by CD Reiss
When Caden and I had been deployed together, a million years ago in 2004, we’d had inconsistent schedules. They’d been posted on a white board behind the nurses’ station. If either of us noticed a crack of time where we could eat a meal together, we’d put a red dot by the other’s name for the cafeteria or a T to meet in his trailer.
Baghdad had a similar setup. I didn’t have my schedule posted, but there was a red R by Caden’s. He was calling me.
* * *
He opened the door and stood to the side so I could come in, then closed it behind me. I spun around and kissed him so hard and so fast it took him a second to catch up.
“It works,” I said, peppering him with kisses. “All of it. It works.”
“What—?”
“The breathing. The shot. Everything.” I dropped my voice, remembering the thin walls. “God, I need you to fuck me now.”
He threw me on the bed and stood over me. I hadn’t taken a second to look at him before kissing him, but at that angle, I saw a shadow of Cold Caden’s expression. The Not Damon. Always there, even with Damon gone.
I toed off my boots as he undid his belt.
“Caden,” I said, “if Damon’s gone, was he replaced with something else?”
He froze. I’d hit on something I hadn’t known I was aiming for.
“Tell me,” I said, opening my voice to accept an answer I wouldn’t like hearing.
“There’s something.” He whipped his belt out of the loops. “It doesn’t have a name.”
“Damon didn’t have one at first.”
He undid his button and zipper. “This one’s too angry to have a name. It wants to destroy everything. It’s dumb and pissed off, and I have a handle on it.”
“So, I shouldn’t be scared?” I didn’t feel scared.
He bent over and yanked down my waistband, whispering with a rumble, “I’ll let you know. I can’t welt your ass, or everyone will hear,” he said. “But you’ll cry anyway. You’ll cry like you’ve never cried.”
This was Cold Caden.
I could fix this man, but when he talked like that, I didn’t want to.
“Always make me cry,” I said as he tied off the tubing. He looked down at me, mouth firm. “Always find my edge.”
“No talking.” He held up the surgical clamp so I could see it. “Not unless you’re telling me to stop. Understand?”
“Yes.”
He calculated, blue eyes flicking side to side across my defenseless body.
“I saw Linderman. And I saw you with Yarrow. You want to do that to me. You want to make me your patient.”
So businesslike he could have been closing off a bleeding artery, he peeled off his shirt and stepped out of his pants until he was wearing nothing more than his dog tags. Wedging himself between my legs, he kissed my cheek and murmured, “Your pain is beautiful. If you fix me, will I still think so?”
* * *
“I want the shot you gave Linderman,” Caden said quickly, as if he didn’t want to think too hard about it.
The afternoon sun shot through the window grates. We were dressed and satisfied. He was himself again, the two halves joined by my pain.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I took a deep breath. He hated talking about his childhood. “It’s for when you look like Linderman or Yarrow. Not for random Tuesdays.”
“I’ll have to get traumatized then.”
“Hush, you.” I poked him in the chest, and he held me tight.
“I want you to traumatize me.” He tickled me, and I laughed.
“Stop or you’ll traumatize me.” I pushed him away, but he caught me and threw me on the bed, laughing, kissing my face and neck.
The knock at the door interrupted us.
He snapped his head around. “What?”
“Um, hey!” It was Dana. “Is Dr. Greysen in there?”
Caden opened the door. My PA hugged a clipboard.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“It’s Yarrow.”
* * *
“Forty-five minutes ago,” Dana said as we strode through the hospital doors. “She seemed fine.”
“Why did you give her the BiCam without me?”
“They had a space on the next chopper out. I knew you wanted to give it to her before she left. I came by your husband’s door, but the bed was squeaking.”
I’d been warned about the thin walls and was about to give her a talking-to about procedures when I heard the screams. We ran down the hall.
An ICU bed twisted at an angle next to a fallen IV tower. A signature of blood streaked the floor, and at the end of it, three MPs held a red-faced Yarrow on her stomach as she screamed. They weren’t hurting her, but there was murder in her voice.
“Don’t! Don’t do it to me!”
“Wait!” I called to the MPs.
I ran, slipped on the blood, and fell, getting my wrist out of the way in time to land on my elbow. I scurried to her, getting on my knees. She’d been fine, just fine, a few hours ago. She’d been smiling and calm. Now she’d bitten her tongue and was bleeding out of her mouth.
“Ma’am,” the MP said, “we have to move her out.”
“Hang on. It’s Doctor Frazier, Leslie. Can you see me?”
She looked at me. Or to be more accurate, her eyes landed in my direction.
I wanted to reach into her and pull out her pain. I wanted her to watch me wrestle it down and kill it for her. But it wasn’t ever that easy. Ever.
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Please.”
“I won’t hurt you.”
“Don’t let him do it to me again.” She tried to get loose, but the MP held her more tightly.
I leveled my gaze at her. “You’re sa—”
“Ma’am! Stand away.”
“Don’t let him hurt me!” Yarrow shouted. “Tell him tomorrow.” Tears ran across the bridge of her nose and mixed with the blood.
