Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  “You’re everything, Greysen. My life with you is all I have. But the only way to protect you is to let you go.”

  “Wait.” She shook her head quickly, as if getting the bees out of her ears. “No.”

  “They’ll chase me, and if they find me, they’ll find you. It’ll be ten times worse.”

  “Let’s go!” someone shouted.

  I took a big step backward, until my heel was on the two-foot-high ledge of the roof. She put her arms around me, clamping me in the cage of her body.

  “No!” She looked up at me, pleading.

  I wasn’t sure I could go through with this, yet I had to do it. I had to detach myself, cut her open, and watch her heart beat before it broke.

  “I’m sorry!” I reached behind and pulled her hands away.

  She did exactly what I’d expected, clinging harder, pushing into me, trying to wrap her legs around me. “Don’t you do it! Don’t you leave me!”

  Our bodies twisted together in a push and pull. A locking of limbs and muscle. I took her by the wrists, fingers pressed to the scars inside them.

  Over her shoulder, Ronin was jogging toward us.

  Shit. Time to push.

  I let her arms go.

  “I have to,” I said coldly, calling on the surgeon and the sadist to do the speaking for me. “You have to go alone.”

  “You promised.”

  “I had to get you here.” I shrugged.

  Her face darkened from desperation to rage. Betrayed. Abandoned. Lied to. With eyes afire and hair whipping around her, she was beautiful and terrifying. Pure power and splendor.

  “Grey!” Ronin said, three steps from us.

  She grabbed my arms, and I tried to pull her off, but she didn’t budge. The Humvees stopped at the street below, six stories down and one step backward.

  “Good-bye, baby.”

  I yanked my arms away, and she pushed me, trying to stay connected but also showing me her anger. She pushed too hard. I lost my balance, knees cut to bending by the ledge, and let her go so I wouldn’t pull her over the edge with me.

  What I let go of, she grabbed for, catching my shirt, clamping onto it hard as if she had the strength to pull me back.

  Which she didn’t.

  My weight pulled her over.

  We were in the air, the beating of the chopper blades snuffed out by the wind in my ears, grounded by neither earth nor the safety of a cable.

  Free floating.

  Subject to the single-minded will of gravity.

  We spilled down.

  A second lasted forever in frightening lucidity. The blue of the sky. The smell of sand and gas in the air.

  She was next to me and a little above, hair flying back, one shoe lost to wind shear, fingers shaped into hooks as she reached for me.

  What gravity pulled down, the wind pushed up. My hand reached for hers, and we touched, sliding our palms together in the split moment before impact.

  Chapter Ninety-One

  GREYSEN

  Lucidity isn’t always sanity. Illusions can seem clear and reasonable.

  That may be the very definition of insanity. Not that a mind is muddled or confused, but that it’s too clear and concise when facing its own misrepresentations, without the ability to turn to reality. Not without help.

  Which is to say, everything got clear on the way down. My life was a deck of cards being bent from the bottom and shuffled. I could see the face cards flipping by, each one an event in my life.

  A person who touched me. Events, meaningless and otherwise. A thing I saw once.

  Lia, who shows me how to make the Egyptian points on the corners of my eyes.

  Jake, who yells when I break his Walkman.

  July Fourth barbecue. The smell of chlorine and ketchup. Colin drinks a beer. He has Dad’s chin.

  My sixth birthday. I’m at the head of the table. I pretend I am queen.

  The thup-thup of hundreds of helicopter rotors.

  In the backseat, the way the sun bursts over the line of the mountains while my brothers argue.

  A clown on stilts hands out bananas.

  My mother at the kitchen table, doing a crossword.

  And Caden.

  Half-seen in slow motion as we parted on the way down—I wouldn’t let him fall alone. Not this time.

  Caden.

  Whose love woke me so slowly I didn’t realize I’d been sleeping.

  Whose body was the source of my deepest aching need.

  Whose arms shook as he carried me to the CSH in Balad. The sun peeking from behind him, bursting as if he was my horizon line.

  Whose body was life.

  Who opened the mail with a rip and a blow.

  Who never let me fall until I pushed him.

  Whose eyes held the promise and protection of the sky above.

  Caden.

  Who was suspended in the air next to me, his posture a scribble of unlikely angles, released from the constraint of gravity even as he was imprisoned by it.

  He was reaching for me, and I didn’t have to abandon him.

  I couldn’t save us, but I’d tried. I’d grabbed his shirt and tried to pull him back. Physics and inertia sent me over with him, but I wasn’t an observer to my foolishness.

  I’d tried.

  Time stretched. All was still. The pressure of the air under me was leverage enough to reach for him. Touch him. Hand to hand. Skin on skin. I had him.

  I was so sorry. Wrecked with a regret I’d never have time to process.

  But I’d tried.

  Everything was clear.

  And real.

  Clicking into place—Forgiveness matched with responsibility. Sorrow with hope. Contentment with worry. Death with love. Acceptance with elation.

  Caden with Greysen.

  The complete puzzle came together, and clarity matched with reality.

  Which is to say, I knew I was going to die sane.

