Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  “You always get philosophical when you’re tired?”

  “I like you. I’m tired enough to say that and mean it. And I want to know your story.”

  “That’s the amphetamine talking.” I put the mask over his face.

  “If you say so.” He backed away, hands still up.

  I called out before he went through the doors to the OR. “Maybe I’ll tell it to you if you’re good.”

  Under his mask, he smiled.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  GREYSEN

  DAY FOUR - 16:23:00

  I spoke to every soldier in recovery. Most of them told their stories with a healthy serving of bravado and swagger. I listened for hours on end, doling out sleeping pills, antidepressants, and when allowed, comfort. I heard a hundred war stories told like the final minutes of a football game that was won or lost. But sadness was not allowed. Weakness was a disease. More than half wanted to go back to the front to join or avenge their buddies.

  My father had been nineteen in 1968. He was a retired staff sergeant who never mentioned Vietnam. Not when my brothers signed up, nor when I did. He only talked about the years he spent training soldiers stateside, as if we didn’t know why we had to knock before we entered a room he was in or why he woke up shouting, “They’re all dying!” in the middle of the night.

  And still, we joined because it was what our family did.

  I’d never seen a battle, nor had I seen the back end of it until Balad. Casualties kept coming. I got a few hours’ sleep when I could, but they kept coming, and they needed me as much as they needed the surgeons. One screaming soldier was rolled under them as a stitched-up one was rolled away. Surgeons grabbed an hour of sleep until the next chopper. But not Caden. He was shredding his brain, and I was helpless to do anything for him except fill him full of vitamins and speed.

  “He stopped joking around three hours ago.” I peered through the window in the OR door. “Hasn’t spoken except to ask for instruments.”

  “You’re obsessed,” Ronin said from next to me.

  Understatement of the year.

  “What he’s doing… it’s not even heroic at this point. It’s suicide. So, yes. I’m obsessed with stopping it.”

  “He has a commanding officer.”

  “Who wants results.”

  “They can get MPs in here to haul him away.”

  I shook my head, watching Caden sew up an internal organ cut open by bullets. No one was hauling him away. They’d work him until he was dead.

  “We should break into the stuff I brought from the Pentagon. It’s labeled for performance under exhaustion.”

  “It’s also labeled to be taken after resting.”

  “Maybe that’ll get him to rest.” Ronin presented the logic like a gold-wrapped box tied with a bow. Justifiably, because it was a double-pronged solution.

  Maybe it was safe enough. Maybe it would help him. Whatever we were doing wasn’t going to work much longer.

  “Go get it. I’m going to talk to him.”

  I scrubbed and grabbed a juice bag. The OR stank of shit, flesh, blood, and rubbing alcohol.

  Caden glanced up from his work long enough to see me. His eyes were so bloodshot the irises were lighter than the sclerae. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t crack a joke or ask me if I had a shot.

  I pushed the straw into the bag and held it up. He nodded, keeping his fingers in his instruments. Getting the straw under his mask, I looked down. The man’s ribs were spread open, and his lungs inflated and deflated. Blood bubbled in a line across one lung. The nurse cleaned the area, and I looked at her.

  Without a word, she told me she was concerned.

  When the juice was empty, I took it away.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  “You’re not talking?”

  “Clamp this here,” he said to the nurse. His voice came through as a sandpaper husk.

  “You should have started hallucinating.”

  “Just aural,” he said. “Shit!”

  Blood spurted everywhere. People appeared around the table, orders were shouted, and I was in the way. I backed out the door.

  * * *

  DAY FIVE - 06:45:00

  If Caden knew how often I checked on him, he’d think I was in love with him. Which I wasn’t.

  Not yet.

  But as the days had worn on, my efforts to keep the simple, sweet fantasies from my mind were failing. They involved the days after the offensive. Meeting in the chow hall. Sitting together. Him across from me, then next to me, his boot pressed against mine under the table.

  “Major Frazier?” Dr. Ynez snapped me out of one such fantasy.

  “Yeah?”

  “I have a guy who needs you.” He handed me a chart.

  Pfc. Sanchez had suffered a clean gunshot to the calf while running back from an IED explosion that had enemy sniper cover. Nothing twenty-four hours, a good hospital dressing, and a full course of antibiotics wouldn’t fix. He was shaved bald, a proud Hispanic man with both his leg and his chin elevated.

  I stood by him. “Private Sanchez, I’m Major Greysen Frazier. I’m a doctor.”

  “The nurse said you have to assess me before I can go back out.”

  “I do. May I sit?”

  “Yeah, this gonna take long?”

  I sat on the stool next to his bed. His left hand had a gold ring on the fourth finger and a dirty, bloodied piece of paper in the fist.

  “It shouldn’t if you’re mentally fit.” I indicated the paper. “What do you have there?”

  “Nothing.”

  I held out my hand. “Then you won’t mind if I see it.”

  I opened his hand and was surprised he let me. The paper wasn’t really paper but more of a plastic sheet of film. It was a sonogram.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful. Congratulations.”

