by CD Reiss
She spit the water, and the Thing dispersed into the air vents, the fogged mirror, the space between my feet and the floor. It snaked around my wife’s voice when she spoke. “She wants to talk to me about creating a treatment protocol for PTSD in vets. Then she’s thinking of maybe expanding it to the general population. Kids and adults dealing with trauma.”
She shook excess water off the brush and popped it into the cup. I didn’t know how much longer I could last.
She was wearing a big T-shirt and underpants. Her feet were bare. Her nipples were hard. She was talking about Tina’s offer to design programs at the Gibson Center, which wasn’t really an offer but more of a suggestion to talk more. She was overwhelmed. She hadn’t been in professional life very long.
“When I was promoted before, it was all forms and steps,” she said. “Now it’s fuzzier, you know?”
Sure. I knew.
“I thought you had a full schedule.”
“I’m thinking I can squeeze it in.”
There were reasons she shouldn’t. She’d push herself to exhaustion. No one was here to give her limits. There was no ceiling or walls on what she could accept. This wasn’t the army.
She crawled onto the bed and flopped into a sitting position with her back against the headboard.
The reasons she shouldn’t do too much were easily explainable, but if I explained them, she’d fight me. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to get angry, or I’d lose it again and hurt her. I didn’t want to feel anything. I wanted this deadness, needed it to dampen the fear and anger.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Did she tell you the salary?”
“No, I mean about…” She spread her legs.
I’d made love to her two nights ago and had barely kept myself from hurting her. I’d had to keep my hands on the bed and let her ride me. The Thing had been watching. If I touched her now, I would tear her apart to get rid of it.
I ran my hand inside her thigh and stopped.
The sense I wasn’t alone was worse when I touched her.
“What?” She pouted.
“Touch yourself.”
She bit her lower lip and slid her fingers under the crotch of her underwear.
Was It watching her? Hard to tell, but the feeling wasn’t as strong.
She groaned. I was aroused, but I didn’t have an emotional response to this beautiful woman running her fingers along her seam.
“I’m so wet for you,” she said.
“Don’t stop.” Was my voice as emotionless and robotic to her as it was to me?
“I want you to fuck me.”
“Faster.” I stood over her and undid my pants. She reached for me, but I swatted her away.
“Tease,” she said when I released my dick and fisted it.
“Pick up your shirt.”
She showed me her tits. I felt the Thing stretching at the edge of my perception, trying to get in on the action, but for some reason, without a connection between Greyson and me, the circuit wasn’t closed. It could feel what was happening, but not see it, or the other way around.
Fuck you, Thing. This one’s for you.
I grunted. “Let me see you come.”
In another minute, she was pumping her hips under her fingers with heavy, wet breaths. I came over her, leaving my semen streaked over her body.
She moaned with a satisfied mmm and took her hand from between her legs. I snapped tissues out of the box and wiped her up with all the tenderness of a clinician.
“Thank you.” She smiled. “Come to bed.”
I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t but couldn’t avoid it.
I loved her, but I felt nothing. My balls were empty and my heart was dead.
My beeper went off.
“Shit,” she said. “Ignore it.”
I picked it up, thanking God without the actual feeling of gratitude. “Hospital.”
She sighed.
“Greyson.” I was this close to telling her everything. If I didn’t have an emergency to attend to, I would have, right then. Instead, I said, “I’m sorry.”
“This is the life of a surgeon’s wife.”
I kissed her forehead and left without looking back.
This wasn’t sustainable.
* * *
I managed to stay at the hospital through the next day. I didn’t know what I hoped for except this Thing would go away if I starved it of my wife’s presence.
The surgery wasn’t done until early morning. I showered in the attending lounge and collapsed on one of the cots. The Thing missed her. Its longing whispered through the air conditioning. I could spite it indefinitely, but I didn’t know how long I could spite myself. I missed her already. We’d spent plenty of time apart, but I’d gotten spoiled. If she was next to me, she was safe. Knowing that helped me rest.
I was awake when she beeped me. I called her back, still on my back on a narrow cot.
“Hello,” I said. “What are you doing up? It’s not even six.”
“I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.” Her voice was husky and broken.
At the sound of her voice, it softened like a puppy and vibrated off the walls. It was worried about her.
“Figured I’d start working on Tina’s proposal,” she said.
“Don’t burn yourself out.”
“I won’t. Are you coming home?”
“I have to check the post-op report in a few hours.”
“Okay. I know you’re tired.”
“I am.”
“We have tickets to a play tonight.”
Shit. How long would it take to starve this Thing? The room was dark, but I covered my eyes with my wrist to block it out. “What time?”
“Seating’s at eight.”
I could fake a surgery. I could fake being tired. I could take a trip. Starve it out. I didn’t know if that was even an option, but it was the only idea I had.
Tell her you have to be in the OR.
