When She Came Home (27 page)

“He’s alive,” she screamed and struggled but Montoya held her back.

Alive. Alive.

“Look away.” From behind, Fatima tried to cover Frankie’s eyes. “You cannot help him. Look away.”

For Frankie to touch a Muslim boy, even to save his life, was taboo. Still she fought against Montoya’s strength and tore at Fatima’s hands until she had no more strength left and all she could do was rest her forehead against the dusty window and watch the boy blink. And blink and die.

As Frankie told the General her story, a line of crows had come to perch on the ridge of the house. She thought of them as jurors in a silent line.

“I went to the chaplain and he advised me to go to my CO. He told me it was awful what happened, the child and all, but he was sure the contractor had a good reason to fire. I told him they were coming from the market with beans and onions, but he said it didn’t matter and I should put it out of my mind.”

“Your CO was right. It could have been beans or onions or it could have been grenades.” The General took her
hand and held it between his own. “Terrible things happen in war, Frankie. Things I never wanted you to see.”

“You say that, sir, and so did the CO, and Bunny. It’s what people always say. But it’s not an excuse. It doesn’t make it okay. I could have saved that boy.”

“It’s reality.” The General’s hold on her hand tightened. “I never wanted you to go—”

“But I did! And what I was doing, working with people, trying to build a school, I was good at that, and I was a good officer, my Marines respected me and they knew I had their backs.”

The General scuffed his shoe at a line of ants.

“I was, I am, a good Marine. But that day? I wasn’t a good human being.”

“And now you want to go in front of cameras and air that dirty laundry? Make a public confession and bring shame on the military?”

“This is about G4S, sir. My story? I don’t know if I’ll talk about that or not. Probably. Maybe. I will if I have to. I just don’t know yet. Right now, I’m talking about one man wearing a G4S uniform who shot down two people in cold blood. I’m not saying they’re all bad because I know they’re not. I honor the good ones, sir. But this guy was dirty. I saw him take aim at that boy and his mother.”

“He saw the bag in the man’s hand, Frankie.”

“So he shot the mother and child? After the man had dropped the bag of groceries? It went down fast, but I saw
it all.” They had been no more than target practice for the blond-haired man. “They were killed for a paycheck, sir. Most of us, we believe in something more important than that.”

The General had no response.

“Bunny said that if I told you the truth, it would kill you. Well, I’ll be honest, holding it inside is killing
me
. I don’t want to lose my husband over this, sir. Or Glory.”

“Is it that bad?”

She knew only this for certain, that she could not go on as she had been. She would rather be dead than face the same memory and shame every morning for the next forty or fifty years. “You taught Harry and me to do the right thing even when it wasn’t easy. Well, this isn’t easy. I don’t want to testify but I’ve thought about it a lot and I know it’s the right thing to do. I’ve known it from the beginning. That’s why I went to the chaplain.”

“What about the interpreter. Or the driver. You weren’t the only person there.”

“But I’m the only one who saw it all.” She pulled her hands away from his and folded them in her lap. Her voice was thin and clear, trembling. “I have to do this, sir. With or without your blessing.”

She waited, not knowing what he would say.

The General stood up and she knew he was going to walk away as he had the other night when Glory announced she had PTSD, as he had done when she told him she was going to Iraq. He stared up at the crows staring down at him.

He said, “You’ll wear your uniform, of course. And you’ll stand tall and you’ll answer every question.” He turned, his back as straight and strong as it had ever been. “Senator Delaware’ll give you a hard time but you won’t dodge around and you won’t cry. He’ll eat you for lunch if you cry.”

“I won’t cry, sir.”

“You’ll tell it to the committee just the way you told me?”

“I will.”

“And you won’t forget who you are?”

“Never.”

“You’re my daughter and you’re a Byrne, never forget that.”

“I won’t, sir.”

“Then I’ll be proud of you.” His blue eyes filled with tears as he saluted her. “
Semper fi,
Francine.
Semper fi.
”

1. In the prologue of
When She Came Home
we are introduced to Frankie as a child, and we see the way her family interacts during a very important moment. What does this tell us about the Byrne family and how does it prepare us for the rest of the novel?

