Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  No energy had been wasted.

  The surgeon side of my husband.

  He’d recognized his name as Damon. That had been clear. What had also become clear was that he had been running headlong into this dissociation for months, and I’d let it happen. A little professional voice told me there was nothing I could have done and, at the same time, that I’d done everything I could. Neither recollection was true.

  I’d done everything that pleased me because my body enjoyed it. Guilt twined around the realization like yarn around a stick.

  * * *

  All night, I sat by him. His head was turned toward the back of the sofa with his eyes open, staring at the upholstery. His vitals were good, so I let him do what I should have been doing. Resting.

  My DSM V was in arm’s reach. I knew what was in it, but I looked anyway.

  Dissociative Identity Disorder.

  DSM-5 300.14 (F44.81)

  Trauma based. Correlated with PTSD. Patients suffering with mental trauma compartmentalized it into discrete personalities as a coping mechanism. The therapist had to tell each personality about the other, validate them, work toward integration (an acceptance of the condition), then fusion (merging of personalities) until normalcy was achieved.

  I’d had a patient with a traumatic split in Iraq and not since. He’d watched a buddy shoot a three-year-old on purpose. This was a man he’d trusted and respected. When one CO wouldn’t believe him and another didn’t care, it tore the fabric of his belief system. He became Molly Jones, Grosse Point housewife, when the memory was too much to bear. His breakdown made it harder for him to convince Command that the event had happened, and he was sent home.

  This couldn’t be happening to Caden.

  But it is.

  My husband was the King of Detachment. He could lock up his emotions to get the job done.

  That’s the problem here.

  I’d married a strong man. A rock. A man who didn’t know how to fail.

  Say it.

  He was the calm eye of a deadly storm, maintaining his composure in the worst of circumstances.

  Say it. You’re getting warmer.

  I’d married a man who would never come undone. I’d married strong, not weak.

  Warmer.

  I didn’t marry a crazy person.

  Jackpot.

  * * *

  At nearly dawn, his finger flicked, and a minute later, his hand twitched at the wrist. A swallow. A jerk of his legs under the blankets. Then his hand found mine and covered it. I held on to him, and he turned his head.

  I recognized Caden’s face. He looked like the twin brother my husband had never had. All the features were the same, but he was different.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Grey.” He squeezed my hand and shifted his body toward me. Paresis done. He had his body back.

  I hadn’t realized how tight I was until the muscles holding worry about his body relaxed. “Are you all right?”

  “Are you?” His voice was thick and slow, as if he had to remember how to speak.

  “I’m fine.” I cupped his jaw tenderly. “What do you remember?”

  “He hurt you.”

  Third person. Complete dissociation. A break.

  “I’m fine,” I said, leaning my lips into his. He smelled like my husband. Freshly ground coffee and cut grass. “One hundred percent fine.”

  “Thank God.”

  He fell asleep.

  * * *

  As a fan of Siouxie and the Banshees and the Dead Kennedys, who wore thick eyeliner and shapeless black clothes, my social group hadn’t required I play a sport. Nor had my family. Basketball, however, had its advantages. I had been athletic enough to play varsity in a few sports, but the constant motion of basketball ran me ragged, and I liked that. Besides, when Dad was around, we played in the driveway.

  Colin shot up when he was thirteen, surpassing my height by the time I turned fifteen. Dad beamed at his son’s new manhood and refused to acknowledge my entrance into womanhood. I understood why, but that didn’t diminish my hunger for his approval.

  “You know why she got the jump? Because she pushes.” Dad bounced the ball with his left hand and pointed at Colin with his right. The pointing meant he was serious, and Colin, bent over his knees and panting after I’d stripped the ball from him to score, turned off the adolescent backtalk long enough to listen. “This little girl here will beat you every time because she has tenacity. When she decides she’s taking what you have, she’s going to work you until you’re standing there wondering what happened.”

  He passed me the ball. I beamed with the compliment, eager to prove I could be the person he thought I was. Even though I was being used as a tool to inspire his precious son, it was the encouragement I got, so it was the encouragement I cherished.

  “Push, Colin! Push!” Dad shouted as my brother covered me. “She’s getting away!”

  My brother avoided organized sports. I was the one on varsity. I was the one with skin in the game, but Colin was pushed to do more, be better, while I was an obstacle to overcome.

  I swung low and jumped, making one off the rim. Colin caught the ball on the way down and flipped it back to Dad.

  “Nice work, Grey. You…” He pointed at Colin again. “You’re getting beat by a girl.”

  Colin’s hair flopped in front of his face. He was skipping the awkward part of adolescence and going right to heartthrob.

  “Yeah, Colin,” I said. “I’m going to tell all the freshmen girls.”

  “I don’t date freshmen.”

  “You’re going to be dating a senior named Steve if you don’t win the next point,” Dad joked.

  The fact that Colin was into girls didn’t make the joke funny. Nothing would have made it funny. But we were young, and I played hard to beat him just to prove I was as good as he was.