  “Don’t take it.” His voice was a dead serious command, and he glanced at me quickly before turning away again. “Major. Ma’am. This baby’s not mine.”

  “How do you know it’s not yours?”

  “It’s not my wife’s either. Am I fit to serve or not?”

  I slid the pen into its holder at the top of the clipboard. “I can’t keep you from going back. But I can delay you.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because you’re holding a sonogram of someone else’s baby.”

  “This isn’t your business, lady.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Major. Sorry, ma’am. This is personal.”

  “Keep in mind, Santa Claus didn’t leave this rank in my stocking. It was earned. I got it because I know better. Now you can tell me what’s going on, or I can delay your return to your unit until I’m sure you’re not on a mission to right some wrong.”

  He pressed his head into his pillow and exhaled deeply. “It’s Grady’s kid. He’s still there. His leg’s pinned under a Jeep.”

  “And he’s still there?”

  I found it hard to believe that Corporal Thompson, a medic with a sense of duty a mile wide, had left a living man behind.

  “Yes. When I tried to pull him away, his top came right off his bottom. I pulled him, and only a torso came. He was held together with like…” He couldn’t find the words, but my mind filled in his spinal cord, intestines—everything must have been spilling out. Pfc. Sanchez didn’t need an anatomy lesson. “He was screaming, ‘Go in my pocket, go in my pocket, find my girl, find my girl.’ Over and over… but the medevac was taking off, and Thompson pulled me away.”

  Either Grady was dead or so beyond help Thompson had had to make a hard calculation.

  “He’s alive,” Sanchez continued. “I told him I’d come back. I swore it. But he gave me this and told me to find his wife. Tell her he loved her and the baby… I’m supposed to be the godfather. I had to run. Because the chopper was taking off. I had to leave him there. I can’t hang around here while he’s under the Jeep. You understand? I have
to get him out.”

  “What happens if you go back and he didn’t make it?”

  “Just shut up!” He caught himself.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Please. I know you’re an officer, but you really need to get me out of here.”

  I didn’t know which was worse. Keeping him for a week to recuperate, during which time he’d be convinced that every ticking minute brought his friend closer to death, or sending him back to where he’d be forced to confront the truth under the most stressful circumstances.

  The fact was the choice wasn’t mine. Like every other guy who wanted to go back out, he’d answered every question on the evaluation to ensure that outcome.

  So, out he goes.

  * * *

  DAY FIVE - 13:15:00

  The OR was empty except for Caden and a nurse with a single patient. I went in.

  “Captain,” I said.

  He nodded without looking up.

  “We have a break,” I said. “No more casualties for a few hours.”

  “Thank God,” the nurse said.

  “You look tired,” Caden said to her, tying a knot with one hand and holding the thread taut.

  She snipped it. “We all are.”

  “Go lie down,” he said. “I’ll close.”

  “No, I have it.”

  “Major Frazier’s scrubbed.”

  She looked at me as if checking to see if I knew what I was doing. I didn’t.

  “Shoo, Lieutenant,” Caden said.

  I wanted to talk to him alone anyway, so I nodded to her.

  She exhaled deeply. “Thank you.” The doors swung as she backed out.

  “Clamp,” he said.

  I handed it to him. “I’d check it before using it. I’m not a nurse.”

  “I did.”

  “So, after this, how about taking a load off?”

  “Probably should. How you holding up? I saw you getting an earful from a Pfc. in the recovery room.”

  “Yeah. It was a hard story to hear. I can only imagine how hard it was to tell.”

  “Really?” He sounded surprised.

  “Really. Why’s that hard to believe?”

  “I’d think you’d heard it all.”

  “You never hear it all.”

  “Little detachment goes a long way. Can you pull this back here?”

  I didn’t think I could, but he was waiting, so I built a quick wall between what I had to do and giving a shit about it and pulled the organ away.

  “Thank you,” he said, looking at me.

  I turned away before my skin went pink.

  He seemed rough with the bone and gristle, as if he was working on a slab of meat, but he found a sliver of metal that had barely shown up in the scan. I bit my tongue against telling him to take it easy.

  “So,” I started. “The aural hallucinations?”

  “I’ve been tired before. I can tell the difference between reality and deliria.”

  “They saying anything fun?”

  “Jumbles of words. Had it in residency too. And in the ER on 9/11. And 9/12.”

  “I hesitate to mention this,” I said.

  “She who hesitates is… something.” He smiled, joking. “Go ahead, mention it. I know you want to tell me how handsome I am under pressure.”

  “You’ve looked better.”

  “Swab this here so I can see what I’m doing, would you?”

  It was hard to look at the inside of a man’s thigh, watch the blood flow through the veins. We weren’t built to see the inner workings of our bodies so clearly. We were built to die under these circumstances.

  “Don’t think about it too hard,” he said, reading my mind. He reached under a raw piece of human meat to remove a shard of metal. “That way lies madness. But you probably know all about that.” Plink. The shrapnel dropped into a tray. He examined the scan.

