When She Came Home (21 page)

“Stay out of the trunk,” she said, mostly joking. “It’s full of guns and top secret docs.”

Ellis left the post office parking lot in Frankie’s car and Senator Belasco relaxed into the corner of the Lincoln’s generous backseat, her hands folded in her lap like those of a proper schoolgirl, ready to learn.

“I may never have served in the military, Captain, but over the course of my years in the House and Senate I have probably talked to more of our fighting men and women than you have. And I have considerable empathy. I think I know what you’re going through. I suspect you’ve spent the last several months reliving what you saw at the square and agonizing over what to do about it. Conflicting loyalties and all that. I imagine it’s pretty much destroyed your personal life. I don’t blame you for not wanting to revisit the scene with microphones rearing at you like snake heads.”

Rick was ready to walk away from her, Glory was suspended from school, her voice was failing, and she could barely breathe. “I can’t deal with this. Not now.”
Maybe never.

“I’ve visited the square,” the senator said. “It’s an important part of that neighborhood’s life. If you were to go there
today, it would appear to be quite an ordinary place—apart from the rubble. Untidy by our standards, disorderly, but the square itself is crowded and busy most days. There are, of course, the government buildings or what remains of them. If you were there I think you might feel as I did, a certain undercurrent, something painful about the place. It’s in the air, so to speak. As if an unreconciled ghost is lurking around, poisoning the atmosphere. Demanding satisfaction. I’ve been told that fifty years ago it was a lovely spot. There actually were three fountains once upon a time. And date palms. But between Saddam, the insurgents, and the coalition—and G4S, of course—it’s lost its charm.”

The senator spoke like a person who enjoyed words and was accustomed to being listened to. She didn’t stammer or register even a whisper of doubt that what she thought and said was important.

“Hearings like mine aren’t popular, in case you didn’t know. Most of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle don’t want anything to do with them. And getting witnesses to appear willingly is always difficult. In the case of incidents involving G4S, it’s almost impossible. Particularly now, in 2008 in the middle of the surge, the company has many powerful friends.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that you are. I think you agree with me that those people and that place deserve justice. Isn’t that why you left your family and went to Iraq in the
first place? Because you believe in justice and because you know that despite our faults, and they are many, America is still the world’s brightest and best hope?”

Senator Belasco was right about her gifts of empathy.

“You believe that a child has the right to walk down the street without being gunned in the back. Yes or no, Frankie?”

“It’s so much more complicated.”

“Tell me. Help me to understand.”

It was easier to talk about the General.

“My father would consider my testimony a betrayal.”

“Are you sure? Have you asked him? No, of course not. But you and I know that the only real betrayal will come if you deny your conscience. Might he agree? And what do you think G4S has to do with the Marine Corps anyway?”

“Many of the employees are former Marines.”

Belasco arched one precisely drawn eyebrow. “Including your godfather, Bunny Bunson.”

Frankie’s throat squeezed shut and the drilling behind her eye became a laser.

“You didn’t know that?”

Someone would have told me.
Unless. Was it possible her mother and the General didn’t know?

“Have you spoken to your godfather about testifying? You have, of course. And I’m sure he’s told you there will be terrible consequences if you do it.”

She thought of Bunny’s beautiful shirts and ties and
the diamonds encircling the black face of his watch and something he said to her when he ambushed her at Jamba Juice on her lunch break. She’d asked him about his Chanel watch.

“I wasn’t like your dad, I didn’t come up through Culver and the academy. Before I became a Marine, I was an Army grunt. You could say I gave my life to the service. So when I came into a little cash, I thought maybe it was time I treated myself to something special. A little reward for hard work.”

The senator placed her hand on Frankie’s knee, gently calling her back from the drift. “Captain, I know you feel loyalty to your godfather and, of course, to the general. These feelings speak well of you. But there is an important issue of national security here. Throughout our country’s history the loyalty of our military has been one of America’s great strengths. Fully armed and trained private security companies threaten that strength because their loyalty is first to their paychecks, then to their employers, and maybe then—for those who are US citizens, anyway—maybe then their loyalty is to America.”

