by CD Reiss
“Why?”
“I could ask you why you came back.”
“You could. You first though.” I was on the edge of my seat, not for the answer but for the comfort of his voice.
“Remember that time you called me from that punk club? The Spot or something?”
I did but barely. I’d been drunk, eighteen, and frightened our parents would be mad. He’d picked me up and taken me home.
“The Red Spot, and it wasn’t punk. It was New Wave.”
“The night before you enlisted.”
A wave of panic went through me, as if talking about this was a toxic sea I was being asked to jump into.
“Let me check on the tea.” I bounced up. The electric pot was already hissing. “Sugar?”
“No, thank you. Do you know, I’ve never felt as useful as that night? Every time I come here, I think I’m going to be doing something I can be proud of, and I’m wrong every fucking time.”
I poured the tea. “You’re useful. You just can’t see the big picture. None of us can.”
“Maybe the picture’s too big for me.”
I was supposed to listen without judgment or direction, but I could still feel the sulfuric sting of the toxic sea and changed the subject. “What about a woman in your life?” I poured hot water over mint leaves. “Anyone?”
He shrugged. “This and that. How’s the moms and dads?”
“We did a little reminiscing when they came to visit. I found out about the talk you had with Scott Verehoven’s father.”
A smile spread across his face. “Yeah.”
“That was gross, Jake.” I handed him his glass.
“But I felt useful. See, that’s the key. I wasn’t looking for shit that wasn’t there or securing a road we’d lose in a month. I could rescue a damsel in distress.”
“Really, Jake?” I tucked myself into the chair across from him, cradling my glass. “That’s sad. You could have let the lawyers take care of it.”
“Fuck the lawyers.” He blew on the tea. “We take care of business. It’s the Frazier way.”
That was how I’d found myself in Baghdad. Just taking care of business. That was why Jake had been bumped down to butterbar twice. We were a family of people completely unsuited to the military, yet there we were, three generations in.
I raised my glass cup. “To the Frazier way.”
He clicked his cup to mine. “The Frazier way.”
“I missed you,” I said.
“I missed you too. Now tell me what the fuck you’re doing with Blackthorne? You came for your husband.”
I sighed. We had thirty more minutes, and I feared we’d spend it talking about me. “I did. I came for him. He didn’t want me to, but I did it anyway.”
He knocked his scalding tea back in a single gulp before clicking the glass on the table.
“That’s how we roll,” he said, and I knew that as much as he didn’t approve of my decision, he’d never deny it was the right one.
* * *
Days went by without word from Caden. If I put my cheek to the window in my office, I could see the hospital. The soreness in my shoulders and between my legs faded. Whenever I saw a Blackhawk land on the pad by the hospital, I wondered if he was on it.
I counseled my fellow contractors in the mornings over marital and money issues. The afternoon’s paperwork was ten percent less odious than the army’s and geared more toward ass-covering than record-keeping.
The BiCam145 serum inside the “latest and best” syringes had been filed away in a refrigerator, but it weighed on me. I wanted to see if it worked. Through my work counseling Blackthorne’s patients, I’d unknowingly had a small part in its development, and I felt responsible for it.
Ferhad’s lunch tray was pushed to the side. He ignored Dana and me in favor of the little notepad he carried on his clipboard. He was a poet and could write it in the middle of a conversation.
“This is terrible,” I said, dropping the rest of my chicken salad sandwich onto the plate.
“I hear it’s harder to get food and stuff into the Green Zone since the bomb attack,” Dana said before finishing the last of her sandwich. In addition to being a font of good cheer, she was a first-class news-gatherer.
“Everyone’s on edge,” Ferhad said, pencil still moving. “Zone isn’t as green as it used to be.”
“The Zone’s always greener on the other side of the wire.” Dana giggled at her own joke.
“They strapped bombs to a child.” Ferhad put down his pencil. “If the doctor trying to help him didn’t speak Arabic, another dozen would have been dead.”
“He—”
—doesn’t actually speak it.
No one needed to know what Caden spoke or didn’t.
“What does dujon mean in Arabic?” I asked. “I speak a little, but I’ve never heard it.”
“I don’t know if it’s Arabic,” he said.
“Oh.” I glanced at Ferhad’s poetry. “I thought you were writing in Arabic.”
“This is Sorani. It’s Kurdish.”
“Ah, I’m sorry to assume.”
He waved it off. “It’s a fine thing. Dujon”—he said it with a different inflection—“is Kurdish too. It means ‘I’m pregnant.’”
* * *
That night, I reconstructed the conversation where Caden had mentioned the word. He had been talking about the suicide bomber, but I was sure he’d said it was a boy.
Who had been pregnant? And when?
Maybe Caden had gotten the word wrong and I’d made it worse. Maybe it was a different word altogether. There might have been no mystery there, but it nagged at me. Right next to the place where I doubted I should have come to Iraq at all.
I wasn’t watching over my husband. Wasn’t caring for him. I still missed him. I still didn’t know if he was in danger, and even if he was, I had no way of preventing it.
