Chapter Twenty Marion
twenty MARION
January was the coldest month. In contrast to December’s windy sweeps of snow, January’s sharp, cruel teeth forced Marion to bundle from the top of her head to the soles of her boots, leaving only a small slit in her scarf for her eyes to peek through. Even then, she tried to cover them with her mittens when she didn’t need to see, because on particularly stormy days like today, her eyelashes froze together.
She climbed out of the bus outside of the new community health centre, with its cheery redbrick face and large windows, safely shuffling like a penguin to the front door, careful not to catch her heels on invisible patches of ice. The windows were frosted to opaque, telling her the furnace was turned way up high. She could hardly wait to thaw out with a cup of coffee.
The cozy staff room was empty, but she was getting more used to that every visit. She didn’t share any shifts here, since the few doctors alternated days. Aside from a couple of nurses and the support staff, she expected solitude. Paul hadn’t been assigned to this centre, and she discovered she missed him.
All of Marion’s patients had been released from the hospital. The only bright side was that her own practice had expanded to include two of the community health centres. Many patients that she had never seen before now came to her there. Having read their backgrounds, she was relieved that many appeared to be doing better than expected, though she did adjust prescriptions for a couple. As for her former patients, she saw a few. Barbara Voss was supposed to meet with Marion at the health centre every Friday, but she hadn’t shown up for her first two appointments. From her records, Marion knew Barbara should be staying with her sister, but Marion had never met the woman. She wondered how it was going between the two. Not knowing was the hardest part.
Like with Big John.
And Daniel.
She had heard nothing from or about either of them since they’d left the hospital, and she was scared to death with all this cold weather. Did they have somewhere to go?
At the end of the day, Marion pulled on her winter coat again then tied the scarf so it spread wide over her face. Sliding on her mitts, she stepped into a raging blizzard and squinted through the snow, waiting for her very late bus. When it arrived, she joined the similarly cocooned people crowded inside, and since there were no seats left, she stood and hung on to the back of one, letting the bus’s motion rock her into a semi-stupor. Her thoughts travelled to Daniel, and she felt a now-familiar sadness. She no longer had access to his records, and he was not assigned to her health centres. After they’d said goodbye, she’d hoped that she would forget her silly—what was it: a crush ?—but she missed him more than she’d expected to. If only she could find out where he was, and how he was doing. But Toronto was a city of more than two and a quarter million people. The chances of finding him now were next to nil.
She wasn’t sure if it was the heat from the bodies in the bus or if the weather had actually warmed a little, but when they arrived at her building, she was able to lower her scarf as she stumbled across snowy Isabella. She rode the elevator to the fifth floor, peeled off her winter clothing as Chester purred around her wet boots, then she turned on the TV and clicked to NBC, only to be horrified by what she saw and heard.
“Earlier today,” stated the white-haired anchor, “South Vietnam’s President Thieu declared martial law. It all amounts to the most ambitious series of communist attacks yet mounted, spreading violence into at least ten provincial capitals, plus American air bases and civilian installations stretching the entire length of the country. None had greater psychological impact than the assault on the American embassy in Saigon.”
“What?” she gasped.
The newscast switched to a reporter in Tokyo. “Two hundred thirty-two GIs killed and nine hundred wounded makes this one of the heaviest weeks of the Vietnam War.”
She couldn’t help but recall Daniel’s quiet, heartbreaking question. “Who’s been killed since I left?”
The coverage swapped abruptly from the cool blue studio to alarming footage of U.S. soldiers rushing from post to post outside the American embassy, evading the Vietcong. The enemy had managed to get into the eight-storey building as well as set up around it. Mortar and rocket attacks had blasted huge holes into the walls.
“Snipers and suicide commandos,” the reporter called them. The coverage went to bodies on stretchers being carried to ambulances. “Two U.S. Marines tried to fire on the Vietcong through the embassy gate and were killed by automatic weapons fire.”
Two U.S. Marines, she thought, feeling sick. Sassy would no doubt be watching this footage as well, her heart in her throat as she sought out a fleeting image of her little brother.
The reporter ducked reflexively, and Marion leaned in, absorbed in the action. The cameraman’s lens followed an FBI man rushing to the building and glancing through a window. He dropped down then blindly fired his semiautomatic weapon through the window in a wide, sweeping motion without looking.
Marion had watched plenty of footage of the men “humping” through the bush, as Daniel called it. It had started to feel almost routine. This footage was different. The attack was happening in cities from Da Nang to Saigon and many in between, with pavement and sidewalks and buildings not too different from Toronto’s infrastructure. There were civilians trapped in that building, regular administrative staff doing their jobs, wondering if they would ever get home again.
The coverage shifted to another reporter, hunched behind a wall at the Saigon airport, his voice temporarily overpowered by a barrage of machine-gun fire. Soldiers sprinted down the street, and Marion noticed Red Cross trucks in the background. Of course they would have had to be in the thick of things, she reasoned, but it was nearly impossible to imagine working in those conditions.
The news anchor in the studio returned, backed by the safe blue screen. In ominous tones, he announced that forty to fifty thousand enemy troops were poised to attack near the U.S. Marine garrison base at Khe Sanh. A map appeared, illustrating that location, about halfway up the eastern coast, near the dividing point between North and South Vietnam. Fighting had resumed in the north, at Laos, he said. Forty thousand additional enemy troops waited there for orders.
Dread pooled in Marion’s gut. Were the good guys actually winning the war? She recalled Davey’s words at Sassy’s dinner party before Christmas, convinced that the Americans were losing, despite what the media said. Today, that seemed chillingly true.
She jumped when the telephone rang, then she picked up the receiver.
“Marion?” It was Sassy. Her voice was shrill, panicked. “It’s Joey. My brother’s missing.”