by CD Reiss
“When?” I asked.
He and Mom exchanged a glance.
Scott’s father had blamed me for the fall, complaining to the dean that since I wasn’t on the diving team, I had no business by the pool at all.
Dad shrugged. “You got any sugar for this tea?”
“It’s right in front of you. When did you meet Scott’s father?”
Mom tapped her foot. “Might as well tell her.”
“Yeah, Dad,” Colin said.
“Well.” He stirred sugar into his tea. “Jakey and I met up with him on this little street in Palisades and had a talk with him.”
“A talk?”
Colin chuckled.
“These pussy Hollywood types spook easy.” He waved off the gravity of whatever it was he’d done. “They see a rifle and start praying.”
“What?”
“We just talked, Grey.” Colin waved it off.
“You were there? You were barely eighteen!”
“I had a driver’s license.”
Dad laughed. “He drove him off the road. Scared the hell out of us.”
“What?”
“I stayed in the car,” Colin protested from behind his cup. “I didn’t get to put a rifle butt through his windows.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was so outrageous I couldn’t speak.
Dad took that as permission to find humor in the story. “He was shaking so hard I thought he was going to create his own weather pattern.”
“What did you say to him?” I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine that ending well.
“Not a word. Jake just kept grunting at him. He’s a funny kid. Laughed the whole way home.”
Colin—my refined, intelligent brother—smirked at the violence. “They just broke his windows and his cell phone. Words would have been superfluous.”
“Jesus Christ, guys.”
“He’d come a long way from going to the hospital with a rifle.” Mom sipped her tea.
“You knew about this?”
“Of course. Can you eat the cheese you took, please?”
I picked up my cheese but stopped it on the way to my mouth. “I don’t know whether to yell at you guys or thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Dad said. “You thanked me by graduating and getting a commission. If you want to yell, you’re a grown woman. You can yell if you want.”
I ate the cheese and chewed pensively, realizing I wished I had been there to smash Mr. Verehoven’s windows with an assault weapon just to see his fear create a weather pattern.
I’d never told my dad I was afraid of falling. He was in the 101st. It was his job to jump out of planes. I didn’t want him to be disappointed in me. After hearing about the broken car windows, I was even more glad. Who knew what he would have done if he’d had any idea how terrified I was of falling from a height?
With Colin gone and my parents tucked in, I couldn’t sleep. The memory of getting pushed off that ten-meter diving platform haunted me. I had been convinced I was going to die, and inside the conviction had been a clarity that expanded time. From the high platform, a diver spends about 1.42 seconds going straight down.
The water had had a misleading gentle turquoise glow from the underwater lights. The surface—I knew—would hit my body with the force of concrete if I landed flat.
My neck would break.
Near-death lucidity was a very real phenomena. It expanded time and mental capabilities. It allowed me to hold my breath. It gave me time to turn just enough to tuck my arms to my body and protect my neck so I only devastated my shoulder.
I lived a full life in a second and a half.
My terror of heights didn’t come from the injuries. It came from the second and a half of clarity. Feeling, seeing, hearing everything. Elongating the string of time into an elastic band the exact length of the rest of my life.
Near-death lucidity was my limit. A hard no.
When Scott had half apologized at my hospital bedside, admitting to no more than clumsiness, I thought he’d had a change of heart. I hadn’t realized my family had gone full military.
Not that it would have mattered. I’d told Scott to go fuck himself. I hadn’t trusted myself with men for a long time after that. I dated on my terms and had sex on my terms.
The night Dad had admitted he’d “facilitated” the diver’s exit from UCLA, I stared at the ceiling with my arms folded over my chest, listening to the soft, irregular hum of traffic and trying to feel remorse or guilt. I had none. Scott could still go fuck himself.
I’d kept myself in complete control until Caden.
I’d chosen wisely. He was worth my trust.
Chapter Six
CADEN
The first time I’d gone outside the wire, in Fallujah, it had been a mess. I didn’t talk about it. Ever. I hadn’t even told Greyson anything more than “Everyone lived, no problems.” After filling out the report, I’d shoved the incident into the back of my mind, where it died a quiet death so that I could live.
My first trip out in Baghdad shut down the Thing before the Blackhawk even got off the ground. We circled over a patch of road with the median blasted out. The injured was lifted onto deck, and I treated him. We went back to the Green Zone without touching the ground.
The Thing came back as soon as I got off the helicopter.
Was it the idea of danger that ran it off the road? How shitty did it have to get before it gave me some space?
I’d had a call with my wife that night. She’d done to herself what I needed to do to her, and it was fucking amazing. The Thing was gone. That space in my mind was filled with Greyson, and it was strong.
Col. DeLeon—no one called her Harpy or even Karen to her face—threw herself into the chair next to me. There were two adjacent desks in the tiny office, each with a beige computer we all used for notes, reports, and requisitions.
