by CD Reiss
“Let’s hope they don’t have to meet.” I got out cranberry juice and closed the door. “Maybe I’ll see him though. We can lunch in the Green Zone.”
Mom looked at me over her glasses. “I know you feel like once you make a decision, you have to stick to it.” She looked back at the paper and added with more than a hint of sarcasm, “I don’t know where you got that from.”
“Don’t put it all on Dad. I have your genes too.”
She scanned her puzzle without confirming that she’d stayed in a military life she hated because she’d decided and that was that.
“Energetic sort,” she said. “Six letters. Last one is O.”
“I’m terrible at this, Ma.” I looked over her shoulder at the five empty boxes, last one O, and it came to me. “Dynamo.”
“Your father decided he could handle what he came home with.” She filled in the letters. “And here we are. You can be like him, but you don’t have to be stubborn about it. You can decide to be different.”
11 DOWN - Suitable to be ridden, as a horse.
“Eleven down is BROKEN,” I said, pointing. “I can’t be here. Not without him.”
18 DOWN - A secret may be told in one.
“I never thought of you as dependent on anyone.”
She put WHISPER in the boxes before I could say it.
“I’m not,” I said defensively. “I’m just…”
32 ACROSS - Subject of transhumanism.
“Yes?”
She’d never let me drift off after half a sentence. Like I said, I had genes from both parents.
“Thirty-two across is CYBORG. And I’m not dependent. I’m emotionally insatiable.”
“Greed is never satisfied, you know. It’ll never let you be happy.”
“That sounds like settling, Ma.” I tapped the paper. “Nine down I can’t figure.”
1 + 1 = 3, for example.
She sighed and filled in nine down.
SYNERGY
“Sometimes you have to stop pushing. That’s all I’m saying. Let things be the way they are. You could make things worse.”
2 DOWN - Cause for laying low, sometimes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I’m just confused now.”
She patted my hand and looked up at me. “I don’t blame you. It’s hard to know what the right thing is.”
“It is. It’s so hard.”
“Think before you leap, and you’ll be fine.” She put her arm around my waist and pulled me to her. “You’re strong and capable. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
She filled in two down.
ACROPHOBIA
After Mom and I finished the puzzle, she went to bed. I read the paper and waited for my call with Caden.
I logged onto Skype at 1:28 a.m. My camera was on. I was a lady with a cup of chamomile tea in the box in the corner.
My heart was lighter, knowing I could call off the whole thing. I didn’t want to stay home, and I didn’t want to go to Baghdad. Staying home had its benefits, but the upside of going was being with Caden and helping him through this. He needed my body for that, and I was more than willing to let him use it. Maybe a little rough fucking every once in a while would keep him grounded.
Or not.
At one thirty, a horn honked outside. I jumped to reach for the mouse, but it wasn’t him.
I would talk to him about whether or not I should go. Full transparency. Now that it was all on the table, he and I could decide together what to do. As a team.
And really, what man in his right mind would choose a war zone over hot sex?
What if the Skype sex wasn’t enough to keep Damon’s noise at bay?
What if he needed physical contact?
He wouldn’t cheat on me, but what if he had to?
At 1:35 a.m., the Skype screen was still dark.
Caden was never late.
All kinds of things could have kept him from the call. Casualties, primarily. Maybe he was working late. Or had a staff meeting. Maybe he’d forgotten.
Maybe he was using another woman’s body the way he’d used mine.
Or maybe he was bleeding, dying, dead.
In the dark, quiet night, I was afraid.
Of his death.
Of being alone.
Of my culpability.
Of pushing it all too far.
I was afraid that he was fine and this was the first of many, many times I’d have to identify my fear, close my fist around it, and fail to crush it.
Chapter Ten
caden
We sneaked down to an OR in the dead of night like lovers. Naked from the waist down, Colonel DeLeon had her legs spread. In stirrups. I wasn’t surprised when she refused general anesthesia.
“Like what you see?” she asked.
“Looks healthy.”
“God, this is going to be so good.”
“Women usually say that before I scrape out their uterus.”
She’d assured me she wasn’t pregnant, and from what I could see, she had been telling the truth.
“You’re being funny, but getting this bleeding to stop is going to change my life.”
“This will pinch a little.”
“He said.”
She wrinkled her nose when it pinched.
“I would have done this for nothing, you know,” I said as I worked.
“As your commanding officer, I don’t like pushing for nontransactional favors. Hard limit. We’re even. That works for me.”
“Works for me too. You’re going to feel some discomfort now.”
“He said.”
I didn’t realize I’d forgotten about my Skype with Greyson until the procedure was done and I was snapping off my gloves.
When it was a decent hour in New York, I called our home phone from the base. Her mother picked up.
“Ma?”
“Caden! How are you?”
She was a truly nice person but strong. Stronger than my mother for sure.
“Good. I can’t stay on long. Is Greyson there?”
There was clicking and shuffling before she could even answer me.
