She closed her eyes, lay back. Drifted. Through a haze that captured her heartbeat, she heard the door open.
Frankie didn’t open her eyes. She was hanging on by a thread here; the last thing she needed was an audience.
She could feel her mother watching her, worrying, but she didn’t open her eyes. She was deeply, profoundly tired. Exhausted, actually.
Her last, terrible thought was, He’s alive. And then: It was all a lie.
Thirty
For the first time in a long time, Frankie started to wake up on her bedroom floor again. She didn’t know why the brutal nightmares of Vietnam had come back now. Maybe it was seeing Rye. Or maybe new trauma reawakened old trauma. All she knew was that there was no way for her to pretend she was okay and soldier on. Not this time.
The pills her mother had given her helped to take the edge off of her pain. She learned that two sleeping pills softened the nightmares and helped her fall asleep, but when she woke, she felt lethargic, unrested. One of the Mother’s Little Helpers perked her right up, maybe even gave her too much energy. Enough so that she needed the pills again to calm down enough to sleep. It became a cycle, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
She stopped visiting her parents, stopped answering the phone, stopped writing letters to her friends. She didn’t want to hear their pep talks, and no one wanted to listen to her despair.
To keep busy, she took extra shifts at the hospital. Most nights, she stayed in the hospital as long as she could, putting off the inevitability of having to go home.
Like now.
Long after her shift had ended, Frankie was still in her scrubs and cap, standing by the bedside of an elderly woman who was in the final stages of lung cancer, that terrible time when the body almost entirely shuts down, stops taking in food, stops any sort of intentional movement. The patient was frighteningly thin, her hands curled into claws, her chin tilted up. Her mouth was open. Her breath was that gasping death rattle that meant time was closing around her, but she hung on to life stubbornly. Frankie knew that four of her grown children and all of her grandchildren had been to see her today, all of them having been told that the end was near, but now, at 11:21, Madge had no visitors, and yet she hung on. Bright crayon drawings covered the window by the bed. Fresh flowers scented the hospital’s disinfectant air.
Madge was waiting for her son. Everyone knew it. Her husband groused about it, while her daughters rolled their eyes. Lester, everyone seemed to think, was “too far gone to say goodbye to his mother.”
Frankie applied some Vaseline to Madge’s dry, colorless lips. “You still waiting for Les, huh?” she said.
Nothing from Madge, just that wheezing death rattle. Frankie gently took hold of the woman’s hands and massaged lotion onto them.
She heard the door open and saw a young man with lots of frizzy hair and huge sideburns walk into the room. A mustache hid much of his mouth and a beard grew in tufts along his jawline. He wore a dirty PRO ROE T-shirt and baggy rust-colored corduroy pants.
But it was the tattoo on the inside of his forearm that caught her eye. The word AIRBORNE above a bald eagle head. She knew that insignia. The Screaming Eagles.
The family had called Lester a drug addict and a thief and said that he made candles at some commune in Oregon. No one had ever said he was a veteran. “Lester?” she said.
He nodded, looking lost, standing in the doorway. He might be high. Or just broken.
Frankie went to him, gently took him by the arm, led him to the bed. “She’s been waiting for you.”
“Hey, Ma.” He reached slowly for his mother’s hand, held it.
Madge took a great rattling breath.
Frankie moved to the other side of the bed, backed up to give him some privacy.
Lester leaned down. “I’m sorry, Ma.”
Madge whispered, “Les,” and took one last breath, released it, and slipped away.
Lester looked up, his dark eyes full of tears. “Is that it?”
Frankie nodded. “She waited for you.”
He wiped his eyes, cleared his throat roughly. “I should have come sooner. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just … Vietnam, man…”
Frankie moved closer to the bed. “Yeah. I was at the Seventy-First. Central Highlands,” she said. “From ’67 to ’69.”
He looked at her. “So, we’re both the walking dead.”
Before Frankie could respond, he turned away from the bed and left the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
His presence—and his sudden absence—left Frankie feeling jittery, unsettled.
Without bothering to take off her scrubs or change her shoes, she left the hospital.
We’re both the walking dead.
He’d seen her in a way that cut to the bone, saw what she was trying so hard to hide.
She was driving over the Coronado Bridge, listening to Janis belt out “Piece of My Heart,” when she reached over into the passenger seat, felt around for her macramé handbag, and pulled out her sleeping pills.
There was no way she’d sleep tonight, and remaining awake—remembering—was worse.
She fumbled to open the cap at a stoplight on the island, and swallowed a pill dry, wincing at the taste.
At home, she parked and got out, a little shaky on her feet as she made her way into the house, where the phone was ringing. She ignored it.
She should eat something. When had she eaten last?
Instead, she poured herself a drink and took another sleeping pill, hoping two would be enough to get her through the night. If not, she might take a third. Just this once.
* * *
That spring, Tony Orlando and Dawn released “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” and reminded America that even though the war was over, there were still soldiers coming home from captivity in Vietnam. Overnight, yellow ribbons began to appear on tree trunks around the country, especially in military towns like San Diego and Coronado. Bits of yellow fluttering in the breeze to remind Americans of the POWs in captivity. Stories of heroes who’d been shot down and imprisoned for years filled the news. Frankie couldn’t get away from the stories and the memories they raised.
She survived one day at a time, by keeping to herself, not saying much. She got a prescription for the pills she needed, worked as many hours as humanly possible, and visited her parents when they demanded it; she talked on the phone in short, expensive conversations with Barb and Ethel, most of which ended with Frankie’s adamant (and dishonest) I’m fine. The letters she wrote to her girlfriends were long and chatty and filled with half-truths and pretense, not unlike the letters she’d written to her parents from Vietnam.
In May, her parents invited her to join them on the brand-new Royal Viking Sky cruise ship for a month at sea. Frankie declined easily and let out a deep breath when she saw them off.
Now there was no one to pretend for. She could be as alone and reclusive as she liked. Finally, she thought, she could mourn without anyone watching.
* * *
Despite her best intentions, Frankie couldn’t seem to pull herself back from the edge of despair. If anything, the solitude and silence settled so heavily on her that sometimes she found it hard to breathe unless she took a pill, which she often did. By the end of May, she had refilled her prescriptions twice; it was easy to do for any woman these days, but certainly easy for a nurse.
In June, an unexpected weather front hit San Diego, a deluge that the local TV weatherman claimed came from the Hawaiian islands. In the middle of the night, Frankie was unexpectedly called in to work. Although she still felt a little lethargic from last night’s sleeping pills, she popped another pill to wake her up and agreed. Without bothering to shower, she dressed in yesterday’s clothes and headed for her car.
As she drove over the bridge, rain pounded on the convertible roof, sluiced across her windshield so hard the wiper blades could hardly keep up. On the radio, a story about the Watergate hearings droned on. Secret meetings. The president. Blah, blah, blah.