In the middle of the night, I curled up inside myself, wondering if I knew what I was doing at all. I assumed I was wide awake until the phone rang.
“Dr. Frazier. This is Colonel DeLeon.”
I shot up to a sitting position as if I’d been administered a day’s worth of cortisol. “Caden?”
“No, no. Hold up.”
“What?”
“It’s not Caden. Old Asshole Eyes is just fine. I’m calling you as the psychiatrist on staff at Blackthorne.”
I put my hand to my forehead and tried to think calm thoughts. “Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.”
“I have two patients here. Just got pulled out of a fire this past morning. Both their files got a big note on them. I’m supposed to call you guys if they’re showing signs of traumatic stress.”
“Right. Yes.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Can I have their names?”
“What’s this about?”
“They were part of a DoD-sponsored protocol. I’ll bring releases.”
“You better.” She gave me the names.
* * *
I handed DeLeon the releases and a pamphlet describing how I didn’t have to tell her shit either because of (or in spite of) the fact that Blackthorne was paid by the Pentagon.
She stuck her tongue in her cheek as she flipped through the pamphlet. “This is bullshit. You know that, right?”
“If I were in your shoes, I’d say the same thing.”
“What’s in the case?”
“It’s confidential.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not going to do chem tests on it. I want to look at it.” She crossed her arms. “They’re in my hospital. I could tell you to just fuck off.”
She could, as a practical matter. If I wanted to challenge her, I’d have to make a series of phone calls I didn’t want to waste time on. I put the box on the desk and opened it.
Without asking, she pulled out the plastic bag with the syringe numbered for Specialist Gregory Linderman. “What is it?”
“It’s new. Experimental. And it partners with a lot of work he’s already put in.” I
mplying she owed it to the man to let him finish what he’d started.
“Why’s there only one?”
I reached into the side pocket for the placebo marked with Leslie Yarrow’s number. I didn’t want to get them mixed up.
“Prefilled? They don’t trust you to do your job?”
“Less transfer from container to container means less chance someone from Halliburton will get their hands on it.”
She handed back Linderman’s syringe. “If you weren’t married to Asshole Eyes, this wouldn’t fly, you know.”
“If you weren’t his CO, I’d throat punch you for calling him Asshole Eyes.”
She whooped a laugh, pointing at me after she clapped. “Wifey for the win. Come with me.”
Chapter Sixty
CADEN
Fighting through a barrage of fire and explosives for control over the blocks around some royal palace or another, they’d found a basement of children tied to hooks in the cement floor. All were malnourished. Three were dead.
Linderman was a mess. He’d come off the chopper with a broken leg an Eagle Scout could have fixed, but he was shaking so hard we couldn’t set the bone. We gave him enough sedative to stop the shaking, but when it wore off, he stared in the middle distance with a notable lack of affect.
Yarrow seemed better at first. Burn wounds on her left side. They’d scar but heal. She started crying the next morning and couldn’t stop.
“What the fuck?” On the computer, DeLeon had been scanning their files before calling in the psychiatrist. She picked up the phone. “I’ll say hi to Wifey for you.”
I looked over her shoulder. Blackthorne subjects.
I wondered if I had the same red box in my file.
I wondered about the children in the basement.
I wondered if there had been blood from the dead ones and if it smelled of copper in the darkness.
* * *
I couldn’t get the children in the cellar out of my mind. The cold floor. The weight of the dark. The smell of blood and the dying ones.
The anger Greysen had helped me satisfy two days ago faded into consciousness, and I was left with the buzz of emotions as a separate thing fought to push through the membrane of my defenses and swallow me in blackness.
It wanted her. It was drawn to her tears and her broken skin.
My better self needed her. She anchored me.
I hadn’t seen her in days, which was nothing. But at the same time… too long. I kept half an eye on her as long as she was sitting in the ICU.
“How old are you?” DeLeon asked.
“Thirty-seven, why?”
“You’re like a smitten teenager.” She pointed at Greysen, whom I’d surreptitiously been watching through a window.
From afar, I’d watched her speak to Linderman for an hour with little response. She’d talked to their CO about what they’d experienced and taken notes. She waved when she saw me, and I nodded then pretended to ignore her. Now she was taking out the syringe, talking to Miss Cheerypants.
“For Chrissakes.” DeLeon rolled her eyes. “Can you go over there and make sure she knows what she’s doing?”
“She knows what she’s doing.”
“Go watch her anyway before I puke.”
* * *
“I’m supposed to watch you,” I said as Greysen unwrapped Linderman’s shot.
He was still in his fugue in the ICU, one room over. Dana had scurried off to take notes on Yarrow.
“I’m capable of giving an injection. You should know that.” She checked the prefilled amount with the amount on her sheet.
“How’s he doing?”
“Bad. And she was one of mine, from New York.” She shook her head slightly. She cared about her people, and this bothered her.
“They’re both going home,” I said.
