Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  “Wait!” I called before she could turn her back on me.

  “You’re asking about him,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “I don’t have time to give you a hug and a pat on the back.”

  “I know.”

  “Four hours ago.” Her voice was flat and emotionless. Just the facts. “The medevac he was on was shot down over an active zone. We have reports of multiple fatalities and casualties, military and civilian, including chemical burns.”

  “Is he—”

  “He’s not dead, far as we know.” A nurse pulled her away, but she called back, “Keep it together, Wifey. We need you.”

  * * *

  Trona was one of the first off the medevac. Third-degree burns from his right shoulder to his fingertips. Right behind him, children came without their mothers. Soldiers with uniforms burned off. Paramedics with blood drained from their faces and cheeks hollowed out as if joy had been sucked from their mouths.

  A paramedic left the ER and promptly vomited on the floor.

  “I’ll get towels,” Dana said.

  I ran up to him. “Hey,” I said, bent over so I could see the long drop of saliva from his profile. “Come sit.”

  He listened to me. I wasn’t an officer without a commission. I wasn’t an interloper. My status as a contractor didn’t matter to either of us. I could listen to him, and he could distract me from worrying about Caden.

  “It was so fast,” he said. “One minute we’re landing; the next, we’re crashing. Me and the doc get out and we don’t know what to do first.”

  The doc must have been Caden. I didn’t react. At least I tried not to.

  “I take the guys on the Phrog, and he goes into the street. Got shot at almost right away.”

  I clutched the fingers of my left hand in my right so tightly my ring pressed against my pinkie.

  “But he tripped over this woman…” He took a deep breath in an attempt to keep it together. “Saved his life, but she was…” He shook his head.

  “And you?” I said.

  “She was melted.”

  I let him see it in his mind for a few seconds before steering him back. “You took care of the pilot and copilot?”

  “Yeah. And two other medics. All fine. Not bad. Minor shit. But we were stuck. All of us. And it was…” He shook his head instead of using words.

  “Greysen!” Dana called. She waved me toward the ICU. “Pfc. Karlson’s in recovery.”

  “He was one of mine!” the paramedic exclaimed. “I pulled him out! Is he all right?”

  “They don’t put dead men in ICU,” I said.

  “Go find out!” He practically pushed me off my chair. “Then let me know.”

  He was suddenly like a kid, and I was suddenly carrying the weight of Caden’s absence.

  “The doctor,” I said before walking away. “Is he all right?”

  “He was when we left him.”

  They’d left him there, probably to make room on the Blackhawk.

  I followed Dana into the ICU. She had the shot on a tray by Karlson’s bed.

  I put on my game face.

  If Caden was dead, I’d know from the way the sky shattered.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  CADEN

  I agreed to land under fire because I was there to get people off the ground, not run back to the Green Zone with my tail between my legs. And yeah, I was terrified. I’d imagined, more than most people, falling out of the sky. It was number one on the list of ways I didn’t want to die.

  But I’d medevaced dozens of times. Every time I went up, it got easier.

  We were circling around a freeway with a hole in the center and debris at the edges. I couldn’t say how close to the ground we were when we were hit, but my stomach had already flipped from the descent, then we started spinning.

  It wasn’t anything like I’d thought it would be. I’d always imagined the fall would be quiet and empty, with nothing but my thoughts and regrets. But it was loud. Centrifugal force pulled me against my seat, and I didn’t have an inward-looking thought in my head. I heard and understood the pilot’s mayday call. I saw the paramedics with utter clarity and noted that the instruments were all strapped down. I was as lucid as I’d always feared, but I was not afraid. My brain was too busy.

  The Blackhawk screwed itself into the ground not far from the hole in the freeway, bending and creaking as a billion dollars in metal bowed around me. The prop smacked into the dirt, creating a ditch.

  Then it stopped.

  Arms. Legs. Fingers. Toes. Eyes. I took inventory of my body and senses. I was sideways. My ears buzzed, but it wasn’t a discrete anger roaring to break free. It was just my ears.

  “Doc?” A paramedic leaned over me. Frankie Beans. I knew him. Soft face. Brave heart.

  “I’m good.” I pressed the buckle of my belt and shrugged off the straps. Frankie helped. I moved slowly in case I had a break I couldn’t feel. I’d ache in the morning for sure. “Who’s hurt?”

  “Unger took a hit to the head.”

  “No vital organs,” I joked, crawling across the cracked space to what had been the front.

  “Fuck you,” Unger, the copilot, said. Blood covered his face, and his temporal vein was still gushing.

  “Everybody out!” our pilot shouted. “Move!”

  He shoved paramedic Mari Barron out his window, handing her box of supplies out behind her. Frankie was already putting pressure on Unger’s head.

  “Doc!” the pilot shouted. “You! Now!”

  I grabbed my case and let him push me out.

  * * *

  I was just a guy, not fearless, and I was no hero. But I was pretty good at my job under pressure. Everything narrowed down into tight focus. I made the decisions I was supposed to make and let the warriors do the rest. The wounded and the medical staff were put in a concrete bunker with stripped electrical circuits on one wall that used to route power to the highway’s lights. I took care of men, children, and women—Iraqi, American, and one Australian.

