by CD Reiss
“Your dad was smart to buy it when he did.”
“He wanted to be near enough to the hospital, but not that close. He had a space for a practice in the garden apartment, which is soon to be…” He waited for me to finish.
“My practice.”
“Bingo.”
“I’m nervous.”
“I know.”
“What if I—”
He put his finger on my lips before I could utter my litany of doubts. “You’re going to do fine. And if it takes longer than you think it should, we can survive on a heart surgeon’s salary for a while.”
Of course we could. There was nothing to be nervous about. He had my back and my front.
“Can I see the office?”
“Yes.”
* * *
We wiggled into pajamas and went down the back stairs, which led to a short carpeted hall with an old wooden door at each end.
“The door at the back leads to a shared kind of alley thing out the front, so patients won’t bump into each other on the way in and out,” Caden said as he turned the skeleton key that stuck out of the office’s keyhole. It clacked deeply before the door swung open. He flicked on the lights.
The office defied every expectation.
I expected cold fluorescents and a dropped ceiling.
What I got was a pristine white ceiling and warm lamps.
I expected an empty space.
What I got was a 1950s era desk and chairs, tufted couch, end tables, a clock where I could see it but the patient couldn’t, and a deep blue carpet to muffle the distracting scrape of chairs and footsteps. Behind the desk, a horizontal filing cabinet had framed pictures leaning on the top. Family. Friends. Caden and me on the rooftop of the hotel in Amman, with the sunset behind us. I picked up our wedding photo. My parents had set up the backyard in flowers and tables, doing the best they could when they heard we were getting hitched on two-day leave. Caden and me outside the combat hospital in Balad, dressed in dull green and smiles.
“I read up on what you’d need. They said family pictures humanized you to patients.”
“That’s right.”
He opened the door on the far end of the room. The waiting room was bathed in the same warm lamplight. It was small. Two chairs and a love seat. A coffee table. A Wasily Kandinski print. Everything matched the interior office.
“I had speakers put in.” He pointed up. Small wood-grain boxes hung in the corners where the ceiling met the walls. “I hear music soothes the savage breast.”
Caden, a psychiatrist’s husband, had hang-ups about mental illness that had revealed themselves after I accepted his proposal.
“I won’t be working with savages,” I said with a raised eyebrow. I was going to have to patiently whittle away this particular neurosis.
“They won’t all have breasts either.” He put his arm around me. “So you like it?”
“I love it. Madly, deeply. I love it.” I put my arms around his shoulders, and his snaked around my waist. “Thank you so much.”
“There’s so much we’re going to do together.” He kissed my neck. “We’re going to build an entire life out of a war.”
“That would be a miracle.”
“First of many. You and me. We’re a miracle.” He pulled back so he could see my face. “You know what I see when I look at you?”
“Your wife?”
“The worst decisions I’ve ever made, I made for a reason. You. You rose out of the destruction. Our life together will be built into the best from what survived the worst.”
“That’s very poetic.”
He smiled. “I’ve been thinking about what to say for days. I wanted to explain how magnificent we’re going to be.”
“Magnificent?”
“I don’t think I quite nailed it.” He took me back into the hall and to an unremarkable door under the stairs. “Basement.”
He opened the door, and flicked on the light. Wooden stairs led to a dirt floor in a four-by-five room. Caden reached around me and put his hands on a vase sitting on a set-in shelf. He yanked it, and the wall slid to the side, revealing a mosaic floral floor and dark wood bar stacked high with cardboard boxes.
“Chez Columbus,” he said, smiling. “1925-1933.”
Amazing. An actual speakeasy with a stairway to the hidden alley on the side of the house, hidden rooms, and lastly, behind the laundry room, a big wall safe. He opened it, then pushed away the wall behind it to yet another room with cylindrical holes in the concrete.
“The bottle room,” he said. “This was where I hid when… you know.”
“When you were scared.”
“When I should have been stopping him from beating her.”
“I’m going to get you out of the habit of blaming yourself.”
“Good luck.” He held out his hand, moving the subject away from the abuse of his mother as he always did. “Come on. It’s cold in here.”
The steps to the bedroom seemed like an eternal climb, but we wound up racing to the top. It didn’t matter who won. We both landed on the bed.
We held each other tight, and I felt safe starting a new life with him.
* * *
That night, with the whoosh of cars outside and a police siren whining far away, he woke with a grunt and a command. “Stop!”
I reached for my revolver, but it was locked away in a strange closet, in the strange bedroom, in a city that was a sea of stone.
But he was there, the street light blue on his cheek, and all was well as long as he was next to me.
“Caden? Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He rolled over to face me. “Sorry.”
“What was it?”
“Dream. Nothing.”
PTSD was as real as the war itself, and I had to know if he was reliving it in his sleep. “Caden. Can you tell me?”
“Pieces of me were breaking off.”
“Were you in Iraq? In the dream?”
“No.” His denial was barely a whisper.
I took it for a normal nightmare and joined him in sleep.
