part0238

C aden wasn’t going to make it to the play. My answering service picked up the message, and delivered it as I was putting on my shoes. He’d taken on another patient, and the patient needed pre-op monitoring.

I should have gone myself, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to go with him.

He’d been worried I was going to burn out, but maybe he was the one who needed to snuff one end of the candle. And maybe this was why he’d been so distant and preoccupied.

People weren’t always predictable. They didn’t react the same exact way even when in very similar situations.

The last time I’d seen Caden under tremendous stress was during the war, and he hadn’t been rigid and distant. On the contrary, even when he was closest to his breaking point, he’d been funny, even charming, as day three of his hands in men’s bodies crested into day four without relief. I was giving him vitamin shots and an uncomfortable amount of amphetamine. He seemed to thrive, and yet… no one thrives when someone loses an arm or a leg on the table and you have to move to the next without a break.

He was like a carnival wheel spinning long after the barker’s hand had left the rail. Spiraling on his own juice and energy, ball bearings lubricated to go on and on, he couldn’t calm himself. Even after I’d given him a sedative, he couldn’t sleep. I’d crawled onto the mattress with him, and finally, relieved of a single thing to do but sleep, he held me in his bed.

I knew how to be detached. My job required it. But I couldn’t be. Not with him. At first, he hadn’t been more to me than the next overworked army doc. But he was the only one I’d ever let pull me onto his cot fully clothed. He wasn’t the only one who had wept with me, but he was the only one I’d wept with.

Was this what it was to love someone? To have that wall of detachment crumble and be rebuilt into a bridge?

I thought so. I swore it to myself because after those hours, we were so real together no one had to ask what was going on. Caden and I were an incurable condition.

Dispassion had a place in our lives, but not with each other.

The situation was different now. We were civilians living in New York City, not soldiers trying to save people in a war zone. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised or concerned by his distance. He might be far away for a reason that had nothing to do with me or our marriage. Maybe it was him, just him.

“Is everything all right?” he asked after I’d beeped him twice. His voice was flat, as if he was asking a patient if they were in any pain and could they please describe it.

“You’re not home,” I said, meaning something completely different.

“I had rounds.” He had a different meaning under his answer.

“I missed you at dinner,” I said.

“I missed you too.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Samuelson’s got strep. I have to fill in for him again.”

“Yeah.” I hung up the phone.

I’d been in session all morning. I heard Caden upstairs while I was with a patient, heard the old pipes rattle in the walls when the shower went on, then saw his feet come down the front steps. I was seeing a patient in and couldn’t catch Caden without disrupting the gentle flow that was part of my job.

“How were you this week?” I asked Specialist Leslie Yarrow, who liked to sit in the chair with the high cushions. She still wore her dog tags under her polo T-shirt and kept her hair very short. She’d been sent home with a shoulder injury that was healing better than her mind.

“Fine. Good.” She shifted in her seat. She’d had a hard time sitting still since she got back.

“Did you sleep?”

“Some. The pills helped. Thank you.”

“But not entirely?”

“Nah.” She flipped it off as if it wasn’t a big deal, but her eyes were ringed in pink and purple.

“Did you have the dream again?”

The dream was a recounting of a child torn apart by an IED. She’d been eight and screaming in pain. When Leslie recalled the memory, she said she screamed for hours while she tried to find a medic, but on further investigation, it had been a minute and a half before the girl died in her arms.

In the dream, the girl was her daughter.

“Something this week… my wife got freaked out. She said I should tell you.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“When I woke up from it, I didn’t know Mindy.”

“I went into her room, and I knew the room and all the stuff. But the kid sleeping there? I was like, who is she? She was a stranger.”

“How long did that last?”

“A minute… maybe ten. Molly came into the kitchen and was like, ‘Are you going to wake her up for school or what?’ and then I came to.”

“So you’d describe it as a fugue state? Did you have the feeling you were half asleep?”

“I was… I forgot the entire thing after not knowing Mindy.” She shrugged, and that wasn’t a normal reaction for someone who’d lost a bunch of time.

“Is that the first time it happened?”

She looked away. “Yeah. I told Molly I really didn’t want to talk about this.”

I wasn’t letting her off the hook. We had four minutes, and it was hers to use to talk or not. Her decision, not mine.