“Good. What they saw. What happened.” She put the needle on a tray. “I’d be traumatized.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Caden.”
“Don’t. I’m fine.”
Still as a statue holding a metal tray with a single syringe, she clearly didn’t believe me.
“Go,” I said. “Before they send him home without your damn shot.”
She went, and I walked behind her. She was the light in the infinite darkness. The fiery star in the blackness of space. With her, there were no cellars.
And yet, the cellar wanted to eat her alive.
* * *
I watched from a safe distance as she administered Linderman’s injection. The base of the needle turned blue, and she placed it on the tray.
Then she went to talk to Yarrow, and I still watched her—not because DeLeon had told me to, but because I couldn’t take my attention off her. She sat at Yarrow’s bedside for over two hours, leaning forward the entire time as if she didn’t want to miss a single word.
That beautiful face, in a cry of pain. My pain. Pain I took from her. A part of me knew I was deep inside the darkest parts of the chasm I carried, but there was so much pleasure there for both of us.
DeLeon came up next to me and spoke softly. “Go look at Linderman.”
“Why?”
“Shut up and do it.”
I tore myself away from Greysen and went to the ICU, where Linderman was sitting up in bed, eating a cup of Jell-O, and joking with one of his buddies. He was animated, warm, seemingly unbroken.
It was as if the children in the cellar had never happened.
Could she erase the cellar for me? Could she make me normal?
Did I want to be?
I should have been happy for Linderman, but I didn’t know whether to envy him or resent him, so I cut off all my feelings about it and added it to the buzz that tried to push its way through me.
Chapter Sixty-One
GREYSEN
The sadness worked its way through Yarrow’s body, wracking it with sobs. For up to ten minutes at a time, she couldn’t form words. I sat with her and waited every time. I liked her. Whether or not I should have come to Iraq for Caden was a moot point. This woman needed a familiar face. She made it all worth it.
“Oh, man,” she said in an interstice between crying jags. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Do you want me to arrange a call to Molly?”
“Not yet. I don’t want her to hear me like this, and I can’t… I can’t tell her about those kids.” She folded a tissue into a square, absently creasing the edges. “She got upset when I told her about the bloody face. Couldn’t sleep for a week.”
The face was a man in her unit who’d died from a head wound. Blood covered his face, his teeth, the whites of his eyes as he screamed. She’d stayed with him as he died and brought him home with her.
“When you were working with me, you said there had been this feeling of being watched. Like someone else was always with you.”
“Yeah.” The crying had slowed now that she was distracted.
“You were doing treatments at Blackthorne for it.”
“I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.”
“I know. But…” I held up the contractor ID that hung around my neck.
“Right. So, you know about it.”
Caden and Yarrow had experienced childhood abuse. If Caden’s work in the black room was painful, Yarrow’s might have been too. But outside that room, my husband’s results had been remarkable. The psychic overload had slowed. Had he been able to keep up with it, he would have had enough respite to work through the issue normally.
I’d been taught the timing and tone of the breathing in New York. I could help her even with a placebo.
“Did the sessions help?” I asked.
“Yeah. They did actually.”
“I know it’s busy in here and the lights are bright, but can you do the breathing if I guide you?”
“I think so.”
“If it gets too much, squeeze my hand, and I’ll bring you out.”
“Okay.”
I put my hand under hers. “You’
re going to be all right.”
“When I close my eyes, I see them.”
“I’m going to give you other things to see.”
“Okay. I trust you.”
“Close your eyes and pretend you’re in the Blackthorne offices. Walk through the halls. Your arm hurts where they gave you the shot. The tech lets you into the small room. See the yellow light of the lamp. The way it makes the black walls look dark gray. You sit and feel the chair under you. You see the cameras. They make you feel safe because you know you’re not alone.”
Her face relaxed, and her breathing got shallow and clear of sobs.
“The tech hooks up your monitors and leaves. The door clicks closed behind her. You’re comfortable and safe.” I waited, watching to make sure she believed she was safe. “Begin the circular breathing with me. Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.”
* * *
Yarrow was resting. She’d sobbed her way through the breathing, but it wasn’t fear or powerlessness. It was cathartic. She came out of it renewed enough to call her wife and give her the good news. She was going home.
Dana came up to me as I was leaving the ICU.
“Hey, you signed off on all these.” She handed me a clipboard with the signed releases. “We still have one in the bag.”
“I didn’t give her the shot yet.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a placebo.” I flipped through the pages, signing. “I wasn’t wasting time with it when she was in real pain. I’ll give it to her before she leaves.”
“Okay. Hey, have you seen Linderman?”
“I was about to go check on him.” I handed back the clipboard.
“It’s like a miracle.”
* * *
DeLeon had woken me at dawn. It was now midmorning. I was hungry and tired.
I was also elated.
Ronin had used me. He was a complete shit. Always was and always would be. But after seeing Linderman, I knew this thing worked. Long-term effects remained to be seen, but in the short term, it fucking worked.