by CD Reiss
It wasn’t just the darkness; it was the thickness of it. The weight. The way it closed in while the sounds outside kept on and on like life moving without me.
And the smell. Cloying and coppery. Slurred words and panic swirling into a whirlwind.
“It was my fault.”
“Caden?”
Caden?
Dr. John.
She squeezed my hand, and I was boy and man. Adult and child. I could make choices, and I was trapped in my impotence. Cut loose from her and twined with her forever.
“What’s happening, Caden? Talk to me.”
She needed me.
She needs me because…
“I knew she was pregnant.”
“The Iraqi woman?” Greysen said in the darkness. “In Fallujah?”
“I had no idea she was pregnant.”
Both were true. I lived two separate realities concurrently. The Iraqi woman spoke with my mother’s voice in the darkness.
Dujon.
“She was bleeding,” I said. “It was everywhere. She was dying. Because of me. Because I got a B on my history essay. It was the punctuation. The commas. He cut off her air to show me the difference between a pause and a stop, and when I ran downstairs…”
Boy, you’re a coward.
“He put her in there with me. Bullet right through the thigh. The medic tied off the femoral artery, but her pressure dropped and her body got rid of the baby to save itself. I was scared he’d come down and see the mess and hurt her again.”
I heard Greysen’s response but didn’t understand the words. I heard only strength and comfort, as if she was a guide through a frightening and alien land. She pulled me forward.
“She let him do it.” I wasn’t sure if I was speaking out loud or if the clay-thick air absorbed the sound before anyone heard. “Why did she let him? What the hell was wrong with her? Fuck her. Fuck her for letting him hurt her. God. There’s so much blood. She’s not moving. She’s limp. Her arms and legs. She’s—”
—dead. My mother is dead, and I killed her with a B in history because I wasn’t careful.
—dead. This woman is dead because you didn’t listen to her.
My wife was saying something. The syllables ran together to make one word said in my mother’s voice, in a dark closet with gunfire on the other side of the wall and the smell of blood all over the cellar and my eleven-year-old hand being squeezed into pain.
Dujon.
Losing blood.
Duyon.
Blood pressure dropping.
Dayon.
Words slurring.
Danyon.
Heart stopping.
Damon.
The anger breached the crack, and its name became a hard buzz, drowning out the soft-bellied Damon. I was busting from the inside, swelling into a third person of unlimited, ever-expanding rage.
I articulated his name. It was no more or less than a roar without cadence or syllables. Unspellable, unspeakable, a sound that shook the earth and made the broken man inside me shrink into a pin dot.
The bag closed, only this time it wasn’t a soft bag held with string, but a tiny room with a metal door. Black as night, I was alone again, listening to the sounds from the kitchen above as he tormented her for all the things I’d done wrong.
“Caden!”
I was so small. Four years old with fat little hands against the cold, concrete wall and the taste of stolen birthday cake on my tongue.
“Caden, listen to me.” Greysen’s voice from the kitchen. She was getting beaten up there, and she was calling me. “Fight it. Fight hard. I love you. I’m waiting for you. Push against it. You’re bigger than this.”
I couldn’t feel my body. Every sense was muffled, but still she called me.
“I need you. Please. I need you. This is not your limit. You’re bigger than this limit. Find it. Find who you are. Breathe. Breathe for me.”
What was it about her voice that cut through the sound in my ears and the thick walls around me? She was so calm even as I was hurting her in the kitchen.
“Listen,” she whispered, and I heard it. “Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo. Breathe with me.”
The angry thing believed in destruction. The angry thing roared and growled. It didn’t believe in bullshit meditative breathing. But my lungs did, and they obeyed, dragging the dense air in and out without a pause. Dizzying, confusing the angry thing taking me over, while the child in the basement felt the walls go soft.
Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.
And Damon returned from a deep, deep sleep with his basket of needs and insecurities.
The buzz turned on him.
Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.
You’re weak.
You’re worthless.
You’re broken.
You are a blemish.
“Caden.” Her voice was the pin of gravity, the edges of the Universe, and the anchor holding me to the center of it.
But I couldn’t respond to her. It was too much. I was still breathing with a rhythm, even without her guidance, as Damon swirled into the same space as the anger.
I pitied him. I wanted to protect him. But he didn’t need my protection. He was ready to die.
“Caden,” she repeated without doubt or weakness. “Go into it. Don’t run away. Embrace it. This is you. They’re all you. I love you.”
She was here, in the darkness—
Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.
—with every mistake I ever made and—
Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.
—she still loved me.
All the doors opened. A single space in my mind where blame and guilt and cowardice lived next to honesty and bravery and love.
I became aware of my body again, and in one gulped breath, I was whole.
Part Eight
Chapter Sixty-Five
GREYSEN
I had a concussion from a falling wooden beam. Boner confirmed the door had saved my leg. It had cracked and fallen on me first, then distributed the impact force of the concrete piece that fell on it. I had a “dead leg,” a quadricep contusion that looked as if I’d spilled black and red paint on my thigh just above the knee.