“Caden?” My wife turned my name into a question.
“I’m coming home, baby.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. I put in a leave request, and I have it on good authority it’s going to be approved.”
“But—”
“Just stay there. Can you just stay?”
A pause, bloated and heavy. I could practically hear her hardening her jaw.
“Don’t come here,” I continued. “Just wait.”
“All right. I’ll try. But temporary leave doesn’t change anything.”
“I love you. You know that?”
“Yeah. I do.”
We hung up. I knew it changed nothing. I knew it left half the job done. But stalling would have to suffice for now.
When I heard the whine overhead, I held on to the bathroom sink with my toothbrush sticking between my lips and foam dripping down my chin. I knew what it was before I spit. The siren wailed, and a voice over the loudspeaker said to take cover.
I rinsed and dressed quickly. I was an old hand at feeling nothing. As the new Thing got louder, I got better at stuffing my emotions, fears, and reactions away.
We were told the attack had come from a residential area over the Tigris, but that was later. It landed near the presidential palace inside the Green Zone, about two and a half miles from the hospital. The explosions were sharp, pounding, more resonant than when they fell in the Red Zone. The earth shook gently and quickly nine times. One for each mortar.
“That’s some minty-fresh breath you have there, Asshole Eyes.”
DeLeon and I were smashed against each other with our medical kits on our laps. Two paramedics had smashed us together in the back of the Humvee. A hit to the Green Zone felt personal. It felt like our neighborhood. We weren’t staying inside the hospital.
> “The better not to kiss you with.”
“Your loss!” she shouted as we slammed over a pothole.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Is this my follow-up visit?” The truck whipped around a turn, and we hung on.
“It’s all your insurance covers.”
She barked a laugh. “I feel great!”
We lost our smiles as we came upon one of the royal palaces. A corner had been knocked off. A block away, a crater opened in the road. People were running everywhere as the Humvee rolled into the blast perimeter. We were out before the truck fully stopped.
A paramedic with soot on his face ran up. “Nurse or doctor?”
“Surgeons,” she said. “Both of us.”
DeLeon was pulled toward an ambulance while I was taken to a patch of grass where the wounded were being triaged.
“We can’t move him.”
An Arab boy of about thirteen was sitting up against a tree. He looked fine until I got close enough to see the iron rod impaling his chest. I trotted up to him. There was no blood. His breathing was raspy. The medic called his vitals. She was obviously upset.
“We can’t see if it’s through the spine.”
“You’re making the lady sad,” I said in terrible Arabic.
He turned to me. He was lucid. Good.
“Do you speak English?” It was my best Arabic phrase, but the boy shook his head. Great.
I tried to see the exit wound, but it was against and possibly through the tree. I ran my hand behind him as he whispered something I couldn’t understand.
“Let’s get his shirt open.” We got the shirt open. Clean entry. Right of the sternum. “I can’t determine the angle,” I said to the paramedic. “But we have to get him to the OR. If he’s pinned to the tree, we have to cut the pipe.”
There had been another time an Iraqi had tried to talk to me. Another incident outside the confines of a hospital. It had been…
Dujon. Dujon.
… bad. I hadn’t listened.
He whispered again.
I reached behind him again, then heard clearly what he was saying.
“Kunbulla. Is that your name, kid?” I stopped myself and asked, “Your name?” in Arabic as I felt behind him for the pipe’s exit.
Around us, people ran, shifted, called out. They prepped a stretcher. Ambulances moved, and the earth turned, but I was focused solely on my probing fingers and the boy’s bloody lips.
“Kunbulla.” The boy made eye contact, trying to warn me. Apologizing at the same time as he was begging me to save him.
Dujon.
In complete emotional detachment, I remembered. I’d thought she’d been reading my name tape. I’d thought she’d been saying “Dr. John.”
Right?
Kunbulla.
Dujon.
My fingers didn’t find the place where the bar exited, but a solid mass, squared at the edges, thick as a pack of cigarettes, and as dense as a few metric tons of potential energy.
Qunbula.
Shit.
Chapter Eleven
GREYSON
The computer started making noise after five in the morning. I ignored it, then the night table phone rang.
“Mmh.”
“Pick up Skype. I need to see you.”
He was freshly showered. Hair wet. Face scrubbed and shaved.
It was noon there, but his hours had to be all over the place.
“Hi.” When his smile turned back down, one cheek stayed red.
“Your face is scraped up.”
He put his hand to it. Looked at his fingertips. No blood. The abrasions were too fine.
“What happened?”
“Qunbula apparently.”
I gasped. “A bomb?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“I told you.”
His look through the screen, across thousands of miles, was as hard and cold as granite. He was quite possibly more beautiful when he was like this than when he was warm with love. But I couldn’t compare what I couldn’t see.
“You can tell me more without giving away locations. You don’t have to say what time or who you were with. Come on. Stop treating me like I don’t know the rules. And stop acting like talking to me isn’t important.”
