Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
Frankie became aware of the music: first the beat, then the words. “Hey Jude…”
She was in the O Club, dancing with Rye. She felt his arms around her, his hand at the curve of her spine; familiar, where it belonged, holding her close. He whispered something she couldn’t hear. “What?” she said. “What?”
I’m married.
I was always married.
Suddenly the music blared, turned loud enough to break glass.
She opened her eyes. They were groggy with grit, wet with tears.
The music snapped off.
She was in her own house, in her bed.
She sat up, saw Barb and Ethel standing there, looking so sad that Frankie’s wound opened again.
He lied.
She remembered asking him the wrong question in Kauai, and his answer: I swear I’m not engaged. The words played over and over in her head.
“You need to get up, honey,” Ethel said. “Henry is on his way over.”
Frankie couldn’t respond. She’d come home from the air station and climbed into bed and cried herself first to a headache and then to sleep.
She knew her friends were ready to lift her up, buoy her, but this pain, this betrayal, was worse than her grief had been.
She’d made her friends stop on the way home to buy a local newspaper.
She’d read and reread the article about Joseph “Rye” Walsh, the local hero who had married his college sweetheart just before going off to war and never met the daughter who’d been born in his absence. Josephine, called Joey.
“Frankie?” Barb said gently, sitting on the bedside, pushing the damp hair back from Frankie’s face.
Frankie pushed the sour-smelling covers back. Without making eye contact with her friends (she couldn’t look at them without thinking of Rye), she got out of bed. Love and pain and humiliation almost toppled her again.
She felt so stupid. Hadn’t Ethel warned her early on? The men here, they lie and they die.
She walked to the bathroom and ran a steaming-hot shower and stepped underneath the hot flow, let it pound her while she cried.
In the empty kitchen, her Gunne Sax dress hung limply from a high cupboard. She couldn’t look at it, so she turned and went outside.
Barb and Ethel were in the backyard, which had been transformed for this weekend’s ceremony.
Folding chairs—eleven of them, for Frankie’s parents, Barb and Ethel and Noah and Cecily, and Henry’s small family—had been set up in front of a rented wooden arch, which Mom had insisted on festooning with white roses.
As if Frankie were a naive debutante instead of a pregnant war veteran.
Two days ago, she’d been almost excited to marry Henry Acevedo and have his baby and start a new life.
Today she couldn’t imagine any of that.
Barb got out of the chair and came toward her. Ethel followed suit.
“Henry loves you, Frank,” Ethel said. “That’s obvious.”
“Do you love him?” Barb dared to ask.
The words submerged Frankie again, left her unable to straighten or breathe. She knew they would support her, these women, her best friends who had flown here at a moment’s notice and were equally ready to stand at the altar with her or stand by her if she canceled the ceremony.
They loved her, were here for her.
But she didn’t want them here now, didn’t want to see their pity.
Away.
That was what she wanted. A place to hide.
“If you don’t get married,” Ethel said tentatively, “come back to Virginia with me. The bunkhouse is still empty. Noah will love you and Cecily needs an aunt to play with.”
“Or to Chicago with me,” Barb said.
They were offering her paths, lives. They had no idea how broken she felt by Rye’s betrayal.
But her feelings weren’t the most important anymore. She was going to be a mother.
“I’ll marry Henry on Saturday,” she said quietly. What choice did she have? “He’ll be a great father. Our baby deserves that.”
She knew what the right thing to do was. If there was one true thing in her life, it was that she always knew the right thing, and did it. Even when it hurt so much she couldn’t breathe.
Rye had betrayed her. Didn’t love her.
Henry loved her and their baby and wanted to create a family. The baby deserved that chance, and Frankie owed everything to her unborn baby.
“You sure?” Barb asked, reaching out to squeeze Frankie’s upper arm.
Frankie looked at her two best friends. “I’m going to be a mom,” Frankie said. “I guess my choices have to start there from now on.”
“Then this is our bridal party. Let’s get it on,” Ethel said. She went back into the living room, cranked up the stereo, and opened the patio doors.
The familiar notes of “California Girls” drifted into the backyard.
“This song always reminds me of Frankie’s first day at the Thirty-Sixth,” Barb said to Ethel, pulling Frankie to dance with her on the patio. “Her eyes were so big they looked like burnt holes in my mama’s best sheet.”
“You guys stripped down to bloody bras and panties in front of me,” Frankie said. “I thought I’d landed on the moon.”
The music changed again. Born to be w-i-i-i-ld…
Halfway through the song, Frankie felt a cramp in her stomach. First a tightening, then a pain so sharp she gasped.