  “Trona,” I said, leaning over the contractor. He’d taken a bullet in the arm. Clean exit. “Didn’t expect to see you on the job.”

  “After a building fell on you, I didn’t expect to see you ever.”

  The paramedics had cleaned him up. I started on the sutures. “We have a way of living through stuff, I guess. This is going to hurt.”

  “More than it already does?”

  “Probably not. But you’ll throw a football again.”

  “They were everywhere,” he said as I worked. “I never saw anything like it. Benito got his head blown off right in front of me.”

  That would explain the blobs of green-gray on the front of his shirt.

  “We’re going to get you back,” I said.

  “It was quiet,” he said. “We avoided Route Irish. I thought—” He cut himself off as I finished up.

  “You thought you were safe.”

  He shook his head quickly. “Never safe, right?”

  “Sometimes you’re safe.”

  “I have to get Dana out of here.”

  “I know how you feel, man. I know how you feel.” I took an extra second with my hand on his arm. I had nothing to offer him but that time.

  As I got up, a sniper bullet grazed my back. It burned.

  “Doc!” Trona yelled.

  Mari scrambled over to me as I crouched.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’ve got to stay low.” Mari checked me out, ripping open the back of my shirt. “This is going to hurt.”

  “She said.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she mumbled as she checked the wound. “He missed your vertebra by a quarter inch.”

  “Easier to miss it than to hit it, right, Trona?”

  “Right,” he grunted. “When are they coming?”

  The light from the tiny square window had gotten long and bright as day waned. A medevac wouldn’t land under fire a second time.

  “Soon,” I li
ed. “They’ll pick you up soon.”

  “I’m not worried about me,” he said, gritting his teeth against pain. “I don’t want them shooting you, bro. We need you.”

  * * *

  The first medevac landed just before midnight. Mari and I stayed behind to fit in more wounded.

  I didn’t know what was going on outside the little cinderblock building, but it was quiet for long stretches leading up to a string of pop-crack-pop, then more silence. I had blood and dirt all over me. The room stank of bodily fluids, gunpowder, and flesh.

  In the middle of the night, looking at the sky through the glassless window, I’d gotten lost in what some might have considered prayer.

  I’d thanked the capital-U Universe for letting me be there to help, for letting me live, for the men who protected me so I could patch people up.

  I’d thanked it for my clarity of mind. The end of the buzz of anger and the hum of cowardice. I was whole, and for that, I counted the stars in Orion’s belt and thanked them for Greysen. I could die in an hour, but I’d die myself as one man, one unconflicted consciousness.

  The moans of the wounded mixed with the high-pitched creak of crickets just as the thup-thup of a medevac came over the horizon. We mobilized everyone to move.

  Trona got up on his own and flicked a piece of Benito’s brain off a front button.

  I had a young boy, about the same age as my qunbula kid, with an exploded foot. When they’d brought him to me, I’d frozen for a second with the memory but had shaken myself out of it.

  Not the same kid. Obviously.

  “Don’t go,” he said with panicked eyes as the helicopter landed. Decoding the Arabic took a second.

  “I bring you.” I was sure I’d gotten it wrong, maybe telling him he was bringing me, but he understood well enough to calm down.

  “Doc,” Mari called, helping a man with an open wound for a leg onto a stretcher, “we’re out.”

  I picked up the kid with the shattered foot and carried him to the medevac. Shots were fired. I kept running, looking straight ahead, and fell.

  Chapter Seventy

  GREYSEN

  It was three in the morning. We were in a lull created by the fact that we couldn’t get a medevac out to pick up the last of the wounded and two medical staff. One of whom was my husband.

  The hardest thing I’d ever done was sit still in that hospital. Especially since I knew he wasn’t that far away. Especially since I had working legs and feet. I couldn’t do a damn thing, really. I’d never get there before they could send a medevac out, and leaving would make it all worse. Logically, I was exactly where I needed to be.

  Yet I felt a physical pull toward him. When I went outside to get air, I saw the three bright stars of Orion’s belt. Caden was under the same sky, and he was looking with me. He was my blue sky, my clear day, the protective shell over my world. At night, we were strung together by the stars.

  “How’s Karlson?” Ronin stood next to me, steamed and pressed, looking at the sky as if trying to figure out what I saw.

  The beating of helicopter wings rose above us. It wasn’t the first time I’d hoped it was a medevac going out for Caden. I’d given up on hope in favor of trust that he’d be back.

  “Fine,” I said. “And Humbert. Yarrow’s the only one who fell apart.”

  “Good, good.”

  The helicopter took off, a black mass blotting out the dots of light and disappearing like hope.

  “They’re going to get the last of them,” Ronin said.

  “Thank you,” I said to the stars.

  “Past two days were like Balad Lite.” He shook a cigarette out of a pack and offered me one.

  I took my eyes off the sky to decline the smoke. “We didn’t even know what we were looking at then when it came to mental trauma.”