“When I was a kid, I lost some stuff. Few hours here and there.” She shifted in her seat. “My dad used to come to my room and do things. It was… I knew he did it, but I would forget the actual thing if you know what I mean.” She made a nervous laugh, and I held onto a non-judgmental, non-enraged, almost inhuman detachment.

“I want to pause for a second. I heard both parts of that, and if you—”

“Is it time to go yet?”

“We have a couple of minutes”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now, okay?”

“Okay, but you’re safe here. Any time.”

She stood. “I should get going.”

I adjusted her sleeping pill dosage and asked her to keep a log of any more feelings that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, or that she didn’t know the people around her. She agreed, apologized profusely, and left.

I hurt for the little girl she had been, and promised myself I’d do everything I could to help the woman who came to my office.

I briefly made the connection between Leslie Yarrow’s dissociation and my husband’s. It was a symptom of PTSD and needn’t be a personal betrayal.

That realization was my medicine for the rest of the day.

It was dark by the time I went back up to the house. Everything was perfect. He hadn’t left a crumb behind. Not a note or a rumpled sheet.

Calling got me his voice mail. I beeped him, but he didn’t call back right away. I heated up dinner. Got into my pajamas. Put on the TV. Shut it off. Listened to the traffic outside. Went to the bathroom.

His clothes were in the hamper. Underwear. Slacks. A pale blue shirt that brought out the depth of his eyes. I gathered it in my hands and pressed it to my face, expecting to smell fresh coffee grounds in stale sweat.

I got something much more floral.

My blood took a second to boil. In that pause, I checked again. Definitely perfume.

I was out the door so fast I didn’t change out of my pajamas and almost forgot to put on shoes. I stuffed my feet into Keds, put on a long coat, and caught a cab at Columbus Circle.

Because, no. We had a deal and the deal included fidelity. Non-negotiable.

People cheated for a reason. Either it was personal, and they were just cheating assholes. Or it was situational, and a cheating asshole was in a situation where it was easy to cheat. Or it was us. And that last option stuck in my craw, because even after years of talking to people about why they found themselves betraying or betrayed, it was now me. And if it was the relationship, it was me, my fault, what I delivered or didn’t deliver.

I’d come to a strange life in a strange city to be with him. Maybe that was the problem. Or maybe we didn’t work as a couple outside a war zone. Or maybe he liked it hotter than I was used to.

Fuck this. It wasn’t my fault.

He owed me better than touching another woman. Saying sweet things to her. Those were my kisses and sweet words.

Or maybe there was none of that. Maybe it was all warm holes and quick spurts.

The disloyalty was bad, but not knowing the exact terms of the betrayal was eating every brain cell not occupied with breathing.

My phone rang on the way. I flipped it open.

Was his dick wet with her? Or was he on his way there?

“Hey, you called?” Flat flat flat. Why hadn’t I seen it before? How blind had I been?

“Where are you? I was thinking of bringing you dinner.”

“Ah, that would be great, but I’m assisting in an hour and I need to scrub in.”

“Oh, all right then. When do you think you’ll be home?”

“I came home today and you were in your office. I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Yeah. Hey, the other line’s beeping. I have to go.”

“I love you,” he said before I cut the call.

“Thanks for the aspirin.”

Wilhelmina was at the front desk of cardiac. She confirmed Caden was scrubbing into an emergency open heart procedure. I told her I needed a key and he had it in his bag. I didn’t like lying, but I was past sense. I was cussing up a blue streak in my head and smiling on the outside as if showing up at the hospital in Keds and a long coat was the result of an annoying misplaced key.

She led me into a row of large grey lockers and left me alone.

I tipped his padlock up to see the numbered dials. It was the same lock he’d had in Iraq, and I knew the combination.

Every marriage has boundaries, and going into his locker had a thick red line around it. My thumbnail in the grooves, I clicked the number sequence, paused with the weight in my hand.

The mature thing to do would be to ask. Just say flat out, you’ve been different. You’ve been unavailable. You’ve got perfume on your shirt.

I snapped the padlock open and slid it out quickly, before I could change my mind.

The locker was the size of a small closet. He had a suit, shoes on the floor, bag of toiletries on the top shelf, new clothes still in tissue paper in a Barney’s bag, and a plastic bag of dirty things.

I picked up the dirties. I smelled it before I even opened the bag. Perfume.