A rush of wetness dampened her underwear. She put a hand down her panties. When she brought her hand back up, it was covered in blood.
Someone knocked on the door. Before anyone could answer, the front door opened. Henry walked into the backyard. “Hey, gals, that’s some good music, and—”
He saw the blood.
Frankie looked at him. “This can’t be happening. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Henry bounded into action, sweeping Frankie into his arms, carrying her out to the car, settling her in the passenger seat. He backed out of the driveway so fast, Frankie smelled burning rubber.
He sped up to the Coronado hospital emergency entrance and slammed on the brakes.
Lifting Frankie out of the car, carrying her into the bright white emergency room, he shouted, “We need help here. My fiancée is pregnant and something is wrong.”
Frankie woke in a darkened room that smelled of disinfectant and bleach.
Hospital.
The previous night came back to her in a rush—blood running down her legs, a terrible cramping, a young doctor saying, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Acevedo. There’s nothing I can do.”
Her saying, ridiculously, “I’m Frankie McGrath.”
She heard a chair creak beside her, saw Henry sitting there, slumped over.
“Hey,” Frankie said; just the sight of him saddened her. He was such a good man and he deserved better.
She pressed a hand to her empty abdomen.
“Hey,” Henry answered, rising, taking her hand in his. He leaned down to kiss her cheek.
“Was it—”
“A boy,” Henry said.
Finley.
“The doctor said we can try again,” Henry said.
There was a knock at the door.
It opened.
Mom stood there, dressed in a rust-colored suede skirt with a print vest over a blouse buttoned up to her throat, and knee-high boots. “How is she?”
Henry answered, “She’s—”
“She’s right here, Mom. And conscious.”
Mom’s smile turned brittle. “Henry, darling, would you go get me a coffee from the cafeteria? I’ve got a headache.”
Henry kissed Frankie, whispered, “I love you,” and left the room.
Mom approached the bed slowly.
Frankie thought her mother looked tired. Her makeup had been applied a little too heavily and she couldn’t hold a smile. As usual, when she was tired or stressed, the effects of her stroke were more noticeable. There was the slightest downturn to one side of her mouth. “I am so sorry, Frances.”
Tears scalded Frankie’s eyes, blurred the image of her mother. “God is punishing me. But I was going to do the right thing.”
“It’s nothing you did.” Mom reached behind her neck, unclasped her necklace, and handed it to Frankie.
As a child, Frankie had been obsessed with the necklace, wondering how that delicate gold chain could hold the obviously heavy heart.
Mom pulled out her silver cigarette case, lit an Eve cigarette.
“You’re not supposed to smoke, you know,” Frankie said.
Mom made a dismissive gesture. “Look on the back of the heart.”
Frankie turned the necklace over, saw an inscription on the back. Celine. She frowned. “Who is Celine?”
“The daughter I lost,” Mom said. “The baby I was carrying when I married your father.”
“You never—”
“And I won’t now, Frances,” Mom said. “Some things don’t bear the weight of words. That’s the problem with your generation, you all want to talk, talk, talk. What is the point? I thought… you could give your… child a name and engrave it there, below your sister’s, and wear it.”
“He was a boy,” Frankie said. “We would have named him Finley.”
Mom blanched.
Some things don’t bear the weight of words.
“I’m so sorry, Frances. Put the pain away, forget about it, and go on.”
“Were you able to do that?”
“Most of the time.”
Mom reached into her purse, pulled out two prescription bottles. “I know you’re a nurse and all, but I swear by these pills. Cheryl Burnam calls them ‘Mother’s Little Helpers.’ The white ones help you sleep and the yellow ones keep you awake.”
“I am a nurse, Mom. And I read Valley of the Dolls .”
“Pooh. Those were bad girls. You just need something to take the edge off. These have hardly more kick than a gin martini.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I’ll put them in your purse. Trust me, you and Henry will be married and expecting again in no time.”
Frankie sighed. “Do you remember the man I fell in love with in Vietnam?”
“The pilot who was killed?”
“Yes, he—”
“Frances, enough Vietnam. For God’s sake, that was years ago. Let it go. He’s not coming back to you.”
She closed her eyes in pain, unable to look at her mother anymore, unable to see pity and sorrow and know that it was for her.
Barb and Ethel stood at Frankie’s bedside.
Their mission was obvious, to keep up a steady stream of banter, to talk about whatever they could think of: the commutation of Charles Manson’s death sentence to life imprisonment, the rockiness of the Taylor-Burton marriage, the uproar over a movie called Deep Throat .
Frankie couldn’t listen anymore. She raised a hand.