  “Fuck, we didn’t.” He lit up. “We knew from Vietnam. Korea. But they weren’t real soldiers, right? We kicked them out and didn’t treat them. We pretended trauma was for pussies. Real men bucked up and went back onto the field. Played the game and won.”

  It was his turn to look pensively into the sky.

  “What’s your deal, Ronin? You’re a callous asshole except when you’re not.”

  He shrugged and blew out a cone of smoke. “I’ve seen things I never want to see again, and I didn’t do shit. Didn’t say shit.” He tapped his ash. A single bright ember curled away in the wind and vanished. “You should have come to Abu Ghraib. You would have said something.” He took a pull of his cigarette. “You would have saved me.”

  “And going up there would have destroyed me.”

  Smoke came from his lips when he laughed. “You? Nah.” He stamped out his butt. “Nothing breaks you.”

  I looked at the night sky, waiting for the one man who made Ronin wrong. “Did you have PTSD from Abu Ghraib?”

  “I’m just trying to balance the scales.”

  “How noble.” I wrapped my sweater around my chest against the coldest part of the desert night.

  “And futile.”

  “I’m going to wait inside.”

  He turned to walk with me, opening the door so I could pass.

  “This was a shitstorm,” he said. “It’ll be a good time to give Caden his shot.”

  “No fucking way.” I went through without looking back.

  He caught up to me in front of the reception desk. “Don’t you want to know?”

  “If he’s going to collapse in a heap like Leslie Yarrow? No, I don’t want to know.”

  “It’s a placebo.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let me set up a saline shot with my own hands.”

  “Do you not get how research works?”

  I stood with my legs apart and my arms crossed. “No. At this point, I don’t.”

  He lowered his voice. “This has been a traumatic trip for him. It’s the perfect time. We need to show we had consistent treatments for both of them so we can isolate the cause of her breakdown. That’s how we determine—”

  “Blah blah blah. No. I’m not going to be responsible for breaking him.”

  I walked away before I had to hear more bullshit reasons.

  He wasn’t putting Caden in danger. Period. We’d worked too hard to throw it all away.

  * * *

  I was on the roof when the medevac landed. Caden had been over the wire many times since he’d treated a pregnant woman in a closet in Fallujah. Still, I half expected him to get off in a fugue and go to his room. But he was on his feet, shouting vitals and instructions.

  Small things. I thanked the night sky and the rising sun for small things.

  * * *

  We’d met in a Balad Air Base scrub room. He’d been undressed and obnoxious. I’d been impressed with the least impressive things about him.

  In Baghdad, I couldn’t wait to see him. I went into the scrub room again. He was naked from the waist up as a nurse helped him change from a blood-spattered shirt into clean scrubs.

  “Caden.” I stood at the door. “I was so worried.”

  “For nothing,” he said, getting his hands under the faucet. “You know I wouldn’t die without asking permission first.”

  His next step was soap, but he kept his hands still under the faucet. I wove through the rushing surgical staff to stand by him.

  His hands were shaking.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Stoney!”

  “Yo,” Stoneface said through his mask. He was already scrubbed in. When he saw Caden’s hands, he nodded. “I got this.”

  Caden shut the water and walked out. I ran after him, silently walking next to him until we were in a quiet hallway with a window at the end. He stopped and leaned against the wall.

  “I thought I was dead,” he said, looking at the hands that had betrayed him. His fingers still quaked as if they wanted to run away from his arm.

  I slid my hands into his, squeezing as if I could keep them still.

  “You’re not.
”

  “They were shooting at us and I tripped. I thought…” He took his eyes off his hands and met my gaze. “All the things we haven’t done, it was all my fault for coming. I was leaving you alone. I wanted to have kids, and we never did. I could see them in my mind, and I was so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I can still see them.”

  “Are they cute?”

  He laid his lips on my cheek for long seconds, breathing deeply. I felt connected to him by that breath. It was made of steel cables, connecting us near or far.

  “They look like you,” he said.

  “I’m still with you. And if you’re fine… I’ll tell Ronin you’re okay because he’s going to ask you to get the BiCam shot.”

  “I saw Dana before I scrubbed in.” He took his face from mine with a shrug. “I told her I’d take it.”

  The squiggle of the blood streak leading to Leslie Yarrow appeared in front of my eyes. It was the path her head had taken across the room as she was dragged while she fought with the chaos in her mind.

  “What? Why?” I asked.

  “It’s the same shit they were giving me in New York. It’s fine. It might even be better.”

  The cables didn’t fray. Didn’t break. But my control was slipping away even as I tried to grasp our connection and pull it tight.

  “Can you just not?” I took his hands and tried to reforge our link with a hard gaze. “Just don’t take it.”

  “Do you know something I don’t?”

  I did. I knew the one thing that would make giving the shot futile, because the thing about placebos was that they were useless if the subject knew. “It’s a placebo.”

  He laughed and kissed me on the lips with a deep sense of appreciation. “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem,” I sulked, crossing my arms and lowering my voice, “is Yarrow got this placebo too, and she had a breakdown a few minutes later. So, either the thought of the shot created the reaction—”

  “Which you just killed by telling the patient.”