  * * *

  With Damon/Caden resting on my office couch, I made a few decisions. Then remade them. Then I accepted my inability to change anything outside my own actions and decided between what I could choose and what I couldn’t control.

  I could decide to stay with my husband no matter what.

  So, I would do that.

  I could decide to respect him as a man, not a part of my caseload.

  So, I would do that.

  I could decide to accept this problem, whatever it was, while simultaneously helping him get better.

  Acceptance was an amorphous goal. But I could commit to the process.

  I was human, fallible and imperfect, but I was dedicated. All I had to do was commit to him as fully now as I had in my parents’ backyard on the day I married him. With my dog tags (something old) dangling over the lace of my wedding gown and shiny army boots (something new) under the train, I’d sworn my life to him. In my mother’s headpiece (something borrowed) and sky-colored socks under the boots (something blue), I’d submitted myself to a life tied to a man I loved for the qualities I’d been raised to admire.

  In my frailty and humanity, I’d vowed to make a superhuman effort.

  I hadn’t been ready for this man.

  There’s freedom in being fully human. Once I admitted my own prejudices, I knew who I was dealing with. I feared my weakness. I was concerned about my sanity. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle Caden and myself if he was in this kind of trouble.

  I had come face-to-face with the fact that my husband had limits, but though I knew they existed, I couldn’t see their outline without knowing what had driven him to them.

  Maybe it was the house. This priceless, coveted property had been the scene of his mother’s abuse. He’d insisted he was fine, that he’d stripped it of every memory. Moved the kitchen, the bedrooms, redone every detail until he couldn’t recollect a single scene. But he couldn’t change the outside, and walking through the door twice a day must have brought something back for him.

  We could move.

  We should move.

  We could sell it and move to
a smaller place. Stay in Manhattan. Maybe Brooklyn. I could take him back to San Diego.

  I put my head on the desk, making constant decisions, tossing them aside, making others, justifying them in my mind to Caden, then Damon, who I didn’t know. I realized there was no chance of a change as long as my husband was in this state. What one personality said, the other could undo.

  There was freedom in being fully human, and there was also confinement.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  CADEN

  I woke up naked on the couch in her office, my legs bent and leaning on the back so I’d fit. Something damp and yielding rippled between my feet. I reached under the blankets and pulled it out.

  A pale-water bottle. I didn’t know how I’d gotten into the office, under the covers, or naked, much less why I’d needed a water bottle.

  Greysen sat behind her desk with her head on her folded arms, sleeping in yoga pants and a ribbed tank. Her pink lips were parted, gravity pulling them slightly toward the center of the earth. She had patches of burst capillaries under her eyes. That was from losing air. I’d carefully cut her off to extend her orgasm, but I didn’t think it had gone far enough to cause the darkness at the tops of her cheeks.

  My primary feeling at seeing her was desire. Not normal sexual desire, but utter filth. I wanted her to wake up as I was coming on her face, then wipe it all off her with my dick so I could make her lick me clean.

  It was morning. No time for that.

  I got out from under the covers. My wife leaned a little in her sleep, ass getting closer to the edge of the chair. It pivoted. She was going to fall.

  I picked her up under the shoulders and knees. She nuzzled me as I laid her on the couch. After covering her, I grabbed the cold water bottle and went upstairs.

  Damon was gone. I’d felt exorcised of him after I’d broken Greysen before, but this time was different. He wasn’t hiding where I couldn’t hear or see him. He wasn’t a pressure in the back of my consciousness. He wasn’t a missing voice in the hiss of the shower or a potential presence from the darkness in the drain. Like a dead thing, he only existed in memory.

  I was free of him, and that satisfied me.

  After putting my wife under the bed covers, I jerked off in the shower, imagining the tiles I came on were my wife’s face and tits. In the fantasy, I pulled her shirt on over my cum so she could wear my mark all day.

  I got dressed before I checked on Greysen. She opened her eyes enough for me to see the bleeding capillaries in the whites. She smiled and patted my hand as if she was too weak for words. I’d taken everything from her the night before. Satisfied again, I went to work.

  * * *

  During the first eight days of the Second Battle of Fallujah, when I’d stopped seeing the men under me as people and started seeing them as puzzles with broken or misplaced pieces, I’d had a sense of personal authority similar to the feeling athletes describe as “the zone.”

  At work in New York, even though it wasn’t a cutting day, the pieces of the world clicked into place according to my actions, my will, my desires. I didn’t crave praise or recognition. I wanted nothing more or less than control over what I could see and touch.

  Greysen, kneeling in the dark, her skin cast in blue from the streetlights on 87th Street filtering through the curtains. The dark fracture between her legs and the eggshells of her ass…inviting me to use her. Waiting for me with her forehead on the rug and her hands boxed behind her back, wrist to wrist, she was no less a lioness.

  That was what I wanted.

  I left a message for her. “I’ll be home at nineteen hundred. Be naked. On your knees. Forehead to the floor. Hands behind your back. Be ready for me to enter you anywhere I want.” I hung up.

