by CD Reiss
When I pulled out my chair, I found a small manila envelope with my name on the front. I undid the string, and a dirty, blood-streaked sonogram fell into my hand. I shook it, and a folded piece of paper came out. A note.
Pfc Sanchez came in again. Head trauma.
Said to give this to the psychiatrist.
He didn’t make it.
No one had died on Balad Base unless they had severe brain trauma. We didn’t have the capacity to treat it. We could only send them to Baghdad as quickly as possible. For Sanchez, that obviously hadn’t been quick enough. Wife and two kids. Damn. Just damn.
What had he said his buddy’s name was? Grady? First name or last? I’d find his wife and tell the story if she wanted to hear it.
I put the sonogram and the note back into the envelope before I started on the paperwork.
* * *
“It was Colonel Brogue out there.”
In the dead quiet of the midnight hour, the staff nurse’s voice carried through the wall. Brogue had wanted to get off base, and it sounded as if he’d done just that. I stopped what I was doing as a less-clear voice mumbled something.
“Little bird got them after the area was secured. All the casualties went to Baghdad. We’re clear.”
I bolted up from my chair and got my jacket.
* * *
I caught a ride to the airfield and waited in the little kitchen, trying to stay out of the way, asking what I could and overhearing the rest.
From what I could glean, Caden’s Blackhawk had landed under fire, which pilots aren’t supposed to do until they do it, then they’re responsible. With a full bird colonel on the ground, it wasn’t surprising they’d taken the risk, but there wasn’t supposed to be human gold in the form of a trauma surgeon on the chopper either.
They’d taken fire. Other casualties. Local civilians had gotten involved. They’d lifted out with the wounded when they knew a little bird was coming for Caden and the minor injuries.
The lighter thups of the smaller helicopter came out of the pale morning sky, and I went outside. With the sun kissing the horizon, the ground was still dark, and the airfield floodlights were necessary. The passengers were shadows in the glass as it landed. I held my jacket tightly around me, approaching into the wind of the rotors to see him, ready to tell him everything, reassure him, give myself to him, scare him out of this life.
He got out of the helicopter after the last of the passengers as the pilot slowed the whirr of the rotor. The front of this shirt and pants were solid black, as if he’d lain in a puddle of ink.
I ran to him. That particular shade of black was the result of the floodlights hitting the deep red of blood.
He didn’t stop. He looked straight ahead, passing me by as if he didn’t see me.
“Caden!”
He got in the back seat of the Jeep, where the driver waited for him. I looked in the window. He was staring straight ahead, in a fugue state, seeing nothing.
What the hell had happened out there?
* * *
I caught a ride behind him and ran to his trailer right out of the seat.
His door wasn’t closed all the way. I knocked. No answer. Knocked again.
“Caden,” I said.
I respected his privacy up to a point, and I’d reached it. Pushing the door, I stepped into the dark room. A band of morning sunlight fell into the corner, catching his bowed, blood-soaked figure. I shut the door, making sure it clicked closed. No one needed to see him sitting in the corner with his arms around his knees.
Crouching in front of him, I laid my hands on his arms and looked into his face. He kept staring into the middle distance.
“Caden.”
With barely any pressure on his arms, they dropped to his sides as if he were dead. Paresis. I put my fingers to his neck. Warm life pulsed there. I caressed his face with that hand, but he didn’t respond.
“I’m going to get someone in here to bring you to the hospital.”
“No.” His voice was low and flat, and hearing it cut open my worry enough to let out my sorrow.
I didn’t know what had happened, but it had broken him. This man who had worked eight days with no more than a short rest, who had let his sense of duty guide him to do the impossible, who had touched me with his vulnerability and strength… they’d broken him.
Oh sure, they’d get him functioning again, because they needed him, but he’d be thrown away because only the weak were broken by war, and the US military had no room for the weak.
“You’re not weak,” I said more to myself than him. “Do you hear me?” He gave no indication that he did or didn’t, but he’d heard me suggest moving him to the hospital, so I continued. “You didn’t have to prove anything to me. You owned me from the moment I saw you, and you never, ever shared me. Do you understand?”
He swallowed.
“Fuck them,” I said more to myself than him, standing.
The army had broken him. The army was going to fix him.
I stormed out into the morning sun. I got thirty feet away. The Humvee tire we’d used as an end zone was at the other side of the field, another thirty feet away. My mind was strategizing who to tap for help and where they were when the mortar hit.
The earth shook, and with a sharp pain in my ears, everything went silent. When I landed on my back, I couldn’t even hear the breath exit my lungs, but I felt it with the agony in my chest.
The silence was more disorienting than the rain of rocks and shrapnel.
I got my feet under me. Dizzy. Planting my feet. Breathing soundlessly with a sharp pain in my chest. I looked down at myself. I was covered in blood. When I looked back up, I realized I’d been turned around. Caden stood at his door, awakened by the blast, his blood-soaked shirt mirroring mine, crying out without a sound.
