Frankie tossed her overnight bag into the car, then slid into the backseat, with Barb on one side and Ethel on the other.
“Train station,” Ethel said to the driver. At the same time Barb said, “We checked you out of the motel, Frankie, so sit tight.”
The taxi drove back down the pier, tires bumping over the rough wood.
“Where are we going?” Frankie asked.
“My dad’s farm near Charlottesville,” Ethel said. “You two are moving into the bunkhouse. We’ll remodel it ourselves. Give us a legit reason to hit things. I’m going to finish school. Barb joined that new organization. Vietnam Veterans Against the War.”
Frankie turned. “You’re against the war now?”
“It’s got to stop, Frankie. I don’t know if this can help, and I sure as hell don’t want to be a part of some privileged white kids picketing something they know nothing about. But this—the VVAW—is about us having a voice. The veterans. Don’t you think someone should listen to us?”
Frankie didn’t know how she felt about that. “And me. What have you two decided on for me?”
“That’s what we’re giving you,” Ethel said, “time to figure it out.”
If Frankie hadn’t been so sick of crying, so emptied out, she would have cried. Thank God for girlfriends. In this crazy, chaotic, divided world that was run by men, you could count on the women.
“This bunkhouse,” Frankie said. “Is there indoor plumbing?”
Ethel’s face transformed with a smile, revealing how nervous she’d been that Frankie would say no to this bold plan. “Why? You too good for a latrine, Lieutenant?”
Frankie smiled for the first time in … how long? She didn’t even know. “No, ma’am. With you two at my side, I can live in practically anything.”
Barb held out her hand. The three put their hands together. “Enough bad memories,” she said solemnly. “We won’t ever forget, God knows, but we move forward. Away from Vietnam. Into the future.”
It felt solemn and important and suddenly possible. Frankie thought: I won’t talk about it anymore. I will forget. Soldier on.
“Away,” they said in one voice.
They stopped only long enough to get Frankie a new pair of shoes.
PART TWO
In a country where youth is adored, we lost ours before we were out of our twenties. We learned to accept death there, and it erased our sense of immortality. We met our human frailties, the dark side of ourselves, face-to-face … The war destroyed our faith, betrayed our trust, and dropped us outside the mainstream of our society. We still don’t fully belong. I wonder if we ever will.
—WINNIE SMITH
AMERICAN DAUGHTER GONE TO WAR
Twenty-Three
VIRGINIA
APRIL 1971
At twenty-five, Frankie moved with the kind of caution that came with age; she was constantly on guard, aware that something bad could happen at any moment. She trusted neither the ground beneath her feet nor the sky above her head. Since coming home from war, she had learned how fragile she was, how easily upended her emotions could be.
Still, she had learned to hide her outbursts, her crying jags, even from her two best friends, who, for most of their first year in Virginia, had watched her intently, trying constantly to divine her moods, assess her level of self-destruction, her grief and anger. In the beginning, it had been difficult, settling into the time-honored McGrath camouflage of I’m okay.
The nightmares had been terrible when she first arrived here, had still wrenched her out of sleep and sent her careening onto the floor.
But time—and friendship—had done exactly as promised: pain and grief had grown soft in her hands, almost pliable. She found she could form them into something kinder if she was deliberate in thought and action, if she lived a careful, cautious life, if she stayed away from anything that reminded her of the war, of loss, of death.
By Christmas of that first year, she’d felt strong enough to write to her mother, who had promptly written back. In their family’s way, neither spoke of the terrible night that had precipitated Frankie’s flight across the country. They simply merged back onto their familiar road, the ground a little bumpy between them, but both determined to stay the course. Frankie remembered, and often reread, that first letter from her mother: I am so grateful to your Army girlfriends for being there for you when your father and I were not. We love you, and if we don’t say it often enough, it is because we grew up in families where there was no such vocabulary. About your father and his … reticence about you and the war. All I can say is that something in him was broken by being unable to serve his country. All the men of his generation went to Europe, while he stayed home. Yes, he was proud of Finley and ashamed of you. But perhaps in truth he is ashamed of himself and worries that you judge him harshly, as he feared his friends had done …