Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  “Shiiiit,” the pilot agreed.

  “You better take care of yourself, buddy. You don’t belong outside the wire.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up. If I survived the helicopter ride, I had this. Save the colonel. Easy. I’d saved dozens of men. One more in slightly more inconvenient circumstances wouldn’t be difficult.

  * * *

  If I could just get out of the house, Mom and Dad would be happy.

  I was sure of it.

  If I went to school far away, my parents would stop fighting. I saw them kissing and laughing all the time. At least, when they didn’t know I was there. They had a sweet banter full of dumb jokes, puns, and shared experience.

  Mom kept telling me I was a good kid, but it was hard to believe that when I couldn’t do anything right. I never lined up my shoes in front. I left crumbs on the counter. I didn’t close the milk when I put it away. Little things. Simple things. Anyone should have been able to do this stuff, but I forgot.

  My dad was overworked. In the 1980s, there weren’t many heart surgeons who could do what every second-year med student knew how to do in 2003. People came from all over the country for bypasses under the great Dr. St. John, and he didn’t refuse anyone. He was tall, six foot three, with slicked back hair that tucked neatly into a surgeon’s cap, smooth cheeks he shaved twice a day, and thin fingers you wouldn’t think could land a punch.

  When he’d point at something like the crumbs on the counter, we had a fifty-fifty chance of getting through to dinner. I’d closed the milk and put it away. Tightly wrapped the bag inside the cookie box, tabbed the slot, and put it exactly where it went. But I’d forgotten about the crumbs. It was always something. There seemed to be a hundred things to remember, and I always forgot one. Sometimes I was the one who discovered the unwrapped bag or the open milk, but the crumbs were hard to hide.

  Mom would rush over and clean them, apologizing for being such a slob when she ate cookies. Mom never ate cookies. She bought them for me even though I left crumbs on the counter.

  That’s love.

  I swear, she’d have eaten dinner for me if she thought she could take the blame for not putting my napkin on my lap or taking more food than I could finish.

  Once, I heard them talking about how small I was. I was eight, and he was worried the kids at school would rough me up for my smart mouth. I think, actually, I wasn’t big enough for him to rough up, and he was waiting.

  But when the milk was open, he’d slap it on the counter. If it was full enough, it splashed everywhere. “How hard is it—?”

  “Oh, that was me.” She snapped a towel off the roll.

  “—to remember—” He slapped it again. More splashing.

  “Run along, Caden,” Mom said quietly to me, jerking her chin.

  “—to close the God. Damn. Milk.”

  I was gone before he finished the last word, padding down the steps into the dark, the speakeasy, the laundry room, the safe with the false back wall, the bottle room, thick with damp and dark, right under the kitchen where I could hear everything but discern nothing.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  greysEn

  I left my husband sick in bed. He really did have some kind of flu and was convinced nothing could heal him except the force of his will.

  Damon and Caden had a lot in common.

  He had a session with Blackthorne on Monday afternoon. I had a lucky cancellation and decided to keep his appointment for him.

  “You’re not allowed back—” the receptionist called from behind me.

  I stopped hearing her when the security guard stepped in front of me. He was a few hundred pounds of muscle under a bald head, armed to the teeth, with an earpiece and no distinguishing identification. “Ma’am, you can leave now, or I can take you out.”

  “You can stop with the faux manners. I need to see Ronin Stevens.”

  “Please turn around and—”

  “Now. And don’t assume I can’t put up a fight.”

  He reached for his gun.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Ronin’s voice came from behind the security guard’s bulk. “I got it. Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir.” The guard got out of the way without any lingering anger or insult. A real professional. Totally detached.

  “What are you doing here?” Ronin asked.

  “Looking for you.”

  “You could have called.”

  “I’m keeping Caden’s appointment.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, doctor.” He smirked, but his grin disappeared when he saw how unfunny I found him. “You have to check in your phone.”

  He led me back to the reception desk, where I signed in.

  “This way.” Ronin led me down the hallway, unlocking the door at the end with his fingerprint.

  On the other side of the door was another hallway lined with more doors and conference rooms. Two men in suits passed us. Through another door and another fingerprint, we went into a windowless section of the building. It was more populated. More women. More lab coats.

  “Welcome to Blackthorne,” Ronin said. “It’s a little fancier than the combat hospital.”

  “But you can neither confirm nor deny it’s nicer than the Pentagon.”

  “I can confirm it’s nicer.”

  For all the people and all the computer screens, I could discern nothing about what anyone was doing. Of course, another door and another finger pad led to a more warmly lit, wood-lined area.

  “Your husband comes through the First Avenue side, which leads to this area.” He opened a smoked glass door for me. His office. Big. It didn’t have just a desk but half a living room set. “Can I get you something?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Would you like to sit?”

  “What’s the Kool-Aid in this place? You’re the guy who kicked my ass literally—put your boot on my ass to push me across the finish line in basic. Now you’re using full sentences like a docent?”

  “Sit the fuck down or don’t.” He sat on a love seat.

  I got in the chair across from him and decided to dispense with the niceties. He knew enough already. “My husband is a careful man, but he’s been thoughtless and stupid.”