  Who would be there when she heard it? A patient? One of the military men she spoke with all day? A colleague? Would they see her blush? Would she smile?

  No. She wouldn’t see anyone today. Not with the bruises under her eyes. The bloodshot whites would be almost healed by now, but the rest would linger, reminding me I’d done something I couldn’t remember. Something terrible. Something that had chased Damon away for good.

  She’d want to talk about it. All I wanted to do was fuck her in celebration.

  I could do both.

  Doing the last of my paperwork for the day, I decided she was welcome to talk about it either after we were both satiated or with my dick in her mouth.

  That should be more than satisfactory.

  Outside, the last of the sun disappeared behind the western horizon.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  greysEn

  I’ll be home at nineteen hundred. Be naked. On your knees. Forehead to the floor. Hands behind your back. Be ready for me to enter you anywhere I want.

  The contents of Caden’s message had been spoken clearly and without an ounce of doubt that he’d be obeyed. His demeanor was so commanding that I at once felt a flood of arousal so strong it hurt…and looked at the clock to see if I had time to shower before nineteen hundred hours.

  That didn’t last long. I wasn’t getting on my knees and offering my body to him until we talked about the previous night. I’d had Friday off sessions as usual, but I’d had to cancel the gym and meetings to hide the way his hands had used me. I spent the day reading journals and studies on dissociative disorders. Dry, hopeless reading.

  Until I knew who I was fucking, or what I was fucking, there would be no fucking.

  Bottom line? I wasn’t in the mood for Caden’s controlling voice or his precise pain. I was tired from the night before. My back ached. Swallowing hurt. If there was going to be any sex, it had to be the kind that made me fall asleep with confidence in my heart and a smile on my face.

  He arrived at seven on the dot. In the crack between curtains, he popped up the stoop with his jacket flowing behind him. I sat on the couch, under a tall lamp, fully dressed in a sexless sweater and jeans. I was a wife waiting to speak to her husband, not a woman getting on her knees for kinky time.

  The door clicked shut. I heard fussing with keys, coat, a cleared throat, and he appeared in the entrance to the living room. I could tell who I was sharing the room with right away.

  Not Caden. At least not the man calling himself Caden.

  “Damon,” I said.

  “Greysen.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  It wasn’t for him to answer. I should have known that, but it was impossible to be a trained therapist about my own husband. I wanted an answer, and the way he smiled was just that. It wasn’t an answer I liked, but it was unlike anything I’d seen from my husband except when he was at his most vulnerable. It had no underlying meanings. No sexual overtones or cynicism. It was a happy smile.

  “May I sit?”

  I realized so much about my husband when he became someone else. Caden never asked to sit. He just sat. He identified the straightest course of action to a result and took it.

  “Please do.”

  The person in my husband’s body sat on the other side of the couch, leaving a full cushion between us, and twisted around so one arm was draped over the back of the sofa. He pressed his thumb to his upper lip and regarded me as if seeing me for the first time. Admittedly, I felt as if I was seeing him for the first time as well. A jaw that had been as angular and unyielding as his personality was now a counterpoint to a softer line of his mouth. The color of his eyes was less a challenge and more of an invitation.

  “I can’t believe how beautiful you are,” he said.

  “Bullshit me later.”

  The fact was I couldn’t believe how beautiful he was.

  “To your question,” he said. “What’s going on… I’m not really sure.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “Good.” He nodded and waited.

  “Can you tell me who you are first?”

  He smiled ruefully and ran his nails along the damask upholstery. The pairing of gestures was surprisingly sensual, and nothing like Cade
n, who delivered answers like an automatic weapon.

  “I am your soul mate.” He laid his hand down and looked at me. “I’m the only person who truly fits with you. I admit I wasn’t born in a normal way, but we were created for each other. Maybe there was some mix-up and the body I was meant for went to someone else?”

  “There was a movie like that.”

  “Then it’s not unheard of.”

  “It’s a made-up story.”

  “You’re saying I’m made up? That what I’ve been going through is fake?”

  Invalidating a personality was dangerous territory. I was tired, aching, in a state of emotional shock, and in no condition to maintain my therapeutic detachment. But I wasn’t going to swap ghost stories either. “Here’s what I know—you’re my husband, and you’re a dissociated personality.”

  “No, I’m sure I’m not.”

  “How are you so sure?”

  “I was my own person before. I had a name, and I’ve loved you from the beginning.”

  “Before last night, where were you?”

  “You really want to talk about this?”

  “What are the options?”

  The way he looked at me told me what he thought the options were. “I’ve waited a long time to kiss you. I guess I can wait another few minutes.”

  Another few minutes? I wasn’t sure I should even let him touch me, much less kiss me.

  “Can you describe your life before last night?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t call it a life. I saw out through his eyes. I heard with his ears, then forgot a lot of it. I wanted things. You, mostly. But getting out was all I could think about.”

  “Getting out of what?”

  “I don’t know. It was a kind of box. Or a bag around me. Tight. I think it was him. He kept me in it.”

  “Him?”