on 9/11 and listening to me tell a war story made him feel as if he’d deployed with me.
“I had this guy on the table,” I said. “We were low on morphine, so no one got it until we put them under, so he was screaming his head off. And rightfully so. His humerus was shattered.”
“Very funny.”
We clinked glasses, and I continued. “His arm was hanging on his body by half a bone. Rotator cuff was torn up. Skin had third-degree burns. I could put him back together well enough to get him to Baghdad, but it would have taken five hours. So meanwhile, you know what he’s screaming?”
“Get the fuck on with the story?”
“‘I’m a guitarist.’” I paused with my drink at my lips long enough to mutter, “He played fucking guitar.” I put the glass down. “Meanwhile, they tell me there’s another guy who’s about to lose his leg. They clamped off the femoral artery, but it’s going stiff real fa
st and he’s going to need a graft.”
“Who’s triaging these people?”
“Someone who loves rock. But what do you do? You can save the arm or the leg. You can’t save both. One gets a quick amputation. The other gets screws and pins. Which is it?”
“Do I get vitals?”
“Answer.”
“Was either in shock?”
“This isn’t a drill, Dan.”
“Hang on—”
“There’s no time.”
“Jesus.”
“Which?”
“All right, all right, asshole. What did you do?”
I finished my drink. “Decided it’s easier to hold down a job with two legs and one arm than the other way around.”
“You got something against music?”
“It was a calculation. Life over limb.”
“You are one sick fuck.” He put his elbows on his knees and shook his head in disappointment, but his smile told me he admired me. “How does your wife even deal with your shit?”
My wife had lived it with me, that was how.
“She didn’t believe me. She came to Balad Base before the second Fallujah offensive to make sure we weren’t fucked in the head. She wouldn’t believe I could turn it on and off. She was like a pit bull, man.”
She cared. More than her big brown eyes or the silken hair she kept twisted in a bun, I remembered her caring about my psychological well-being. I was no one to her, but she didn’t want me to suffer. That first session, when I laughed at her, I also started to fall in love with her.
She hadn’t believed that either. How could a man so detached feel love? How could I be brokenhearted one minute and perform surgery the next without opening myself to a crippling emotional breakdown?
Eventually, she learned I could do both. More than nimble hands and the will to finish med school, at-will detachment was my most valuable skill.
“I maintain going was stupid,” Danny said. “Noble, but stupid.”
“Like I said, I met Greyson.”
“The internet works fine, thanks.” He picked up his glass. “That’s where I met Shari.”
“When do I get to meet Shari? Or do I have to go on the internet to do it?”
“Soon. You want another?”
“Sure.”
He went to the bar. The sky turned orange with the sunset.
You didn’t meet women like Greyson on the internet. She’d spent her adult life in the army, and if she hadn’t met me, she’d still be wearing boots and brown. She’d be fucking some other lifer.
She’d be living her life the way she always thought she would.
I’d rescued her from all that.
She’d be just fine.
Deployment after deployment. A slave to pay grade and rank. Stable.
Greyson wanted her boundaries pushed. She wasn’t happy unless she was doing more, going faster, expanding in all directions. The military limited her ability to find how far she could go.
I hadn’t considered that maybe the limits were the point.
When Dan came toward the table with the drinks, I resolved yet again to make sure Greyson was happy.
Chapter Three
GREYSON
I didn’t just have to get used to New York or civilian life. I didn’t just have to acclimate to finding work instead of having it given to me. I had to get used to being married.
Caden and I had met in a war zone. I’d been prepared to live in that zone my whole life. My family prized duty and loyalty to near fetish.
He had gotten a direct commission as a doctor in late 2001 out of a sense of duty he wasn’t explicitly raised with. He held it in his heart next to his need to be a part of a solution. He entered the army with his privilege, his money, his medical pedigree, and a cockiness usually only found in fighter pilots and bomb specialists.
We were from different countries in the same America. When I’d arrived on base, he was just another good-looking soldier who wanted to get in my pants. Another one denying he was stressed. Too boastful, too proud, too full of himself to take no for an answer.
He broke down my professionalism by being honorable, dutiful, brilliant, and just enough of an asshole to remind me he was fully a man, and just vulnerable enough to remind me he was fully human.
He also smelled nice and had a casual way of touching me that made me want to purr.
My CO had issued me a pass just long enough to fly home and get married. We did it at my parents’ house in San Diego. He had no one in New York. The night before we tied the knot, I had a vivid dream. In it, I was marrying the wrong man. On top of a tall building, guests filled the chairs. Mom congratulated me. Dad flew in on an F-14. Colin wore camo and boots he wouldn’t be caught dead in outside a dream.
