“It isn’t dangerous, Frankie. Trust me. I’m a Naval Academy graduate, an officer with a cushy assignment on a ship. I’ll be back in no time. You’ll hardly have time to miss me.”
Everyone said the same thing: Communism was an evil that had to be stopped; these were the Cold War years. Dangerous times. If a great man like President Kennedy could be shot in broad daylight by a Red in Dallas, how could any American feel safe? Everyone agreed that communism couldn’t be allowed to flourish in Asia, and Vietnam was the place to stop it.
The nightly news showed smiling soldiers marching in packs through the Vietnamese jungle and giving newsmen the thumbs-up. No bloodshed.
Finley put an arm around her.
“I’ll miss you, Peanut,” he said. She heard the catch in his voice and knew he was scared to go.
Had he been hiding it from her all along, or hiding it from himself?
And there it was, the fear and worry she’d been trying to suppress all night, to ignore. Suddenly it was too big to bear. No looking away now.
Her brother was going to war.
Two
For the next six months, Frankie wrote to her brother every Sunday after church. In return, she received funny letters about his life on board the ship and the antics of his fellow sailors. He sent postcard pictures of lush green jungles and aqua seas and beaches with sand the color of salt. He told her about parties at the O Club and rooftop bars in Saigon and celebrities who came to entertain the troops.
In his absence, Frankie increased her course load and graduated early, with honors. As a newly registered nurse, she landed her first-ever job, working the night shift at a small hospital in nearby San Diego. She had recently begun to think about moving out of her parents’ home and getting an apartment of her own, a dream she’d shared with Finley in a letter only last week. Think of it, Fin. Us living in a little place near the beach. Maybe in Santa Monica. What fun we could have …
Now, on this cool night in the last week of November, the corridors of the hospital were quiet. Dressed in her starched white uniform, with a nurse cap pinned on her sprayed, bouffant bob, Frankie walked behind the night charge nurse, who led the way into a private room devoid of flowers or visitors, where a young woman lay sleeping. Frankie was being told—yet again—how to do her job.
“High school girl from St. Anne’s,” the night charge nurse said, then mouthed, Baby, as if the word itself were a sin. Frankie knew that St. Anne’s was the local home for unwed mothers, but it was a thing no one ever talked about: the girls who left school suddenly and came back months later, quieter and lonely looking.
“Her IV is low. I could—”
“For goodness’ sake, Miss McGrath, you know you’re not ready for that. How long have you been here? A week?”
“Two, ma’am. And I’m a registered nurse. My grades—”
“Don’t matter. It’s clinical skills I care about, and you have little of those. You are to check bedpans, refill water pitchers, help patients to the toilet. When you’re ready to do more, I’ll let you know.”
Frankie sighed quietly. She hadn’t put in all those long, exhausting hours in study carrels, getting her nursing degree early, so that she could change bedpans and fluff pillows. How was she going to acquire the clinical skills she needed to land a job at a first-rate hospital?
“So please record and monitor all IV meds. I’ll need the information promptly. Go.”
Frankie nodded and began her nightly rounds, going from room to room.
It was almost three in the morning when she came to Room 107.
She opened the door gently, hating to waken the patient if she could help it.
“Have you come to see the freak show?”
Frankie paused, uncertain of what to do. “I could come back…”
“Stay. Please.”
Frankie closed the door behind her and moved toward the bed. The patient was a young man, with long, shaggy blond hair and a pale, narrow face. A weedy patch of blond and brown hair tufted above his upper lip. He looked like a kid you’d find surfing the break at Trestles, except for the wheelchair in the corner.
She could see the outline of his legs, or his one leg, beneath the white blanket.
“You can look,” he said. “It’s impossible not to. Who wouldn’t look at a car wreck?”
“I’m bothering you,” she said, taking a step back, starting to turn.
“Don’t go. They’re sending me to a psych ward for trying to kill myself. Involuntary hold, or some bullshit. Like they would know what I was thinking. Anyway, you might be the last sane person I see for a while.”