2. Frankie attributes her desire to enlist in the Marines to the attack on September 11. She says she imagined that her own child could have lost her life, and she wanted to help ensure that kind of violent tragedy would never happen again. Do you think this truly was her motivation, or was there another desire driving her? Could she have had more than one motivation?

3. General Byrne has clear feelings regarding the roles men and women should play both in the military and at home. How do you feel about his position? When it comes to women serving in the armed forces, is there a double standard? Is there a difference for a child when her mother deploys rather than her father?

4. What do you think about Rick’s relationship with Melanie? Do you believe they were just friends? Is this friendship understandable and acceptable given the circumstances?

5. Rick suggests that the problems in their marriage are more Frankie’s fault than his, and she seems to agree with that assessment. Do you agree that Frankie is more at fault than Rick? If so, why? If not, is Rick more to blame, are they equally at fault, or is there another factor to consider?

6. Should Rick have done more to help Frankie readjust to life after Iraq? What more could he have done to help her? Is two months an acceptable amount of time for a person to adjust after coming home?

7. How do you feel about the way Frankie handles Glory’s troubles at school? Should she have gotten Rick involved sooner? Should she have punished Glory in some way? Do you think she gave her sound advice for how to deal with the problem? What might you have done differently if you were Glory’s parent? How common do you think bullying really is? Did you ever experience bullying in school?

8. Compare the relationship Glory has with Rick to the relationship Frankie has with the General. What positive influence might a father have on his daughter when she is Glory’s age (eight) or older? What were Rick’s strengths as a father? What were the General’s?

9. Frankie is sometimes jealous of Glory’s relationship with the General. Why is that? Is it a normal response, for a mother to envy a daughter? What other circumstances might give rise to this feeling? Is the General a bully? If you accused him of this, how would he react? How does bullying in the family compare to that which goes on in schools?

10. Maryanne has seen two generations of Byrne Marines come home from war and knows how difficult the readjustment process can be. Do you think she was right to stay quiet about what she saw in Frankie? Should she have gotten more involved in Frankie’s problems? If so, what could she have done? Or conversely, was Maryanne wrong to speak to Rick and Glory as she did after the football game incident? How would you have handled that situation in her position?

11. Maryanne and the General were very much in love when they were young. How has this love changed with the years? How does their forty-year marriage compare to others you might know? Why have they stuck together?

12. Why is Domino so important to Frankie? Should Frankie have ignored Domino’s protests and called the police to go after Jason? Do you think Frankie did the right thing by bringing Domino into her home, or by doing so was she putting her own family in danger? What is the significance of Frankie’s meeting with
Dawny at the Jack in the Box? With Mrs. Greenwoody at the supermarket?

13. In some ways Frankie seems like her own worst enemy. She initially didn’t want to go to therapy and is reluctant to write in her journal or attend group sessions. She keeps secrets from her husband and won’t see a doctor about her throat. Are Frankie’s actions understandable, given the circumstances? Why or why not?

San Diego, California

The State of California v. Simone Duran

March 2010

O
n the first day of Simone Duran’s trial for the attempted murder of her children, the elements conspired to throw their worst at Southern California. Arctic storms that had all winter stalled or washed out north of Los Angeles chose the second week of March to break for the south and were now lined up, a phalanx of wind and rain stretching north into Alaska. In San Diego a timid sprinkle began after midnight, gathered force around dawn, and now, with a hard northwest wind behind it, deluged the city with a driving rain. Roxanne Callahan had lived in San Diego all her life and she’d never seen weather like this.

In the stuffy courtroom a draft found the nape of her neck, driving a shudder down her spine to the small of
her back: she feared that if the temperature dropped just one degree she’d start shaking and wouldn’t be able to stop. Behind her, someone in the gallery had a persistent, bronchial cough. Roxanne had a vision of germs floating like pollen on the air. She wondered if hostile people—the gawkers and jackals, the ghoulishly curious, the home-grown experts and lurid trial junkies—carried germs more virulent than those of friends and allies. Not that there were many well-wishers in the crowd. Most of the men and women in the courtroom represented the millions of people who hated Simone Duran; and if their germs were half as lethal as their thinking, Simone would be dead by dinnertime.