And I was marrying the wrong man. No one would listen. They thought I was crazy. I woke up in a terror, convinced I was making the mistake of my life.
Then I saw Caden sleeping next to me, and the terror fell away. I wasn’t marrying the wrong man. I was marrying Caden, and he was right. I was never as sure about anything in my life as I was about him.
In New York, the last place on earth I thought I’d find myself, those first months of our relationship seemed like a dream. I remembered the blood, the explosions, the prayers uttered to a God I’d forgotten a hundred times, but the hours of gentle relief with him became more of a home base to balance against the violence I’d seen. That knowledge that no, I wasn’t making bad decisions because he was with me, became my anchor.
Before we were married, and after he inadvertently rescued me from an assignment that would have ended my career, we both got approved for R&R.
We couldn’t acknowledge each other on the streets of Amman, but in the American hotel, we could be a couple. We became intimate with the hotel tea shop and the details of our separate rooms. On the rooftop patio, he traced the red scar down my right wrist. His lips were parted a little, as if ready to kiss at any moment, and his face was lit by the sun’s reflection.
“Your eyes match the sky,” I said to him. His face was framed in the blue Iraqi ceiling.
“They’re actually holes in my head,” he said. “You’re seeing right through.”
Caden ran his fingers over the top of my hand, connecting the knuckles like a man taking territory one hill at a time. We were so deep inside each other, there was no such thing as a public place.
I hadn’t gone to Iraq to fall in love. I was there to do the impossible—talk to soldiers about how they felt in a situation where feelings could kill. It was exhausting.
Caden energized me.
He traced the scars I’d gotten when I broke my wrist. “Does anyone think you tried to kill yourself?”
“Everyone. My mother still thinks I’m trying to hide a suicide attempt.”
“Why?”
“I was a goth teen. Eyeliner out to here. The world was so boring, like, so uninteresting.” I rolled my eyes dramatically.
“Can’t imagine it.” His fingers kept tracing the scar.
“I did want to… well, I almost gave up after I broke it. I lost flexibility, and it was permanent. I wanted to be a medic.” The admission embarrassed me, because I’d failed.
“That doesn’t surprise me at all.” He lifted my face by the chin. “You’re an adventurous spirit.”
“So are you.” I nudged him.
“No, really. You’re pretty angry at your limitations.”
“Angry?”
“Frustrated. Don’t worry, we’re going to get rid of either the anger or the limits.”
“When?”
“Don’t rush. We have a lifetime.”
* * *
Jenn showed up in leggings and a gray army hoodie, exactly on time. Five in the morning like a good soldier. I was early, stretching on the summit of a huge boulder in Central Park. She joined me.
“Ronin’s coming,” she said. “That all right?”
Ronin and I had dated, if that was what you called spor
adic sex in the first year of enlistment, then a long separation, then a few rolls in the hay when I was a resident at Walter Reed and he was working in Intelligence.
“What’s he doing in New York?”
We took off down the boulder, stopped at a small rock embedded in the grass, and dropped for push-ups.
“Who knows?” Ten then back up the rock.
“Really?”
“Left Aberdeen Proving Grounds.” Top of the rock. Squat thrusts.
After everything that happened at Abu Ghraib, they’d sent him to Aberdeen. Jesus Christmas on a ladder, the army was fucked.
“They sent him here? Why?”
“He’s out of uniform now.”
Our breathing became unavailable for talking as we worked out. Ronin showed up midway through, in designer jeans and a sport jacket. He may have gone spook, but he was a handsome one. Dirty-blond hair, dark blue eyes in a face that had been chiseled and pristine when we met, but was wearing its ruggedness well.
“You doing it in that jacket?” I said between finishing push-ups and running back up the boulder.
“In a minute.” He took out a cigarette and lit it.
Jenn gave him the finger. He waved.
I didn’t think I could do another. The push-ups were murder on my wrist and my lungs burned.
“One more!” I cried, heading back down the boulder.
“I can’t!” Jenn put her hands on her knees.
“You can!”
I was telling myself more than her. I pushed myself. Push-ups. Run. Squat thrusts. Run.
I fell to my knees on the grass and rolled onto my back.
Ronin slow-clapped with the cigarette dangling from his lips. “Nice work, Major One More.”
Instead of telling him to go to hell, which would have taken a spare breath I didn’t have, I held up my middle finger.
“Two from me!” Jenn held up both of her birds.
Ronin laughed and put his cigarette out under his shoe. “You’re just jealous I don’t have to work as hard as you.” He picked up his cigarette butt and flicked it toward the garbage pail. It was too far to reach and too small a target, but it landed.
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