Frankie stared at him for another long moment. She could tell him all of it again, how she’d learned to understand her own weakness, and her own strength, how she’d come to believe that Rye was not just a liar, but selfish and cruel as well. But none of that mattered anymore; Rye didn’t matter. If she saw him on the street, she’d pass him by with nothing but a pang of sad remembrance, and Henry knew all of that. “It was a lucky day when I met you, Henry Acevedo.”
“Lucky for me, too, Frankie.”
She bent down and picked up the old, banged-up travel bag her mother had packed for her months ago, when Frankie’s world had collapsed.
Down the hall, she saw that Jill Landis was conducting a group session: eight new people sat in a horseshoe in front of the therapist.
A young man with long hair and slumped shoulders was saying something about heroin.
Frankie paused, caught Jill’s gaze, and waved. Goodbye.
Here, just like in ’Nam, people came, did their time, were changed in existential ways, and moved on. Some made it in the outside world, some didn’t. It was especially bad with Vietnam vets. The statistics on their rates of suicide were becoming alarming.
Frankie didn’t go back to her room, vaguely afraid that, once there, she would find a reason not to leave. She walked through the front doors, out into the cold day.
She saw her mother’s black Cadillac, parked beneath a jacaranda tree.
The driver side door opened. Then the passenger side. Dad and Mom stepped out, stood at their respective sides of the car, looking at her.
Even from here, she saw their joy. And their anxiety.
She had given them so much to worry about in a few short years. Vietnam. Trauma. The miscarriage. Rye. The drunk driving. The pills. She knew how hard all of it was on two people for whom reputation and standing in the community were vital. She had no idea what they had told their friends this time. Maybe drug and alcohol treatment had become tagging penguins in Antarctica.
Either way, she wouldn’t ask. Having discovered her own failings, she was less inclined to judge others.
Her parents didn’t understand her, perhaps, and certainly they didn’t condone most of her choices, but they were here.
You know love, Frankie.
Frankie walked across the gravel parking lot.
“Frances,” Mom said at her approach.
A look passed between them, a sharing of emotion between mother and daughter. “You look good,” Mom said. “Too thin.”
“You, too,” Frankie said, walking into her mother’s arms, being held in the new, fierce way that Mom had developed. Like Frankie, Mom had learned how capricious life and one’s own body could be.
When Mom finally let go—with tears in her eyes—Frankie turned, looked across the shiny black roof of the Cadillac at her dad.
She had aged him, she knew, taught him that success and money couldn’t insulate a family from loss or hardship. Walls around a house were no guarantee of safety, not in a world that was constantly shifting. He’d changed with the times, in a way, grown out his sideburns, and traded in his custom suits for knit bowling-style shirts and double-knit pants, but there was no denying the wariness in his eyes when he looked at his daughter.
She remembered him carrying her out of the water that night. The memory of his crying would always be with her. What he’d learned about her that night, about them, could never be erased. She knew a part of him would worry about her forever. And that he would never say a word about it. He and her mother were of a quieter generation. They didn’t believe in words as much as they believed in optimism and hard work.
“I think you look great, Frankie,” he said.
“Thanks, Dad.”
She opened the back door, tossed her bag in the backseat, and slid in next to it.
When Dad started the engine, Perry Como’s voice sang through the speakers and pulled time away. Suddenly Frankie was ten years old again, sitting in the backseat of the car, sliding across at every turn in the road, bumping into her brother.
“That bag still smells mildewed,” Mom said. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Monsoon season,” Frankie said, staring down at the black, soft-sided bag that had gone around the world with her. “Everything was wet. Nothing ever dried.”
“That must have been … unpleasant,” Mom said.
The first real conversation they’d ever had about Vietnam.
Frankie couldn’t help smiling. They were trying, hoping to change in small and meaningful ways. “Yeah, Mom,” she said with a smile. “It was unpleasant.”