The senator had experience with unwilling listeners. Her unwavering eye contact, her syntax and precise diction, the careful pauses between words and phrases demanded Frankie’s attention.

“I’m not against private security companies. My critics say I am, but they never really pay attention to what I’m saying. They’re more interested in trying to make me look
foolish. The draft is not coming back and for this reason, like it or not, companies like G4S have their place. Ours is a professional military force now, and no one is conscripted against his or her will. But while ours is a large army, it’s not big enough to provide security for every tinhorn sheik who feels threatened. Nor do we have the manpower to peel potatoes or clean up the mess hall and the latrines. So let’s agree that private security companies are an unfortunate necessity. The question is, should they be free to operate outside the scope of the law?”

“It’s a military matter,” Frankie said, parroting the General.

“I might agree if the military were inclined to do anything much with transgressors. But they are not. There was a recent incident, perhaps you followed it. A security company employee was accused of wounding an Iraqi man and raping his daughter. Unlike most such incidents, it got a lot of press. But the Pentagon did nothing. DOD? Almost nothing. Both trivialized the event. The security company paid the Iraqi man five thousand dollars for his shattered collar bone and his daughter’s virtue, his family’s good name and future. The security employee was sent back to the United States and given a pension and a payoff of an undisclosed amount.”

Frankie knew all of this and agreed it was a scandal.

“We are either an honorable nation of law and morals, or we are not. You decide, Frankie. You saw what happened
at Three Fountain Square that day. It’s up to you to tell the truth. It would be an act of heroism. Different from your father’s, of course, but no less heroic.”

Heroic? The idea was so absurd, it worked to clarify everything.

“I can’t, I won’t do it.”

The senator sighed. “In that case you will receive a subpoena to appear. I will make you testify. I will make you tell the truth.”

Get home, Frankie thought. Close the doors, lock the doors, all the doors.

She parked the car in the garage, collected the day’s mail, and went upstairs. In the kitchen Flame danced around her, demanding either attention or a biscuit, preferably a lot of both. Frankie tossed her a Milk-Bone. She was casting third-class mail into the blue recycling bin when she remembered to listen to Harry’s message on her cell phone.

“Frankie, can you find Domino? We did some blood work on Candace the other day and turns out she’s got hep A. Not a huge thing but super contagious so we can’t let her go to school until it’s treated. Domino’s probably got it too and she works with food. Not good. Can you find them?”

I
t wasn’t quite three o’clock. Glory could stay with her grandmother a while longer.

Frankie sped back over Point Loma, almost exactly retracing her earlier route to the Pacific Coast Highway. Traffic lights and gridlock, drivers who did not signal their turns, an off-road vehicle with tires four feet wide, all pulled at the strings of her fraying nerves. Her heart kept time with the Nissan’s hip-hop beat.

Finding Domino and getting her to accept help would be difficult, but of all the problems Frankie faced, this was one she felt competent to solve. The rest of her life was advanced calculus by comparison. She had helped no one, saved no one in Iraq. She had broken her promises to Fatima. When she met Mrs. Greenwoody over the onions and tangerines, she’d been half tongue-tied, unable to defend the kids’ clinic or condemn the violence. At home—she wouldn’t think about Rick and Glory, couldn’t face the facts and their complications. Right now helping
Domino was not only her desire but imperative if she was to save any of her self-respect. But she couldn’t do it alone.

It was after four and still unseasonably warm when she parked under the sign of the blue nude and walked across the street and into the veterans’ complex. A large rectangular corkboard on wheels had been positioned in the middle of the entrance, blocking the interior patio. A sign stuck in with pushpins directed her to the left for information.

