by CD Reiss
“You knew these guys?” Dana asked Trona when we were all sitting. “Was it from Fallujah?”
“Yeah. Threw a football around with this guy.”
“You have a good arm,” I said. “Are you stationed here?”
“Contracting. Can’t beat the money.” He pointed his cup at the window next to Greysen’s. “I live in the apartment right up there.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” Greysen said with a smile. “He’s been living in the apartment downstairs since he met this lady.”
Trona put his arm around Dana, and they shared a kiss.
“At least when he’s here,” she said with a playful pout. “He’s out doing security runs all the time.”
“Fucking nuts out in the Red.” He shook his head.
I let my hand creep over to Greysen’s lap, sliding it over hers. We wove our fingers together.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“What are they calling you here?” Trona poured more wine. “Can’t call you Fobbit anymore.”
“Asshole Eyes,” Greysen said with a scowl.
Trona cracked up. “I’m not even gonna ask.”
“What’s Fobbit?” Dana asked.
“It means he’s an inexperienced rube who doesn’t go over the wire,” Greysen said, swirling her cup. “Which I preferred.”
“Yeah,” Trona said. “After that medevac you were on in Fallujah, I’m surprised you ever went out again. More power to you, man. I drink to your balls.”
“What happened?” Dana asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Not that big a deal.”
“We had sniper fire on a convoy out. He was good. Hit a full bird colonel.”
“Colonel Brogue,” Greysen said.
“Yeah, and civ haji were everywhere. Our guy hit a woman running away. I dragged her into the building we were holed up in, but she was bleeding bad out her leg.”
“Femoral artery,” I added. I didn’t want him to recount this story. Not here. Not ever. But I couldn’t react, or I’d overreact. It was easier to tamp it all down. “It was a mess, but we got there in time.”
“For the colonel,” Trona added. “But that lady with her screaming? Gave away our location.”
I was about to change the subject, but Greysen leaned forward as if she was interested in his story. I put my eyes on my cup. It was half-filled with blood.
“Then what?” Greysen prodded.
“We held them off. But the medic’s trying to put on the tourniquet, and she’s screaming his name, this guy right here.” He indicated me. “Or I thought that was what it was. St. John. Dujon, dujon. Like, okay we get it. You want the doctor. Can we not tell the world where we are?”
“Oh, my God.” Dana was rapt, and Trona loved it.
I tried to take a sip of wine, but the liquid in my cup smelled like copper and discarded tissue.
“We dragged her and the doc into a fucking closet while we waited for a pickup and tried to get things under control. When we opened it…” He paused.
Maybe he was checking my reaction. I didn’t know. The cup was full, and it reeked of death.
“She was dead. The tourniquet held, but there was blood everywhere. Man.”
Greysen’s hand was cold in mine.
“Our interpreter said dujon wasn’t the name on Fobbit’s uniform,” Trona said. “He told us in the chopper, didn’t you hear? It means ‘I’m pregnant.’”
“She miscarried from blood loss.” Greysen’s voice was an electric blanket that warmed the air and fried the mind at the same time. “And it killed her.”
“Dunno,” Trona said.
“That’s right,” I said flatly. “That’s exactly what happened.”
Greysen let go of my hand, and my world narrowed into a long, endless hallway.
“Oh, my God, no more war stories!” Dana cried. “Let’s polish off this bottle. Okay?”
My wife swigged the last gulp of wine and put down her cup. “You guys finish it. I have to be up early tomorrow.”
She got up and went to the steps. I knew that if I didn’t follow right behind, she’d slam the door in my face.
I was right. At the top, she got it halfway closed. I put my hand on it and passed through.
“Get out,” she hissed.
I shut the door behind me. “What’s the problem?”
“You lied. You said she lived. You said everyone lived. You lied to me.”
“So what?”
She turned toward her bedroom, and I knew I wasn’t invited there.
“How does what happened that night affect you?” I asked. “Or us? Or anything?”
“You. Lied.” Her voice was as steady and thick as the air around us.
“I had my reasons.”
“Good night, Caden. Be safe walking back.”
My wife could yell. She could get spitting, kicking, screaming mad. But this? She was stating facts with utter clarity, as if she’d looked at the situation from down the block and decided to cross the street to keep her distance from it.
No.
She never walked away from a conflict.
Anger swelled, stretched, heavy as a water balloon filled to the breaking point.
In two steps, I had her arm clasped in my fingers.
“Don’t touch me.”
The man I’d always been released her, but the buzzing rage heard the hard flatness in her voice and wouldn’t let go.
Hurt her.
“It’s nothing.” I heard myself growl as if I was an observer.
Hurt her until she listens.
“Let me go, or your balls are going to be removed from your body.”
The threat didn’t move me. I wasn’t worried about my testicles. But I made a calculated decision that I had nothing to gain from holding her, and the angry man inside me, the one who was pushing to get out, agreed with the assessment and released her arm.