No words came. I couldn’t lie. I could make the words in my head but couldn’t get them out.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t lie. And I knew, as sure as I knew the boundaries of the dark room I’d gotten up to pace across, that I couldn’t lie because my emotions were stuffed in a bag and sealed away. Lying meant I had to fear the truth, which I didn’t, and it meant I had to create fake vocal nuance, which I couldn’t.
Hiding my emotions had been intentional, but easier than ever. The process of detachment had become greased. Frictionless. I barely had to think about it. I wasn’t nervous. Wasn’t panicky. I was curious about my feelings, what they’d been and how they drove me to lie. Why would a person lie unless there was a reward for it?
“Okay. I’ll meet you there.”
“Barring unforseens.”
“Yes,” I said. “Barring unforseens.”
“I love you, Caden.”
“I love you too.”
I hung up, and with the separation, the Thing became clear in my mind. Very loud. And for the first time, it had a well-defined thought I could read.
You don’t love her. I do.
* * *
The front desk had a vertical whiteboard with the rooms, procedures, and the doctors performing. I scanned it as Wilhelmina picked up the eraser.
“Looking for something, doctor?” she asked, getting up on a stool to reach the top.
“Not yet.”
Checking her clipboard, she erased Dr. Everett’s name.
“What happened to Everett?” I asked.
“Strep.”
Nurse Bergstrom picked up the phone. “Samuelson’s on call.”
“I have it,” I cut in.
Wil looked at me as if I’d just clucked like a chicken. “It’s an assist.”
“I know. It’s fine. I got it.”
Will shrugged and wrote St. John in the empty space.
Chapter Ten
Greyson
Caden wasn’t going to make it t
o the play. My answering service picked up the message, and delivered it as I was putting on my shoes. He’d taken on another patient, and the patient needed pre-op monitoring.
I should have gone myself, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to go with him.
He’d been worried I was going to burn out, but maybe he was the one who needed to snuff one end of the candle. And maybe this was why he’d been so distant and preoccupied.
Maybe.
People weren’t always predictable. They didn’t react the same exact way even when in very similar situations.
The last time I’d seen Caden under tremendous stress was during the war, and he hadn’t been rigid and distant. On the contrary, even when he was closest to his breaking point, he’d been funny, even charming, as day three of his hands in men’s bodies crested into day four without relief. I was giving him vitamin shots and an uncomfortable amount of amphetamine. He seemed to thrive, and yet… no one thrives when someone loses an arm or a leg on the table and you have to move to the next without a break.
He was like a carnival wheel spinning long after the barker’s hand had left the rail. Spiraling on his own juice and energy, ball bearings lubricated to go on and on, he couldn’t calm himself. Even after I’d given him a sedative, he couldn’t sleep. I’d crawled onto the mattress with him, and finally, relieved of a single thing to do but sleep, he held me in his bed.
I knew how to be detached. My job required it. But I couldn’t be. Not with him. At first, he hadn’t been more to me than the next overworked army doc. But he was the only one I’d ever let pull me onto his cot fully clothed. He wasn’t the only one who had wept with me, but he was the only one I’d wept with.
Was this what it was to love someone? To have that wall of detachment crumble and be rebuilt into a bridge?
I thought so. I swore it to myself because after those hours, we were so real together no one had to ask what was going on. Caden and I were an incurable condition.
Dispassion had a place in our lives, but not with each other.
The situation was different now. We were civilians living in New York City, not soldiers trying to save people in a war zone. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised or concerned by his distance. He might be far away for a reason that had nothing to do with me or our marriage. Maybe it was him, just him.
“Is everything all right?” he asked after I’d beeped him twice. His voice was flat, as if he was asking a patient if they were in any pain and could they please describe it.
“You’re not home,” I said, meaning something completely different.
There’s a nagging ache in the center of my chest.
“I had rounds.” He had a different meaning under his answer.
On a scale of one to ten, with ten being unbearable, how would you rate your pain?
“I missed you at dinner,” I said.
I want to say it’s a three, but it’s closer to a seven.
“I missed you too.”
Here’s an aspirin.
“When are you coming home?”
Maybe I can have something stronger?
“Samuelson’s got strep. I have to fill in for him again.”
No.
“Okay.”
I’ll manage then.
“I love you.”
Maybe try acupuncture.
“Yeah.” I hung up the phone.
Shove it.
* * *
Mid-afternoon.
I’d been in session all morning. I heard Caden upstairs while I was with a patient, heard the old pipes rattle in the walls when the shower went on, then saw his feet come down the front steps. I was seeing a patient in and couldn’t catch Caden without disrupting the gentle flow that was part of my job.
“How were you this week?” I asked Specialist Leslie Yarrow, who liked to sit in the chair with the high cushions. She still wore her dog tags under her polo T-shirt and kept her hair very short. She’d been sent home with a shoulder injury that was healing better than her mind.
“Fine. Good.” She shifted in her seat. She’d had a hard time sitting still since she got back.
