It was a question that hadn’t occurred to her before. She’d done her best to exist （or not exist, really） in the safety of her bed, with the covers pulled up, but even she knew that couldn’t go on forever.
What did she want?
Rye.
A wedding.
A baby to hold in her arms.
A home of her own.
“How has it been, coming home?” Barb asked.
“Besides finding out that the man I love is dead?” Frankie said.
“Before that,” was Ethel’s softly spoken answer.
“Tough,” Frankie said. “No one wants to talk about the war. My father is ashamed of me even going.” She looked at her friends. “So, what did you two do?”
Ethel shrugged. “You know my story: I started vet school and fell back in love with my high school boyfriend, Noah. He was in-country while I was, but we never saw each other. He knew how much I loved George. We have … history. When I’m feeling fragile, he has a way of holding me together.”
Frankie nodded. “You have nightmares?”
“Not much. Anymore,” Ethel said at the same time Barb said, “You’ve got to push it aside, Frankie. Do something.”
“What do you have left, Frank?” Ethel asked after a while, when the music changed to something folky and soft. No anger in this music, just sadness and loss and sorrow.
“What do you mean?”
“You tell me.”
“Well.” Honestly, this was something Frankie had never thought about. She knew who she’d been raised to be, what was expected of her, but that was before, wasn’t it?
Barb repeated the question: “What do you have left?”
Frankie thought about how she’d changed in the past two years, what she’d learned about herself and the world. About Jamie, and her certainty that she had to do the right thing, which meant that she’d never even kissed him; she thought about Rye and how their passion had transformed her, loosened her into a different, bolder version of herself. She thought about Fin and their idyllic childhood, the way he’d told her, It’s okay, and she’d believed him.
All of them, the three men she’d loved, had awakened her, filled her heart, made her happy, but they couldn’t be everything.
“Nursing,” she said softly.
“Damn right,” Ethel said. “You are a shit-kicking, take-no-prisoners-good nurse. You save lives, Frank. Think about that.”
Frankie nodded. She sensed a glimmer of possibility, a way to move around her grief. In helping others, maybe she could find a way to help herself.
“You guys are the best,” she said, her voice breaking. “And I love you. Truly.” She got to her feet, turned, looked at them. They were here to help her, but she knew—as they knew—if she were to be saved, she’d have to do it herself.
* * *
In the next few days, Frankie showed Ethel and Barb all the places she’d loved as a child; the three friends spent long hours on the beach, just talking, listening to the music that made them laugh and cry and remember. By the time her best friends left, Frankie had a plan for going forward. She spent days scouring the want ads in the San Diego newspaper and making calls. When she finally scored an interview, she got up early to prepare. She typed up a résumé on the IBM Selectric on her father’s desk that no one in this house ever used. Her mother believed, of course, in handwritten letters, and her father had secretaries to type for him. When she was happy with it, she zipped it off the roll, reread for typos, and then slid it into the lambskin-leather briefcase that had been her high school graduation gift. It was the first time she’d used it. Her initials—FGM—were stamped in gold on the black leather.
Grateful—for once—that her mother was an ardent shopper, Frankie found a suitable two-piece striped dress with a funnel neck and a hip-hugging green belt hanging in her closet. Her top dresser drawer held an array of rolled-up panties, a few lacy bras, and some pantyhose in the cinnamon hue Frankie and all her high school friends had worn in the winter to look tan. She slipped her feet into a pair of low-heeled camel pumps.
From the ferry’s car deck, she saw the almost-completed bridge; huge concrete stanchions rose out of the wavy blue water, curving from one shore toward the other.
On the mainland, the small hospital was housed in a Mission-style white building that took up a city block, its front and side yards studded with palm trees. Frankie parked in the visitors’ lot and walked to the front door. The minute the doors opened and welcomed her in, she smelled the familiar scents of disinfectant, alcohol, bleach, and for the first time since coming home she felt like herself.