by CD Reiss
“Did I make that signature?”
“No, sir.”
“Who did?”
“I did, sir.”
“Why did you do that? And be honest, please. I don’t want this to be harder than it has to be.”
“I thought you’d get mad that it was a low grade.”
“I would get mad. I didn’t fight for you to be in eighth grade math so you could get fourteen percent of the questions wrong, did I?”
“No, sir.”
“And what about the magazine? Where would an eleven-year-old boy get pictures like that?”
“Brian Muldoon’s brother.” Brian was Irish. He had six brothers and sisters. The Hustler was a third-generation hand-me-down.
“All the Irish do is fuck and have babies, Caden. Don’t forget it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you tell me what you think you’re looking at?”
If I hadn’t been sweating before, I was when he asked me to study the photos.
“A motorcycle.” Mom heaved a breath. I was shaking. “A naked lady on a motorcycle.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Showing her… thing.”
He yanked Mom up to her knees. Her hands clutched the belt, and her eyes tried to tell me everything was all right.
“Your mother was hiding these with the test when I came home. Do you think she’d bother hiding a meaningless thing?”
“No. Yes? I… I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what? The real name?”
He must have wanted me to not call it a “thing.”
“Puh-puh-pussy.”
“No.” He denied my answer, but it satisfied him enough to let Mom back to the floor. “These ‘things’ have names.”
I swallowed. My mother didn’t make a sound. Her silence was for me. I was old enough to know that but too young to forgive her for it.
“Vulva,” I whispered.
“Louder. Like a man.”
“Labia minora.”
“Better.”
“Labia majora.” Tears streamed down my face, but I spoke clearly around the sobs. “Urethral meatus. Clitoris. Vestibule. Introitus.”
“Very good. You’re qualified for a career in gynecology. Now. You have two pairs of scissors. One is for fabric. One is for paper. Cutting paper with fabric scissors dulls them. Paper scissors cut fabric inefficiently. You use the right tool for the right job. When you’re done, your mother will start dinner.”
I picked up the heavy fabric scissors and sliced my favorite shirt in half. After I’d shredded it to rags, I switched scissors and started on the test. Last, I cut up the motorcycles and the women on them, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I’d left their delicate parts intact. I couldn’t bear to slice those. It hurt to think about.
When I was finished, I was sent into the bottle room until Mom finished making dinner.
Chapter Forty-Eight
GREYSEN
I kept walking around the house.
I’d seen him off to a week of training in Fort Bragg, after which he’d be sent to Iraq as part of the troop surge. He’d kissed me at JFK, and I’d breathed him deeply, smelling fresh coffee grounds and the laundry detergent we’d washed his uniform in. The taste of my pussy was faint on his tongue, but once he brushed his teeth and showered, I’d be erased from his body despite his claims of a marital vascular infection. Vitamin G.
He’d said a lot of things in our last day together, and I believed he’d meant every word. When I stopped overthinking everything, in the nether state where wakefulness won’t leave and sleep won’t come, I knew they were all true. He and I were bound together by something more than shared history and compatible pheromones.
I knew him. My instincts felt his presence in the world. He’d meant what he said, but he was torn apart. Pulled away from his feelings, his passions, his doubts. Damon had been forced back into the bag, along with half of what I loved about him.
And his feelings for me? They were locked away even if he said they weren’t. I was a feeling he knew he was supposed to have, a love he believed he had but didn’t understand.
Without him in it, the brownstone was a fancy hotel. I smelled him in the sheets, in the shirts hanging in the closet. His love was in the furniture choices in my office, soaked in the linens, in the things I liked that he’d left for me in the refrigerator. But soon, those things would be gone.
I walked the house in the dark, exploring closets and corners built in 1821 and saturated with the aches and triumphs of the five families that had owned it. In an unused room on the top floor, a window seat held a stash of old New York Times from World War I. The brown paper flaked to the touch, and the pictures were muddled, grainy blobs inside rectangles. I tried to read them, but without the exhausting detachment I showed at work, I couldn’t concentrate. There was no point anyway.
Different time. Different war. Different soldier.
I threw the papers back and wandered again, looking for answers to questions I couldn’t articulate. Loneliness and loss weren’t wandered away.
I ended up in the bottle room. It was bare, flat concrete down to the corners.
I shut off the light and closed the door. The darkness was complete. Heavy. Thick. It partnered with the silence to press against the senses.
Feeling for the wall, I leaned against it, crouching to the floor. Nothing to see, hear, taste, smell. I touched the cold floor to get a sense of my space and reality.
The compulsion to leave was so strong I sucked in a breath and stood without willing myself to. That deep breath, coming after the smell of nothing, brought a new scent so faint it would have disappeared in any other room.
Copper. Iron. Meat. An operating room without the sting of cleansers.
Blood. It was blood.
I turned on the light and inspected the floor. It was spotless.
Eventually, I gave up and went back into the laundry room, where I smelled nothing but fabric softener and dust.
He was landing in Fort Bragg, and I was desperately worried.