  He pushed forward, tilting toward me to signal his ever-so-grave concern. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. He choked me during sex, which was nominally consensual, and I’d like to think he just took it too far.”

  His eyebrow lifted, but he didn’t interrupt. Which was good. I didn’t have the time or will to explain why I’d never gotten that risky with him.

  “But last night, he took me down the New Jersey Turnpike at a hundred thirty miles per hour, in traffic, after doing the mildest vets art therapy session I’ve ever seen.”

  “Wow. I’m so sorry. I saw him last week, and he wasn’t showing any reckless ideation. Did you get the idea there was a correlation with his sessions here?”

  I kept my face impassive. “There’s so much I’m not telling you. So much.”

  “Okay, well, I have the length of his session to listen.”

  “I didn’t know there was talking.”

  “Not much.”

  When nothing more was offered, my curiosity morphed into something more urgent. Partly, I was offended by the secret-keeping, but I was also afraid of what was happening here. There was only one way to prove to myself I hadn’t put my husband in danger.

  “Whatever you do with him, you’re going to do with me,” I said. “Today. Now.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Because I’m not reserve duty. Right?”

  “And you don’t have any of the indicators.”

  “Have you gotten valuable data from him?”

  “Yes.”

  No elaboration, of course.

  “You haven’t gotten anything, and if you knew what I know, you’d either pull him out right now, or you’d change everything you thought you knew about what you’re doing here.”

  One eye narrow
ed. He may have known about the disassociation. He may have even known Damon and Caden were battling. Or not. That’s the thing about not knowing what you don’t know.

  “He told me you give him a shot, he breathes in a dark room, then fills out a form.”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny.” When he smirked at his little joke, he crossed one leg over the other so tightly he twisted to the side. Joke or no, his answer was defensive.

  “Let me breathe in a dark room,” I said. “Without the shot or with a lower dose.”

  He tapped his thumb on his knee and considered.

  “I see him change every day,” I continued. “It’s killing me. I want to save him, and I can’t because one thing that doesn’t change is his conviction that he has it under control. Everything else flies out the window. He’s not the man I know.”

  “You met him during a war.”

  “And it broke him. That war broke him. He had no business there, and he has no more business in the reserves. If he goes back, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

  “It was his choice.”

  “Irrelevant.”

  He sighed. “You want to see what’s going on here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit since Iraq. Or basic even.”

  “You have.”

  Leaning on his knees, he got up. “I’ll set you up to breathe in a dark room. No more. And I’ll have Joan draw up an NDA.”

  * * *

  It took three minutes to give me instructions on how to breathe and when. The room wasn’t dark but had a single, warm lamp by a cushioned chair. I spotted four cameras in the corners.

  A soft female voice came over the speakers, enunciating gentle syllables.

  Soo–hoo soo–hoo

  I closed my eyes and breathed as I had been instructed. When I got a little dizzy, I gripped the arms of the chair but kept breathing.

  Soo–hoo soo–hoo

  It wasn't quite hyperventilating even when the soo–hoos got faster. I was breathing deeply, definitely getting enough oxygen.

  Part of me couldn’t believe Caden sat still for breathing exercises in a windowless room.

  He must really love me.

  Faster.

  Soo–hoo soo–hoo soo–hoo soo–hoo soo–hoo soo–hoo soo–hoo soo–hoo

  Dizziness turned into a sort of stability. It was hard to keep up with the speed of the breaths, but I knew Caden did, so I would. And then it happened.

  It started with a lightness that wasn’t quite dizziness and the heaviness of a gravitational pull from my chest. I was sitting in a room, in a chair, inside my body. I could feel the chair under me. I could feel my hands on the arms. But I was elsewhere. Everywhere. I expanded inward from a tiny planet in a dust mote of a universe into an infinitely vast space inside myself.

  I still knew where I was and who I was; it just didn’t matter. And not in a flip or dismissive way. My identity was as irrelevant as a fly buzzing half a world away, yet even that fly was an indelible part of that eternal space inside me.

  To describe it as overwhelming would have implied I was confused or amazed. In fact, the feeling left me sane with dispassion. I was overcome with righteous awe, knowing I was part of a truth that needed no explanation. Even as I was facing it, I hesitated to say I was touching God because I believed in endorphins and serotonin, not bearded white men in the clouds. But my hesitation didn’t change what happened.

  The pace of the soos and hoos slowed, and though I was disappointed the experience was over, my lungs were keyed to breathe with the voice. My consciousness deflated like cigarette smoke curling back into the butt. I was in a chair, in a room, in a building, in New York.

  The woman’s voice stopped, and soft music played long enough to keep me from jumping out of my seat when the door behind me clicked open and Ronin came in.

  “Well?” he said, leaning on the far wall.

  “Bioenergetic breathing. I can’t believe you got him to meditate.”

  “The trick is to not call it meditation. You’ve done it before?”

  “I read about it as a PTSD therapy.”

  “So, it was positive?” he asked.

  “If I believed in God, I would have introduced myself.”

