The question was, how? How did you get through grief, how did you want to live again when you couldn’t imagine what that life could be, how you could be happy again?
It was a question that hadn’t occurred to her before. She’d done her best to exist (or not exist, really) in the safety of her bed, with the covers pulled up, but even she knew that couldn’t go on forever.
What did she want?
Rye.
A wedding.
A baby to hold in her arms.
A home of her own.
“How has it been, coming home?” Barb asked.
“Besides finding out that the man I love is dead?” Frankie said.
“Before that,” was Ethel’s softly spoken answer.
“Tough,” Frankie said. “No one wants to talk about the war. My father is ashamed of me even going.” She looked at her friends. “So, what did you two do?”
Ethel shrugged. “You know my story: I started vet school and fell back in love with my high school boyfriend, Noah. He was in-country while I was, but we never saw each other. He knew how much I loved George. We have … history. When I’m feeling fragile, he has a way of holding me together.”
Frankie nodded. “You have nightmares?”
“Not much. Anymore,” Ethel said at the same time Barb said, “You’ve got to push it aside, Frankie. Do something.”
“What do you have left, Frank?” Ethel asked after a while, when the music changed to something folky and soft. No anger in this music, just sadness and loss and sorrow.
“What do you mean?”
“You tell me.”
“Well.” Honestly, this was something Frankie had never thought about. She knew who she’d been raised to be, what was expected of her, but that was before, wasn’t it?
Barb repeated the question: “What do you have left?”
Frankie thought about how she’d changed in the past two years, what she’d learned about herself and the world. About Jamie, and her certainty that she had to do the right thing, which meant that she’d never even kissed him; she thought about Rye and how their passion had transformed her, loosened her into a different, bolder version of herself. She thought about Fin and their idyllic childhood, the way he’d told her, It’s okay, and she’d believed him.
All of them, the three men she’d loved, had awakened her, filled her heart, made her happy, but they couldn’t be everything.
“Nursing,” she said softly.
“Damn right,” Ethel said. “You are a shit-kicking, take-no-prisoners-good nurse. You save lives, Frank. Think about that.”
Frankie nodded. She sensed a glimmer of possibility, a way to move around her grief. In helping others, maybe she could find a way to help herself.
“You guys are the best,” she said, her voice breaking. “And I love you. Truly.” She got to her feet, turned, looked at them. They were here to help her, but she knew—as they knew—if she were to be saved, she’d have to do it herself.
* * *
In the next few days, Frankie showed Ethel and Barb all the places she’d loved as a child; the three friends spent long hours on the beach, just talking, listening to the music that made them laugh and cry and remember. By the time her best friends left, Frankie had a plan for going forward. She spent days scouring the want ads in the San Diego newspaper and making calls. When she finally scored an interview, she got up early to prepare. She typed up a résumé on the IBM Selectric on her father’s desk that no one in this house ever used. Her mother believed, of course, in handwritten letters, and her father had secretaries to type for him. When she was happy with it, she zipped it off the roll, reread for typos, and then slid it into the lambskin-leather briefcase that had been her high school graduation gift. It was the first time she’d used it. Her initials—FGM—were stamped in gold on the black leather.
Grateful—for once—that her mother was an ardent shopper, Frankie found a suitable two-piece striped dress with a funnel neck and a hip-hugging green belt hanging in her closet. Her top dresser drawer held an array of rolled-up panties, a few lacy bras, and some pantyhose in the cinnamon hue Frankie and all her high school friends had worn in the winter to look tan. She slipped her feet into a pair of low-heeled camel pumps.
From the ferry’s car deck, she saw the almost-completed bridge; huge concrete stanchions rose out of the wavy blue water, curving from one shore toward the other.
On the mainland, the small hospital was housed in a Mission-style white building that took up a city block, its front and side yards studded with palm trees. Frankie parked in the visitors’ lot and walked to the front door. The minute the doors opened and welcomed her in, she smelled the familiar scents of disinfectant, alcohol, bleach, and for the first time since coming home she felt like herself.
This was where she belonged, who she was. Here, she would find a path through her grief.
She went to the front desk, where a bouffant-haired young woman greeted her with a smile and pointed the way to the director of nursing’s office on the second floor.
Frankie’s hand on the briefcase’s leather handle was damp. This was only her second real job interview. Military recruitment didn’t count. She knew that she looked young—was young, at least chronologically.
She found the office she was looking for, two doors down from the elevator on the second floor. Outside of it, she stopped, took a breath.
No fear, McGrath.
Standing tall, shoulders back, chin up, as she’d been taught by her parents and the nuns at St. Bernadette’s, she walked up to the door that read MRS. DELORES SMART, DIRECTOR OF NURSING, and knocked.
Mrs. Smart looked up from the work on her desk. She had a round face with bright red cheeks and wore her gray hair in old-fashioned pin curls that lay flat against her head.
Behind her, a large window overlooked the parking lot. “Mrs. Smart? I’m Frances McGrath. Here for an interview.”
“Come in,” the older woman said, indicating the empty chair in front of her desk. “Your résumé?”
Frankie sat down, took the folder out of her briefcase, and slid it across the desk.
Mrs. Smart read it. “St. Bernadette’s,” she said. “Good grades.”
“I graduated at the top of my nursing school class at the San Diego College for Women.”
“I see that. You worked for a couple of weeks at St. Barnabas. Night shift.”
“Yes, but as you can see, I just returned from Vietnam, ma’am, where I was an Army nurse for two years. I worked my way up to surgical nurse, and—”
“You are hardly trained for surgical assistance,” Mrs. Smart said crisply. She pushed her glasses up and stared at Frankie. “Can you follow instructions, Miss McGrath? Do as you’re told?”
“Believe me, ma’am, the military demands it. And my Vietnam training has made me an exceptional nurse.”
Mrs. Smart tapped her pen on the desk as she read and reread Frankie’s résumé. Finally, she said, “Report to Mrs. Henderson at the first-floor nurses’ station Wednesday at eleven P.M. for your first night of work. Tilda in the office next to mine will set you up with a uniform.”
“You’re hiring me?”
“I’m putting you on probation. Eleven P.M. to seven A.M.”
“The night shift?”
“Of course. It’s where all beginners start, Miss McGrath. You should know that.”
“But—”
“No buts. Do you want to work here?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. See you Wednesday.”
* * *
On her first day of work, Frankie dressed in a starched white uniform with an apron, thick white stockings, and comfortable white shoes. The nurse’s cap sat on her teased, precision-cut bob like a flag of surrender. In ’Nam, in the shit, it would have fallen into some patient’s gaping ab wound, or been splattered with blood.
She arrived ready to work, was shown to her locker and given a key. At precisely 2300 hours, she reported to the night charge nurse, Mrs. Henderson, an elderly woman in white who had a face like a bull terrier’s, complete with whiskers.
“Frances McGrath, ma’am, reporting for duty.”
“It’s not the Army, Miss McGrath. You can just say hello. I hear you have almost no hospital experience.”
Frankie frowned. “Well. Civilian, maybe, but I was in Vietnam at a mobile—”