* * *
“Look,” the AMEDD recruiter said. I’d finally called. It was the same guy who’d signed him the first time. “Anyone who’s been on a previous deployment gets a battery of psych testing. If he passes, he goes.”
“What tests? Specifically.”
“ASVAB, TAPAS, MEPS. MMPI for meds. Plus an interview. If he had PTSD, we would have caught it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Trust us. We’ve done this before.”
And that was that. Caden was going to do what he did, and the army would do what it did. It was out of my hands.
Soon after I hung up and went upstairs, the phone rang. It was our first night apart. Had Damon punctured the curtain that detached the doctor from the man? Had he freaked out? Was the call from Command telling me to come get this un-soldierly mess?
I ran down the stairs like a woman on fire.
“Honey?”
My mother.
“Mom?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I stared into the sink. It was bone-dry. “I don’t know.”
I knew, but it was too awful a reason. I hadn’t wanted to tell her I’d lost. My battle to not be like her had been won only briefly. In the end, my husband had gone away and left me home to worry and wait.
“Your father says it’ll be fine.”
My father’s brusque voice came on the line. “He’s a doctor. He’s not getting shot at.”
“I’m not worried about him dying, Dad.” I regretted saying that before I was done with the sentence. They’d ask what I was worried about.
Thankfully, my father had a point to make that superseded mine.
“Besides,” he continued as if I hadn’t said anything. “It’s not like it was. Now it’s all tactical strikes. It’s not as messy.”
Sure. A clean war. Because if a foreign army came down Main Street, USA, in an orderly fashion, everyone would be calm an
d the battles would be bloodless.
“He’ll be fine.” I leaned over the counter, flicking a grain of sugar off the marble.
With a click, my mom got on the other line. “You should come stay with us.”
“She has an important job now, Louise.”
“Then I can go there.” Mom sounded as if she’d tried to make this point a few dozen times.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Really. Maybe I’ll come out for a weekend.”
“Bring your brother,” Dad huffed.
“Charles,” my mother said, “I’d like to speak to my daughter.”
“About what?”
I smiled and rubbed my eyes. My persistence had been handed down in my genes.
“Woman talk.”
Dad grunted and hung up the phone.
“Mom, I’m fine.”
“I know you are. I’m not worried about you. I’m never worried about you. It’s Caden. You always said he was a civilian in uniform.”
I bristled. I was allowed to say and think that, but I didn’t want to hear it from anyone else. “He’s more than qualified, and if you’d seen him in Fallujah, you’d know that.”
“Yes, I understand.”
I could almost hear her smile, and I knew why. I was being unreasonably defensive, and she knew it. I sounded like a loyal army wife, which I’d become in spite of all my efforts.
“But, yeah, I’m having a hard time.”
“Come home for a weekend,” she said. “We can talk.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
CADEN
BAGHDAD - APRIL 2007
Baghdad was different from Balad and much the same as I remembered from Greysen’s injury three years before. The facilities were permanent. I had a room, not a trailer. The docs shared a personal computer with spotty, expensive Wi-Fi. I’d been inserted into an established unit as a replacement, and I hadn’t even met my new CO before I heard the first of two Blackhawks drop onto the landing pad.
The buzz dispersed like hornets in a high wind.
And suddenly, I knew what I was doing. A butterbar who went by the unexplained nickname “Toadie” was showing me around when I heard the thup-thup of rotors. I must have snapped to attention like a man waking up from sleep.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re staffed.”
“I want to see triage.”
* * *
Eight at once. IED. The madness and noise of triage had an orderly pattern. Toadie fell away into his own job as I entered into mine, following the last injured man. He was gurgling. Color was bad.
“St. John. 61J.” I gave the medic the code for general surgeon. “What do we have?”
“IED. Fucking mess. Chest wound. Lungs filling up.”
She gave me his vitals as I opened his shirt. Fucking mess was right, but I’d managed worse in poorer conditions.
“Get him prepped for the OR.”
“Hey, what are you doing here?” Male voice from behind.
I turned. White guy in scrubs. Six-three. Bald head shaped like a wedge. I stuck out my hand. “Cap—Major St. John. I’m your new GS.”
He shook. “Captain Quinn. Ortho. Call me Boner. Glad to have you. Scrub-in is third on the right.” As I walked down the hall, Boner called, “Six tonight!”
I turned and walked backward.
He continued. “The roof. Thursday is Beerday.”
I gave him the thumbs-up.
* * *
I pushed into the scrub room. Three surgeons were getting their blues on over their clothes. The fourth was in the process of stripping off a blood-soaked uniform. When she saw me, she paused, clearly unashamed of her mismatched bra and panties.
“You must be the new 61J,” she said, hands on the curve of her hips, ignoring the nurse who held out a gown for her.
She was daring me to look at her body, so I didn’t. I stayed focused on her ochre eyes. “St. John. Caden.”
She held her hands out for the gown. “I hope you live longer than the guy you’re replacing.” She turned around to give the nurse access to the back of the gown.