Roxanne and her brother-in-law, Johnny Duran, sat in the first row of the gallery, directly behind the defense table. As always Johnny was impeccably groomed and sleekly handsome; but new gray rimed his black hair, and there were lines engraved around his eyes and mouth that had not been there six months earlier. He was the owner and president of a multimillion-dollar construction company specializing in hotels and office complexes, a man with many friends, including the mayor and chief of police; but since the attempted murder of his children he had become reclusive, spending all his free time with his daughters. He and Roxanne had everything to say to each other and at the same time nothing. She knew the same question filled his mind as hers and each knew it was pointless to ask: what could or should they have done differently?

Following her arraignment on multiple counts of attempted murder, Simone had been sent to St. Anne’s Psychiatric Hospital for ninety days’ observation. Bail was set at a million dollars, and Johnny put the lake house up as collateral. He leased a condo on a canyon where Simone and her mother, Ellen Vadis, lived after her release from St. Anne’s. Her bail had come with heavy restrictions. She was forbidden contact with her daughters and confined to the condo, tethered by an electronic ankle bracelet and permitted to leave only with her attorney on matters pertaining to the case and with her mother for meetings with her doctor.

Like Johnny, Roxanne visited Simone several times a week. These tense interludes did nothing to lift anyone’s spirits as far as she could tell. They spent hours on the couch watching television, sometimes holding hands; and while Roxanne often talked about her life, her work, her friends, any subject that might help the illusion that they were sisters like other sisters, Simone rarely spoke. Sometimes she asked Roxanne to read to her from a book of fairy tales she’d had since childhood. Stories of dancing princesses and enchanted swans soothed Simone much as a lullaby might a baby; and more than once Roxanne had left her, covered by a cashmere throw, asleep on the couch with the book beside her. Lately she had begun to suck her thumb as she had when she was a child. Roxanne faced the truth: the old Simone, the silly girl with her secrets and demands, her narcissism, the manic highs and the
black holes where the meany-men lived, even her love, might be gone forever.

A medicine chest of pharmaceuticals taken morning and night kept her awake and put her to sleep, eased her down from mania toward catatonia and then half up again to something like normal balance. She took drugs that elevated her mood, focused her attention, flattened her enthusiasm, stifled her anxiety, curbed her imagination, cut back her paranoia, and put a plug in her curiosity. The atmosphere in the condo was almost unbearably artificial.

Across the nation newspapers, magazines, and blogs were filled with Simone stories passing as truth. Her picture was often on television screens, usually behind an outraged talking head. Sometimes it was the mug shot taken the day she was booked, occasionally one of the posed photos from the Judge Roy Price Dinner when she looked so beautiful but was dying inside. The radio blab-meisters could not stop ranting about her, about what a monster she was. Spinning know-it-alls jammed the call-in lines. Weekly articles in the supermarket tabloids claimed to know and tell the whole story.

The whole story! If Roxanne had had any sense of humor left she would have cackled at such a preposterous claim. Simone’s story was also Roxanne’s. And Ellen’s and Johnny’s. They were all of them responsible for what happened that September afternoon.

Roxanne’s husband, Ty Callahan, had offered to put his work at the Salk Institute on hold so he could attend the trial with her, but she didn’t want him there. He and her friend Elizabeth were links to the world of hopeful, optimistic, ordinary people. The courtroom would taint that.

The night before, Roxanne and Ty had eaten Chinese takeout; and afterward, while he read, she lay with her head on his lap searching for the blank space in her mind where repose hid. They went to bed early and made love with surprising urgency, as if time pressed in upon them, and before it was too late they had to establish their connection in the most basic way. Roxanne should have slept afterward; instead she got up and watched late-night infomercials for computer careers and miraculous skin products, finally falling asleep on the couch, where Ty found her in the morning with Chowder, their yellow Labrador, snoring on the floor beside her, a ball between his front paws.