“You can do anything to me,” she said. “You can hurt me. You can push every boundary I have. But lying? Lying’s a line, and you crossed it.”
“I had to.”
She cocked her head and folded her arms.
“I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Not acceptable.”
“You have no right to be this way. Whether or not a casualty died has no effect on you or us. It’s none of your damn business.”
She was going to try to redefine her business, and I was prepared to answer her point for point, then I was going to fuck the—
“How many times?” She interrupted my train of thought.
“How many times what?”
“You lied about the woman. You lied about the word dujon…”
“I just forgot it.”
“You lied about your father.”
Now I wanted to choke her. My hands flexed into fists and unflexed. She looked at them, then back at my face. Her fearlessness was a clinical condition.
“You pushed too far, Caden. Multiple times. Over years. Lies of omission. Lies of minimization. Lies I don’t even know about. And I let you get away with it. I pretended you hadn’t gone over the line, but I knew. I knew.”
“What’s the fight for, baby?” Baby wasn’t a coo; it was a gunshot, and I was too deep inside anger to mitigate the damage. “You want to sit here all night and grill me about every word I’ve ever said to you? What’s your endgame? You want to split up? Walk away? If I crossed some kind of line with you, let’s talk about how you react when I tell you things. Because you’re pushy. You’re stubborn. You don’t do what you’re fucking told, and you have no regard for me as a separate person. I only exist as I relate to you.”
Anger is always a partner to righteousness, and I was fucking right. She was an impossible woman to deal with. A life-sucker. A divorce waiting to happen. Standing there looking at the floor between us, as still as a predator waiting for an opening. Not to kill me. No, an opening to love me to fucking death.
And yet… I wanted her, and I wanted her to want me. And I
wanted her to move the damned line for the lies the way she moved it for everything else.
And yet… what I wanted was taking a back seat to something much more toxic.
“What?” I leaned toward her. “Nothing to say? Not spouting all the answers? For once?”
That lit a fire under her. “Go home.”
Her anger opened a gate wide, releasing a swarm of hornets. I had to look away so she didn’t see the full-throated rage, and when I did, I saw a paper rectangle on the table.
A sonogram. Early. Under twelve weeks.
It took a split second to analyze it.
I didn’t know what I looked like when I turned back to her, but I was covered in darkness and the buzz, the leash broken, unable to pull back the need to break her.
It took her a single move to get past the threshold to her room. She slammed the door before I could reach her, and the bang of wood hitting wood made the earth shake and tilt.
Chapter Sixty-Three
GREYSEN
At first, I thought he was banging on the door. I thought he was banging so hard the ground shook. I thought he hit the door forcefully enough to shake the plaster from the walls and ceiling with a deep, ear-splitting pow. He must have grown twenty feet tall, bursting through the upper story and the roof. His rage was an explosion of rock and a rain of dust.
I crouched, arms over my head to protect me from his falling debris. It didn’t work. I was knocked over by it. It filled my lungs with fire and smothered me in darkness.
* * *
Greysen, Greysen, Greysen—baby, baby, baby—I want to tell you a story.
* * *
His voice circled the outer reaches of my consciousness. There was blood and black, air thick in my nose and hot in my lungs. A driving cramp in my gut and a sharp ache in my head. I couldn’t move. I thought my eyes were closed, then I blinked. It was so dark I couldn’t tell the difference. I coughed, and a warm flood soaked my pants.
What a time to get my period.
“Greysen?”
His voice. A bark. Close. Five feet? Three?
“Caden.” I was alive. “Where are you?”
“Right here.” His voice seemed deeper in the small space. A low roar. “Can you move?”
I took stock of my extremities. “My arms. There’s something heavy on my legs.”
Glass clinked as he moved toward me. “Can you feel them?”
I felt him near, but there was no light. I couldn’t see, and my head hurt too much to move. “They hurt.”
“That’s good.” He swallowed the last word into a rasp. A growl from deep in his chest. His hand fell on my hair splayed over the floor, gripping and pulling.
He released my hair, and our hands found each other in the darkness. He squeezed my fingers so hard he hurt me, and I became deeply aware of the small space and my inability to move inside it.
“Caden? Are you crying?”
No. This wasn’t crying. He was hurtling air out of himself. This was something deeper. An inner battle I couldn’t fathom.
He uttered a single word. It was rage and danger in a syllable, barked like an animal in a cage.
“No.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
CADEN
The brain craves information. It starves in the absence of light. Pupils dilate like open mouths, crowding the irises until they’re thin rings of color. That’s all eyes are—collectors of information for a brain wired to make sense of the environment with very little data.
Modern people rarely experience complete darkness. Light pollution smothers out the darkness. Even without it, starlight can illuminate the path ahead. A sliver of moon behind clouds sends enough data to the brain to make out shapes.
When there’s nothing, like in a cave or a windowless concrete cellar, the other senses collect more information, cracking open perceptions that are usually shut.