“Why do you push like this? I just wanted to see your face.”
I leaned into the camera. “You have what you want. Plus my unconditional love. Nothing you say is going to scare me.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The only thing he feared was my fearlessness.
“Did you get the leave?” I asked. “Are you coming back?”
He bit his upper lip and let it pop out. If the resolution had been better, I was sure I’d have seen the dampness of that top lip and a pinkish blur where his teeth had scraped the skin.
“Do you know the Arabic word, sounds like dujon?”
“I don’t, but my Arabic isn’t that good.” I wrote it down phonetically. I’d never learned the alphabet. “Is anyone fluent there?”
“Yeah. I’ll try them.”
“Where did you hear it?”
“It was a suicide bomber,” he said.
Where? Medevacs got to the Red Zone after the bombs went off. Was it in the Green Zone? Why were you near him? How did they get in?
Tell me everything.
I couldn’t ask any of those questions because he couldn’t answer them. I put my hand over my mouth partly in shock, partly to shut myself up.
“A kid,” Caden continued. “I was trying to move him. He was… I can’t say without giving up the order of events.”
“I understand.”
“He warned us he was wrapped, and we got away.”
“Are you doing all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m sure I’m fine.” He was trying to convince himself.
“Tell me.”
Those two words broke something in him. Was it the right time to ask? Had something changed?
“It’s getting harder,” he said. “The Thing. It’s different. It’s not fear and sympathy. It’s anger.”
Anger.
What would that split look like if it was allowed to happen?
“Sometimes,” he continued, “I think it’s all right and I can manage. Then days like today, it’s a four-alarm fire.”
He bent his body to run his fingers through his hair, turning his face from me for a moment. When he popped back up, I touched the screen where his lips moved.
“We have ways of keeping it down,” I said. “But my parents are in the next room.”
He looked at his watch. “Dad’ll be up soon.”
“Can you make it until tonight? I can send them to a movie.”
“I’ll spend the afternoon deciding where to bruise you.”
“I miss you.”
“About that...I have some bad news.”
“Let me guess.” I let my fingers fall from the screen. That needed to be the only expression of disappointment. I couldn’t lay more on him. “After today’s incident, all R&R passes and nonmedical leaves are withdrawn.”
“Baby,” he said softly, with a voice that never let me feel infantilized, only loved with the depth one loves their own blood. “I know I can’t stop you from doing what you want.”
“You didn’t marry me for my obedience.”
“No, I didn’t.”
The implication in his tone was that maybe he should have. I let it go. I heard my dad startle awake as if a bomb had just gone off.
“They’re up,” I said. “I love you, Major.”
“I love you too.”
We hung up, and I leaned back in my chair. If this Thing was like the old Thing and it was getting louder more frequently, we were back in the old pattern. That period had been awful and unsure, but thinking of the sex made me tingly and wet.
I could stay. I could
be that obedient women he hadn’t wanted. I could live in our house and patiently wait for something to happen. Be the bedrock of his chaotic life. It wasn’t as if I had nothing to do in New York.
Trusting him came naturally. He’d never presented as a player or a cheat. Even when I’d broken into his locker, I had been ready to have completely misjudged him. But when I considered that if he needed rough sex to stay sane, he’d have to get it, and I’d have to deal with it, my blood curdled. Even the thought of him touching another woman made my palms sweat and my skin prickle with angry heat.
That wasn’t on the table. If he’d wanted a milquetoast housewife, he’d had his pick. He’d married me because I pushed his boundaries and let him push mine. But not every limit needed to be tested.
Some lines had to be crossed so others wouldn’t be.
Part Two
Chapter Twelve
GREYSON
The Phrog’s dual rotors buzzed like a swarm of bees. My knuckles were striated in white and pink, and my palms already ached in the center. I kept my eyes on my boots and focused on the pain, feeling it in three dimensions as the shooting ache ran from my right wrist to my shoulder. That helped. Focusing on pain always did.
Nothing had changed. Not for me.
The Iraqi sky was still an infinite blue, but now I knew why that blue had always spoken to me, calling me into it. It borrowed the color from my husband’s eyes.
On the way to the Blackthorne offices in Baghdad, I was flooded with fear that I’d drop out of that glassy vacuum and into the solid mass of the earth. Falling away from that blue was falling away from Caden.
“You all right, Frazier?”
I let go of the bench long enough to direct a thumbs-up at Dana Testarino, a PA and fellow contractor. She’d called me by my civilian name, reminding me that I was rankless and unprotected. I had no unit, no position, no military hierarchy. Ronin wasn’t there to rib me. Jenn wasn’t there to defend me. I was surrounded by a dozen other contractors. We were professional advisors. Experts in our fields. We’d bought our own kits and supplies mostly. I had a cold case strapped to the floor between my feet. It held prefilled syringes of the same compound they gave subjects before the soo-hoos. It was called BiCam145.