Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  I left the box on the bar and went to the hidden safe with the false wall. The bottle room was still bare, still cold, still psychologically the farthest away from the rest of the house. I turned on the light and crouched through the door. It was a prison with concrete walls lined in cylindrical honeycombs. Just a little too short to stand straight. A little too small to stretch your arms. A hard, cold womb.

  The little boy had hid here until he was too big to feel safe in it. Or was that the reason? He’d never told me why or when he’d stopped hiding here, only that he had. I ran my fingers along the dusty concrete shelf the depth of a whiskey bottle and pushed the door closed halfway so I could see the back of it.

  There was no knob, obviously, since it was disguised as a wall from the other side. The sheet metal had holes in the back where a lock would have been. If the people in the bar were hiding, the lock would be on the inside so it would seal the room away from the cops. My first thought was that young Caden had locked it one too many times and his father had taken off the bolt. But when I looked at the outside, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. The lock had been moved to the outside, where it would be visible from inside the safe but not accessible from the bottle room.

  That didn’t make sense.

  Until it did.

  * * *

  I put the box on the living room floor. My husband was curled up on the couch with the TV muted and his eyes closed. I touched his face. It was cold and clammy with a breaking fever.

  “I got your uniform.”

  “Thank you,” he said, tucking my hand under his head as if he wanted to trap it for use later.

  “We should make sure it still fits.”

  “It will.” He closed his eyes. “I’m the same.”

  He wasn’t. Not at all.

  I left my hand under his cheek and poured the rest of my body over his, feeling the rasping rise and fall of his breath under me as he slept.

  Chapter Forty

  DAMON

  At Mt. Sinai, I managed to get out of surgery all week, but the military wasn’t as forgiving when a guy felt under the weather. I had to put on the clown suit and show up.

  I’d forgotten some kind of saluting protocol and done it at the wrong time. I was missing a piece of my uniform. My shirt placket didn’t line up with my fly. No one yelled at me. I was an officer. But one of the nurses took me aside and told me, touching all the things that were wrong, in a voice sticky with sex. She had long, blond hair up in a twist and languid blue eyes. She didn’t have a ring on her finger and didn’t seem to care about mine. She laid her hands on my chest and told me where she was staying on base.

  I was a handsome guy. I’d forgotten that. When I fought with Caden in the mornings, I thought of him as the good-looking one, the charming and smart one.

  But when the nurse left without a promise or rejection from me, I realized I had all those attributes as well. Handsome Caden, who was usually quiet by afternoon, growled at the edges of my thoughts.

  Don’t.

  I hadn’t considered cheating on Greysen for a single second. Not until I felt his demand.

  “Stay down,” I said softly, “and I won’t.”

  * * *

  I sat through horrifying sessions with new techniques for chemical burns, shattered bones, and amputations. I was sick to my stomach most of the time, but I understood and retained it all.

  If I couldn’t get the thoracic position in New York, I was switching to pediatrics or something less gruesome. Maybe I’d go back to school for psychiatry and copractice with Greysen. Maybe I’d leave medicine entirely.

  The nurse who’d corrected the placement of my captain’s bars sat two rows ahead of me and to the right. She looked around, making eye contact. Her name was Trina.

  Don’t.

  He wasn’t staying down.

  In the break between training and dinner, I took a jog with my earbuds jammed in tight and the radio set to static. I carried the phone so it looked as if I was talking into the mic on the white wire.

  I ran the track around base, speaking his name, daring him, prodding him to come out. He didn’t come until the sun touched the horizon and I was so tired I feared I’d have to wait until morning.

  Don’t.

  “There you are.”

  Don’t.

  The effort this took him tugged at the corners of my perception.

  “Don’t what? Fuck the blonde?”

  I’ll kill you.

  The static, and his voice inside it, got louder and lower.

  “How? You’re getting weaker in there. Every morning I swat you down like a bug, and you’re quiet all day.”

  I’ll tell her.

  “Grey? No, you won’t.” I made a left as if I knew the base, which I did. Until that moment, I’d forgotten I’d trained here before my first deployment. “Here’s what I need—I need you to go away. I need you to die.”

  I stopped in front of a long building with a row of doors. It looked like a motel, but it was reserve officer barracks. Each one had a bedroom with a desk and a bathroom. Lieutenant Trina Anderson was in #434. The windows were dark. She’d be at dinner with everyone else. I stepped off the curb anyway…just to prove a point.

  Stop.

  He said it with a burst of static, like a nodule of deeper white noise that promised lucidity but didn’t deliver it.

  I stopped, planting my feet in the street. “You stop fighting me in the morning. You stay down. Forever. Because there’re plenty of women in New York, and with this face, I can fuck all of them until you scream.”

  After a beat, my radio shut off completely, as if he was taking the signal into the darkness with him.

  * * *

  That night, after sitting across from Trina’s flirtations at dinner, I lay in bed alone.

  Flirting with Trina had been relatively painless. I’d done it to see if he’d come back, and he hadn’t. Either he was tired from the conversation through the static, or he was doing as I’d demanded.