The smack of the mortar shell came at the same moment she slammed the door in my face, and the ensuing heat, fire, and rumble came as I cracked inside, letting the anger take shape, fully formed.
It had a name, but I wouldn’t say it, and getting knocked over by half a wall took the wind out of its appearance. It was half in, half out, like a dog stuck in the cat door.
In the distance, more shells fell. I had to breathe. Take stock. The rubble had formed a pocket of complete darkness. A drop of warm liquid fell over my cheek. I was cut. My hands were free. I touched my face. Glass. I removed what I could. My foot was under something heavy. I shifted it, and a brick came off easily, but when I tried to turn, glass clinked under me, and a sharp pain seared the heel of my hand.
“Greysen?”
She didn’t answer. The wall between us must have crumbled, because her breathing was close. I pulled my sleeves over my hands and crawled to her. My back scraped against something hard. Tight space. Dark. I felt for her body. She was so close. I could smell her. Hear her. I could sense the blood pulsing through her body, but I couldn’t find her.
If she was dead, the Thing would eat me alive in fury.
“Baby. Please.”
Rock. Just rock. Such a small space and such infinite darkness.
A woman I loved in such danger, in such a tight space, and me—helpless to save her.
This wasn’t—
This didn’t—
No. I was a grown man.
I wasn’t—
I didn’t—
“Greysen.”
The smell of blood everywhere. She had to be all right. This couldn’t happen. Not again. Not to me. The blood was copper and broken bodies. It flowed like a river, and it was my fault. The anger with the name I wouldn’t articulate wedged its way out another inch, growling and hissing simultaneously.
No.
“Greysen!”
Her name was a shout in the dark, eaten by a small space without an echo. I didn’t hear a response, but my hearing had been sharpened on the stone of darkness. I would have sworn I heard her heart beating. Maybe it was my own heart. Maybe they were beating with matching rhythms.
I wouldn’t give up on her. Not now. Not ever. I wouldn’t lose anything else in the dark. I’d lost too many women in the dark. Too many had hurt in my hands but out of my sight.
Not Greysen. Never Greysen.
I took a deep breath so I could call louder, harder. Bring her back from the dead if I had to. The air cracked into dust and shards, slicing my windpipe on the way down. I coughed before I could scream her name again.
“Caden.” She was alive. “Where are you?”
Her voice. The sound of an angel choking on sand and broken seashells.
I reached for it and found a handful of her hair. I left myself. I was in a closet. I was in the bottle room. I was trapped in the smell of blood and hopelessness.
“Right here. Can you move?” My voice was swallowed by the air, pressed into impotence. Anger, unreasonable and explosive, pushed against judgment. It howled a single word with both insult and justification.
Dujon.
“I don’t know,” Greysen said. “Where are you?”
Her voice pulled me to reason.
I hadn’t realized how dead still the air was until it moved from the swing of her arms. I found her hand, and the touch wasn’t fortifying. It split the membrane, hitting me like a bomb on an apartment building.
Dujon.
“Can you move?” I asked, focusing on the moment, not the crowd of memories funneling into my consciousness.
She’s pregnant.
She’s pregnant.
“My arms. There’s something heavy on my legs.”
I’m trying to understand her, but nothing makes sense.
Her legs. My wife’s beautiful legs.
Covered in so much blood, I thought she was wearing stockings.
“Can you feel them?” I was on my belly near her, squeezing her hand. I felt her pulse on my fingers, but the buzz was too loud. I couldn’t count.
I blamed the darkness. I blamed my w
eakness.
“They hurt.”
“That’s good.”
“Caden. Are you crying?”
“No.”
I spit the word in a voice of pure instinct and raw fury. Maybe I was crying, but it wasn’t sadness. Oh, no. It was something more powerful and far less manageable. It didn’t have words. Just sounds meant to scare prey into shocked stillness. I was fighting a monster’s release, pushing against two sets of events I wanted to forget while my most recent lucid memory was the love of my life slamming a door in my face.
I reached for her and was greeted with a hard, flat surface. Not stone. Wood.
“It’s the door,” she said. “I think it fell on me, and something’s holding it down.”
A door between us.
Not a wall.
Dujon, dujon
“I’m all right,” she said as if she could feel my panic. “Someone will come.”
Why is she saying my name over and over in the dark?
“If I change, Greysen baby, you have to leave me.”
“What?!” Her alarm echoed in the space, bringing the realization of how small it was.
My heart rate picked up in panic, and my defenses weakened further. The swarm of hornets buzzed, pushing against the force of my will.
“Never see me again.”
It’s not your fault, sweetheart. It’s just—
That slammed door. Her pushed in. The slap of the lock.
“What’s happening?” she asked from far, far away.
“Promise me!” I demanded. “Promise now.”
“No!”
Our hands found each other. I felt for the hard circle of her ring.
—you’re going to have a little sister.
But I wasn’t. Not after the lock of the door.
“Mmm,” I said, barely audible to myself. I sounded like my own hallucination.
“Never.”
