At the end of the song, with the last notes echoing across the Mall, the speaker said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is now dedicated.”
A cheer rose up from the crowd, a thunderous applause.
Someone else stepped up to the podium. A grizzled, old-before-his-time vet in stained fatigues. “Thank you for finally remembering us.”
Reporters and cameramen pushed through the crowd, seeking statements for the nightly news.
Frankie drifted down the sloping grass, drawn to the Wall. She saw women holding framed photographs of the men they’d lost, and a teenager wearing his father’s too-big dress uniform.
As she neared the mirror of black granite, she saw her own reflection—a skinny, long-haired woman in fatigues and a boonie hat—superimposed over the names of the fallen. She glanced down the black line, saw men in uniform standing tall in front of it, while women knelt before it, children and parents at their sides.
“Frances.”
She turned and saw her parents moving toward her.
“You came,” Frankie said, overwhelmed with emotion.
Her mother held a framed photograph of Finley to her chest. Dad held tightly on to Mom’s other hand. “I wanted to see his name,” Mom said quietly. “My son. He would want me here.”
The three of them moved as one to the Wall, searched the names and dates.
There he was.
Finley O. McGrath.
Frankie reached out to touch the stone; to her surprise, it was warm. She traced the etching of her brother’s name, remembering the sound of his laughter, the way he teased her, the stories he read her before bed. I’m going to be a great American novelist … Here, Frankie, that’s your wave. Paddle hard. You got it.
“Hey, Fin,” she said.
It felt good, to think of him as he was, as he’d been. Not just as a casualty of war, but as a beloved brother. For too many years, all she’d thought of was his death; now, at the Wall, she remembered his life.
She heard her mother crying, and the soft, wrenching sound of it brought tears to Frankie’s eyes, too, blurred her vision.
“He’s here,” Frankie said. “I feel him.”
“I always feel him,” her mother said in a voice that held on to sorrow. Beside her, Dad stood rigid, his jaw clenched, afraid even here to show his grief.
“Ma’am?”
Frankie felt someone tap on her shoulder and say again, “Ma’am?”
She turned.
The man who’d tapped her shoulder was maybe her age, with long sideburns and a straggly beard. He wore torn and stained fatigues. He pulled off his boonie hat, which held patches from the 101st. “Ma’am, were you a nurse over there?”
Frankie almost asked how he knew; then she remembered that she was wearing her fatigues and boonie hat, and her winged ANC pin.
“I was,” she said, studying the man, trying to remember him. Had she held his hand or written a letter for him, or taken a picture with him or brought him a glass of water? If she had, she didn’t recall it.
She felt her father step closer to her. “Frankie, do you—”
Frankie held up a hand for silence. For once, her father complied.
The soldier reached out to hold her hand, stared into her eyes. In that moment, on the Mall ground, with the Wall shining beside them, the two of them shared it all—the horror, the grief, the pain, the pride, the guilt, the camaraderie. She thought, Here we are, for the first time since the war, all of us together.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and she nodded and let him go.
Frankie felt her father’s gaze on her.
She turned, looked up at him, saw the tears in his eyes. “Finley loved his service, Dad. We wrote letters all the time. He found himself over there. You don’t need to feel guilty.”
“You think I feel guilty for urging my son to go to war? I do. It’s a thing I live with.” He swallowed hard. “But I feel more guilt about how I treated my daughter when she came home.”
Frankie drew in a sharp breath. How long had she waited to hear those words from him?
“You’re the hero, aren’t you, Frankie?”
Tears blurred her vision. “I don’t know about a hero, Dad, but I served my country. Yeah.”
“I love you, Peanut,” he said in a rough voice. “And I’m sorry.”
Peanut. God, he hadn’t called her that in years.
Frankie saw him crying and wished she knew the perfect words to say, but nothing came to her. Life was like that, she guessed; it was all wrong until suddenly it was right, and you didn’t really know how to react in either instance. But she knew love when she saw it, and it filled her. “I don’t know about heroism,” she said. “But I saw a lot of it. And…” She drew in a deep breath. “I’m proud of my service, Dad. It’s taken me a long time to say that. I’m proud, even if the war never should have happened, even if it went to hell.”