Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  I flipped through the file. My report was on top. “I think you need to hold off on this program until you know.”

  He got pensive on me instead of addressing my suggestion. “Every treatment addressing PTSD focuses on reducing the trauma’s impact by serving the trauma back with a sense of control. Facing fears. Defusing memories.”

  Behind my report was her circular breathing treatment schedule, the BiCam145 dosages, and her questionnaires.

  “It’s got to be done with a teaspoon,” I said. “Not a shovel.”

  “Is that why you didn’t give St. John his syringe?”

  Calling my husband by his last name was a way to detach himself and me from the decision. A cute way to remind me that I was a clinician.

  “No signs of trauma. He looked better on the way out than the way in.”

  “Unlike Linderman,” he said.

  “Unlike Yarrow.”

  “I feel bad.” He drew out the last word as if remorse was a foreign concept.

  “Like I said, I think you should suspend the program.” I got to her application to enter the treatment. Scanned it. “Unless you like feeling bad.”

  “The upside’s bigger than my feelings. Speaking of, how do you feel? Heard you were trapped for hours.”

  “It sucked. However—” I was going to tell him about Caden and facing fears. Defusing memory. Giving control. I was deciding what was Ronin’s business, what would be helpful to the program and thus everyone, and what was too private to share. But I got to the last part of Yarrow’s file and stopped on a card paper-clipped to a report copied from Stars and Stripes. I’d seen her file before but missed this. Leslie Yarrow’s unit had been on the front lines in the second battle of Fallujah.

  “However, being stuck with Caden St. John was tedious?” he said, trying to get under my skin and failing.

  I read while Ronin jabbed me about my husband.

  Yarrow’s unit had been under sniper fire for three days. Surrounded. Trapped in an abandoned orphanage. They were getting picked off one by one until they rallied and made a heroic escape.

  “Are you okay?” Ronin asked.

  A single orange card was clipped to the sheet. A form filled in with stubby pencil. A date in 2003, a dosage, and all her basic info scrawled as if in a hurry.

  “When you were with Intelligence,” I asked, “did they have people embedded on the front lines?”

  He shrugged. “Defense? Sure. Are you supposed to be standing with that leg?”

  “I have two legs.” I handed him the sheet and leaned on my good leg. “This is before you came to Balad.”

  “Yeah.” He scanned the pages and handed them back to me.

  “When we were at Balad, I had two jobs, more or less—evaluate soldiers for PTSD and keep the surgeons on their feet. I came with caffeine shots, vitamins, and amphetamine.”

  He leaned back again, pushing away from the desk. “You saved lives with those shots.”

  “You came with a synthetic amphetamine.”

  “I’ll repeat—those shots saved lives.”

  “And according to this”—I held up the orange card—“Leslie Yarrow got it, probably with the rest of her unit. Helped with knowing if you were being watched, right? It heightens sensory cues, which wakes up the mind for a surgeon. But if you’re being watched by, say, a sniper? You’d know where they were and when they saw you. It was a cure for scopaesthesia. Unless your paranoid fantasies are real.”

  “And thanks to it, they found a way out of an impossible situation. The same way it kept Caden and two other surgeons working in Balad.”

  I sat. Leaned forward. Folded my hands together on the desk. “I don’t believe you.”

  Mirroring me, he leaned forward and folded his hands together on the desk. “I don’t care.”

  “How many others who got that shot are presenting with dissociative disorder?”

  “None who told the truth.”

  Well. There you had it. He knew. Maybe too late, but he knew. I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. I was, in a way, relieved.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were looking at the questionnaires?”

  “You weren’t supposed to know. You would have asked questions, and I didn’t want to answer questions.” He sighed and put his hands flat on the blotter, looking out the window. “My whole career is defined by what I can and can’t say to whomever I’m talking to. There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to tell you. That was why I wanted to bring you into intelligence. One of the reasons. There were more. And don’t look at me like that. This isn’t about you or friendship. It’s not about our past together. It’s about keeping our eyes on the prize. Those dumbasses in Abu Ghraib threw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity out the window. They went from making Iraqi prisoners uncomfortable, which was the idea—you know, just have a woman look them in the eye or tell them what to do—and they went right to torture. Right to forcing them to suck each other off. It was disgusting. We could have won this war in half the time with half the deaths, but no. They didn’t stay in the lines, and now here we are with a private company picking up where the US government had to stop.”

  My face was covered by my hands. I pressed my eyelids down until I saw exploding stars.

  “I’m sorry, Greysen,” he said. “It’s for the greater good.”

  I wouldn’t be able to talk him out of his ideals, no matter how misguided.

  I took my hands off my eyes. “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “You should know you’re doing good work. Worthy work. Don’t just look at what’s gone wrong. Linderman is doing fine still. You know, from what you’ve seen, there’s no way a guy in that serious a mental state is restored like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Until now. We have to understand what happened with Leslie Yarrow and make adjustments. She won’t be the last one.”