  Could I cheat on Greysen if I had to? When he was pressing against me, I couldn’t allow even a shred of doubt, but with him gone, I had to consider all the options.

  Assuming I’d get away with it, assuming I’d never hurt Greysen, would I? Was crippling Caden worth fucking any woman but the love of my life?

  When I’d gotten back from the medevac, having successfully moved the colonel and gotten him onto the Blackhawk, I watched it fly away toward Baghdad, and waited with a brigade unit. I had been fine up until that moment. Then there was blood everywhere. I knew blood. I knew the smell of shiny copper and glucose when it was fresh and the cloying scent of old wet pennies, rotting eggs, and curdling milk when it was stagnant in a wound. This was fresh. It was everywhere. It was dark.

  Could I cheat on Greysen to rid us of him?

  In the space between putting the colonel on the Blackhawk and the little bird coming to lift us back behind the wire, there was blood. I went into blackness. Copper and wet blood and darkness so viscous it pushed against me.

  I must have been doing something right. I got a commendation.

  But whatever I did about that blood was lost. I got back to Balad, but I didn’t remember how. I only remembered choking on darkness as I tried to swallow what had just happened. I couldn’t wake, and I couldn’t get it down. I was going to die. I couldn’t breathe. I sank deeper, throat plugged. The whistle of the mortar coming over the wire woke me.

  Greysen was outside. I clawed out of the thick fugue for her. Only for her. Like a man in a dream waking in a panic, opening the door as the mortar exploded and she fell.

  She’d woken me from a nightmare, but I’d never swallowed the memory. I’d coughed it up and left it behind to catch her as she twisted and fell with a piece of metal stuck in her chest.

  She thought I’d saved her life, but she’d saved mine.

  I fell asleep before deciding what to do.

  * * *

  Sunday morning. Caden didn’t fight
me. The threat had worked for the time being, but now I knew how to get to him.

  Last day, last hours in the monkey suit. I had to demonstrate an emergency tracheotomy to a group of field medics, then I was home.

  I knew how to do a tracheotomy. I explained it with words and slides, then I stepped up to the gurney, where a dull-featured mannequin lay under a white sheet. The medics gathered around.

  “So, I’ll do it first, then you all will,” I said. “Once you’ve assessed that a trach is necessary and would increase chances of survival, you hyperextend the neck.” I pulled back the chin. “If the neck can’t be extended, you can’t find the cricoid cartilage, so no trach. Locate the Adam’s apple, and the cartilage should be about an inch down. You can feel it.” I picked up a scalpel. “At the middle point between, make a horizontal incision.”

  I knew what I had to say and do. The training and the procedure were beneath me, to be honest. The eyeless thing on the table was made of plastic with precut incisions.

  But when I put the blade against its neck, I froze.

  It wasn’t human. Not even a dead human. It was a doll.

  I couldn’t cut its throat as a demonstration of an actual incision in an actual living person.

  They were waiting. Eight of them. Sixteen judging eyes. I’d told them I was doing it first, and if I didn’t make the cut, I’d be a laughingstock. If I puked right there, which I wanted badly to do, I’d be Captain Buffoon, subject of unflattering stories.

  Poor Damon.

  He’d come through the door opened by my panic, slicing through the veil between us with his disdain and confidence.

  “Half an inch long,” I stalled.

  Cut, then open with your finger.

  The finger. Even if I got through this step… I cut off the rest and clamped down on Caden, tightening my thoughts into a narrow lane. I knew it wouldn’t work. He was there.

  “Half an inch deep.”

  More stalling, and they knew it. They weren’t looking at the mannequin. They were looking at me. They wanted to get their hands on the procedure, but they needed to see it first.

  It’ll take me thirty seconds.

  “Are you all right, doc?” one of them asked.

  They were a haze of eyes and need. I couldn’t discern which one had asked.

  I wanted out of the situation.

  I admitted to myself that he could fix it.

  I didn’t know that was an opening.

  I didn’t know he could get through it.

  I didn’t know how slippery it all was.

  By the time I realized it, everything was dark.

  Chapter Forty-One

  GREYSEN

  Caden never called me with his flight info. I had no idea what time he was coming home Sunday or Monday. That was the thing about life in the army. You were in control until they had you. At least as a full-timer, there were no illusions. You belonged to something bigger and more demanding. You submitted to that ideal, or you found another way to spend your life.

  I left Caden a note on the counter in case he came home, and I went to the board dinner. I was still one of two candidates, and this was another hoop I had to jump through.

  Bob Abramson had said he’d send me a car, but I didn’t know he’d be in it.

  “Oh, hi,” I said when I saw him in the back seat of the limo.

  “Fancy meeting you here.” He smiled. The driver closed the door behind me. “I hope you don’t mind sharing.” He adjusted in his seat, crossing one shiny shoe over the other as he stretched his legs.

  “It’s fine. How are you?”

  “Fine, fine. How’s Caden? He was pretty sick when I saw him on Monday.”