“Not today. Not tomorrow.”
“If you talk nice to Daddy, he listens sometimes.”
“He’s dead, Leslie. He died alone and miserable.”
She broke down in tears. The doc on staff swabbed her arm and gave her a sedative.
I turned my attention to the MPs. The one who had told me to get away was firm but not without compassion in his expression.
“Be gentle with her,” I said. “Please.”
“We will be.”
Caden stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. I couldn’t look at him. He was my strength and stability. I was a buoy in a storm, and he anchored me to the sea floor. But he’d gone through the same treatments as Yarrow and gotten a placebo for the same reason. Knowing he could turn into a screaming face on the hospital floor was too much to bear.
* * *
“You already signed off on the shot.” Dana articulated every word as if speaking more slowly would help me understand. She had her hands folded between her knees, and she sat on the edge of the chair on the other side of my desk. “If she left without it, the paperwork would be wrong.”
“I am aware of that. Thank you. From now on, BiCam is not to be administered without me.”
“So, I should have knocked?” Confrontation with a side of sarcasm, because of course, who knocks on a bedroom door when they can hear the bed squeaking? People have shame.
“Yes, you should have knocked.”
Her eyes went just a little wider.
“Dana.” I folded my hands on my desk. “People fuck. They do it behind closed doors, in beds that sometimes squeak.”
“Awkward.”
“Would you rather feel awkward or have an episode like that?”
“You don’t know it was the shot. You said it was a placebo.”
“I know.”
“Was it a placebo or not?”
I tapped my fingertips together. The pamphlet said it was a placebo. The staff at Blackthorne NY had said it was placebo. It shouldn’t have affected her at all.
The door clicked open behind Dana, and Ferhad poked his head in. “New York is on in Conference Room Three.”
* * *
“We need the syringe,” Ronin said from the screen.
“We have it,” I said. I’d already stowed the syringe with its blue-tinted hub to send back.
“I need a report with every detail. The circular breaths. The shot. Everything.” He leaned on the end of a long, shiny table with chairs around it. Through the windows on his right, New York was overlaid with late morning clouds. “That’s not supposed to happen.”
I leaned against the conference table in Baghdad with the same sun under the same sky in the windows. “Was it a placebo?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
“Are you sure there wasn’t a mix-up?”
“We’ll test it and let you know.”
“I don’t care what you test. What about Leslie? What are you going to do for her now?”
He shook his head slowly. Nothing he could do. Out of his hands. A woman had bitten her tongue bloody, but if it happened again, it was just because shit happened.
“I want you to test Caden’s,” I said. “Before I administer it, I want you to make sure it’s a placebo.”
“I can’t unseal it.” Putting his hands behind him, he grabbed the edge of the table. “That would defeat the purpose.”
“How about I just don’t give it to him?”
“I’ll see if we can send a new one. How is that?”
“Fine.”
“Fine. Moving on.”
“Moving on,” I agreed.
“You can’t tie your PA’s hands. She has to do her job.”
“She didn’t waste any time going to you, did she?”
“We only hire the best, Greysen. If the job needs to get done, it needs to get done. She doesn’t need a babysitter.”
Maybe I was being ridiculous. I had signed for the placebo because I thought it was fine. I would have given it to Yarrow even if Dana had knocked on the door. Blaming her was useless and adding another layer of bureaucracy to our jobs wouldn’t undo it. Prevention was in Dana seeing what had happened. She wouldn’t want to be responsible for it happening again.
Chapter Sixty-Two
CADEN
Only the bottom ten feet of the Green Zone were actually green. High walls and barbed wire didn’t keep out the rockets and mortars. I knew from personal experience that a suicide bomber could get past the gates and checkpoints.
The Green Zone was at least as dangerous as Balad Air Base had been three years before, yet it was different. Not more or less. Just different.
When I had been at Balad, Greysen was close to me. She was a major in the army. She was protected.
At Balad, I’d been sane.
Now, I wasn’t.
I’d said a lot of things in New York when the whispers started, but I’d never let myself believe that I was truly insane. I’d admitted to a problem. A temporary illness. A set of symptoms curable with the right treatment.
But when I saw Yarrow crawling on the floor, overtaken by fears she thought she’d overcome, I called her insane in my mind. I had compassion for her plight, but at the same time, I categorized her neatly. She was crazy.
It was a dismissal, and I didn’t realize I was doing it until I recognized the child’s pleas that came out of her mouth. A woman’s voice with a child’s desperation. An identity twisted backward on itself.
What was the difference between her and me?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
I came to this at my most lucid, right after tying my wife to the bed, but two days later, when the buzz started swarming, the reality of it had to be shut away. It had to be denied. I grabbed control, and the diligence it took to hold that control meant what it always did.
I had no feelings one way or the other about whether or not I was sane. I had a job to do. The Thing that buzzed and sometimes had a name sucked all the worry and fear into itself, leaving me in peace.
It was a great system even if it was crazy.
When the rockets fell after the midnight prayer, I got dressed. The casualties got to the hospital as the second round shook the earth.