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  CADEN

  SAN DIEGO

  OCTOBER, 2005

  I hadn’t thought I’d ever get married. I didn’t love bachelorhood or despise the institution of marriage. It wasn’t a position I’d staked out and defended. It was simpler than that. I’d long ago accepted the fact that I was emotionally unqualified for the job of husband.

  Then she’d come, and it didn’t matter.

  Nothing else mattered. Not my rented tux or the wedding gown she’d plucked off the rack like a pair of jeans. Not Doug, the photographer who worked for the local paper. Not the brown sludge seeping into the hem of her dress or the grit between my toes.

  What mattered was the sun setting behind her, the way her laughter rose above the bang and gurgle of the crashing waves, the wind pulling her veil behind her toward the infinite ocean.

  She was connected to the sun, the sea, the wind, and the sand, and I was connected to her.

  I’d never thought I’d get married, but how could I have known a woman like her existed?

  “Stop kissing for one minute, guys!” the photographer cried. “I can’t see your faces.”

  I opened my eyes. She had sand in her lashes.

  “We should let the man do his job,” I said.

  “If we wanted posed pictures, we would have hired that other lady.”

  I turned to Doug and smiled, keeping her close. Behind him, her parents watched. Dad held Mom’s shoes. Jake and Colin were to the right, still arguing about politics as a cover for deep personality differences. Cousins, uncles, aunts, none mine before this day, played in the sand or wrinkled their noses at their sullied finery.

  I heard the hiss of the foaming wave before I felt the cold rush on my feet, and as Greysen squealed, I sank an inch into wet sand and laughed. Doug click-clicked, and we ignored him.

  “I just lost the deposit on this tux.”

  She picked up the skirt of her dress. “It’s ruined,” she laughed. “I guess I can’t wear it again.”

  I swept her in my arms and spun he
r. “I’ll shred it later just to make sure.”

  “Oh no!” she cried when I put her down. “Look!”

  Five feet away, a sand castle was getting waterlogged.

  “Let’s move out,” Dad called. “The caterer’s going to start in half an hour.”

  “We have thirty minutes to save it!” Veil dragging, she ran to the castle. “Mom!” She tossed her mother her shoes.

  “Twenty minutes,” I said. “Ten minutes to drive back.”

  She got on her knees and patted the base of the castle. “Help me!”

  “You can’t be serious?”

  Looking up at me with a streak of sand on her left cheek and the last bits of the sun catching the hairs flying out of her up-do, she caught me in the web of her higher expectations.

  I got on my knees across from her, the castle between us.

  “Just this one thing.” She pointed at a tower that had survived the wave. It had been made by a careful child, with evenly cut turrets and a window with sticks for bars.

  “Hurry.” I got my hands under it, and she did the same.

  A wave smashed and foamed, ripping toward us as we carefully lifted the tower without a second to spare.

  “Slowly,” I said. “Careful.”

  “Okay. We got it.”

  Doug took his pictures. Jake and Colin stopped arguing. The kids watched with wide eyes. Everyone held their breath, rooting for us to move the tower to safety.

  We stepped over the newly wet sand, balancing the piece of the castle. With every step, the tower cracked and split, and as we stepped out of the tidal zone, it collapsed in our hands.

  A collective aww went up.

  “We tried,” I said, slapping the sand off my hands.

  She looped her arm through mine. “We did.”

  When I kissed her, she tasted like sea foam, so I kissed her again and again on the way back to the house.

  We tried.

  We did.

  Epilogue

  caden

  Death changes you even when you don’t die.

  I’d recognized the Blackthorne building as soon as we got to the roof, and I saw the yellow-and-blue striped airbag below. I had a second to decide if the opportunity to have Greysen push me off a building would occur. I didn’t have time to ask if the bag was inflated or if it was safe. I didn’t have time to train in the proper way to fall.

  If I’d had a second more to think about it, I wouldn’t have put her at risk.

  Maybe I just did impulsive things when she was about to get on a helicopter with Ronin. Maybe I’d never know, and maybe it would never matter.

  The bag had been inflated, and we fell side by side. Not quite safely, but not quite dead either.

  “Baby!” I wrestled the inflated bag to turn to her.

  “Caden!”

  Anything could be wrong. I hadn’t seen the angle of her fall, and it took very little to paralyze a person from that height.

  “Can you feel your hands and feet?”

  “Yes.” The sound of her voice was a song, and her expression was sharp and aware. “Are you—?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I rolled on top of her, pushed by the movement of the air in the bag. Four hands clasped between our chests.

  “We’re fine,” I said.

  “We’re fine.”

  I was promptly arrested.

  * * *

  I was court-martialed, demoted, and had my bonus taken. It wasn’t fun. I stated my case, expressed regret, took responsibility, but also made it clear that I would always do what I had to do to save my wife. Greysen was a character witness, as were her father and Jake, whose survival after capture was a miracle. Ronin testified with eyes averted from my wife’s face.

  What kept me going through the shame of it all was Greysen. She was whole. We’d recreated her pivotal moment, and she’d taken control of it the way I’d taken control of my own.

  That was the only cure so far.