“Fuck you, Caden.”

I threw the bag back in and slammed the door. Something clicked and fell.

“I don’t care.”

“I don’t.” I put the lock in the loop.

I opened the locker and readjusted the laundry bag. I couldn’t find what had fallen. I tiptoed so I could see the top shelf. Next to the toiletry bag, a glass bottle lay on its side. I picked it up. It was from Lyric scent shop, where I got my perfume.

Before I even turned it over, I knew.

Scent #6512 - Greyson F.

Before I opened the top and waved it in front of my nose, I knew.

It was mine. I hadn’t recognized it mixed with his scent, but once I had the bottle under my nose, it was unmistakable.

When we were separated, he’d given me one of his T-shirts. His smell had comforted me. I buried my face in it when he called, wrapped it around my neck when I slept, curled around it when I brought myself to orgasm.

When had he taken my perfume? And why? Did he know he’d be gone for days?

I put the bottle back and put the padlock back in place, touching the door with my fingertips. “I’m sorry.”

Across the room, the door opened. I peeked around the lockers to find a cleaning person wheeling in a yellow bucket.

“Hello?” he called. “Anyone in here?”

“Just leaving,” I said, smiling stiffly as I walked by.

“Did you find the key?” Wilhelmina asked blithely, as if nothing was wrong. She could see into my heart and all was well there.

“I realized I had it.”

“Ah, better watch, doctor. When the mind starts going, the body’s sure to follow.”

I laughed a little, but it was more from uneasiness than humor. “Do you know where he is?”

She slid a clipboard into a cubby. “I think he’s in five.” She took a quick inventory of my posture, my hair, my coat and pajamas, the look of emotional desperation that must have been all over my face, using a skill they didn’t teach in nursing school but a large number of nurses had. “It’s a viewing theater, if you want to take a look.”

“Um, sure. Okay. Yeah. Yes, I’d like that very much.”

I didn’t know what insight I expected to get from watching him. Something was still off. My perfume didn’t change that. But Wil led me to the upper floor viewing room where med students watched the procedure. I sat away from them, letting the narration from their instructor fade into the ambient hiss of the air conditioning.

From above, I saw him and the other attending move together with an efficiency bordering on grace. They cut a woman open and spread her ribs. I flinched. It was hard to watch.

But still, my husband did his job, isolating a living, beating heart.

The lead turned away from the table and looked up at the med students. Her voice carried over speakers to the little room as she spoke a language I hadn’t been trained in med school to understand. My eyes were glued to my husband anyway. He was still working, though I couldn’t discern what he was doing. When the lead surgeon said his name, it cut through the jargon.

“Doctor St. John here is assisting, but he’s been lead on this procedure a few hundred times.”

Caden looked up to salute the students.

He saw me and froze.

We didn’t move as the other doctor continued. His eyes betrayed nothing. I was wrong to be here. Wrong to distrust him. Wrong to worry. He had his hands on a living heart. Of course his detachment bled over.

I waved and tried to smile.

He nodded and got back to work.

He called after one in the morning. I was in bed, watching the clouds cross the setting moon over the brownstones across the street.

“Did I wake you?” he asked. The vocal deadness was still there. Maybe I’d have to get used to it.

“Did you enjoy the surgery?”

“Better than Cats. ”

He laughed a real, true, guttural laugh and I almost burst into tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I disturbed you.”

“You didn’t disturb me.”

He sighed. It wasn’t an annoyed sigh or a sigh of boredom, but a final exhale of breath after the realization that what was started wouldn’t be finished. It was an acceptance of defeat. “You know how much I miss you? I stole your perfume so I could smell you when I’m on the cots.”

“You’re not that far away.”

He didn’t offer an explanation as to why he couldn’t sleep at home, or why he’d decided to stay away for days. I was owed that.

“Are you coming home now?” I asked.

“I need to be here.”

“You’re pushing it, darling.”

“I’ll be at Jenn’s opening tomorrow at five. The masks.”

“I thought you saw it last week.”

“It’s been in previews or something. Ask her when you see her. Don’t come if you want to sleep in. But if you sleep in, you sleep here.”

“Is that an order?”

It shouldn’t have to be an order, but I couldn’t read him well enough to know if he was being playful or if he was offended at having his leash yanked.