by CD Reiss
I was right. At the top, she got it halfway closed. I put my hand on it and passed through.
“Get out,” she hissed.
I shut the door behind me. “What’s the problem?”
“You lied. You said she lived. You said everyone lived. You lied to me.”
“So what?”
She turned toward her bedroom, and I knew I wasn’t invited there.
“How does what happened that night affect you?” I asked. “Or us? Or anything?”
“You. Lied.” Her voice was as steady and thick as the air around us.
“I had my reasons.”
“Good night, Caden. Be safe walking back.”
My wife could yell. She could get spitting, kicking, screaming mad. But this? She was stating facts with utter clarity, as if she’d looked at the situation from down the block and decided to cross the street to keep her distance from it.
No.
She never walked away from a conflict.
Anger swelled, stretched, heavy as a water balloon filled to the breaking point.
In two steps, I had her arm clasped in my fingers.
“Don’t touch me.”
The man I’d always been released her, but the buzzing rage heard the hard flatness in her voice and wouldn’t let go.
Hurt her.
“It’s nothing.” I heard myself growl as if I was an observer.
Hurt her until she listens.
“Let me go, or your balls are going to be removed from your body.”
The threat didn’t move me. I wasn’t worried about my testicles. But I made a calculated decision that I had nothing to gain from holding her, and the angry man inside me, the one who was pushing to get out, agreed with the assessment and released her arm.
“You can do anything to me,” she said. “You can hurt me. You can push every boundary I have. But lying? Lying’s a line, and you crossed it.”
“I had to.”
She cocked her head and folded her arms.
“I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Not acceptable.”
“You have no right to be this way. Whether or not a casualty died has no effect on you or us. It’s none of your damn business.”
She was going to try to redefine her business, and I was prepared to answer her point for point, then I was going to fuck the—
“How many times?” She interrupted my train of thought.
“How many times what?”
“You lied about the woman. You lied about the word dujon…”
“I just forgot it.”
“You lied about your father.”
Now I wanted to choke her. My hands flexed into fists and unflexed. She looked at them, then back at my face. Her fearlessness was a clinical condition.
“You pushed too far, Caden. Multiple times. Over years. Lies of omission. Lies of minimization. Lies I don’t even know about. And I let you get away with it. I pretended you hadn’t gone over the line, but I knew. I knew.”
“What’s the fight for, baby?” Baby wasn’t a coo; it was a gunshot, and I was too deep inside anger to mitigate the damage. “You want to sit here all night and grill me about every word I’ve ever said to you? What’s your endgame? You want to split up? Walk away? If I crossed some kind of line with you, let’s talk about how you react when I tell you things. Because you’re pushy. You’re stubborn. You don’t do what you’re fucking told, and you have no regard for me as a separate person. I only exist as I relate to you.”
Anger is always a partner to righteousness, and I was fucking right. She was an impossible woman to deal with. A life-sucker. A divorce waiting to happen. Standing there looking at the floor between us, as still as a predator waiting for an opening. Not to kill me. No, an opening to love me to fucking death.
And yet… I wanted her, and I wanted her to want me. And I wanted her to move the damned line for the lies the way she moved it for everything else.
And yet… what I wanted was taking a back seat to something much more toxic.
“What?” I leaned toward her. “Nothing to say? Not spouting all the answers? For once?”
That lit a fire under her. “Go home.”
Her anger opened a gate wide, releasing a swarm of hornets. I had to look away so she didn’t see the full-throated rage, and when I did, I saw a paper rectangle on the table.
A sonogram. Early. Under twelve weeks.
It took a split second to analyze it.
I didn’t know what I looked like when I turned back to her, but I was covered in darkness and the buzz, the leash broken, unable to pull back the need to break her.
It took her a single move to get past the threshold to her room. She slammed the door before I could reach her, and the bang of wood hitting wood made the earth shake and tilt.
Chapter Eighteen
GREYSON
At first, I thought he was banging on the door. I thought he was banging so hard the ground shook. I thought he hit the door forcefully enough to shake the plaster from the walls and ceiling with a deep, ear-splitting pow. He must have grown twenty feet tall, bursting through the upper story and the roof. His rage was an explosion of rock and a rain of dust.
I crouched, arms over my head to protect me from his falling debris. It didn’t work. I was knocked over by it. It filled my lungs with fire and smothered me in darkness.
Greyson, Greyson, Greyson—baby, baby, baby—I want to tell you a story.
His voice circled the outer reaches of my consciousness. There was blood and black, air thick in my nose and hot in my lungs. A driving cramp in my gut and a sharp ache in my head. I couldn’t move. I thought my eyes were closed, then I blinked. It was so dark I couldn’t tell the difference. I coughed, and a warm flood soaked my pants.
What a time to get my period.
“Greyson?”
His voice. A bark. Close. Five feet? Three?
“Caden.” I was alive. “Where are you?”
“Right here.” His voice seemed deeper in the small space. A low roar. “Can you move?”
I took stock of my extremities. “My arms. There’s something heavy on my legs.”
Glass clinked as he moved toward me. “Can you feel them?”
I felt him near, but there was no light. I couldn’t see, and my head hurt too much to move. “They hurt.”
“That’s good.” He swallowed the last word into a rasp. A growl from deep in his chest. His hand fell on my hair splayed over the floor, gripping and pulling.
He released my hair, and our hands found each other in the darkness. He squeezed my fingers so hard he hurt me, and I became deeply aware of the small space and my inability to move inside it.
“Caden? Are you crying?”
No. This wasn’t crying. He was hurtling air out of himself. This was something deeper. An inner battle I couldn’t fathom.