“How you holding up, Asshole Eyes?”
That, apparently, was my nickname. My father had been an asshole, they were his eyes, and bang—nickname. Could have been worse. She’d called me Pretty Boy once, and I’d given her a look that made the buzz in my ears even louder. She knew enough about leadership to back off. I appreciated that.
Not looking away from the computer I typed notes into, I answered, “Good.”
She tapped her password into the other machine. “Heard you were at Balad for the first few days of Phantom Fury.”
“Yeah.”
“Eight days straight.”
“More like seven and three quarters.”
“Impressive.”
“Not a big deal.”
“You speak Arabic too?”
“I understand enough. My wife speaks it.”
Mentioning Greyson was completely unnecessary yet critical.
We worked for a few minutes, then she twisted her chair to face me and crossed her legs. “Why’d you resign your commission?”
“Personal reasons.”
“It seemed strange,” she said, blowing right by my answer, “because you’re really good at this. You belong here.”
Finished, I logged out and turned to her. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It is.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t like me much, do you?”
“Are you here to be liked?”
“Hell no.” She smiled and crossed her arms to match her legs. “It’s not about you learning about me. It’s about me learning about you. A lot of guys take issue working under a woman, and I need to know where you stand on that.”
“I’m fine with it.”
“I know. You all are. But some of you have a little voice inside you that’s bothered by it, and it’s my job”—her voice got very feminine and seductive—“to tease out that tiny voice, little by little, so I can crush it.” She said “crush” with a growl and a clenched fist.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it, and neither could she.
“My little voice has been crushed
,” I said, holding up my hands. “Trust me.”
Her eyes fell on my wedding ring, then on my asshole eyes.
Women flirted with me. I knew it when I saw it, but I wasn’t particularly good at it. When I made an innuendo or expressed a desire, it was because I planned to follow through. Promising sex without the intention of delivering it was a waste of everyone’s time.
I was sure I hadn’t given DeLeon reason to believe I was interested in flirting or fucking. She’d seen my ring. I’d seen the fact that she didn’t have one. Not that it mattered. Married people fucked around all the time. Just not me.
But I had a problem. I was back to square one with a new Thing. It was in the sounds and the shadows. In the midnight chanting from the minaret and the muffled voices behind doors, it buzzed. It wasn’t frightened away; it was satisfied away, like a noisy cat being scratched behind the ear. It was quieted by danger, surgery, and Greyson’s pain.
Danger came when it did, and surgery was regular but unplannable. Without Greyson’s body, I didn’t know how to stifle the presence. Without access to her pain, I couldn’t placate it.
“Eyes!” Heartland ran up behind me as I checked the charts. He refused the word “asshole” like a vegetarian refused meat. “Nine-line. Boner’s in OR.”
“I’ll go.”
As the Blackhawk lifted upward, inertia tried to pull my stomach downward. I usually took this as a sign of my discomfort in the air, but with the reappearance of the Thing came the slippery shaft I pushed my emotions into. Fear went right into the locked box.
We arrived over a rocky dry riverbed in four minutes.
“Aw, shit,” the pilot said in my headset.
I looked down, something I would have struggled to do without my personal emotional sponge, and took in the scene.
An overturned truck. Two stopped but upright. A plume of smoke. A perimeter of men on their stomachs protecting the center. A man waving a sign for sniper fire. Two men crouched over another lying on his back. The pool of blood enclosed him in a huge, black comma.
They weren’t military.
“We can’t land under fire,” the copilot, Gangrene, said in my headset.
“That’s a lot of blood,” I replied.
“Fucking contractors,” the paramedic grumbled.
“He’s going to die,” I said, turning to make eye contact with the medics, then the pilot and copilot.
“Fuck!” the pilot barked. “Are we in or not?”
“I’m in.” If the doc answered first, it was easier for the other guys to agree, and I knew they wanted to.
They chimed in their agreement, the contractor-hating paramedic consenting last.
The Blackhawk whipped around and swooped down.
Trapped in a speeding tin can, hurtling into sniper fire with the angry Thing boiled into adrenaline, I’d never felt so free.
Chapter Seven
GREYSON
It was eight thirty in the morning in Baghdad when I called. Army lunchtime.
“Corporal Lorben. How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Dr. St. John. This is his wife.”
“He’s not here. Do you want to leave a message?”
No, I did not want to leave a message. I wanted to hear my husband’s voice.
“When is he on duty?” I asked.
“I think he’s on his way back from a medevac.”
What?
“No, that’s…”
Not possible.
Not right.
Not allowed.
Stop acting surprised.
My hope that his last trip out had been a one-time deal got shot out of the sky.
“Ma’am?”
“Let him know I called. It’s not an emergency.”
If sleep wasn’t happening, I could at least go to my office and get work done. On the way down, I heard my father making his “night noises.” Huffs of fear. Startled jumps. As I passed, he made the uh-uh-uh that could go on for minutes.
