Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He took his hands off his eyes and bent his neck to face me. “Because I’m fine.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m doing fine. No one can tell.”

  “I know no one else can see it, but I can. You’re not Ca—”

  “Don’t say it!” He flopped back on the bed. “I’ll go. Just don’t say that.”

  I checked my watch and sat on the bed. I put my hand on his stomach. “If that’s not working, then do Jenn’s art therapy. But something. You have to do something.”

  “Okay. Blackthorne. Fine.”

  “Promise?” I leaned on the bed.

  “Promise.”

  I kissed him and went downstairs to meet a patient.

  * * *

  Working in the house was great. Couldn’t beat the commute. But I had to make a concerted effort to get out. During his days off, Caden/Damon walked the neighborhood with me, ate lunch, took me out to dinner. We made love in the afternoon and evening.

  It was great sex.

  Really.

  He had as much right to consent as I did. He could refuse any sex act in the lexicon.

  But I didn’t have to be happy about it.

  In the midst of discovering new things about my desires through my husband, he turned vanilla, flipping like a coin. And I couldn’t ask him again to hurt me. No means no. But, damn. Making love had become an adrenaline rush. Now it was nice. Fine. Better than adequate. But I found myself thinking of the sex right before the change the way one might think of an unappreciated ex-boyfriend who’d slipped through her fingers.

  He went to Blackthorne on Thursday but didn’t talk about it. I thought nothing of it. He hadn’t talked about the treatments before the change either. So, I was surprised when he asked about Jenn’s art therapy class.

  “Are you ditching Blackthorne?” I asked.

  “No, I just think it would be fun. You know, art’s fun.”

  “It’s in Hoboken.”

  “It’ll give me an excuse to take the car out.”

  “All right then.”

  * * *

  Surprisingly, Jenn had a last minute cancellation in her Saturday afternoon Intro to Mask Making for Vets. I stepped into crisp spring air under a clear blue sky—not quite Iraq-colored, but close. Green leaves caught the breeze.

  We didn’t have seasons in San Diego. I’d experienced full seasonal cycles all over the country. I’d experienced fall while stationed in Washington and Maryland, but New York City in the spring was magical.

  There were never parking spaces on our block. It was hard to say who grabbed them, but it was always someone. The only empty space was by the hydrant. Sometimes drivers parked their cars there in desperation, and they were ticketed faster than leaves fell. So, when a black-on-black Ferrari pulled into that space, I figured the driver was an entitled prick or desperate after hours of circling the block.

  The hazard lights flashed, and Caden got out of the driver’s seat.

  Jesus Christ.

  I trotted down the steps. “What did you do?”

  “You like it?” His smile was wider than the gate he opened for me.

  “What happened to the Mercedes?”

  “Traded it in. It’s an old-fart car.” He opened the door for me.

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  “Get in.” He held out his hand and helped me in. The seat was so low I felt as if I had to crawl to get in.

  It did smell nice.

  And the leather seat had a way of hugging me.

  He got in, and the dashboard lit up like a woman recognizing a lover. “Comfortable?”

  “Sure?”

  “The seats adjust.” He showed me the buttons. “You can heat them up too. And this baby goes fast.”

  “There’s traffic all the way to Hoboken.”

  The engine roared when he started it, and he winked at me because he obviously didn’t give a shit about traffic.

  * * *

  What do you look like?

  The class was a quick introduction. Deep work came later in the process. Veterans sat at long wooden tables with unpainted white masks in front of them. I was a vet, so I got to paint my own. I wasn’t much of an artist, and I didn’t want to paint one, but Jenn had teased me into it.

  “Therapists are the absolute worst at getting therapy,” she’d said.

  “Fine.”

  “Just let it flow. Don’t think too much about it. If y’all stay around a few sessions, you’ll make a really nice one at the end. It’s cathartic.”

  “Well, if you’re promising catharsis.”

  * * *

  Caden’s mask was pretty obvious—initially.

  He painted the skin tone the same as his own. He laughed with me when he threatened to turn it into a clown mask and wear it home. He poked gentle fun at the hearts I put on the cheeks of mine; one was pink, and one was blue. With a whisper in my ear, he asked which heart was his and which was the other guy’s.

  “You’re the same person, remember?” I whispered back.

  For a minute, he worked on the eyebrows. I didn’t see his expression or what he was going through in that time, but something changed while I wasn’t looking.

  He dunked his brush in the red paint and drew a fine, straight line down the center of his mask.

  I watched through my peripheral vision. He was coping with the disassociation. Obviously.

  Then he stopped painting altogether.

  I nudged him with my elbow. “You’re either having an epiphany, or you hate painting.”

  “I was thinking about the rose petals.”

  “The rose petals?” I pretended to pay attention to my work, but his voice had gone a touch deeper, and I listened to that change with my whole heart.

  “In Iraq, I promised you a bed of rose petals.”

  I smiled so hard I could barely move my lips around words. “I believe you did scatter rose petals all over your bed that one time.”