It hurt like hell, truth be told. The pain didn’t bother me because my mind was completely occupied with Caden.
Under the rubble of my apartment building, I’d talked him through something neither of us had understood at the time. At one point, he’d just rested his head on my chest, and I’d stroked his hair. We’d waited in silence until we heard the trucks outside, then we shouted for all we were worth. As the voices of rescuers got closer, our shouts were mixed with relieved laughter. When the first shaft of light shot through the debris, I saw him for the first time since I’d slammed the door in his face.
“Wow,” was all I could say. He was covered in a mask of gray dust, but the blue of his eyes reflected the morning light like windows to the sky, just like they always did, except for one thing.
The sky wasn’t frightening. It was clear and calm, a protective shield not just over me, but over him as well.
“You look stunning yourself,” he’d said from above me. “Not that you have a choice, but stay still.”
Then he’d looked at the rescue team as they moved another slab, getting between me and the pebbles falling from the sky.
* * *
If I’d still had my commission, they’d have sent me to Germany to recover, then decide if I had to go back to my unit or go home. But I was a contractor and part of the conversation about my own best interests. The military hospital kept me overnight to monitor the concussion.
In the dim light, surrounded by the soft hiss of machines, Caden leaned into my bed. “Dana and Trona are fine. Minor contusions. A few scrapes. They got sent home.”
A rectangle of bandage clung to his forehead where he’d been cut by falling glass.
“For scrapes?”
“Home, Baghdad home.”
“It’s a pile of rock.”
“Blackthorne owns a third of the Green Zone.” He sat
next to the bed and stroked my cheek. He wasn’t the cold, detached man we’d fought to control, nor did he have the soft, insecure expression I’d come to know as Damon’s. He was neither and both. He was impossibly complete.
“What’s different about you?” I asked.
“Everything.” Even his voice was somehow more whole, like a puzzle with all the pieces in place. “It’s over.”
“It can’t be,” I said. “Nothing’s that easy.”
“You call that easy?”
“I don’t even know what it was.”
“It was all the stuff I never told you.” He slid his hand under mine and laid the other one on top. “I’m sorry, Greysen. I’m so sorry I lied to you. I thought if I relived it, I’d… I don’t know. Die, maybe, if I want to overstate it.” He brushed his thumb along the side of my hand with that perfect pressure I’d come to love. “Let me tell you what happened twice. No, two and a half times.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“I wasn’t afraid of the dark when I was a kid,” he said. “I wasn’t afraid of anything. I was like you.”
“I’m afraid of plenty.”
He shrugged as if I was splitting hairs. “If you say so.”
“I’m sorry I interrupted. Go on.”
After a short pause, he began again. “I went in the bottle room when I was scared. I could hear everything from the floor above, but I felt safe. I told you this, but I didn’t tell you the last time I went down there. I was about eleven. I wasn’t a careful kid. I didn’t cross my Ts and or dot my Is generally, and composition wasn’t my strong subject. I’d gotten back a history essay with too many corrections. Commas. Fucking commas.”
I nodded. “Commas are sneaky.”
He smiled in the dim light. “I was in a gifted school, and there was a lot of homework. I was tired when I wrote the essay, and I didn’t check it over. He—my father—took it out on my mother. Sometimes I got mad at her for putting up with it, but I was always more mad at myself for not checking my work. Like she knew it, she always made sure to blame herself. The more I think about it, the more I think that was why I fell in love with you.” He looked at me and squeezed my hand. “You’d never put up with that from me.”
I held back a comment, but he read my mind.
“Except on your terms,” he said with half a grin. “That’s safe for me. Until it wasn’t. Then… you know what happened.”
“Damon.”
“I protected myself from hurting you. I was already fucked in the head with him pushing on me because he was my protector.”
“Did you feel split before then though?”
“No, I don’t know what opened that up.”
I had a feeling I knew what it was, but I wasn’t ready to admit my hand in his breakdown. Not to him and not to myself. But I knew.
“Here’s what I never told you.” He cleared his throat and looked away. “That time, with the commas, he put her in the bottle room with me and locked the door from the outside. He did that sometimes with just me but not for long. This time, after the history essay, it was different. Jesus, this is hard.”
I let it be hard. He hadn’t dealt with any of it. Hadn’t looked it in the face and taken control of it.
“I could hear her, but I couldn’t see her. She was crying. She didn’t cry in front of me. But she was across that little room, sobbing. And I was on the other side, feeling like it was all my fault but also resenting her for invading my safe place. Then she was groaning in pain. And I said, ‘Mom, are you all right?’ and she said, ‘It’s your sister.’”
He didn’t have a sister.
“And that…” he said with a deep breath from the bottom of his lungs. “That was when I smelled the blood.” His face scrunched into a knot, revealing every beautiful dimple. “It was sticky. So sticky and thick. The smell… and there was so much. Just on and on. A puddle. I thought she was dying. I thought…” Another deep breath he had trouble taking. “I thought I’d killed her.”
“She was miscarrying,” I whispered, and he nodded.
