Chapter 28 When, Not If
When, Not If
When Frankie wakes, it’s early. There, on the nightstand beside her, is the script.
She reaches for it and rolls over in bed, eyes adjusting to the print.
The truth is she wants it to make her angry, just so she won’t regret how things ended last night with Jack.
Still, she’s not prepared to be immediately irritated, but by page three, she’s mad.
The woman is the man’s maid. Now Frankie sits up in bed and turns on the light, trying to be calm.
The character lives in a tenement, destitute though morally grounded and strong, and though the man she works for is rich and people describe him as blessed, he’s lost all sense of right and wrong.
To add to the situation, he’s a single father and raising his son all on his own, a child who seemingly has everything but is craving the one thing he doesn’t have: a mother.
And indeed, the woman does the saving—both of the child and the man, who realizes what it is to truly be happy.
It’s trite, but Frankie knows audiences are going to love it.
They will relate, and they might even feel better about their lot in life.
As Frankie turns the last page, she knows that it’s true—this was a tribute to both Frankie and her mother, one that only she’d recognize.
She puts the script back on the nightstand.
In an alternate version of her own story, she would’ve seen this play out in a theatre.
June and Jack would be in the front row, and behind them would be an entire audience watching their every reaction.
Frankie would be rows behind, off in a corner maybe, but close enough to see Jack turn.
And she would know he was looking for her, and know who he really meant was saved.
“They’re saying it was Los Angeles’s biggest known earthquake,” Virginia says, still in pajamas.
The floor is cold, and Frankie searches for her slippers as her roommate continues.
“John, from across the street, he said that the farther south you go, the more like a war zone it is. And he was at Verdun, so he knows. Oh, and that production assistant with the red hair was here this morning and said they need you at work.”
“He was here?” Frankie looks at the clock. It’s barely nine a.m.
“Our phone lines are still down. Sorry, I thought you were sleeping.”
Getting to work is a challenge, both from the fact that many streets are a mess but also from the fact that Frankie wants to slow down to look at the damage.
The quake was centered in Long Beach, a small community now reeling with the most extensive destruction: collapsed houses and destroyed schools and fire-gutted neighborhoods and broken families.
Let this be a reminder, the man on the radio says, no matter how fancy we think we are, Mother Nature can and will put us in check.
Houses thrown off their foundations. Walls crumbled.
Sidewalks split. Wrecking crews are scattered throughout the city, there to finish the job, like putting animals out of their misery.
Friends and neighbors and strangers, everyone is outside, sweeping glass and shoveling concrete and uncovering cars from beneath bricks.
At a park, food stations are set up alongside long tables as if the city is preparing for a massive picnic.
Once she gets to work, the talk is endless. Everyone has a story to tell. Where were you? What were you doing? Betty looks as though she hasn’t slept in a week, even though the quake was only yesterday.
“You hear about the prop room? All the china and crystal, gone. And that big chandelier fell. It’s just glass in there.”
“It could’ve been worse,” Frankie says, the mantra everyone repeats in a disaster.
Betty hands her a stack of messages. “Now we circle the wagons. Damage-control time, literally and figuratively. Nico’s already out handling the big messes.”
Frankie gathers reports on all their stars and sends off a cleaning crew to remove what sounds like a roomful of broken liquor bottles from an actor’s house before then concocting a cover-up story to hide the fact that another one of their stars was trapped in his pool house with the pool boy.
It’s lying, yes, but it’s a lie she endorses, because why should the public crucify the actor for his own choice in his own life?
If lying is what protects him and his desire to be with the pool boy, then she will lie.
The whole day, Nico’s gone, and his absence only prolongs a sort of limbo, some uncertain territory where he could still be upset at her accusation.
The only way she can gauge whether things have gone back to normal is when she sees him.
Putting out fires, he told her about his tasks for the afternoon. Thankfully not real ones.
On the way home, she stops at a local market and joins the line for food.
“There’s the reminder, isn’t it? And that’s just the part we see.”