  The way he lowered his chin and dropped his voice a touch? He meant Caden.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  CADEN

  I felt great. For the first time since I’d first felt Damon’s hiss or the nameless buzz, I felt truly whole. Six days went by with neither a relapse nor the threat of one. I went on a medevac, and though the heights still bothered me, I did my job and came back without a voice or a sound or an errant perception.

  “You seem weirdly happy,” Boner said over Thursday beers on the roof.

  “It makes me uncomfortable, gotta be honest,” Stoneface added.

  “My wife.” I shrugged. “What can I say?”

  “Thanks for the mental images,” Boner said, tipping his bottle to me in mock appreciation.

  The evening prayer call arced over the city as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon.

  “So,” Stoneface asked, “what’s she doing exactly?”

  “That, my friend, is none of your business.”

  Agent Orange laughed. Boner shook his head. Heartland was on duty, but he would have changed the subject.

  “Nah, I mean… here. What’s that shot she’s doling out?”

  I sipped my beer. That wasn’t any of his business either. Blackthorne had worked out a permissions system that didn’t exactly override army medical, but since it was through the DoD, it didn’t give them the authority to ask specific questions.

  “I don’t know,” I lied, focusing on a grain of truth. I wanted out of the conversation.

  “I’m asking because it’s the fucked-up-in-the-head guys who get it.”

  As usual, I couldn’t get a read on what he was thinking.

  “And when they do, it’s like…” Agent Orange spread out his hands. “Pow. They’re cured.”

  “If they get it,” Stoneface said. “Some don’t. Some she doesn’t do anything with.”

  “I noticed that,” Agent Orange added. Him I could read. He wasn’t accusatory. Not exactly. He was holding his judgment, but the judgment was getting loose.

  “Guys, she works for Blackthorne. Who the fuck knows what they do? It’s not like she tells me
. She’s got NDAs up the ass.”

  “That shot though.” Stoneface shook his head.

  “Fucking miracle,” Boner added.

  “Well,” I said before finishing my beer, “I guess she’s just magic.”

  * * *

  “They’re talking,” I said to Greysen a few days after the rooftop beers.

  We’d had a dozen casualties come in overnight, and one had been flagged for the Blackthorne psych. Everyone had watched as she spoke to the guy, and when she didn’t give him the shot, they dispersed like a crowd after the firetrucks left. I caught her outside the hospital before she got back on the truck to the offices.

  “Why?” she asked. “Because we haven’t spent a night together in over a week?”

  It had been busy, and our schedules hadn’t overlapped. It sucked, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.

  “About your miracle shots.”

  In the desert wind, her hair crossed her face like a web. “It’s not a miracle. It’s research and preparation.” She faced into the gust to clear the hair out of her eyes.

  “They don’t know why some people are getting it and not others. Or if it’s going to contraindicate anything they’re prescribing.”

  “I’ll tell my boss. It may be something PR has to handle.”

  An errant strand crossed her face, sticking to her bottom lip. We didn’t touch or show affection publicly, but I moved it without thinking.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  The whoosh of the wind almost drowned her out. We stood in broad daylight, surrounded by people walking in and out of the hospital. But we were totally alone.

  “What happens if I slip back?” I said.

  “Back?”

  “If I crack. If the split comes again.”

  Her brow knotted. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  “How do you know?”

  She shook her head slightly, slowly, thinking about her answer just a little too fucking hard.

  “You don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try me.”

  She looked around, checking for ears and eyes. I led her to a window ledge wide enough to sit on.

  She pulled the hair off her face and took a deep breath. “You’re in a group that developed dissociative disorder because you had previous trauma. You’re the only one who had a chance to relive the event while being talked through it. You faced your fear and got control. You’re the only one who’s been made whole.”

  I waited for more. Some proof. Some studies. Some evidence that it wasn’t coming back. I got none of that. All I got was a look of devotion, which was nice but no cure for my concern.

  “So, you don’t know shit.”

  “No. Not really. But, Caden…” She reached for me, but I didn’t return the affection.

  “I don’t know how I ever lived like that,” I said. “If it comes back, I don’t know what I’ll be. Loving you isn’t going to be enough to fix it, and I can’t do it again. I won’t.”

  What was I threatening exactly?

  It didn’t matter. I’d fought enemies I couldn’t see because they were inside me. The memory of the splits, the constant battles, the lack of sleep, the torment of feeling that there was something hostile I couldn’t escape was too much.

  “I know you’re scared.”

  “If I slip back, will you give it to me? The shot? Will I get it?”

  “You’re not going to slip back.”

  “I’m not playing this game with you. Yes or no?”

  Through the veil of hair whipping over her face, I held her eyes with mine. The wind took on a rhythm that got louder and louder. I wouldn’t move until she answered.

  The rhythm turned into the thup-thup-thup of choppers. Paramedics ran out to meet new casualties. I’d be managing life and limb in minutes.

