Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  “They need me.” She pinched her fingers together to put the glove back on.

  “What’s with the glove?”

  She froze, looking at it as if she didn’t know why it hung from her fingertips like a jellyfish.

  “Jenn, you can’t hook up any more lines until you pull it together.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “‘Oh, my God’ what?”

  “I don’t remember putting any lines in.”

  The hit had traumatized her, even if temporarily.

  “Let’s double-check what you did.”

  We checked the IVs and stents. She’d done it all perfectly, as if autopilot had worked even if the plane was about to crash.

  “I’m not doing this anymore,” she said. “Last deployment.”

  It was the first time she’d ever said that.

  * * *

  I wanted to see Caden. I told myself I wanted to make sure he was okay, but the fact was I wanted him to tell me I was okay.

  His trailer was dark, and he didn’t come to the door when I knocked. He wasn’t in the chow hall. Or the hospital.

  “Hey,” I said to a doctor in recovery.

  “Hi.” She smiled. “Ferguson. I’m stationed at the airfield.”

  Airfield surgeons went into combat with the medevac teams. Dr. Ferguson had vibrant skin and clear eyes. She didn’t look like a woman who went to the front lines in a Blackhawk, but that assumption said more about me than her.

  “I have an eye specialty, and they traded me,” she said.

  “Traded?”

  “For a general surgeon, oddly, not a field doc. I was going to rush back, but they’d already left on a nine-line with him. That won’t go over well.”

  General surgeons were too valuable to go past the wire.

  “Did his name happen to be Captain St. John?”

  “Yeah. Hard name to forget. He jumped right in. Volunteered like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  The medevacs did not fuck around with time. Caden must have jumped on the truck to the airfield, told them he was a doctor, and taken off.

  Caden outside the wire. Everything could go wrong. What was he thinking?

  He wanted to own me, but he didn’t even know me. He didn’t know my father had been eaten alive every day by regret and guilt even as he gave more and more years in service. He hadn’t grown up with stories of blood and gore, rage and impotence. I had. The fact that I’d chosen to serve in a war zone didn’t mean I fetishized battle. It meant I went in with my eyes open.

  I wished I’d had time to open his eyes, and when he got back, I was making it my job to put away all our power games and make sure he didn’t deploy again. He was going to hear about my father’s night terrors, my brother’s suicide attempt, my grandfather’s guilt. Eight days of treating soldiers who had been blown to bits was going to seem like a cakewalk.

  Caden was going home after this deployment if I had to scare the shit out of him.

  * * *

  I couldn’t mill around the airfield like a lost lamb. I kept my eyes on the dark sky and my ears open for approaching birds. I wasn’t privy to what was happening, whether they’d landed under fire or at all. Nothing.

  I should have told him the truth right away, without backpedaling or soft-shoeing. I was his, completely. Unabashedly. Unreservedly. Instead of enforcing my will, I should have opened myself with the same nakedness he had.

  My desk was piled with paperwork. Since I wasn’t going to sleep until I knew Caden was all right, and my office was close enough to the hospital to hear when they brought in casualties, I figured I’d do it.

  When I pulled out my chair, I found a small manila envelope with my name on the front. I undid the string, and a dirty, blood-streaked sonogram fell into my hand. I shook it, and a folded piece of paper came out. A note.

  Pfc Sanchez came in again. Head trauma.

  Said to give this to the psychiatrist.

  He didn’t make it.

  I put the sonogram and the note back into the envelope before I started on the paperwork.

  “It was Colonel Brogue out there.”

  In the dead quiet of the midnight hour, the staff nurse’s voice carried through the wall. Brogue had wanted to get off base, and it sounded as if he’d done just that. I stopped what I was doing as a less-clear voice mumbled something.

  “Little bird got them after the area was secured. All the casualties went to Baghdad. We’re clear.” I caught a ride to the airfield and waited, trying to stay out of the way, asking what I could and overhearing the rest.

  From what I could glean, Caden’s Blackhawk had landed under fire, which pilots aren’t supposed to do until they do it, then they’re responsible. With a full bird colonel on the ground, it wasn’t surprising they’d taken the risk, but there wasn’t supposed to be human gold in the form of a trauma surgeon on the chopper either.

  They’d taken fire. Other casualties. Local civilians had gotten involved. They’d lifted out with the wounded when they knew a little bird was coming for Caden and the minor injuries.

  The lighter thups of the smaller helicopter came out of the pale morning sky, and I went outside. With the sun kissing the horizon, the ground was still dark, and the airfield floodlights were necessary. The passengers were shadows in the glass as it landed. I held my jacket tightly around me, approaching into the wind of the rotors to see him, ready to tell him everything, reassure him, give myself to him, scare him out of this life.

  He got out of the helicopter after the last of the passengers as the pilot slowed the whirr of the rotor. The front of this shirt and pants were solid black, as if he’d lain in a puddle of ink.

  I ran to him. That particular shade of black was the result of the floodlights hitting the deep red of blood.