The ground rotated under me.
I was falling.
I would hit the dirt at the acceleration of gravity.
I couldn’t break my fall, but I didn’t need to.
A man was under me, catching me, holding me in his arms as he ran.
Deaf but not blind, I could only see the blue sky. The black smoke from the mortar bounded my peripheral vision on one side.
When he looked down at me for a second, he wasn’t broken anymore. The eternal sky was captured in his eyes, deadly and comforting, alive with purpose.
* * *
I remembered cool sheets under my head.
I remembered a drowning feeling.
I remembered bright light through the fog of my vision and choking on a tube.
I remembered the blood cooling on my skin when they cut off my clothes.
I remembered his eyes set over the rectangle of a surgical mask, cutting through the fog with unguarded concern and utter confidence.
I could never forget the love in them.
Chapter Six
A single shard of metal had missed my heart by two millimeters.
“There’s more ways to miss a heart than hit it,” Caden said from beside my bed.
He’d used his R&R days to fly into Baghdad after me. The incision was small. I could have recuperated in Balad, but Caden had stepped in, making sure I was in the best-equipped hospital whether I needed it or not.
“I prefer to think of myself as lucky.”
“Preference noted. They’re sending you back to the CSH.”
He was making an assumption that I was going back to Balad based on the fact that I was going back into the field. I was indeed going back into the field—but not to the CSH.
“What happened out there?” I asked. “Outside the wire?”
He shrugged and looked away. “The usual intense shit.”
“I saw Brogue.” My CO was down the hall with another injury so close to deadly it confirmed the existence of luck for me—and the existence of statistical probability of survival for Caden’s patients.
Brogue being down the hall had its benefits. I’d wheeled down there and checked on him. He
was going home, but he was still the commanding officer of the First Medical Brigade. He could task me out of my unit up to Abu Ghraib to work with Army Intelligence for a while.
He’d agreed it was an opportunity to go from a specialty no one respected to something where I could move up, make a difference, release myself from the constraints of a unit for a while and decide how I wanted to work. He’d do the paperwork as soon as he could sit up in his goddamned bed.
If I went through with it, I wasn’t going back to the support hospital with Caden.
“He said you saved his life and a few others,” I continued. “He’s recommended you for a commendation.”
“I get a nice pat on the back whenever I do my job.” He squeezed my hand and ran his finger along my forearm with a touch that was uniquely his.
“Why did you go out?” I asked. “There are field surgeons who could have gone.”
“You asked me this, Greyson.”
“And you deflected, which I let you do because I was post-op.”
Four fingertips went back down my forearm with a tenderness that could only be described as worshipful. “You don’t let stuff go, do you?”
“Nope.”
“I want to be with you. Do you want to be with me?”
“Yes. More than anything.”
“And if we are a couple, this is what I can expect? You to lock onto things?”
I didn’t want to turn him off, but I wouldn’t lie to him either. “Yep. But I’m also patient. I won’t forget, but I’ll let you tell me things in your own time.”
He stared at the way his thumb stroked the scars on my wrist. “I went out to prove that I could.”
That wasn’t news. I could have told him that. But having him say it so plainly was unexpected and earth-shattering and a chest-spreader, exposing my heart to his attention.
“You didn’t need to do that.”
“I did. Not for you. For me. And maybe you a little. I knew you’d say it didn’t matter, but I didn’t want to look in your eyes in ten years and wonder if you ever thought you could do better.”
Ten years?
I was crazy about him. Infatuated. I wanted nothing more than to continue this relationship for all it was worth. Bleed him dry emotionally. Suck him to the bare, delicious, raw core.
But ten years? How was that even possible?
“Caden.”
“Greyson?”
So impossibly blue, his eyes were holes to the sky.
“I can’t do better,” I said.
“Well, I know that.”
We smiled, and I looked away. “But you’re not staying in the military, and this is my life.”
“I do catch movies sometimes. Guy’s off on deployment and calls his woman from base. She’s always in the kitchen of some suburban house, holding the phone with both hands because she loves him. We can just switch it. You call me. I’ll hold the phone with both hands.”
“In a suburban house?”
“Probably not. That a deal-breaker?”
“No. Not that.”
He didn’t ask me what the deal-breaker was. Either he didn’t want to know, or he was aware of what I didn’t yet know.
There were no deal-breakers.
“We don’t have to decide now,” he said.
“How much longer do you have here?” I shook my head. He had almost a year here in Iraq, but that wasn’t what I meant. “In Baghdad?”
“I’m on call tomorrow morning. We’re still trying to retake Fallujah, you know. But I’ll try to come back to get you.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“I know. But I worked it out with my CO and some of the other guys. We switched stuff around. We’re fine until the next offensive. And if they need me, you just have to come back without an escort.”
“My feminine heart wouldn’t stand it, sir. Imagine what could happen?”
