All she heard was the rain. Pounding. Rattling. Monsoon-hard.
—blood washing across her boots, someone yelling, “Hit the generators”—
She clung to the wheel.
In the hospital parking lot, she parked and ran into the bright building and went to her locker. Peeling off her damp clothes, she dressed in her scrubs and sneakers. She put on her surgical cap and coiled her long black ponytail up inside as she walked down the busy hallway toward the front desk.
Even inside the building, she could hear the rain, shuddering against glass, pounding on the roof.
At the nurses’ station, she guzzled two cups of coffee, knowing it was a bad choice when she was this on edge.
It was the rain, reminding her of Vietnam.
She should eat, but the thought of food made her sick. Every time she closed her eyes, images of Vietnam assaulted her. Fighting them weakened her. Thank God it was a quiet shift. Just as she had that thought, the double doors at the end of the hall banged open. A pair of ambulance drivers rushed in, pushing a gurney into the bright white glare.
Blood.
“GSW,” someone shouted.
The patient was wheeled past Frankie. She saw him in a blur—blood pumping from a chest wound, pale skin; he was screaming.
“Frankie!”
She ran after the gurney into the OR, but she felt dazed, untethered by memories, images. She was slow at scrubbing in, couldn’t remember for a second where the gloves were kept.
When she turned around, a nurse was cutting off the kid’s bloody jacket.
Silver blades snipped through the fabric.
And then: his bare chest. A gaping bullet wound, pumping blood.
Choppers incoming. Chinook. Thwop-thwop-thwop.
“Frankie. Frankie?”
Someone shook her, hard.
She looked up, realizing in a flash that she wasn’t in Vietnam. She was at work, in OR 2.
“Get out of my OR, Frankie,” Dr. Vreminsky yelled. “Ginni. You scrub in.”
Shame overwhelmed Frankie. “But—”
“Out,” he yelled.
She backed out of the operating room and stood in the hallway, feeling lost.
The damnable rain.
* * *
Frankie woke on her bedroom floor, her head pounding, her mouth dry. Summer sunlight streamed through her window, hurt her eyes. The memory of last night’s shame made her groan aloud. She stumbled to her nightstand, reached for her pills, and swallowed one with water.
She passed the closed nursery door on her way to the bathroom. She hadn’t gone into the room in months, not even to clean. If she had the energy she’d gut it, paint over the cheery yellow walls, give away the furniture, but she wasn’t strong enough to even open the door.
She took a hot shower, washed and dried her long hair and pulled it back into a loose ponytail, and then dressed in shorts and a T-shirt.
The phone rang.
She glanced at the wall clock. Twelve-twenty on a Saturday afternoon.
Barb.
Frankie knew her friend would keep calling until Frankie picked up, so she grabbed her beach hat and chair and left the house.
Carrying the chair across the street, she set it down in the sand.
As she stared out at the glittering blue waves, she remembered last night again, the way she’d frozen in the OR like some FNG fresh off the plane.
She couldn’t go on like this. She needed to quit taking the pills and get her life back on track. But how?
She pulled the hat lower on her head and pulled her sunglasses and a tattered paperback copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull out of the chair’s side pocket. Maybe the bird could give her some much-needed advice on how to live.
The beach was a hive of activity on this hot June day. Kids running around, teenagers in packs, mothers running after their children. It soothed her, these familiar beach-day sounds, until she heard a man shout out, “Joey, come back from the water. Wait for me.”
Frankie felt her skin tingle, even in the heat. She looked up slowly from beneath the wide brim of her sun hat.
Rye stood at the shoreline, facing this way, wearing shorts and a faded gray NAVY T-shirt.
The summer sun had darkened his skin and lightened his hair, which was long enough now that she knew he’d left the Navy. He moved in an awkward, limping way to keep up with his daughter—Joey—who giggled and tried to jump over the low roll of incoming surf.
His wife sat on a blanket not far away, wearing a billowy summer dress, one hand tented over her eyes, watching them, laughing easily. “Be careful, Jo-Jo!”
Frankie sank deeper into her chair, hunched her shoulders, trying to disappear, and pulled her hat down lower.
Look away.
She couldn’t.
It was bad for her, maybe even dangerous, to watch Rye with his family, but she couldn’t get up, couldn’t stop looking at him and the easy, loving way he was with his daughter. It had been a day just like this when Rye had shown up in Kauai, standing over her, saying, I swear I’m not engaged.
God, how she loved him.
She heard his wife—Melissa, her name was Melissa, Frankie knew from reading about them in the newspaper. Melissa yelled something, and Rye and Joey moved toward her, him limping. They were close enough now that Frankie could see he was gritting his teeth. Ugly scarring encircled his wrists and ankles.
He knelt awkwardly in front of his wife, grimacing again in pain.
Help him, Frankie thought. Melissa, help him. But his wife just sat there, packing food back into a wicker picnic basket.
They look unhappy.
No.
He looked unhappy.
The thought was there before she could protect herself against it. And after all he’d suffered.
“Stop it,” Frankie muttered. They were a family, the Walshes, and their happiness—his happiness—had nothing to do with her. She knew their true story now, how they’d met, how they’d married, the hardware store that her parents owned in Carlsbad, the managerial job that waited for him when he left the Navy.
Look away, Frankie.
This was wrong. Sick. Dangerous.
Frankie finally forced herself to get up. She turned her back on them, folded up her chair, and walked off the beach.
“Damn it, Melissa, slow down.”
She heard Rye’s voice behind her and froze. Then she gritted her teeth and kept walking, over the mound of greenery and down to the side-walk and across Ocean Boulevard. On the other side, against her best intentions, she turned slowly, stared at them from beneath the brim of her hat.
He and his wife and daughter were leaving the beach, heading toward the street.
Frankie had to leave. Now. Before she called out to him. She clamped the chair to her side and walked resolutely down the block toward her house.
All the way there, she thought, Don’t look back, Frankie. Just let him go.
But he knew she lived on Coronado, or at least that she’d been raised here. Did it mean something, that he’d brought his family here, to the beach she’d so often talked about?
She stopped at her car, which was parked in the driveway at her house, and looked back.
Now Rye was opening the trunk of a metallic midnight-blue Camaro, putting the picnic basket inside. Melissa opened the passenger door and helped Joey into the backseat.
Rye closed the trunk and limped toward the driver’s-side door.
Frankie opened her car door, tossed her things in the backseat, and slid into the driver’s seat. She plucked her keys from the visor, started the engine, and backed into the street. Slowly, her foot light on the accelerator, she drove forward, edged toward the stop sign on Ocean Boulevard.
Rye got into the Camaro. The engine started up with a roar.
She followed him. Them.
All the way across town, up Orange Avenue, over the bridge, she berated herself. This was stalking. Embarrassing. He didn’t love her. He was a liar.
Still, she followed them, drawn by an obsessive need to see his life.
If he was unhappy …