3. Four Houses Down #5
"Oh no, dear. They didn't allow nurses on the carriers.
Those were for men only." Charlie's jaw tightened.
Helen saw it and patted her arm. "I know, dear, I know.
It's just the way it was. It still is. The men go off to fight, the women and children stay.
" Charlie nodded her head, not quite agreeing but understanding Mrs. Beckman in a way only women could. "I did serve as a nurse, though—"
"—at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station just outside of Chicago!" Katie piped up, remembering Helen's stories at the kitchen table together. Helen laughed and Katie grinned.
"That's right, sweetie."
"That's where we met," Frank said, pointing at Helen with his coffee cup.
"Well, yes, because you wouldn't stop being a hypochondriac."
Frank leaned toward Charlie and Katie, lowering his voice to a stage whisper. "I wasn't really a hypochondriac." Charlie scoffed, but Katie looked confused.
"What's a hypo-coon-droo-ack?" Katie asked, lowering her own cookie.
Charlie laughed at her little sister's butchering of the word. Helen gave Frank a look, but the warmth underneath burned away any true animosity.
"It's what Mr. Beckman pretended to be so he could keep finding excuses to come back to my infirmary," Helen said.
Frank sat up straighter. "Hey now," he began, an expression on his face poised to defend his honor.
"I went through Great Lakes for basic training just like everyone else, before being sent to aviation school and then deployed to the Enterprise.
You can't blame me for what happened while I was there!
Who would have thought I'd meet the most beautiful nurse in the whole Navy before I even set foot in combat?
" He looked up at Helen with big doe eyes, and she gave him a kiss on top of his head.
"He just would not give up," Helen said, turning to the girls. "A 'cough' that wouldn't quit. A twisted ankle that was 'still bothering him.' A headache that definitely needed 'checking out.' I was worried he was suffering something far worse than drinking too much beer on weekend leaves."
"I was a wily one," Frank teased. Helen scoffed.
"No you were not!" Helen punctuated, making the girls laugh. She turned to them. "I figured it out by his third visit. Didn't say a darn thing. Just started having his chart ready before he walked through the door."
"And one day, she did just that," Frank explained. "She looked up at me right when I walked through the door and said—"
"'What is it today, Beckman?'" Helen finished, grinning. They looked at each other then, the years between that moment in the infirmary and this kitchen collapsing into nothing, as if no time had passed.
"I smiled at her, knowing in that single instance that I was done in, right then, right there," Frank continued. "So I looked right in her eyes, smiled at her like a complete doofus, and said, 'I think it's my heart, ma'am.'"
Helen sighed happily at the memory. "You'd think a cheesy line like that wouldn't have passed muster," Helen teased. "But, well, it did," she said. "And that was it."
"What was it?" Charlie asked.
"The beginning of everything," Helen replied. Frank wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her close, up against his side.
"We wrote to one another all through the war," Frank said, still looking at Helen. "I told her about the Enterprise, the planes, the Pacific. The sounds the engines made at dawn when the flight deck was still wet."
"And I told him about the hospital, about the boys coming home, and about Illinois in winter and how the lake froze so solid you could actually walk to Wisconsin."
"She still has all the letters," Frank said.
"You do?" Charlie whispered.
"Of course I do." Helen looked up at Frank, her gaze lingering on his face.
"I kept every single one in a stash in my quarters at the base, knowing they were each a piece of our growing story.
They reminded me, in darker times, that there was someone out there fighting for our chance to be together.
And that he wanted it just as much as I did. "
Frank leaned down and kissed Helen right on the lips, in the middle of their kitchen, with two young girls listening to their love story. Katie giggled and Charlie smiled.
Charlie took a good look at the two of them.
These wonderful people, forty years in, still reaching for each other across a kitchen table, still finishing each other's sentences, still looking at each other like the room had just gotten brighter when the other walked in.
She felt it, how two people chose each other, who kept choosing one another, who wrote letters across a war and kept every single one.
The feeling was warm and formless and unfamiliar, but it settled into her chest like something that had always belonged there and was only just arriving.
At fourteen years old, sitting at that yellow kitchen table with chocolate on her fingers, a vocabulary for propulsion, and a sister who was her entire world, Charlie hoped that one day she'd be able find a love just like theirs.