  He didn’t stop. He looked straight ahead, passing me by as if he didn’t see me.

  “Caden!”

  He got in the back seat of the Jeep, where the driver waited for him. I looked in the window. He was staring straight ahead, in a fugue state, seeing nothing.

  What the hell had happened out there?

  * * *

  I ran to Caden’s trailer.

  His door wasn’t closed all the way. I knocked. No answer. Knocked again.

  “Caden,” I said.

  I respected his privacy up to a point, and I’d reached it. Pushing the door, I stepped into the dark room. A band of morning sunlight fell into the corner, catching his bowed, blood-soaked figure. I shut the door, making sure it clicked closed. No one needed to see him sitting in the corner with his arms around his knees.

  Crouching in front of him, I laid my hands on his arms and looked into his face. He kept staring into the middle distance.

  “Caden. I’m going to get someone in here to bring you to the hospital.”

  “No.” His voice was low and flat, and hearing it cut open my worry enough to let out my sorrow.

  I didn’t know what had happened, but it had broken him. This man who had worked eight days with no more than a short rest, who had let his sense of duty guide him to do the impossible, who had touched me with his vulnerability and strength… they’d broken him.

  I stormed out into the morning sun. I got thirty feet away. The Humvee tire we’d used as an end zone was at the other side of the field, another thirty feet away. My mind was strategizing who to tap for help and where they were when the mortar hit.

  The earth shook, and with a sharp pain in my ears, everything went silent. When I landed on my back, I couldn’t even hear the breath exit my lungs, but I felt it with the agony in my chest.

  The silence was more disorienting than the rain of rocks and shrapnel.

  I got my feet under me. Dizzy. Planting my feet. Breathing soundlessly with a sharp pain in my chest. I looked down at myself. I was covered in blood. When I looked back up, I realized I’d been turned around. Caden stood at his door, awakened by the blast, his blood-soaked shirt mirroring mine, crying out without a sound.

&
nbsp; The ground rotated under me.

  I was falling.

  I would hit the dirt at the acceleration of gravity.

  I couldn’t break my fall, but I didn’t need to.

  A man was under me, catching me, holding me in his arms as he ran.

  Deaf but not blind, I could only see the blue sky. The black smoke from the mortar bounded my peripheral vision on one side.

  When he looked down at me for a second, he wasn’t broken anymore. The eternal sky was captured in his eyes, deadly and comforting, alive with purpose.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  GREYSEN

  A single shard of metal had missed my heart by two millimeters.

  “There’s more ways to miss a heart than hit it,” Caden said from beside my bed.

  He’d used his R&R days to fly into Baghdad after me. The incision was small. I could have recuperated in Balad, but Caden had stepped in, making sure I was in the best-equipped hospital whether I needed it or not.

  “I prefer to think of myself as lucky.”

  “Preference noted. They’re sending you back to the CSH.”

  He was making an assumption that I was going back to Balad based on the fact that I was going back into the field. I was indeed going back into the field, but not to the CSH.

  “What happened out there?” I asked. “Outside the wire?”

  He shrugged and looked away. “The usual intense shit.”

  “I saw Brogue.” My CO was down the hall with another injury so close to deadly it confirmed the existence of luck for me, and the existence of statistical probability for Caden’s patients.

  Brogue being down the hall had its benefits. I’d wheeled down there and checked on him. He was going home, but he was still the commanding officer of the First Medical Brigade. He could task me out of my unit up to Abu Ghraib to work with Army Intelligence for a while.

  He’d agreed it was an opportunity to go from a specialty no one respected to something where I could move up, make a difference, release myself from the constraints of a unit for a while and decide how I wanted to work. He’d do the paperwork as soon as he could sit up in his goddamned bed.

  If I went through with it, I wasn’t going back to the support hospital with Caden.

  “He said you saved his life and a few others,” I continued. “He’s recommended you for a commendation.”

  “I get a nice pat on the back whenever I do my job.” He squeezed my hand and ran his finger along my forearm with a touch that was uniquely his.

  “Why did you go out?” I asked. “There are field surgeons who could have gone.”

  “You asked me this, Greysen.”

  “And you deflected, which I let you do because I was post-op.”

  Four fingertips went back down my forearm with a tenderness that could only be described as worshipful. “You don’t let stuff go, do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I want to be with you. Do you want to be with me?”

  “Yes. More than anything.”

  “And if we are a couple, this is what I can expect? You to lock onto things?”

  I didn’t want to turn him off, but I wouldn’t lie to him either. “Yep. But I’m also patient. I won’t forget, but I’ll let you tell me things in your own time.”

  He stared at the way his thumb stroked the scars on my wrist. “I went out to prove that I could.”

  That wasn’t news. I could have told him that. But having him say it so plainly was unexpected and earth-shattering and a chest-spreader, exposing my heart to his attention.

  “Caden.”

  “Greysen?”

  So impossibly blue, his eyes were holes to the sky.

  “I can’t do better,” I said.

  “Well, I know that.”