A man stands on the sidewalk, gesturing to a giant sheer rock wall behind the parking lot.
The layers of earth are exposed like a slice of cake, but the layers aren’t straight—they’re ruffled like a bedsheet.
Countless times, she’s walked past this and wondered at the sight but never stopped to appreciate the force involved in actually bending the earth like this.
Within seconds, another woman stops and stares.
“When did that happen?” she asks, eyes wide.
The man replies, with a laugh, “Not yesterday.”
Offended, the woman shakes her head as she walks away, finally calling back, “They need a tree to block that. No one needs to see that.”
Now the man smiles at Frankie. “A tree’s not going to make it go away.” He laughs. “Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. Which works till you realize it’s been under your feet the whole damn time.”
Candles and canned food and heavy blankets and a battery-operated “farm radio” that Susan finds in the small storage basement.
The power’s still off all through the night, and it’s cold, colder than before, and Sunday morning, Frankie wakes up to the phone ringing, which at least tells her that’s back on and gives her hope.
She clicks the light switch, but there’s nothing.
“Frankie,” Virginia yells down the hall.
For a fleeting moment, Frankie waits for her to tell her it’s Grant.
Grant, whom her roommates haven’t even asked about, as if suspecting that the man they’ve never met would naturally disappear at the first sign of trouble.
Frankie thinks of Jack’s visit after the quake, there to check on her, sure, but with the goal of getting her to turn on Nico.
“My suspicion,” Nico says when she picks up the phone, “is that you’re not eating properly and everything in your refrigerator needs to go in the trash.”
“All true.”
“Well, we’ve got more power than we know what to do with and food coming out of our ears, so six p.m. dinner is on. We’ve canceled enough. If this earthquake taught us anything, it’s that if you’re lucky enough to be alive, you better live.”
Relief. He was telling the truth; he was proud she was thinking critically, and she didn’t ruin anything with her accusation.
When she’s about to leave, she spots the neighbor with the fig tree locking his front door behind him.
Quickly, she grabs the garden clippers that her downstairs neighbor keeps in a basket by the hose and crosses the street.
The man listens with confusion as she explains herself and why she’s holding clippers.
Wary but in a hurry, he waves his hand toward the tree before shutting his car door.
Frankie finds a branch and does as Nico’s taught her, making a clean cut at a forty-five-degree angle.
Ultimately, she takes the tips of four branches.
The more, the better, he’s told her, in case some fail.
It’s ten to six when Frankie rings the bell. Angela’s wearing the same apron she always does, and the familiar sight—a vestige of the past—makes Frankie hopeful that things can return to normal.
“He’s teaching Gabriella soccer out back. So far, he claims she’s better than anyone ever was at that age, ever, in the history of the world, and I’ve lost two flowerpots. They’re blaming the earthquake, but I know.”
Frankie holds out the fig cuttings, wrapped in damp newspaper, and Angela sighs.
“You too? We’ll be out of yard soon.” Then, as she heads back to the kitchen, she adds, “Be sure to score the bottoms.”
The little bathroom attached to his office is filled with cuttings in pots, many with bright-green leaves that angle toward the window.
Frankie had never even tasted a fig till she met Nico, but he could charm a snake by describing them, listing off flavors and profiles like wine: dark blackberry or bright strawberry, notes of floral honey or sweet melon.
Along the wall are shelves, each with cuttings in various stages, and one with soil-filled pots, ready with the special mix he uses.
She takes four prefilled plastic pots to the little potting table.
Working in the dimming light, she scores the bottom of each section of branch, scraping away the bark, then inserts one into the first pot, another into the second, and is working on planting the third cutting when it meets resistance.
Something hard is mixed in with the potting soil.
Digging her hand in, she freezes when her finger touches something smooth.
Even as she pulls it out, she understands she will not come back from this. This solid truth in her hand will change everything, forever. But it’s as if her body has chosen to learn what her heart’s not ready for, because her hand works on its own. She shakes the item loose.
There, covered in dirt, is June’s necklace.