He put his hand on my face and kissed me. “I pity the poor slob who tries to keep you from me.”
“Me too.”
We kissed again.
“You’re tired.” He told me that as if he knew me better than I knew myself, and though it seemed too soon for that to be possible, he was right.
“I can’t wait to be at a hundred percent again.”
Caden pressed the button that lowered the bed to a sleeping position. “You at a hundred percent is what I want.” He stroked my face. “Close your eyes.”
They wanted nothing more than to shut so I could fully feel his touch slide over my skin.
“Once you’re at a hundred percent,” he whispered, “I’m going to fuck you down to twenty. When your arms are limp and you’ve come so many times you think you can’t come again, you’re going to curl up next to me to try to sleep. I won’t let you. I’ll fuck you down to ten percent. I’m going to leave you at five before I let you sleep.” I opened my eyes halfway, but he closed them with a brush of his hands. “Just sleep.”
“Stay.”
“I brought paperwork. I’ll be right here, cursing it.”
“Mmm.”
My arms and legs got heavy and my mind drifted away until I felt as if I had no body at all except for where Caden touched me and where a piece of metal had sliced a thin, throbbing hole in my chest.
* * *
Caden came back for a day when I was well enough to leave the hospital. We went to a nearby teashop filled with enough American servicemen that it was all right to have an unmarried woman and man at the same table. He left on the next Phrog out.
“I wish I could drive,” he said absently as the rotors thupped.
“It’s ten times more dangerous.”
“Yeah.”
I knew that look, and his “yeah” was more than a simple agreement over the danger of on-road travel. “Caden?”
“Major?”
“Are you afraid to fly?”
“No.” He waved away his answer. “Not in a plane. Not a ‘flight,’ with tickets and an airport. But those damn helicopters. They have a way of dropping out of the sky.”
“I think they more spin than drop.”
He smiled, and I was disarmed. I wanted to offer him the same openness he’d given me.
“Also,” I said, “me too. These things terrify me. I white-knuckle it the whole way.”
His eyebrows went up. I was glad I still had the ability to surprise him.
“The enormity of falling,” I continued. “Feeling the space around me and floating in it?” I shivered. “I’d almost rather risk an IED.”
“Good thing we don’t get to make that call.”
“Good thing.”
He held my hand, focusing on where our bodies knotted.
“There’s this jumper picture from 9/11,” he said. “A couple holding hands on the way down.”
I’d seen it, and I had to consider for a moment that it meant something for him it didn’t mean for me. Everything from that day would have layers of meaning for him.
“You think it was your parents?”
“No. It’s not. But I like to think that her last action was to refuse his hand. Tell him no.”
“Do you want me to tell you no?”
“I want to never give you a reason to.”
* * *
“I’m not going home,” I said into the hospital phone. Jenn was on the other side of the line. I had an envelope stamped with the US Army seal crunched in my hand.
“Why not?”
“The incision was nothing. It was clean.”
“You lost a ton of blood.”
“I have it back. I’m replenished like a vampire.”
“Well, it’ll be nice to have you around.”
I didn’t think it would be hard to tell her, but I had to take a second to rework what I intended to say. “I’m not staying. Not for long. I got tasked out to Defense.”
“Where?”
“I’m heading up to ABG.”
My paperwork had gone through. Brogue was laid up and on his way home but ha
d signed the recommendation. The approval had come in the envelope my palm was sweating on.
“Abu Ghraib? Why? For what?”
“I can’t—”
“It’s Ronin.”
“It’s Ronin,” I confirmed.
“Okay, I’m saying this once, then you do what you want, okay?”
“This should be good.”
“It will be. Write it down.”
I laughed silently so she couldn’t hear me, but I had the feeling I wouldn’t need to write it down. “Go ahead.”
“You do not have the moral vacancy required to work with the DoD.”
“The project conforms to the Geneva Convention.”
“Okay, if he has to say that, then that’s a problem. And have you asked yourself what he needs you for?”
I didn’t, and wouldn’t, mention the second part of Ronin’s offer, but my pause while I decided that was enough of an opening for Jenn to jump in.
“The medical degree,” she said. “You can script and dispense.”
“It’s my job.”
“I don’t like it. It bothers me.”
“You’re just going to miss me.”
“Yeah. That too.”
Chapter Seven
Caden wasn’t able to come to Baghdad to escort me back to the CSH. Despite his commission, he was and always would be a civilian—with a civilian’s confidence in his own agency. He’d always think he could make decisions, work around the rules while staying in the lines, negotiate with his superiors, charm his way through a narrow opening in his options.
On the Chinook, with my knuckles pale caps over where my fingers and my hand joined, I wondered how he would tolerate my career. Military wives had to submit to a host of indignities, starting with a loss of control over where they lived and ending with a loss of control over parenting. Their husbands were married to the military first. How would Caden manage always playing second to the army, especially when, after two deployments, he still didn’t understand how little power he had?