He uttered a single word. It was rage and danger in a syllable, barked like an animal in a cage.
“No.”
Chapter Nineteen
CADEN
The brain craves information. It starves in the absence of light. Pupils dilate like open mouths, crowding the irises until they’re thin rings of color. That’s all eyes are—collectors of information for a brain wired to make sense of the environment with very little data.
Modern people rarely experience complete darkness. Light pollution smothers out the darkness. Even without it, starlight can illuminate the path ahead. A sliver of moon behind clouds sends enough data to the brain to make out shapes.
When there’s nothing, like in a cave or a windowless concrete cellar, the other senses collect more information, cracking open perceptions that are usually shut.
The smack of the mortar shell came at the same moment she slammed the door in my face, and the ensuing heat, fire, and rumble came as I cracked inside, letting the anger take shape, fully formed.
It had a name, but I wouldn’t say it, and getting knocked over by half a wall took the wind out of its app
earance. It was half in, half out, like a dog stuck in the cat door.
In the distance, more shells fell. I had to breathe. Take stock. The rubble had formed a pocket of complete darkness. A drop of warm liquid fell over my cheek. I was cut. My hands were free. I touched my face. Glass. I removed what I could. My foot was under something heavy. I shifted it, and a brick came off easily, but when I tried to turn, glass clinked under me, and a sharp pain seared the heel of my hand.
“Greyson?”
She didn’t answer. The wall between us must have crumbled, because her breathing was close. I pulled my sleeves over my hands and crawled to her. My back scraped against something hard. Tight space. Dark. I felt for her body. She was so close. I could smell her. Hear her. I could sense the blood pulsing through her body, but I couldn’t find her.
If she was dead, the Thing would eat me alive in fury.
“Baby. Please.”
Rock. Just rock. Such a small space and such infinite darkness.
A woman I loved in such danger, in such a tight space, and me—helpless to save her.
This wasn’t—
This didn’t—
No. I was a grown man.
I wasn’t—
I didn’t—
“Greyson.”
The smell of blood everywhere. She had to be all right. This couldn’t happen. Not again. Not to me. The blood was copper and broken bodies. It flowed like a river, and it was my fault. The anger with the name I wouldn’t articulate wedged its way out another inch, growling and hissing simultaneously.
No.
“Greyson!”
Her name was a shout in the dark, eaten by a small space without an echo. I didn’t hear a response, but my hearing had been sharpened on the stone of darkness. I would have sworn I heard her heart beating. Maybe it was my own heart. Maybe they were beating with matching rhythms.
I wouldn’t give up on her. Not now. Not ever. I wouldn’t lose anything else in the dark. I’d lost too many women in the dark. Too many had hurt in my hands but out of my sight.
Not Greyson. Never Greyson.
I took a deep breath so I could call louder, harder. Bring her back from the dead if I had to. The air cracked into dust and shards, slicing my windpipe on the way down. I coughed before I could scream her name again.
“Caden.” She was alive. “Where are you?”
Her voice. The sound of an angel choking on sand and broken seashells.
I reached for it and found a handful of her hair. I left myself. I was in a closet. I was in the bottle room. I was trapped in the smell of blood and hopelessness.
“Right here. Can you move?” My voice was swallowed by the air, pressed into impotence. Anger, unreasonable and explosive, pushed against judgment. It howled a single word with both insult and justification.
Dujon.
“I don’t know,” Greyson said. “Where are you?”
Her voice pulled me to reason.
I hadn’t realized how dead still the air was until it moved from the swing of her arms. I found her hand, and the touch wasn’t fortifying. It split the membrane, hitting me like a bomb on an apartment building.
Dujon.
“Can you move?” I asked, focusing on the moment, not the crowd of memories funneling into my consciousness.
She’s pregnant.
She’s pregnant.
“My arms. There’s something heavy on my legs.”
I’m trying to understand her, but nothing makes sense.
Her legs. My wife’s beautiful legs.
Covered in so much blood, I thought she was wearing stockings.
“Can you feel them?” I was on my belly near her, squeezing her hand. I felt her pulse on my fingers, but the buzz was too loud. I couldn’t count.
I blamed the darkness. I blamed my weakness.
“They hurt.”
“That’s good.”
“Caden. Are you crying?”
“No.”
I spit the word in a voice of pure instinct and raw fury. Maybe I was crying, but it wasn’t sadness. Oh, no. It was something more powerful and far less manageable. It didn’t have words. Just sounds meant to scare prey into shocked stillness. I was fighting a monster’s release, pushing against two sets of events I wanted to forget while my most recent lucid memory was the love of my life slamming a door in my face.
I reached for her and was greeted with a hard, flat surface. Not stone. Wood.
“It’s the door,” she said. “I think it fell on me, and something’s holding it down.”
A door between us.
Not a wall.
Dujon, dujon
“I’m all right,” she said as if she could feel my panic. “Someone will come.”
Why is she saying my name over and over in the dark?
“If I change, Greyson baby, you have to leave me.”
“What?!” Her alarm echoed in the space, bringing the realization of how small it was.
My heart rate picked up in panic, and my defenses weakened further. The swarm of hornets buzzed, pushing against the force of my will.
“Never see me again.”
It’s not your fault, sweetheart. It’s just—
That slammed door. Her pushed in. The slap of the lock.
“What’s happening?” she asked from far, far away.
“Promise me!” I demanded. “Promise now.”
“No!”
Our hands found each other. I felt for the hard circle of her ring.
—you’re going to have a little sister.
But I wasn’t. Not after the lock of the door.
“Mmm,” I said, barely audible to myself. I sounded like my own hallucination.
“Never.”
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?” Greyson 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 Greyson’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.” Greyson’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.