The woman behind the counter in the office looked up, her expression equal parts defensive and accusatory, determined to give nothing away. For a time Frankie had traveled with a team out of FOB Redline made up of Army recruits who were nineteen and twenty years old, many of them women. They drove the trucks and Humvees and turned a tough face to the world in a way she came to believe was both learned on the job and carried over from their lives before they chose the uniform. They did as they were ordered and protected themselves. Frankie understood how it was. Even when there was no threat showing, a woman in the military had to be ready for it.

Her name tag said she was Josie.

“Help you?”

“I’m looking for a guy who works here sometimes. His name’s Dekker?”

“You mean Bo. He’s on the patio, but he’s got a group now.”

Frankie said she would wait.

She stood in the shade of the open arcade and looked out into the courtyard, bright and hot in the late afternoon sun. The table umbrellas were up, red and green like decor for a sunny Christmas, and each round table was occupied by men and women talking quietly or, more often, reading or writing. No cell phones. No music. In the far corner eight or so men had gathered at two tables, pulled together. They were an odd assortment. Long-haired, skinhead, or scruffy, tattooed, neatly dressed and not, they sat backward on metal folding chairs or right-way around, tipped forward, hunched over the table. The focal point of the group was Dekker. She recognized him from the support group she had looked in on a week ago.

Discreet in the shadows of the covered walkway, she watched and saw immediately that like Dr. White, he was a listener by nature. The men responded positively to his concentrated attention. Sometimes he nodded or asked a question but mostly he just listened. Once he threw back his head and laughed hard and the sound carried across the courtyard to Frankie. She wanted to run.

That’s the kind of group Dr. White wants me to join.
The words that popped into Frankie’s mind were
undignified
and
embarrassing.
Which was pretty funny when she recalled how dignified she’d been just fifteen minutes earlier, snarling like a junkyard dog at the drivers on Rosecrans. This group might not be right for her but for the first time she realized that somewhere there must be one that was.

All the tables were occupied. Frankie approached one
where a woman sat alone, reading a book with her feet propped up on a chair. A notebook—of course—lay open beside her and Frankie saw a few scribbled lines written in pencil.

“Mind if I sit here?”

“Be my guest.” She gave the footrest chair a little kick in Frankie’s direction.

Frankie wanted to send Harry a text, telling him what she was doing, and she thought about texting Rick but there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t take thousands of words and hours of time. She put her hand into her purse for a mint and her fingertips touched the spiral binding of the notebook she had bought on Sunday at Vons. Thus far all she had written in it was that first day’s date. She stared at her nails and wished she had an emery board. Eventually she withdrew the notebook. Opening it to the first page, she wrote the day’s date right under the previous date.

I’m sitting in Veterans’ Villa waiting to talk to some guy Domino trusts.

She imagined Dr. White asking her why.

Candace is sick.

In some populations hepatitis A was as common as a head cold and just as contagious. Even so this didn’t explain why Frankie was sitting in Veterans’ Villa waiting for Dekker when for weeks she had been avoiding his group.

This isn’t about me,
she wrote and then crossed out the
words and ran her pen over and over them so she wouldn’t have to look at the lie.

Candace was Domino’s daughter and Domino was like a sister to Frankie. Although they hadn’t literally fought together, the specifics didn’t matter because Mosul, Fallujah, the Green Zone, and FOB Redline were the same in more ways than they were different. At its heart war was all the same.

I need to make something work out right for a change.

She looked at the words she had written and wanted to scratch them out too. She heard her therapist asking
why?
Frankie drummed her pen on the metal table.

“Do you mind? That’s really irritating.”

“Sorry.” Shifting her chair away from the table and into a patch of October sunlight, Frankie tilted her head to the warm light and closed her eyes and drifted, letting the tangled spool of time unwind, freeing the memory of Three Fountain Square. She saw the Iraqi boy only a few feet away, running toward his father. He wore soiled khaki pants and an orange T-shirt. She saw the terror in his dark eyes, the sweat cutting rivulets down his grimy cheeks, his young arms pumping. Within Frankie, a wound tore open. The pen dropped from her trembling hand and rolled across the uneven paving stones, coming to rest against the toe of a boot, scuffed down to the color of mustard.