3. Four Houses Down #2
And Frank told her. Not all at once, over time, in the garage while Charlie worked and Frank sat in his lawn chair with his lemonade.
He told the girls about the SBD Dauntless dive bombers that won the Battle of Midway.
About the Grumman Wildcats, stubby and mean, and the TBF Avengers heavy with torpedoes.
He told them about the Hellcats that came later on in the war and swept the sky clean.
Frank talked about the carrier itself, telling them about the hangar deck, the vast space below the flight deck where he worked and the aircraft were maintained and repaired and armed while the fights in the Pacific Ocean raged on.
He told them about what it was like to work through the night with nothing but a wrench and a flashlight and the knowledge that if you got it wrong, a pilot had a higher chance of not coming back.
He told them about the sounds the ship made in rough seas, the way the hull groaned like a living thing, growling and churning beneath him while he slept in his bunk.
And how you learned to sleep through sounds like that, how to sleep through anything except the one sound that meant trouble.
Charlie and Katie always listened to Frank completely, with their whole ears while Charlie's hands went still on whatever she was working on.
Charlie would ask questions that surprised him.
Not "were you scared" or "did you see anyone die," the questions adults usually asked.
She would ask about the engines of the planes.
About the fuel systems and how you keep a radial running in salt air with limited parts and no dry dock for a thousand miles.
Frank answered every one, and each answer opened three more questions.
He watched as it became evident that Charlie was already, without her knowing it, building toward something much bigger than lawn tractors.
Eventually, Katie got tired of stories about airplanes and engines and sea sickness. She would always be Charlie's partner but, Katie needed to find something else to talk about, something else to work on besides things that got her dirty.
"Why don't you go see what Mrs. Beckman is up to?
" Frank once prompted Katie when he saw her eyes going crossed at his and Charlie's tech-speak.
"Maybe she needs help with a batch of cookies.
" Frank winked at Katie, and Katie ran from the garage so fast, you'd think she give anything for a taste of Helen's special chocolate chip cookies.
Helen Beckman's kitchen had a small yellow table with four chairs, yellow curtains to match hanging over the window above the sink, and a cookie jar shaped like a rooster that was never empty.
Katie claimed the chair closest to the window on her first visit and never sat anywhere else.
Helen didn't assign it but then again, she didn't need to.
She just noticed where Katie sat and made sure there was always a glass of milk waiting there every time.
Helen did tell stories too, but not engine stories, to Katie's relief.
Helen told people stories. She'd been a nurse in the Navy Nurse Corps at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, just outside Chicago, during the war.
She told Katie about the boys who came through basic training, eighteen years old and terrified and trying not to show it.
She told her about the ones who came back from the Pacific with stories of their own that they'd share with her while she treated their wounds.
And she told Katie about how she learned to hold someone's hand without flinching, and about the letters she wrote to families when the news was bad, and about the morning a boy no older than nineteen asked her to read him a letter from his mother because his hands were shaking too hard to hold the paper.
Katie listened to Helen the way she listened to Charlie.
Without needing to understand every word because she trusted the person saying them.
She'd sit at that yellow table with cookie crumbs on her sweater and a milk mustache on her upper lip, and Helen would regale her with tales of people and culture and histories that Katie believed were magical.
She would nod along and occasionally ask a question so intrinsically precise that Helen would stop mid-sentence and gaze at this child with something close to wonder.
"Were you ever scared, Mrs. Beckman?"
"Every day, sweetheart."
"But you kept going?"
"That's what you do when people need you."
Katie thought about that for a long time.
She didn't know the word xenoanthropology yet, or that she would one day study how cultures sustain themselves through crisis.
She just knew Helen Beckman was someone who stayed when things were hard, and that felt like the most important thing a person could ever do.
It was no surprise that Helen was someone who noticed things. She'd spent years reading patients and understanding the words underneath the sentences spoken to her when she was treating men in the hospital.
She never lost the skill.
That's why she noticed the mornings that Charlie came to the house with shadows under her eyes, her hands not quite steady around the hot chocolate Frank always handed to her when she and Katie walked in together.
She noticed the way Charlie moved slower on those days, like her body hadn't quite caught up with her decision to be awake.
Helen never asked about it. She just made sure there was a plate of something warm waiting, and that the kitchen was quiet so that if Charlie wanted to sit at the table with her and Katie and not talk for twenty minutes before going out to the garage, that was fine.
The chair was there. The milk was there. Helen and Frank and Katie were there.
One afternoon, Katie was at the yellow table doing homework and Charlie was staring out the window, not really seeing anything with her fingers wrapped around a mug of cocoa she hadn't touched.
Helen sat down across from her but said nothing, instead, sitting the way you sit with someone when you know they're carrying something but they're not quite ready to put it down.
Charlie looked over at her after a while. Helen smiled, and that smile said everything to Charlie that it needed to without a single word.
It was a Sunday afternoon, a few weeks after the Cutlass and the hot chocolates and the stories had started, when Frank put on the television in the living room and said, "Girls!
Come on in here." At that moment, the sound of elephants stampeding alerted Frank that the girls were on their way in from the kitchen, Helen following just behind them with a bowl of popcorn in her hands for them.
"I want to show you something special." He instructed each of them all to sit on the sofa, including Helen, taking a seat against the left side himself.
Katie sat in the middle of everyone and held the bowl of popcorn, hands reaching around her and over her to grab pieces.
Katie liked this because any stray pieces would always fall right into her lap, up for grabs, and she had a prime spot to grab first.
As they finished settling, a crescendo of music started on the television screen.
The something special Frank wanted to show them was a television show called Star Trek.
Reruns came on every Sunday on a local channel, and Frank had picked this exact one that he'd seen before specifically because it had a good look at the infamous ship captained by James T.
Kirk of Starfleet under the United Federation of Planets.
Charlie and Katie sat mesmerized by the images flashing across on the screen. Frank beamed at their excitement.
The Starship Enterprise appeared on screen for the first time, sweeping through stars, and Frank leaned forward.
"Now. Do you know what that ship's called?
" Frank watched as Charlie scanned the television screen, using her knowledge of Frank's stories that every ship and every plane and every military vehicle always identified itself on its hull.
Charlie tried to catch the hull markings against the ship flying up and down and fast through space.
When her eyes went wide, he knew she had seen it.
She spun around against Katie so fast the popcorn bowl nearly went flying.
"That's the Enterprise!" She looked at Frank with her mouth open. "'The Big E!'" Charlie exclaimed, remembering the nickname Frank had told her time and time again about the beloved warship of the United States Navy. "You served on the real Enterprise, Mr. Beckman?!"
Frank grinned wide, his smile taking thirty years off his face. "You betcha. And it was a hell of a ride."
Helen swatted his arm. "Language, Frank."
"They're going to hear worse, Helen."
"Not from you they're not."
Katie was already glued to the screen, watching the crew walk through corridors that looked nothing like a real ship but everything like an adventure.
Charlie was just as absorbed. She studied the way the ship moved, the way the nacelles glowed, the way the whole thing was designed to look like it could work.
Her engineer brain was already pulling it apart, already asking how.
It may have been the best Sunday of all, for all of them.
After that, they watched a rerun every Sunday.
It became a ritual, right alongside the garage and the kitchen table and the cookies and cocoa and popcorn bowl in Katie's lap.
Frank and Helen and Charlie and Katie on the Beckman sofa, Star Trek on the television, Helen providing commentary on the medical inaccuracies ("That is NOT how you treat a plasma burn, for heaven's sake") and Frank pointing out every time the Enterprise did something his Enterprise had done first.