  “Grey,” I said urgently.

  “There’s a dose with your name on it.”

  Was that enough reassurance? I decided it was.

  “Thank you,” I said in an exhale of relief.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  GREYSEN

  Standing in front of the medical refrigerator, I held his syringe.

  CADEN ST. JOHN

  145-361-9274

  To be given soon after an event as described in section 54a. Breathing methodology B2.

  A placebo, right?

  Like Yarrow’s.

  Supposedly.

  He had to medevac like everyone else. He was exposed to traumatic situations every few days. Which one would tip him? Which one would shut him down or split him apart? Was this a cure for a man who was whole? Or a detonator for an unprotected mind?

  “Lunch?”

  I jumped. Ronin peered in from the hall.

  “You scared me.” I put the syringe back.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Just… dosages. Making sure we’re consistent.”

  “We’re not. They’re different for everyone depending on height, weight, gender, how long we treated them stateside.” “The medical staff is asking what the shots are about. How are they supposed to be sure it won’t react negatively with something they’re administering?”

  “Legitimate concern, but we covered it in trials.”

  “Why everyone who needs it isn’t getting it.”

  He shot out a derisive laugh. “Try giving it to someone who hasn’t had the prep and see what happens.”

  “What happens?”

  “Usually nothing. Usually.”

  * * *

  Night.

  Caden and I on his narrow bed, bodies draped over each other. His chest rising and falling under my head. The beating of his heart. His fingers drifting over my shoulder as the doors of my mind clicked gently shut, one by one, in surrender to sleep.

  I knew the sound of choppers overhead. I could hear them from miles away. I could tell if they were going to land on the north pad or by the hospital. I could tell a Blackhawk from an Osprey, speeding to save lives from a standard landing.

  Caden’s hand stopped moving just before I heard it. Blackhawk. If it came from the south, it was going to the airfield. If it came from the west, it was touching down on the hospital landing pad.

  We remained twisted together, frozen as the thup-thups got louder, our full attention on the sky.

  * * *

  The day had started normally, but the insurgents had had a different plan. I overheard the soldiers and marines as they came in. US positions had been hit on four fronts. Massive casualties.

  In Balad, I could have helped. If no one needed a psychiatrist, I could push paper, carry containers, take orders.

  In Baghdad, I felt useless. Men were coming in torn apart, bloody, screaming for their buddies, and I couldn’t help. Couldn’t even talk to them until a doctor found a flagged file. Then Dana would come with the BiCam and I’d have a purpose.

  I went to the chow hall to get out of the way and found Dana at a table with a cup of coffee and a gossip magazine.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What are you reading?” I sat down.

  “Anna Nicole Smith died. So sad.”

  “Yeah, that’s terrible. Aren’t you supposed to be waiting at the office until they open a flagged file?”

  “I brought everything,” she said, tapping something between her legs. I looked under the table. It was a big medical cooler. “She was thirty-nine. Overdose.”

  “Yeah.” I blew on my coffee. It looked like Dana didn’t have the kind of gossip I was hoping for. “How’s everything with Mr. Trona?”

  She flipped a page, eyes still on the magazine. “Went on a security detail two days ago.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “He was on the run that was ambushed this morning.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know he was part of that.”

  “Did you know Anna Nicole Smith dropped out of school at fourteen?”

 
“Yeah. I mean, no.” I went from agreement to honesty in four words. A teardrop fell onto her magazine, leaving a dark-gray burst. “Do you want to go check the hospital? See if he came back?”

  I handed her a tissue. She took it without looking up.

  “There’s still no word.” She turned the page. “But I’m sure they’re going to be fine once they get a medevac in.”

  “The medevacs have been back and forth. Maybe he’s back.”

  “Nothing’s gone out since the one that got shot down.”

  She did have the gossip I was looking for but not what I’d been hoping for.

  There was no delicate way of asking if there had been a doctor on the medevac or if that doctor was my husband. Worry hardened over my confidence, crystalizing like ice on the window as Dana commented on every page of the magazine to distract herself.

  Had Caden been on that Blackhawk?

  I was cold and brittle, useless to Dana or anyone.

  He wouldn’t have gone up with casualties coming in. Even if they’d had an injury they needed a surgeon for, they couldn’t possibly have spared him. Right?

  He’d just been made whole again. God wouldn’t take him away so soon after, would he?

  The building trembled in answer to my question. The helicopter pad was above us, and something was coming or going. I leaned to look out the window. A Blackhawk with a big red cross on the tail sped across the sapphire sky.

  My beeper went off.

  “We’re on,” I said. “I’ll help you with the cooler.”

  * * *

  “Fucking nightmare,” DeLeon said to a nurse as she passed. Dana and I carried the cooler between us. “Wifey,” she barked, peeling off the nurse and redirecting herself toward me.

  I stopped short, jerking Dana to a stumble.

  “You have three flagged on their way.” DeLeon softened. “It was a rough ride. They’re going to need you.”