“That was close,” the paramedic said, wheeling in an Iraqi civilian who’d had a wall fall on his arm. He stopped where I told him, and the nurse cut the man’s sleeve open while I got his vitals.
“Where were you?” I asked as I checked him over.
“At my daughter’s house in Kardat Maryam,” he said in accented but excellent English.
I didn’t have a good sense of where the neighborhoods began and ended, but that was close to Greysen’s apartment. It was late. She’d be home.
The nurse opened the sleeve.
“This hurt?” I pressed a spot on his swelling forearm.
He nodded vigorously.
“X-ray,” I said to the nurse. “This is Boner’s.” I turned back to the patient. “We’re going to x-ray your arm, and an orthopedist is going to take a look at you.”
“Yes. All right.”
“Was the neighborhood hit badly?”
“The house is half off.”
“And the buildings around it?”
I was sorry about his daughter’s house, but I needed to know if my wife was on her way into the ER or under a pile of rubble.
“Nothing. Like God was protecting them.”
* * *
I didn’t believe in God without Greysen. Didn’t buy his protection or his love. My faith only went as far as her well-being. It would snap back if anything happened to her.
I lay awake in the hours before dawn with the Green Zone quiet and my patients recovering. She was all right. She would have come through the doors if she’d been injured.
But the buzz didn’t believe it. The buzz needed to check before it let me sleep. I was on medevac duty in three hours, where I’d sit in a room waiting for a nine-line that might never come. I’d stare down the black swarm. I’d keep it locked up while it pushed against its boundaries, forcing me to acknowledge its existence, while I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t out of my fucking mind.
I was in my room, pacing. Pretending I had it under control. I wasn’t panicked as much as I knew this wasn’t right.
I tried to call her. The signal here was so bad calls dropped before they rang, and the one time I got through, my wife didn’t pick up.
The shelling had stopped. I was off duty. If she was in danger, I’d know it by now. She would have been wheeled in.
And yet…
And yet…
You can’t take care of her.
I froze.
The buzz didn’t coalesce into Damon’s voice. There wasn’t a question in it. It wasn’t immature and cowardly. The buzz growled its words. It was angry. I felt its rage like a knife in my thoughts, not a cloud over them.
What would it be to unleash this Thing?
I snapped up my jacket.
* * *
I rang the bell outside her apartment. When she didn’t answer, I took inventory of the wall. There were no streetlights, but the moon showed me no way to scale it. I pressed it again. If she didn’t answer in sixty seconds, I’d check the perimeter. Maybe there would be a way to climb over in the back.
The light went from blue to yellow. Her light.
Voices. A woman and a man. The blade cut through my thoughts again.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Not Greysen. The blade retracted, but I was aware of its presence in the sheath.
The little window behind the gate opened, and a man’s face looked through. “Who’s there?”
“I’m looking for Greysen.”
“That’s Caden,” the woman’s voice said. “Her husband.” It was Dana, chipper as always and, if I had to make a guess, a little tipsy.
The door snapped open. I recognized the man from a football game in Fallujah. With a hairline that had receded a f
ew inches since the last time I saw him, he looked as if more than three years had passed.
“Pfc. Trona.”
“Hey! Captain Fobbit.” He held out his hand after Dana closed the gate behind me. “Oh, sorry. Major. Got your leaves, I see.”
The front yard’s hanging lights were on, and the little table had one plastic cup and a bottle of wine. Dana had the other cup in her hand.
“Yeah. I heard this neighborhood took some shelling.”
“A little west of here.”
“Everyone all right?”
He put his arm around Dana. “All good. I thought you went home.”
“Didn’t last.”
“Greysen’s upstairs,” Dana said as my wife’s door opened on the veranda above.
Greysen leaned over the railing in sweatpants and slippers, her back bathed in light from her apartment. The army T-shirt was worn to gauze, and she had to cross her hoodie over her hard nipples. “Caden?”
She hustled down, zipping her sweatshirt, and I went to the bottom of the stairs to meet her. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“I’m fine.”
“Come sit,” Trona said, “have some wine.”
Dana reached under the table for the sleeve of cups. “Yeah! Hang out.”
Neither Greysen nor I answered. I couldn’t stop looking at her body. The brown eyes, warm in the chilly night, her feet in her slippers. The perfectly-shaped toes in front, a genetic gift, with the callouses from hard work in the back. Her hair was a nest from sleep, and her eyes were puffy. I didn’t need to see the scar under her shirt or inside her right wrist to know they were there. This was what a woman looked like when she’d lived her life fully. The choices she made were all over her body and her manner.
“Sit, sit!” Dana said. “Was it busy at the hospital after the shelling? We didn’t get a call that one of ours came in.”
“Not too bad,” I said with my eyes on my wife. I was so intent on her I didn’t notice the buzz or concern myself with the angry voice.
Greysen sat on the bench and took a cup from Trona. She thanked him and, with a glance and a smirk, invited me to sit next to her. The night was quiet except for the wind and the crickets that dotted the white walls of the building. The buzz had been tamed for the moment. The woman I’d married was safe and beautiful.