Chapter Three
Caden
Greyson was back, and like good news when nothing’s going right or a seat by the radiator after a day in the snow, she brought relief to pain I forgot I was feeling.
As soon as she agreed to marry me, while I was still deployed, I started getting the house ready. I met with an architect and contractor on a short leave, and again on the way back from our wedding in California. I was barely off the plane before I started furnishing the house. I had an attending position waiting at Mt. Sinai, but she had nothing and I needed to give her everything.
The house had been unoccupied since I left. Dad’s office was a wreck. I’d had it ripped down to the studs. Had the shitty memories scraped out of the plaster and sanded off the wood. When I resigned my commission and returned, it was all details and new furniture.
That was when the dreams started.
Or more accurately, the dream. They were all the same dream, the way a woman was the same woman from all angles, naked or dressed. Same person, only time and situations changed.
I was somewhere in the house. The windows were painted over. I was in tremendous dream pain. Meaning I was terrified to the point of pain, but I couldn’t physically feel my body being torn in two.
Obviously. It was just a dream. I never felt pain in my dreams.
The dreams weren’t long. They came in the middle of the night, and I woke enraged, because I wasn’t just coming apart. Something was taking me apart. It had to be stopped.
But when I woke to Greyson’s voice, I wasn’t pissed off at the dream thing. I was fine, and I went back to sleep. It hadn’t come back in two nights.
“It’s nice to not have to rush through surgery,” I said, swinging my racquet at the tiny blue ball. It popped off the front wall, made it past the receiving line, and took off for the back wall.
Danny thought he was in an action movie, again, and tried to
climb the wall to get it, managing to just get it back into play. I slammed it to the other side of the court while he was recovering.
“How about not getting shot at? Is that an improvement?” Danny said as I helped him up. He was a buddy from my residency at NYU Medical. Pediatric surgery, but he floated into general pediatrics when he didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to cut into children.
“No one was shooting at me.” I snapped up the ball and got ready for my serve. “It was easy.”
“I still think it was stupid,” he said. “But you lived, so whatever. They were your years to waste.”
“Wouldn’t have met Greyson.”
I served. He was better set up this time and won the point.
“Yes! One more and drinks are on you, Private.”
“Captain.”
“You’re nothing out here, buddy. What’s Greyson? A major? That higher than captain?”
“Yes, but we’re nothing here.”
“Your woman still ranks you.”
“Trash talk won’t win you the point.” I bounced the ball, setting up a serve that wouldn’t overpower him, which he’d be ready for, but one to surprise him.
“That’s right. I forgot you were unshakable.”
I served. He was off guard, recovering enough to return but not win. Two points later, I had the game.
* * *
The club’s lounge wasn’t crowded on weekdays. Out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the rooftops of Manhattan were laid out like a fallen dresser with drawers pulled out randomly. Water towers, HVAC units, greenhouses, and patios dotted the rooftops, and through the slit of Second Avenue, I saw the southern tip of the island.
Danny placed our drinks on the table by the window and threw himself into the chair. Guy couldn’t sit straight to save his life. I hadn’t noticed that until I got back from my second deployment. Sloppiness had always bothered me, but slouching never had. All kinds of new things bugged me now, but more things seemed petty and unimportant. Status symbols. Expensive things. A woman everyone else wanted. None of that was interesting anymore.
“Sit up straight, would you?” I said. “You look like a rag doll.”
“I’m entitled to sit like this today.”
I tipped the Perrier bottle into the glass. The ice clicked. When it settled, I took a sip. “You blow one too many noses?”
“I had to refer a kid, thirteen… he was thirteen. Had to refer his parents to an oncologist they’ll go broke paying. And it was hopeless. There was no… ah, never mind.”
“Sorry, that’s… well, it’s part of the job. But sorry.”
“Asshole.” He crossed ankle over knee and drank his beer. He was a redhead and, in the ultimate irritating cliché, had a temper to match.
“I am an asshole.”
“That some kind of opening for another war story?”
It hadn’t been an opening any more than Dan’s snide comments were actual insults. My friend was making a request. He’d lost his brother on 9/11 and listening to me tell a war story made him feel as if he’d deployed with me.
“I had this guy on the table,” I said. “We were low on morphine, so no one got it until we put them under, so he was screaming his head off. And rightfully so. His humerus was shattered.”
“Very funny.”
We clicked glasses, and I continued. “His arm was hanging on his body by half a bone. Rotator cuff was torn up. Skin had third-degree burns. I could put him back together well enough to get him to Baghdad, but it would have taken five hours. So meanwhile, you know what he’s screaming?”
“Get the fuck on with the story?”
“‘I’m a guitarist.’” I paused with my drink at my lips long enough to mutter, “He played fucking guitar.” I put the glass down. “Meanwhile, they tell me there’s another guy who’s about to lose his leg. They clamped off the femoral artery, but it’s going stiff real fast and he’s going to need a graft.”
“Who’s triaging these people?”