“Lt. Cash,” a female nurse introduced herself. “Call me Aretha. Sink’s here…” She quickly showed me the layout of the room, and I got to work.
I tried not to think about how the last guy had exited his job. If I died in Iraq, Greysen would find a way to bring me back to life so she could personally kill me.
Thinking about her raging doggedness, I couldn’t help but smile.
Even with thousands of miles between us, her tenacity made me strong.
* * *
I felt good, working on that first chest wound. In control. Sane, mostly. I knew sanity was a slippery concept, but Damon was gone, replaced by a buzz I didn’t know well enough to fear. I didn’t have time to attribute it to the pace of the work or even pure necessity. I only had time to get pieces of metal from a guy’s lungs.
“Need help?” Female voice.
I looked up. It was the half-naked woman from the changing room.
“Almost done.”
“How’s his love muscle?” I must have reacted because she smiled under her mask. “His heart.”
“Little nick right here.” I pointed. “We got it in time.”
“Good find.” She met my gaze over the table. “Those are some pretty eyes you have there.”
“Thanks.” I put my attention back on the patient. “Got them from my father.”
“He must be a handsome guy.”
“He was an asshole, if that matters.”
To my relief, she walked away without answering.
* * *
The docs had set up chairs in front of the rooftop stairway structure. A thick layer of clouds hung over the sky. At Boner’s feet sat a specimen cooler full of half-warm beer cans. A doc with a flat top and a diamond earring on the left handed me a can.
“This is Captain Jackson,” Boner said.
“Call me Stoneface.”
“Thanks.” I took the can of Miller Lite and shook his hand.
“Major McDonnell over here. He’s a fucking star.”
As I shook the hand of the man with curly red hair and boyish cheeks, McDonnell said, “Agent Orange. And I’m no star.”
“You guys and the names.” I cracked the can and tried to catch the foam before it made a mess.
Without warning, the air was filled with a plaintive voice singing in Arabic. It came from a thin stone tower that rose above the rest of the city. The voice hopped from octave to octave, calling all Muslims in earshot to prayer.
“You get used to it.” Another white guy with an all-American haircut and clean cheeks transferred his O’Doul’s to his left hand so he could hold his right out to me. “I’m Timothy Eberhardt.”
“Let me guess yours,” I said as I shook. “Boy Scout?”
“Good guess, but it’s Heartland.”
“Nice one. Who gives these out? So I can avoid them.”
“Harpy,” Boner said. “Our CO.”
“Harpy?”
“Colonel DeLeon,” Jackson said. “She’s all right. You’ll like her.”
“I think I met her in the OR.” I wasn’t shocked or dismayed that a woman was running the unit. I wasn’t concerned with what she was but who she was.
“Smart mouth?” Eagle asked. “Light-brown hair with eyes to match?”
“Body like a—” Agent Orange stopped himself and sipped his beer.
“Yeah. That’s her.”
“A real firecracker,” Heartland said.
“She’d get along great with my wife,” I offered. “Same set of brass balls.”
I loved Greysen’s balls, and truth be told, I loved bragging about them.
“Where’s she holding the fort down from?”
“New York.”
“Civilian?”
“Resigned her commission last year,” I answered. “But she’s from a long line of military, so she gets it. Her father was in the 101st Airborne. Plane jumper.”
&nb
sp; “Badass.” Stoneface tipped his beer in respect. “Mine’s military too. She’s nearly snapped my neck between her thighs a few times.”
“Probably because you eat pussy like a dog lapping a bowl of water,” Boner said.
“What do you know about pussy, cocksucker?”
“Spread your legs, and I’ll show you.”
We all laughed at the final insult. Boner and Stoneface tapped their cans and drank.
The singing stopped, leaving the whipping wind to fill the soundscape.
It was there. The buzzing. The new Thing.
I heard it in the white noise, breathing in my ear like an angry parent. Not weak like Damon, but strong and chaotic. Unfocused. Wordless. Without intention. But there.
I didn’t have Greysen’s willing body to keep me together, and I wasn’t convinced that was a good thing. Damon hadn’t wanted to hurt her, and I’d used his fear and distaste to frighten him away.
This new Thing wanted her pain like a thirsty man wanted water. Damon was gone, but I was still broken in two.
Disappointment became resentment. I walked away to suppress it. These guys didn’t need to see me all wound up. But as I got to the edge of the roof, a hand locked painfully onto my bicep. It was Stoneface. I understood then where he’d gotten his name.
“We stay on this side of the stairs.” He pointed at the concrete structure, then out at the tower where the voice was being projected from. “They have snipers in the minaret.”
From there, they could have picked me off like a duck in a shooting range. Shoot out the star for a prize. I was less than human and more valuable for it.
I joined them in the circle of chairs.
On cue, after prayers ended, the bombs started in the distance. I remembered the sound of mortar fire all too well. So did the Thing I wouldn’t call by name.
“Ah, shit.” Agent Orange took his beer from his lips.
We peered out from behind the structure at the plumes of smoke.
“The Blackthorne guys were talking about a convoy out that way,” Boner said.
