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.