  He held up his red-tipped brush. “I couldn’t find this color.”

  “They were beautiful. Everything I wanted.”

  He filled in the curves of the line as if precision was important, grabbing my hand under the table and tightening his grip as if he were falling from a precipice and our connection was the only thing saving him from certain death. “When we met, I thought I didn’t have anything of value to give you. You were perfect already.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I want everything to be right for you.” He wasn’t whispering. There was nothing soft about his tone, but his quiet words were for me alone. I’d forgotten what Caden sounded like inside the split, but as soon as I heard that voice, I remembered. “You smell like apples. Roses were wrong.”

  “Caden, look at me.”

  When he turned to dip his brush, I caught his gaze and held it.

  He was confident. Arrogant. As sure as shit that he had a place in the world. And under that was the man who needed me to be that place. He was fully himself, but I didn’t know for how long.

  “Next time,” he said, “I’m going to get it right. It’s going to be apple blossoms. If I could…” He smiled and shook his head at a silly thought he wanted to dismiss but couldn’t. A contradiction in keeping with the whole man I married. “If I could write my love in the sky, it wouldn’t be big enough. I’d run out of room. I’d fall out of the sky trying to say it all.”

  “We’re going to beat this,” I said.

  “You’re inhumanly strong. If I have to go through this, there’s no one I’d rather do it with. But there’s no one I’d wish it on less.” He swallowed, closed his eyes, taking a long blink. When he opened them, he was the man I used to call Damon. He put his brush on the towel and pushed the mask away. “Let’s open up the car.”

  * * *

  The New Jersey Turnpike was a thick, gray ribbon in a lifeless landscape. Saturday traffic was nothing to speak of compared to the city, and we
were at the on-ramp in twenty minutes.

  “Where are we going?” I asked for the third time.

  “Driving,” he answered with manic cheer, clicking his signal to get into the left lane.

  Traffic was moving at the speed limit, more or less, but as soon as he was in the fast lane, he gunned it. I gripped the sides of my seat. He tailgated the car in front of us until it moved.

  “Slow down!”

  “What’s the point of a Ferrari if you can’t drive fast?”

  “That’s faulty logic!” I had to yell over the roar of the engine.

  “It’s fine. Just enjoy it.” He whipped to the right to pass, coming so close I cringed.

  “Damon!” I shouted.

  “Not my name anymore.”

  He looked at me. He was Damon. I was relieved a third personality hadn’t shown up, but my husband didn’t drive like this. He certainly didn’t take his eyes off the road to look at me at ninety mph.

  “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  Eyes back on the road, he wove between cars to go five miles faster. “Nope. I’m trying to live.”

  I put my left hand against the dash as if that would stop me from dying in a crash. “So you think—”

  He hit the gas. The car easily accelerated to one-ten. “There’s nothing fun about this?” He whipped his head around to look over his shoulder and cut right again. “Come on. Let’s unstuff this shirt.”

  Glancing at me, then my ring, he smiled. He slammed on the gas and cut left to avoid a Toyota, climbing to one-thirty. Traffic was getting heavier. What was going on in this man’s mind? Who was he trying to kill, and who did I have to convince to stop?

  Maybe both of them.

  “You’re going to kill someone!” I said to Damon. “And you’re going to kill me!” I added for Caden.

  The response was immediate.

  He tapped the brakes.

  One-twenty.

  Swerved to avoid someone.

  One hundred.

  Slowed down again to pull into the right lane as the speedometer dropped to eighty-five.

  Panting like a runner after a sprint, I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself, focusing on my breath. The adrenaline flowed away, leaving me to release the tension in my shoulders and legs.

  The car stopped. I opened my eyes. We were at a light at an off-ramp, then pulling into a gas station. He put the car in park.

  “What. The hell. Was that?”

  “That was me trying to live while I could.”

  I didn’t ask what he meant. I was tired of asking how he was and what he was feeling.

  “I’m sorry.” He played with my emerald, brushing my hand in that casual way only he could.

  “Speed limit on the way home, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  But he didn’t start the car. He just pushed the ring side to side. “You should take this off.”

  “Why?”

  Our eyes met over the distance of the car, and it was miles and miles connected by the glass-blue ceiling of the sky.

  “I can’t hold it anymore. I’m not strong enough. He’s coming back, and he’s pissed.”

  * * *

  I drove home. The man next to me was more or less silent. His fingers brushed mine gently, carelessly, doing nothing but feeling the nerve endings of our joined skin vibrate together.

  Dissociative disorders had patterns but no lines, and Caden’s was as blurry as they got. His secondary personality was still a heteronormative cisgender male of the same race, age, and nationality. The amnesia extended to events before his awakening but not general, objective knowledge. And the secondary, Damon, stuck around.

  But just as Caden had felt himself disintegrating before Damon showed up, I could see it happening again.

  He walked home in silence and up the stairs listlessly, like a man with the flu, and dropped himself on the bed with his arms out. I pulled off his shoes, his socks, unbuttoned his pants.

  “Grey,” he said at the ceiling.