  “Well enough to go to reserve duty.”

  “When is he coming back?”

  “Tonight or tomorrow morning. He’ll join us later if he gets in.”

  “Good. So, I wanted a minute to talk to you about something we’re considering. I’ve brought this up with your husband already.”

  “Okay.” I tried to wipe my voice of the keen curiosity I felt.

  “He’s on the short list for head of thoracic.”

  “That’s great. He’d be wonderful.”

  “And we’re… I mean, you can see… we’re considering you for a leadership position in the mental health unit. You’re quite a pair.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You met in the military?” he asked.

  “He was a surgeon at the combat hospital. I was brought in with my unit ostensibly to help with front line trauma, but I spent more time helping the medical staff do their jobs without sleep.”

  “So, he was a trauma surgeon then? Why did he go back to heart surgery?”

  “Did you ask him? I’m sure he’d tell you.”

  “He presented it as a preference.”

  “Ah, you’re asking me if he was good at it.”

  “Not exactly.”

  Denials aside, that was exactly what he was asking.

  “I’m a psychiatrist. I can’t tell one thing from another in the OR. But I’ll tell you what I witnessed. The first offensive filled the hospital for eight days straight. He was…” I shook my head with the memory of him, hour after hour, with the wounded coming by the dozen, a blur of blood and burned flesh. “I’ve never seen anyone work like that, one after the other. Day after day. He got a commendation for it. He also got me.”

  “I don’t blame him for not wanting to do it again,” Bob said.

  “That level of dedication and sacrifice… he brings it everywhere with him.” I wanted to brag about Caden for another hour, and I could have, but we were close to the restaurant. “He went outside the wire.”

  Surgeons weren’t supposed to go off base. It wasn’t safe, and they were too valuable. But after the first offensive, while we were dancing around couplehood, he’d jumped on a medevac when Colonel Brogue’s convoy hit an IED. He’d come back bloody and never talked about what happened.

  “What does ‘outside the wire’ mean?”

  “Off the base. Ask him about it. I wasn’t there. I was just…” I let the sentence melt into a smile. “It was a war. Everything was haywire.”

  Our love had been forged in military routines that offset the hazards of flying mortars and sniper fire. The trouble we were having now, inside a stable civilian life without routine or danger, was the exact opposite of the world we’d met in. We’d have been crazy to not have problems.

  * * *

  “Tina’s on her way,” Bob said as we got in from the cold. “Five of the board will be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Two missing? Milchenko and Karlsson?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “They both live overseas.”

  Before I had the last button undone, Bob moved behind me and took my coat.

  “Thank you,” I said as he gave it to the maître d’.

  I heard Bob’s voice say something nice, but the words got pushed into a perceptual border framing a man standing in the doorway. He wore a navy suit with a wine tie and crisp white shirt. He was pressed, fit, straight-shouldered, and proud.

  I choked back a throatful of spit, losing control of my emotions.

  “Dr. Frazier?” Tina spoke my name from a few light-years away. She must have shown up when I was lost in the vortex of my husband.

  I stepped toward my husband to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. He pulled me forward, holding me up, moving my legs with his intensity. Only one man could do that.

  By my last step, I knew I was right. It was him.

  “Caden.” The name was thick with tears I held back.

  “Greysen.” That voice. How could everyone within earshot not do his bidding?

  “I missed you.”

  He cupped my jaw, and I leaned into his hand like a kitten. I didn’t care who saw it or what they thought. He was home. I was home. It was over.

  I blinked, and a tear fell onto my cheek. Wrong place and time. But I had no control. I di
dn’t sob or blubber, but that drop needed to fall.

  Caden ran his thumb over it, making it disappear as the other eye let one go. “Later. You’ll cry again.”

  “Promise?”

  He nodded ever so slightly and then changed.

  I didn’t understand why the change happened, but it was unmistakable. The hard line of his lips softened. The cold calculation in his eyes turned compassionate. The precision of his posture turned relaxed. A line of concern appeared between his eyebrows, as if my tears upset and confused him.

  At the speed of thought, he went from king to vassal.

  Like that, Caden was gone.

  * * *

  “What are you doing?” he asked as I frantically yanked clothes out of my dresser and threw them on the bed.

  “I’m not calling you Caden. You’re not him.”

  “Hang on, hang on.”

  I went into the bathroom for my toothbrush without letting him tell me what to hang on about. I’d gotten through dinner and the cab ride home. I’d gotten up the damn steps and into the bedroom without saying a word. I wasn’t hanging on another second. Not until he blocked my way out of the bathroom.

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “Tell me why you won’t talk to me.”

  “Because I don’t know who I’m talking to.”

  He put his fingers to his chest. Left hand. The one with the ring. Damn him. “Me. You’re talking to me.”

  He reached for me, but I put up my hands. “Back up.”

  “Okay, I—”

  “What have you done with him?”

  He shot out a laugh and rubbed his eyes. “That’s hilarious.”

  “I fail to see the humor.”