The PTSD never left him, but he’d never admitted he had it. Mom had stopped nagging him years ago.
Don’t let Caden become like Dad.
I hurried downstairs, banishing the thought. Keeping busy was the trick. I packed up the files of the patients I’d referred out and the ones moving to the hospital practice.
Decisions are made before they’re made. The seeds are planted and watered, growing invisibly under the surface until the sprouts show, and even then, with those first two spear-shaped leaves, we can’t identify the fruit they’ll bear.
But a seed had been planted. I just couldn’t see it in the noise of daily life. I had bills to pay, a business to wind down, a dream job to ramp up, and patients who needed care.
As I went through the files, I noticed where they’d come from. Some of my first military clients had come from Jenn, but even more had come from Ronin.
I’d stacked the files in order of where they were going, but I restacked them according to where they’d come from, then I looked at the names.
I knew them. I knew their problems, their struggles, and the details of their PTSD.
I wrote down the names of those who had described feelings of dissociation. Most were mild and had shown improvement. One had gotten worse, but he’d been stop-lossed two weeks before and I couldn’t check on him.
Weird.
They weren’t supposed to stop-loss troops with PTSD. Maybe Caden hadn’t been an exception.
But in a way, Caden was part of a larger pattern.
All of the dissociative cases had come from Ronin.
“Coincidence,” Ronin said casually. His body was turned to the side, and his legs were stretched out while his elbow rested on the table as if he wanted to be fully present but also needed to be able to leave the coffee shop quickly.
“Were any of them getting the same treatment as Caden?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“How did you expect me to help these people if they weren’t forthcoming about what other treatments they were receiving?”
“Nothing you prescribed interfered with what we were doing.” He was such a baldly self-involved ass that I didn’t have an immediate reply, which gave him room to wedge in more excuses. “Overall, did your PTSD patients have a normal ratio of disorders or not?”
“The problem is that they all came from you.”
He shrugged. “Your sample is too small to determine that I’m the problem here.” He turned his body around to face me fully. “What we’re doing is important work, and it’s safe work. It’s for us. For the country and for the life of every soldier in the field.”
“You going to vomit stars and stripes now?”
“You’re looking for a reason your husband broke. The fact is there is no reason. It just is. Some people break, some crack, some are fine. Look at you.” He put his hand out as if presenting me on a silver platter. “You’re fine.”
Was I fine? Maybe. I slept. I ate. I loved.
After the carnival where I’d stared down a fear of mortar fire, I didn’t jump at whistles or booms. My mind had snapped back like a new rubber band. I hadn’t identified any triggers that changed my mood or caused a sharp negative reaction.
So, I was fine. I was the end of a long line of soldiers.
I had been born for this.
“I want you to send me back,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Blackthorne’s contracting security in Iraq. I want to go back. Hire me.”
“Wait, wait, wait…” He shook his head.
“A psych on staff can reduce your liability when your teams come back with PTSD.”
“We have no liability.”
I wasn’t ready to blame Ronin or Blackthorne for my husband’s condition. It had started before the treatment, and it had gotten better under it. But he’d been sent away because of them and they owed me. “Hire me.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Tell me how it works and make i
t happen.”
“Why don’t you just sign on for another commission?”
“Because they’ll put me where they want me. I could end up in Korea. Blackthorne will put me near my husband.”
“I always thought you were crazy.” He stood and placed his hands flat on the table so he could lean close to me. “You’re still gorgeous, but you’re still out of your goddamn mind.”
“I’ll get on a plane to Jordan right now and walk to Baghdad. If I have to do that, Ronin, if I have to go as a free agent, I’m talking to every left-wing, contractor-hating journalist who’ll listen.”
“About what exactly?”
“All I have to do is make them curious about what you’re doing here. They already hate you because of Abu Ghraib. Hire me, station me where I want to go, and you’ll have your NDA.”
He stood straight and buttoned his jacket. “It’s been great catching up.”
“Caden?”
“I heard you called?”
It was one in the morning, and as soon as the phone rang, I knew it was him.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
Sure. Everything was fine. This whole thing was over, and we could go on like a normal couple.
“How’s Damon?”
He breathed into the receiver, cleared his throat. I waited. The sound of people talking in the background was cut off after the click of a door and the squeak of a desk chair.
“I’m managing it,” Caden answered finally.
“How?”
“I want to get you on Skype. I need to see your cunt.”
Blood flowed between my legs with an urgency that ached. “My parents are here. In the house.”
“I don’t care.”
“I want to talk about the medevac.”
“Do everything I say and tell me you’re doing it.” His resolve left no room for my concern. It flooded me with a desire to please him. “Take off your clothes.”
After dropping the phone on the bed, I wriggled out of my shirt and underpants and put the phone to my ear again. “I’m naked.”