“Someone who loves rock. But what do you do? You can save the arm or the leg. You can’t save both. One gets a quick amputation. The other gets screws and pins. Which is it?”
“Do I get vitals?”
“Answer.”
“Was either in shock?”
“This isn’t a drill, Dan.”
“Hang on—”
“There’s no time.”
“Jesus.”
“Which?”
“All right, all right, asshole. What did you do?”
I finished my drink. “Decided it’s easier to hold down a job with two legs and one arm than the other way around.”
“You got something against music?”
“It was a calculation. Life over limb.”
“You are one sick fuck.” He put his elbows on his knees and shook his head in disappointment, but his smile told me he admired me. “How does your wife even deal with your shit?”
My wife had lived it with me, that was how.
“She didn’t believe me. She came to Balad Base before the second Fallujah offensive to make sure we weren’t fucked in the head. She wouldn’t believe I could turn it on and off. She was like a pit bull, man.”
She cared. More than her big brown eyes or the silken hair she kept twisted in a bun, I remembered her caring about my psychological well-being. I was no one to her, but she didn’t want me to suffer. That first session, when I laughed at her, I also started to fall in love with her.
She hadn’t believed that either. How could a man so detached feel love? How could I be brokenhearted one minute and perform surgery the next without opening myself to a crippling emotional breakdown?
Eventually, she learned I could do both. More than nimble hands and the will to finish med school, at-will detachment was my most valuable skill.
“I maintain going was stupid,” Danny said. “Noble, but stupid.”
“Like I said, I met Greyson.”
“The internet works fine, thanks.” He picked up his glass. “That’s where I met Shari.”
“When do I get to meet Shari? Or do I have to go on the internet to do it?”
“Soon. You want another?”
“Sure.”
He went to the bar. The sky turned orange with the sunset.
You didn’t meet women like Greyson on the internet. She’d spent her adult life in the army, and if she hadn’t met me, she’d still be wearing boots and brown. She’d be fucking some other lifer.
She’d be living her life the way she always thought she would.
I’d rescued her from all that.
She’d be just fine.
Deployment after deployment. A slave to pay grade and rank. Stable.
Greyson wanted her boundaries pushed. She wasn’t happy unless she was doing more, going faster, expanding in all directions. The military limited her ability to find how far she could go.
I hadn’t considered that maybe the limits were the point.
When Dan came toward the table with the drinks, I resolved yet again to make sure Greyson was happy.
Chapter Four
GREYSON
I didn’t just have to get used to New York or civilian life. I didn’t just have to acclimate to finding work instead of having it given to me. I had to get used to being married.
Caden and I had met in a war zone. I’d been prepared to live in that zone my whole life. My family prized duty and loyalty to near fetish.
He had gotten a direct commission as a doctor in late 2001 out of a sense of duty he wasn’t explicitly raised with. He held it in his heart next to his need to be a part of a solution. He entered the army with his privilege, his money, his medical pedigree, and a cockiness usually only found in fighter pilots and bomb specialists.
We were from different countries in the same America. When I’d arrived on base, he was just another good-looking soldier who wanted to get in my pants. Another one denying he was stressed. Too boastful, too proud, too full of himself to take no for an answer.
He broke down my professionalism by being honorable, dutiful, brilliant, and just enough of an asshole to remind me he was fully a man, and just vulnerable enough to remind me he was fully human.
He also smelled nice and had a casual way of touching me that made me want to purr.
My CO had issued me a pass just long enough to fly home and get married. We did it at my parents’ house in San Diego. He had no one in New York. The night before we tied the knot, I had a vivid dream. In it, I was marrying the wrong man. On top of a tall building, guests filled the chairs. Mom congratulated me. Dad flew in on an F-14. Colin wore camo and boots he wouldn’t be caught dead in outside a dream.
And I was marrying the wrong man. No one would listen. They thought I was crazy. I woke up in a terror, convinced I was making the mistake of my life.
Then I saw Caden sleeping next to me, and the terror fell away. I wasn’t marrying the wrong man. I was marrying Caden, and he was right. I was never as sure about anything in my life as I was about him.
In New York, the last place on earth I thought I’d find myself, those first months of our relationship seemed like a dream. I remembered the blood, the explosions, the prayers uttered to a God I’d forgotten a hundred times, but the hours of gentle relief with him became more of a home base to balance against the violence I’d seen. That knowledge that no, I wasn’t making bad decisions because he was with me, became my anchor.
Before we were married, and after he inadvertently rescued me from an assignment that would have ended my career, we both got approved for R&R.
We couldn’t acknowledge each other on the streets of Amman, but in the American hotel, we could be a couple. We became intimate with the hotel tea shop and the details of our separate rooms. On the rooftop patio, he traced the red scar down my right wrist. His lips were parted a little, as if ready to kiss at any moment, and his face was lit by the sun’s reflection.
“Your eyes match the sky,” I said to him. His face was framed in the blue Iraqi ceiling.