“Did you sleep?”
“Some. The pills helped. Thank you.”
“But not entirely?”
“Nah.” She flipped it off as if it wasn’t a big deal, but her eyes were ringed in pink and purple.
“Did you have the dream again?”
“Yeah.”
The dream was a recounting of a child torn apart by an IED. She’d been eight and screaming in pain. When Leslie recalled the memory, she said she screamed for hours while she tried to find a medic, but on further investigation, it had been a minute and a half before the girl died in her arms.
In the dream, the girl was her daughter.
“Something this week… my wife got freaked out. She said I should tell you.”
“Should you?”
“Yeah, probably.”
I waited.
“When I woke up from it, I didn’t know Mindy.”
“How so?”
“I went into her room, and I knew the room and all the stuff. But the kid sleeping there? I was like, who is she? She was a stranger.”
“How long did that last?”
“A minute… maybe ten. Molly came into the kitchen and was like, ‘Are you going to wake her up for school or what?’ and then I came to.”
“So you’d describe it as a fugue state? Did you have the feeling you were half asleep?”
“I was… I forgot the entire thing after not knowing Mindy.” She shrugged, and that wasn’t a normal reaction for someone who’d lost a bunch of time.
“Is that the first time it happened?”
She looked away. “Yeah. I told Molly I really didn’t want to talk about this.”
I wasn’t letting her off the hook. We had four minutes, and it was hers to use to talk or not. Her decision, not mine.
“When I was a kid, I lost some stuff. Few hours here and there.” She shifted in her seat. “My dad used to come to my room and do things. It was… I knew he did it, but I would forget the actual thing if you know what I mean.” She made a nervous laugh, and I held onto a non-judgmental, non-enraged, almost inhuman detachment.
“I want to pause for a second. I heard both parts of that, and if you—”
“Is it time to go yet?”
“We have a couple of minutes”
“I don’t want to talk about this right now, okay?”
“Okay, but you’re safe here. Any time.”
She stood. “I should get going.”
I adjusted her sleeping pill dosage and asked her to keep a log of any more feelings that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, or that she didn’t know the people around her. She agreed, apologized profusely, and left.
I hurt for the little girl she had been, and promised myself I’d do everything I could to help the woman who came to my office.
I briefly made the connection between Leslie Yarrow’s dissociation and my husband’s. It was a symptom of PTSD and needn’t be a personal betrayal.
That realization was my medicine for the rest of the day.
* * *
It was dark by the time I went back up to the house. Everything was perfect. He hadn’t left a crumb behind. Not a note or a rumpled sheet.
Calling got me his voice mail. I beeped him, but he didn’t call back right away. I heated up dinner. Got into my pajamas. Put on the TV. Shut it off. Listened to the traffic outside. Went to the bathroom.
His clothes were in the hamper. Underwear. Slacks. A pale blue shirt that brought out the depth of his eyes. I gathered it in my hands and pressed it to my face, expecting to smell fresh coffee grounds in stale sweat.
I got something much more floral.
Feminine.
This is not cologne.
My blood took a second to boil. In that pause, I checked again. Definitely perfume.
Oh, fuck no.
No no no.
I was out the door so
fast I didn’t change out of my pajamas and almost forgot to put on shoes. I stuffed my feet into Keds, put on a long coat, and caught a cab at Columbus Circle.
Because, no. We had a deal and the deal included fidelity. Non-negotiable.
Deep breath.
People cheated for a reason. Either it was personal, and they were just cheating assholes. Or it was situational, and a cheating asshole was in a situation where it was easy to cheat. Or it was us. And that last option stuck in my craw, because even after years of talking to people about why they found themselves betraying or betrayed, it was now me. And if it was the relationship, it was me, my fault, what I delivered or didn’t deliver.
I’d come to a strange life in a strange city to be with him. Maybe that was the problem. Or maybe we didn’t work as a couple outside a war zone. Or maybe he liked it hotter than I was used to.
Fuck this. It wasn’t my fault.
He owed me better than touching another woman. Saying sweet things to her. Those were my kisses and sweet words.
Or maybe there was none of that. Maybe it was all warm holes and quick spurts.
The disloyalty was bad, but not knowing the exact terms of the betrayal was eating every brain cell not occupied with breathing.
My phone rang on the way. I flipped it open.
Him.
Was his dick wet with her? Or was he on his way there?
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey, you called?” Flat flat flat. Why hadn’t I seen it before? How blind had I been?
“Where are you? I was thinking of bringing you dinner.”
“Ah, that would be great, but I’m assisting in an hour and I need to scrub in.”
So that’s what you sound like when you lie?
“Oh, all right then. When do you think you’ll be home?”
“I came home today and you were in your office. I didn’t want to bother you.”
You knew I’d be in session.
“Yeah. Hey, the other line’s beeping. I have to go.”
“I love you,” he said before I cut the call.
