Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(17)

* * *



I didn’t have time to see Jenn’s show. Not really. I had an emergency session with a new patient who hadn’t slept in a week. His wife had called me in desperation. He was having aural hallucinations and she couldn’t tell if it was the exhaustion or the PTSD.

I met him, wrote him a script, and didn’t have a place in my schedule to see him until he started crying. A grown man. A soldier. Six feet tall and two hundred pounds of muscle, weeping in my office.

And I got upset when my husband was a little distant.

I handed the patient a tissue. He cracked his neck and got on with it. Maybe I needed to relax on Caden a little.

Deciding I didn’t need lunch on Wednesdays, I fit him into my schedule. Then I got a cab to 57th Street while it was still daylight.

“Here!” The driver pulled over in front of the Kadousian Gallery.

From the street, I saw Jenn, in baggy overalls and Vans, animatedly talking to people I couldn’t discern past the glass’s reflection. Rows of painted masks hung on the walls.

Jenn saw me and opened the glass door. “Hey!”

We hugged, and she introduced me to her guests. Tina Molino of Mt. Sinai’s Psychiatric Division, and Dylan Coda from the VA Hospital in Newark.

“I’m sorry I’m late. I had an emergency.”

“I was just telling Tina she works in the same hospital as your husband.”

Tina was almost six feet tall with a black bob, white skin, and red lipstick. She looked like Snow White. “I was hoping to meet you at the fundraiser. Caden St. John is quite a star around the doctors’ lounge.”

“Careful. His ego can get to the size of a blimp.”

“You trained him well.”

“War makes men humble.”

“Nice segue.” Jenn held her hand out to the rows of masks and began the tour. “All of these were made by vets as part of the NEA’s Creative Forces program.”



* * *



I was halfway down the block when I heard a woman’s voice calling my name.

Tina scurried toward me. “Hey, I wanted to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”

I looked at my watch. “I have about eleven if there’s no traffic uptown.”

“It’s enough.”

We went into the little coffee shop wedged between a FedEx and an office building. We had our coffee in ninety seconds and seats on the window ledge in five more.

“Okay. Jenn told me you’re an officer and an MD specializing in PTSD in vets.”

“Kind of fell into it. But yeah.”

“Do you like it? I’m trying to hurry so I don’t keep you.”

“Do I have to answer quickly?”

“Take your time.” She sipped her coffee, leaving red lipmarks on the plastic top.

“I’m from a military family. I enlisted at eighteen.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It was the only life I knew. Then I met Caden, and he wanted to go into private practice. So I left the army and came here with him. I thought I’d never feel right as a civilian, and New York… my God, there’s no place in the world more overwhelming.”

“That’s the truth.”

We tapped our coffee cups together.

“Helping these men and women… they’re broken, but working with them makes me feel like I’m home. I love it.”

“That’s…” She shook her head in appreciation. “I’m glad to hear that. We’re tackling a mental health unit to serve the military and—here’s the newish thing—civilian contractors. Anyone who’s worked in war. We’re financed by Darren Gibson, and I think I may have an opportunity for you.”





Chapter Nine





Caden





Greyson spit toothpaste into the sink. When she ran the faucet, the Thing spoke inside the gurgling water. When she took the water in her mouth and her lips tightened and moved when she swished, my inner cold ran boiling hot.

She spit the water, and the Thing dispersed into the air vents, the fogged mirror, the space between my feet and the floor. It snaked around my wife’s voice when she spoke. “She wants to talk to me about creating a treatment protocol for PTSD in vets. Then she’s thinking of maybe expanding it to the general population. Kids and adults dealing with trauma.”

She shook excess water off the brush and popped it into the cup. I didn’t know how much longer I could last.

She was wearing a big T-shirt and underpants. Her feet were bare. Her nipples were hard. She was talking about Tina’s offer to design programs at the Gibson Center, which wasn’t really an offer but more of a suggestion to talk more. She was overwhelmed. She hadn’t been in professional life very long.

“When I was promoted before, it was all forms and steps,” she said. “Now it’s fuzzier, you know?”

Sure. I knew.

“I thought you had a full schedule.”

“I’m thinking I can squeeze it in.”

There were reasons she shouldn’t. She’d push herself to exhaustion. No one was here to give her limits. There was no ceiling or walls on what she could accept. This wasn’t the army.

She crawled onto the bed and flopped into a sitting position with her back against the headboard.