  “Not everyone has that kind of experience.

  “What’s Caden been experiencing?”

  “That’s privileged.”

  “I’ll just ask him.” I stood.

  “He won’t remember. It’s an incidental result of part of the treatment. And before you ask which part, it’s classified.”

  I sat back down and rubbed my temples. “He has a distinct dissociative split.”

  “Another personality?”

  I’d thrown him. The stillness of his expression came from a conscious decision not to broadcast a reaction.

  “With another name,” I said. “Can I presume you didn’t notice?”

  “He didn’t seem that different.”

  “He is.”

  “Alternate personalities are more distinct, with made up histories—”

  “I know.”

  “—different nationalities, genders—”

  “I know, Ronin.”

  “—ages even.”

  “Are you mansplaining?”

  He slid down the wall until he was in a crouch with his fingertips tenting between his knees. “He needs to keep coming.”

  “Because you expected this.”

  “In experimental medicine, you get hit with the unexpected all the time.”

  Fuck him and his excuses.

  “He thought he was being watched,” I said. “And between whatever is in the shot and the bioenergetic breathing that peels away identity, you gave form to the watcher.”

  “He needs to keep coming,” Ronin repeated.

  “Why?”

  “To learn to control it.”

  “So it’s not dissociative disorder?”

  “Not as commonly understood.”

  “And the cure?”

  He turned his hands until the palms were up in submission to his ignorance.

  * * *

  Caden had been hearing voices before he ever went to Blackthorne, so as much as I wanted to lay the entire problem at Ronin’s feet, I couldn’t. He might have had this his whole life. The Caden I’d met at Balad Base could have been a single, dominant personality. He could have split at any time and held on for the two years I’d known him.

  I sat on the boulder Jenn and I had climbed repeatedly and listened to the birds chirp. The breathing exercise had relaxed me in a way. I was clear in a way I hadn’t been since Caden admitted he thought he was going crazy.

  Assume that was a single personality of many.

  Assume it was a dominant personality but not the primary one, which would be depressed and anxious.

  Assume this split happened in adolescence, after a trauma with his father.

  Now try to fit all of it into a clinical model of dissociative disorder, and what do you get?

  A bunch of square pegs and round holes.

  He was a surgeon, and a brilliant one. Split personalities were a minefield of unknowns, but generally they didn’t share that kind of professional knowledge.

  Captain Caden St. John of the US Army had not been a cardboard cutout. He’d been a real man. Complex. Contradictory. Sane.

  Damon was not a child, a woman, or a stock white male character of any kind. He was as real as Caden. In a Venn diagram of the two men, there was a huge overlap of knowledge and desire. And if I was feeling brave, which I had to be, a Venn diagram of those desires would overlap most significantly over ownership of me.

  I walked home in a fog, waiting for lights when no one else did, face cast at a forty-five-degree angle, trying to unravel this mess. I wanted to blame Ronin, or the army, or his father, or myself, but the responsibility wouldn’t stick on any one thing.

  He was home, sitting in front of the television, when I got there. Caden never watched televis
ion, especially not a dumb sitcom. And if he did, he wouldn’t laugh. He’d sneer at it. He’d find it charming when I laughed, but he wouldn’t stay to see what I thought was so funny.

  “Hi,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “It’s a mycoplasma infection. I picked up some Vibramycin.” He turned away from the screen and looked me up and down. “Fucking horse pills. Where did you go?”

  “To see Ronin.”

  “Cool.” He turned back to the TV. “How is he?”

  Caden always had a slight note of jealousy when it came to Ronin. He hid it under an abiding respect for me and a trust in my motivations, but it was always there, under the surface.

  Damon didn’t seem to care one way or the other. That was good, in a way. Also troubling because it highlighted the fact that I was having a conversation with my husband and myself at the same time, and those two conversations were in direct opposition.

  “He’s fine. Says hi.”

  “Great.” He muted the TV. “I have some bad news.”

  I sat on the couch. “Tell me.”

  “I have reserve duty this weekend.”

  “I thought you were IRR?” The reminder that he’d signed on for the reserves was sandpaper on raw flesh. I hadn’t wanted this, and I would be nervous about him for the duration he was away. “Individual reserve doesn’t do specialty training.”

  “There’s a surge. They called. What am I supposed to do? Say no?”

  “Where?”

  “Walter Reed.” He turned the sound back on. “I can’t get out of it.”

  The Comparison Train stopped at Duty Station to add another car. The Caden I’d married, whether he was a full personality, a primary, or some other unlikely split of the same, would never have tried to get out of a commitment. He took his duties seriously.

  “We’ll dig your uniform out of the basement.”

  He muted the TV again and turned to me. “Can you get it?”

  “Sure.”

  * * *

  I’d agreed to go downstairs because my husband had asked me for an easy favor and I had no reason not to. He wasn’t feeling well. I’d make him soup and pour him tea. I’d tuck him under blankets and put a hot water bottle between his feet. But going down the narrow wooden stairs, I realized he hadn’t asked me to get his uniform because he was sick but because he didn’t want to go down to the basement.