  We smiled, and I looked away. “But you’re not staying in the military, and this is my life.”

  “I do catch movies sometimes. Guy’s off on deployment and calls his woman from base. She’s always in the kitchen of some suburban house, holding the phone with both hands because she loves him. We can just switch it. You call me. I’ll hold the phone with both hands.”

  “In a suburban house?”

  “Probably not. That a deal-breaker?”

  “No. Not that.”

  He didn’t ask me what the deal-breaker was. Either he didn’t want to know, or he was aware of what I didn’t yet know.

  There were no deal-breakers.

  * * *

  “I’m not going home,” I said into the hospital phone. Jenn was on the other side of the line. I had an envelope stamped with the US Army seal crunched in my hand.

  “Why not?”

  “The incision was nothing. It was clean.”

  “You lost a ton of blood.”

  “I have it back. I’m replenished like a vampire.”

  “Well, it’ll be nice to have you around.”

  I didn’t think it would be hard to tell her, but I had to take a second to rework what I intended to say. “I’m not staying. Not for long. I got tasked out to Defense.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m heading up to ABG.”

  My paperwork had gone through. Brogue was laid up and on his way home but had signed the recommendation. The approval had come in the envelope my palm was sweating on.

  “Abu Ghraib? Why? For what?”

  “I can’t—”

  “It’s Ronin.”

  “It’s Ronin,” I confirmed.

  “Okay, I’m saying this once, then you do what you want, okay?”

  “This should be good.”

  “It will be. Write it down.”

  I laughed silently so she couldn’t hear me, but I had the feeling I wouldn’t need to write it down. “Go ahead.”

  “You do not have the moral vacancy required to work with the DoD.”

  “The project conforms to the Geneva Convention.”

  “Okay, if he has to say that, then that’s a problem. And have you asked yourself what he needs you for?”

  I didn’t, and wouldn’t, mention the second part of Ronin’s offer, but my pause while I decided that was enough of an opening for Jenn to jump in.

  “The medical degree,” she said. “You can script and dispense.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “I don’t like it. It bothers me.”

  “You’re just going to miss me.”

  “Yeah. That too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  GREYSEN

  Caden wasn’t able to come to Baghdad to escort me back to the CSH. Despite his commission, he was and always would be a civilian—with a civilian’s confidence in his own agency. He’d always think he could make decisions, work around the rules while staying in the lines, negotiate with his superiors, charm his way through a narrow opening in his options.

  On the Chinook, with my knuckles pale caps over where my fingers and my hand joined, I wondered how he would tolerate my career. Military wives had to submit to a host of indignities, starting with a loss of control over where they lived and ending with a loss of control over parenting. Their husbands were married to the military first. How would Caden manage always playing second to the army, especially when, after two deployments, he still didn’t understand how little power he had?

  He wanted a life with me. I was torn between talking him out of it and agreeing to everything. Was there a middle way? Someplace between him pursuing a stateside medical career in the army and me taking off my uniform forever?

  I alternated between frustration and an uncomfortable feeling of validation. Why do I have to think about this now? soon became Being wanted by Caden feels too good to refuse.

  * * *

  I was as sleepy as I’d ever been, trying to make sense while wrapped in his arms.

  “We’ll get R&R when we can,” I said. “ABG isn’t far. Not from here.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “For the deployment. After that… you’re resigning your commission, right?”

 
“Yes.” He peppered my face with gentle kisses. “My obligations are done.”

  “I don’t want us to get our hopes up. The odds of us staying together—”

  “Hush.”

  “They’re not good.”

  “You’re being a pessimist.”

  “I’m scared,” I said, making fear my final negotiating point.

  “Of what?”

  “That you won’t be able to stand the long distances or moving around or any of it.” I didn’t mention that I could retire my commission. Of the few commitments I’d ever made, the only one I could see myself sticking with was my commission.

  “You don’t think much of me.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “I’m not a child, Major. I’m a grown man who can make his own decisions.”

  “And you’re going to decide to have a life because you’re normal.”

  “No one’s ever called me that before.”

  “It’s a compliment.”

  “So, a complimentary thing about me is something you’re going to use to argue that we can’t be together?”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. “My brain can’t get around what you just said.”

  “What I said was…” He kissed my nose. “Your thinking is incomplete. Your way of seeing me is limited. You need to give me a chance.”

  “Why?” I made a mm sound in my throat to stop his reply, waking up a little. “That came out wrong. I’m just… I want to. But outside dual deployment for married people, the army doesn’t care about anyone’s love life. There’s no way we’re going to be together much. Not for a while. I won’t be surprised when you tell me you can’t wait around for me.”

  “I’ll be surprised.”

  “Okay. You be surprised. But I don’t want to be hurt either. And, to quote a very sexy man, you can hurt me.”

  “I won’t.” He unraveled his limbs from mine and stood over me.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have a shift.” He got dressed, hiding his beauty from me one piece of clothing at a time. “You should stay here and get some rest. Think about it, then tell me you want me as much as I want you. Tell me you’d feel broken without me.”