She saw his struggle with emotion. “You should talk to someone, Frankie. The new VA medical center offers therapy for vets. It can really help to talk to someone.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I love you, Frankie,” he said, his voice cracking on emotion.
“You’ll find someone better.”
“Jesus, Frankie. You break my heart.”
“Henry—”
“And for a woman in love, you have the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
* * *
Frankie left the hospital in a wheelchair, like an ancient woman, wearing a pad to absorb the bleeding. Dad pushed the wheelchair and ordered the local nurses around as if they were employees under his charge.
Mom pulled up in front of the hospital and they both helped Frankie into the passenger seat of the new Cadillac.
At home, Frankie crawled into bed. Mom stayed in the bungalow, trying to distract her—as if such a thing were possible—until Frankie begged her to go home.
I’m fine, she kept saying, until at last there was nothing left for Mom to do but leave.
Alone, Frankie reached for the purse on her nightstand. She took a pill for pain and then two sleeping pills.
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.