  “Yes?”

  He didn’t say anything right away. I slid off his pants.

  “I thought I loved you, back in the darkness.”

  I came around the bed, intending to swing his legs around, but in addition to being naked, he was fully erect now, and I was only human. He looked like the man I loved. He smelled like him. Spoke with the same voice. He was a part of him, and the fact was, I liked him.

  I may have even loved him.

  “Really?” I got behind him and pulled his shirt over his head.

  “But I was wrong,” he said to the ceiling. “I didn’t love you then.” He picked his head up so he could see me. “I love you now.”

  Gathering my shirt at the hem, I twisted it off and removed my bra. “I know.”

  He watched me lower my pants until I stood before him naked.

  “And I want you to know that I love you.” I took the emerald off my finger and put it into the night table drawer.

  I crawled over him and kissed his lips.

  “If you’re ever in the darkness again,” I said, “don’t ever doubt that I love you.”

  Even if I make you stay there.

  Part Five

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  caden

  I could have made a list of things about this shithole, drawn up a few examples of what it was like. I wasn’t much of a metaphor guy, but I could have made some about it. It was like being in wet concrete but also glue. It was like having my thoughts popped apart at the joints. It was like a chest spreader for the consciousness used so it could be filled with crude oil.

  But the worst of the worst was being unable to sense her.

  When we were separated by a few thousand miles, I could place her in my mind. Call up her scent or her voice. But after I let the Thing take over, I was cut off in a way I couldn’t bear.

  I pushed, but I could only move him when he was weak or with his permission.

  I caused him pain, but I couldn’t get through.

  There wasn’t a depressive bone in my body, but now that my bones weren’t my own, it was getting to me. Darkness pressed around me. It wasn’t black. Not the absence of light. Darkness was the absence of anything at all. You’d have thought things and sounds and lights would press up against you, but no. Not like this. This emptiness had its own mass and density. It pushed me away and pulled me into it at the same time. Like being crushed under a black hole’s gravity, I didn’t know if it would compress me into a white dwarf or blow me into a million stars.

  Greysen’s voice sometimes came through the nothingness. Not a word or even a syllable. I couldn’t detect a mood or tone. Vowels skipped and repeated. Letter sets ran backward and over each other, but it was her. I clung to it when I heard it, pointed my attention at it and let it take me into its meaningless sense, twist, change, swirl around in a space that didn’t exist into the cries of my mother in the dark.

  That time.

  When I’d hidden her in the bottle room with me.

  The floor was sticky and warm.

  The smell of copper was everywhere.

  And it was my fault.

  * * *

  Darkness and I had a history. The bottle room was just another part of the house. I’d followed Dad down there to get wine or wandered in while Mom or Clarita, the nanny, did the laundry. The door looked heavy, but it wasn’t. A five-year-old could swing it shut really easily. The light switch was on the outside, and when Clarita shut it off to go upstairs, the darkness had a physical thickness that pushed all the oxygen to the edges of the room. It was hard to breathe deeply enough to scream. But I did, and Clarita came right away to wipe my tears. She showed me how to open the door from the inside. As long as it wasn’t locked, I had control.

  I wasn’t alone in the dark for more than two minutes. The story told over dinner was charming and forgettable. After that, I’d tested myself by going in there and shutting the light and the door to see how long I could last cut off from everything.
>
  Pretty long, as it turned out.

  I went to med school right out of college to prove to my father that I was smart enough, careful enough, precise enough to do what he did.

  I joined the army to prove to him that I loved him even though he’d fallen from the North Tower and disintegrated on impact.

  I deployed a second time to prove to my mother that I could last in a dark room as long as I had to even though she’d jumped with him.

  When I climbed into that medevac, it was at the end of a series of choices meant to prove to Greysen I was worthy of her. I could go over the wire into a war zone. I was at least as much of a soldier as Ronin, her old fuck who she kept as a friend and who looked at her with more than friendship on his mind.

  After eight days in surgery with her watching my mental state like a mother hawk, I’d taken her to bed. I knew with the same conviction that the sun rose and set that I loved her. But the bond was new, and I couldn’t measure the length of the tether that tied us.

  When I walked out to the airfield, the Blackhawk’s rotors thupped in the night. Once I was up, they wouldn’t go back just because I didn’t belong there.

  The pilot shouted code and swung back to look at me. “You the doc?”

  “Yes.” I put on the headphones.

  The bay doors were open as we took off into the star-splashed sky. Shit. A person could fall out and drop into the darkness at the acceleration of gravity.

  “Convoy hit an IED,” the copilot said into my headset. “Full bird from the CSH is down. Medics won’t move him without a field surgeon.”

  Spine injury probably.

  “I’m not a 62B,” I said.

  The pilot let out a cuss of frustration, and the copilot spun around to face me. Taunting them kept me from imagining the minutes I’d spend falling before I disintegrated.

  “We can’t go back!”

  “I’m a GS.” I smiled, coding that I was overqualified, not underqualified. “61J.”

  “Shit.”