  “The human mind is nothing if not surprising.”

  “Get in here with a sponge so I can sew up the artery.”

  I did it.

  “Thanks. Tell me what surprised you today,” he said.

  “You surprise me.”

  “Your strategy is textbook. Stroking my ego’s the best way to keep me awake.” He reached across the body and took his own threader. “Just keep it clean over here.”

  It took a second to realize he was talking about part of the leg, not my language when speaking about him.

  “I’m not trying to do either. Nothing I say is going to get you to rest, and from what I can see, the last thing your ego needs is a good stroke.”

  His mask stretched when he smirked. “You’re doing great, Greysen.” He stitched the artery. “Tell me why my ego surprises you then.”

  “It doesn’t. But earlier today I couldn’t find you in here, and I thought maybe you’d finally taken a nap. But you weren’t in your bunk.”

  “You checked my bunk?”

  “Yes. Does that bother you?”

  “If I knew you were coming, I would have covered the bed in rose petals.”

  I willed him to not look up and see how my cheeks reddened, but he defied my silent wish.

  “Let’s clean this up and close. Then, since I have a few hours, I’ll lie down.”

  “I’ll alert the media.”

  He laughed.

  * * *

  DAY FIVE - 15:45

  He stopped just outside the medical tent and squinted in the sunlight as if the blue of his eyes couldn’t compete with the depth of the sky. He rocked back and forth slightly, then with more curve to the pendulum.

  I grabbed him under the arm before he fell.

  “I’m fine.” When I tried to take away my support, he put his hand over mine. “Stay.”

  “I’ll walk you to your bunk.” We started in that direction.

  “I haven’t had a chance to arrange the rose petals.”

  “None required.”

  “You’re too easy.” He shook the fog out of his head. “Didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I know. And you’re too fucked up to do anything about it now anyway.”

  “Most days, I’d take that as a challenge.”

  “But not today.”

  “Definitely not today.”

  “Good to know your limits.”

  His trailer was neat, standard issue with few memories of home. The air was stale after less than a week. I laid him on the bed and took his boots off as if he was a drunk.

  “Can you come get me when casualties come?”

  “Someone will come, I’m sure.”

  “I want it to be you.”

  I sat on the edge of his bed and took his pulse. Ninety-five. High but not a heart attack.

  “What was it you hesitated to mention?” His eyes were closed, and his voice was barely a whisper.

  I had to scan my memory of the past hour to recall that I had been about to tell him about the vial Defense sent. “How much I like you.”

  “Like you too.”

  “And that you’re a fool for pushing yourself so hard, but I can’t help but admire it.”

  I got up to leave, but I didn’t quite make it to the door.

  “Major.”

  “Yes?”

  “Please don’t go.”

  “I have to.” But I went back to him.

  “I keep seeing their faces. Then their wounds. And the screaming. I keep hearing the screams.” He turned away from the wall and held his hand out to me. “I’m too tired to try anything. All this… in my head. It’s just sensory overload. But it’s bad. Stay. Please.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed, not intending to do more than that, but he pulled me down with him. My body was strong enough to resist, but my heart was weak. After days of talking to men who never admitted a need or a weakness, Caden’s raw humanity touched me. He was fearless in so many things that I hadn’t expected vulnerability.

  I curled into him, my shoulder blades to his chest, and let him put his arms around me. Against my back, he wept f
rom exhaustion and pain. From tension and sorrow. I had to wipe my own eyes and swallow a hard lump of sobs.

  Eventually, his body stopped shaking, and he slept. I waited until his breathing changed and his arms were dead weights before I slipped out of them. Kneeling by the bed, I touched his cheek. His tears had dried, but his black lashes were still stuck together.

  “You’re not cut out for this, Captain,” I said softly.

  Maybe no one was.

  I put a blanket over him and left.

  * * *

  DAY FIVE - 20:43

  The first chopper had come in an hour before, but we had enough doctors to take care of them. I’d kept a close eye on the time and peeked in on Caden’s bunk twice. Five hours of solid sleep. He’d need another few days’ worth to catch up, but he wouldn’t get it. The last push into Fallujah was brutal, and they were coming faster than they could be admitted.

  “Where’s St. John?” Colonel Brogue shouted in triage.

  “Resting,” a nurse replied, getting her gloves on.

  “Someone get him.”

  “I’ll do it.” I jumped up.

  “Quick. We have more coming.”

  I ran to Caden’s trailer, and when there was no answer to my knock, I went in. He was still on his back with his hands crossed over his chest. He didn’t react to the light being turned on. I sat on the edge of his bed and leaned into his chest. Breathing steady. He didn’t move when I took his pulse or when I let my hand linger over his before pulling away.

  “Caden,” I said.

  No answer. He was out.

  “Caden.” I tapped his cheek. “Come on. Casualties.”

  I tapped his cheek harder. Nothing. I pinched his forearm gently, then harder.

  He groaned.

  “I’m sorry. They need you.”

  Deep suck of breath.

  “Casualties,” I repeated.