  By the time I was a free man, Blackthorne had quietly ended the BiCam study. They’d shuttered the medical study division, wiping it from their website as if it had never existed. Ronin went into the Saudi facility. I hoped they found a simpler cure, but knew they’d never tell me.

  In the end, I was treated fairly. I negotiated staying in the army even after I could have been discharged. Greysen didn’t admit to wanting to keep her connection to the military, but I knew she did. Once she told me she was pregnant, I knew I had to stay.

  * * *

  I surfed. A few months to forty-two years old, army captain, New York City born and raised, I’d taken up surfing at five in the morning before I had to report at the Presidio.

  Monterey was on the wrong side of dawn. The sky over the water didn’t change from dark to light as much as it went from navy to cadet, and when the ocean swelled, it looked like a black plastic bag being shaken out.

  The surfer rides between the shore and a force that threatens to throw him against it. The push is stronger than any one man, and riding it means using it, respecting it, knowing it can pick you up and slam you against the earth if you’re not careful.

  Which it did. A lot.

  I spun in the brine, tucking my body into itself as I was rolled against the sand and spit up onto the beach with grit between the edges of my suit and my skin.

  Shaking out my hair, I located my board and tucked it under my arm. My watch said I had time for another shot at it and—

  “Caden!”

  Sun rising behind her, Greysen was pulled forward by our son. He was named Hank, but we called him Yank because he pulled us in all directions as hard as his eighteen-month-old body could. I stuck the board in the sand and held my arms out for the baby. The fat, brown curls he got from my side of the family had been bleached blond by the sun, and the dark eyes he got from my wife were big with delight when I picked him up.

  “You’re up,” I said facetiously.

  Of course she was up. Hank didn’t actually sleep. It was unusual for her to drive to the beach before seven in the morning. I kissed her, but her lips were tight.

  I turned to Hank. “What’s Mommy mad about?”

  He reached over my shoulder to the bright-yellow board. I put him down.

  “I’m not mad,” she said.

  “Boo!” Hank peered around the board and popped back behind it.

  Distracted, I chased him around the yellow barrier. “I’m going to get you!”

  Crouching, chasing him in circles as he squealed, I was low enough to see what Greysen had in her hand. A white letter-sized envelope.

  Snatching up Hank, I laid him over my shoulder and blew noisy air onto his belly, then I turned him upside down while he laughed and brushed the sand with his fingertips.

  “What do you have there, baby?”

  She held up the envelope. The front had the US Army seal. “Are you deploying?”

  Since I was normal active duty, I would have known weeks ago if I was being sent overseas. Greysen knew that, but once burned, she assumed everything was fire.

  Gently, I lowered Hank onto the beach. “No. It’s not that.”

  “What is it then? Why didn’t you open it?”

  “Because.” I snapped away the envelope. “I know what it is, so there’s no point.” I jammed my finger under the flap’s corner and yanked, making a mess of the tear. “And you’ve been with patients, or I’ve been on shift. We’re busy.” I blew into the split to open it. “I was waiting for the right time.”

  Hank was pulling at my legs to get up.

  I held the envelope out to him. “Pull that out.”

  I had to get it removed halfway before he could get the paper loose. I handed it to Greysen still folded. She took it suspiciously, as if I’d lie about being deployed.

  No. She trusted me. She still thought the army could lie, and I didn’t blame her.

  “Open it,” I chided, picking up Hank again.

  She swung her head to let the wind keep the hair out of he
r face and unfolded the page, glancing at me as if to ask if I had anything else to say before I was proven wrong.

  “Mommy is a suspicious lady.”

  Hank made a farting noise with his lips.

  Greysen read the letter, every word of it, a satisfied smile growing across her face. “Major St. John. Congratulations.”

  “I’m off square one.”

  Her hands dropped, wrinkling the letter. “God, when can I stop worrying about this?”

  I reached for her and pulled her close. Hank transferred his weight from me to her. “This is our life, baby. Is it that bad?”

  “No. It’s perfect.”

  I kissed Hank’s cheek, then her lips. They yielded this time, and I tasted her mouth until Hank jammed his fingers between us, laughing.

  “Hanky,” I said, “are you ready for your little sister?”

  “Yes!” He pointed at his mother’s belly, which was just starting to show.

  “All right.” I gave him to Greysen and picked up my board. “So am I.”

  “So am I,” Greysen said when I took her hand.

  Hank wiggled to the ground and pulled us away from the ocean to the car, our home, our life together with its ups, its downs, its surprises and routines.

  I helped Greysen onto the curb even though she didn’t need it and kissed her until our son pulled her away. I watched her stuttering walk to her car as she tried to keep up with a child who wanted to see everything every minute and wanted to take us along for the ride.

  She glanced back at me, smiling, and waved me forward. “Keep up, Major!”

  I hitched my board under my arm and chased my family home.

  Was our life perfect?

  Yes.

  Yes, it was.

  * * *

  GREYSEN

  How many possible futures did I have?

  When we walked away from that air bag, I knew I was starting a possible future so unlikely that I needed to appreciate every minute of it.