“I didn’t know that. I couldn’t see her, and she kept saying she was fine. I thought he’d stabbed her over commas. My commas.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He pressed my hand to his lips and closed his eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.” His lips moved against my knuckles. “She just lay there and said it was okay. She said it wasn’t my fault. She forgave me.”
“Do you forgive her?”
“Not really. When she stopped groaning from the cramps, I crawled over to her. I got blood all over my hands and knees. She didn’t move. I picked up her arm, and it was like a dead weight.” He rested his head on my belly, the bandage disappearing in the folds of the sheets, looking at me with sideways eyes. “I swore to her that when we got out, I’d never miss another thing. I’d pay attention to every detail no matter how tired I was. She said, ‘Okay.’ That was how I knew she wasn’t dead.”
I ran my fingers through his hair. I was mad at Caden’s father for being too dead to face justice, but I wasn’t mad at Caden for lying. Not anymore. All the boundaries between us were false walls.
“And then,” he continued. “The woman in the closet. The femoral artery. It was like I was eleven again. I asked her to forgive me, but she didn’t understand my shitty Arabic.”
“Because she was Kurdish.”
“I think that was when I first felt Damon, but he was so small.”
“And you were doing surgery all the time. The army too. So orderly it was safe to keep him in the background.”
His eyes were transparent in the cold light of the moon. “In the rubble, it was different. No Damon. Just a monster. I swear, if you hadn’t talked me through it, I don’t know what I’d be now. I can do anything with you. I’m still fucked in the head, but it feels normal. I’m a fucked-up person but a whole fucked-up person. All the doors opened, and it’s one room again.”
“I think we stumbled on something,” I said. “The breathing, plus the opportunity to face fear and get control. Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is you look like the man I fell in love with before all this. You’re the fucked-up, brave, honorable, strong asshole I love.”
“I’m going to be everything you need from now on.”
I believed him. I wasn’t sure the world would let us be happy, but I was sure that if happiness was to be found, it was with him. All of him.
He sat up straight and got something from his pocket. He held it close before showing me.
Grady’s sonogram.
“I understand why you didn’t tell me,” he said.
I laughed. He looked wounded.
“It’s not mine.”
“You lost it. I know.” He took my hand as if I needed comfort, but he was the one who needed his hand held.
“No. No, no, no. It’s from a soldier in Balad. He died, and I keep it for… I don’t know why. Luck or respect.”
He laughed once, softly, and the last of his tension fell off in a single breath. “Like a rabbit’s foot.” He plucked it off the bed.
“I would have told you,” I said.
“I found it when we were fighting, so everything was upside down.”
“Keep it for good luck or respect.”
He slid it into his pocket and tilted his head right, then left to stretch his neck. “I have to get to work. I’ll be in the next room if you need me.”
“I need you. Trust me.”
He bent to kiss my cheek, letting his lips linger on my skin. I turned, laying my mouth against his. Slowly, we entered into a kiss, savoring the taste and touch as if it were the first. His tongue gently met mine, and I melted into a pool of desire. With a leisurely pace, he opened his mouth, and I made my shape match his until we were bound by breaths and moans.
We jerked apart with a rustling of paper and the scrape of a chair behind him.
“I should go.” He drew his thumb along my cheek. The corner of the bandage on his forehead h
ad curled a little from laying his head on my chest, and I was struck again by the wholeness I’d taken for granted when we met and that I hadn’t seen in a long time.
The Universe, assuming it even existed with a capital U, had a way of demanding Caden’s attention. If there was any other explanation for his being repeatedly in dark rooms with bleeding women, I couldn’t come up with it.
“We’re very lucky,” I said.
“There’s someone up there watching out for us.”
He was more prone to name divine causation than I ever thought possible.
You never really know a person.
Chapter Sixty-Six
GREYSEN
They let me out of the hospital the next day. I bought a set of crutches and got a lift to my new apartment. The building was much bigger. Thirty units opening onto shared balconies around a barren courtyard. All Blackthorne personnel. Fortified with a thick wall and barbed wire that wouldn’t keep out a bomb any better than the last place.
I was in a single-room studio on the second floor.
“I’m on three,” Dana said, unpacking the stuff she’d managed to retrieve from the rubble. “It’s a longer walk up the stairs, but it’s so great.”
I was sure it would be “so great” no matter where she was.
* * *
Ronin was at my desk like he owned the place. He had a stack of files at one elbow and a cup of coffee at the other.
“Make yourself at home,” I said, putting my crutches by the door. I didn’t need them to walk but to keep the pressure off a leg working to heal.
“Thanks. I got you coffee.” He flipped his hand to a cup by the guest chair. “Black, right?”
I picked it up. “You didn’t say you were coming.”
“Last minute.” He flipped a page.
“What are you looking at?”
“Leslie Yarrow.”
“How’s she doing?”
“No clue.” He closed the file and tossed it across the desk in my direction. “Do you have something useful to add to this fucking shitshow?” He leaned back with his hands linked over his diaphragm. “Because it wasn’t supposed to turn out that way. I mean, maybe she’s fine now, but that’s not an excuse.”