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.