When She Came Home (8 page)

“Can she have some cake, Grandmommy? Can she?”

Richard.

Frankie’s mother, standing just behind Melanie with her hand on the doorknob, looked up at the stairs and caught Frankie’s eye. Her head tilted slightly in a way that asked a question Frankie could not answer.

M
elanie had declined the invitation to join the family for dessert. After her departure and a plate of cake and ice cream, Glory collapsed in whiny exhaustion and only Rick could comfort her, saying to Harry as he held her on his lap that some days an eight-year-old was just a taller version of a four-year-old. For a minute Frankie felt like a stranger in the family. In the time she had been deployed Rick had learned how to be a single parent and required no help from her.

At home he carried Glory upstairs, and she did not stir except to tighten her arms about his neck. Following behind them Frankie reached for the banister to steady herself, staggered by a wave of soul-sapping weariness. Jared Westcott, the conference at Arcadia, and her father’s baiting: it was more than she knew how to handle. And the worst of it had been those moments upstairs, confronted by the fierce little girl she and Rick had made.
She had failed to do the right thing, to be the mother she wanted to be.

She sank to the stairs and sat with her head in her hands, her fingers pressed hard against her closed eyes.

At Three Fountain Square she had failed to be the Marine she wanted to be. So little had been asked of her. All she had to do was force open the door of the Humvee and step out. But she had done nothing.

Lions and bears and two or three different floppy-eared dogs, a pony the color of Pepto-Bismol, Zee-Zee the chartreuse cobra, and more creatures whose names Frankie did not know were arranged in a protective wall around Glory. Frankie’s impulse was to clear the bed and give her room to uncurl like a blossom from a tight bud. She had once tried to do this but the results were unhappy. Glory had awakened in the darkness without her protectors, screaming for Daddy, her eyes alight with a nightmare she could not remember.

Frankie didn’t think she had ever screamed for her daddy in that way. But then she hadn’t ever had a “daddy.” Her father had been either “the General” or “Sir” for as far back as she could remember, a formidable and sometimes frightening figure. Even so her memories of childhood were mostly happy. Eight had been a year of wonders, of falling into bed exhausted at the end of every day and being asleep before her head touched the pillow. It was a time of bikes and Rollerblades and Boogie-boarding, sleepovers and
learning to sail and horseback ride, of finding that she was strong and naturally adept at a lot of things, that when she made a suggestion, the other girls agreed and went along with her. Somewhere around age eight she had begun to sense that she was a leader.

She could not remember ever being afraid at Glory’s age.

And then, without warning, an experience leapt out of memory to contradict her. The General had gone on a Canadian fishing trip and been away ten days. At eight she had only a map-gazing knowledge of where Canada was, even less of British Columbia and a lake called Ruination. She looked the word up and the meaning raised the hair on her arms when she realized that the General had gone to a place named for destruction and death. He might never come back from Ruination. In this way she had first understood that her demanding, powerful, and awe-inspiring father could die. And, therefore, so could she.

Children died all the time.

Glory shifted under her patchwork comforter. “Hi, Mommy.” In half sleep, her voice was whispery and moist. “Sing the blackbird song, okay?”

“I can’t, honey.”

“Please?”

“It hurts my throat.”

Bye, bye, Blackbird.

Frankie and Rick lay in the dark, neither of them ready to sleep. Through the window the fog reflected and dispersed
the city’s light, illuminating the room with an ashy glow.

“It’s not really dark in here,” she said. “Maybe we should get blackout curtains.”

“I like being able to see you.”

“In the desert, if there’s cloud cover, the darkness is so thick sometimes you can be looking right down at your feet and not see them. You just put one foot in front of the other and hope you’re going in the right direction.”

“Hard to believe.”

Rick rolled onto his side, his face a few inches from hers. She wondered what would happen if she leaned in and kissed him. Would she regret it like the last time and the time before, like every time they had been intimate—and there were not that many—since she came back from Iraq? If she kissed him now would he think she wanted him to make love to her when it was the last thing she desired? She tried to believe her therapist’s promise that someday she would want him to touch her again.

“In the Middle East most of the heavy construction is done at night because of the heat. They use those big white-bright lights. I knew this Marine from OT. She was stuck in Bahrain and lived in a condo twenty stories up, brand-new and mostly empty. Right next door they were building another high-rise. At night it was so bright in her apartment, she bought rugs in the souk and hung them over the windows.”

“I don’t think you need to go that far.”

“An Indian family lived in the apartment next to hers. She could hear him beating the wife, but she wasn’t allowed to do anything. She told her CO and he said she should get a headset. Listen to music or something.”

“Frankie, honey—”

Smothering under the comforter’s feather weight, she kicked it away and sat up, slumped on the edge of the bed, digging her toes into the thick carpet. “It’s bizarre, how you can be surrounded by people and still be lonely. At FOB Redline sometimes, I felt like I lived at the bottom of a big hole. I’d get up and do my job and that was good, a lot of the work was good. But at the end of the day I went back in my hole. If it weren’t for Fatima—”

“You never mentioned her before.”

Frankie shrugged. “My interpreter.”
My friend.

“Tell me about her,” he said, stroking her back through the T-shirt she slept in.

But Fatima meant talking about Three Fountain Square. She shivered and shifted away from his hand.

“Please, talk to me.”

“I’m too wired.”

“How can you be wired? You never sleep. You should be falling-down exhausted.”

“Let me be the way I am, Rick. Just try to understand.”

“I’m trying, baby, I really am. But you’ve got to see how hard you make it. You know, Frankie, we were lonely too. Do you ever think about that? Glory and I were a family while you were gone, but not the family either of us wanted.
I know, I know, we’re military and deployment comes with the package. Okay, I’ve got that. But does that mean we can’t miss you and want you back? Frankie, you’re home now. How come it feels like you’re still gone?”

“I’m a Marine, Rick.”

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Have you got any idea how sick I am of hearing those words?
I’m a Marine.
Like it’s some kind of sacred calling? You’re my wife, Frankie. You’re Glory’s mother. Swear to God, I think nothing means as much to you as the almighty Marine Corps.”

“I love you both more than anything.”

“Then why don’t we feel it?”

She didn’t know how to answer. She wanted to get in the car and drive away, stop somewhere, and begin her life all over again where no one expected anything of her.

“Just tell me one thing. Do you want to go back?”

She closed her eyes. “No.”

“Then what is it you
do
want?”

To forget Iraq and what she’d seen there, to forget the sand and heat and parched air. The mistakes, all the fucking mistakes that were made every day. The missteps and oversights and, despite everyone’s best efforts, the failures again and again. She wanted to love Rick and for Glory to laugh and tell moron jokes as she once had. She wanted to sing her daughter to sleep again.

Her voice broke like kindling. “I don’t know.”

She waited for his breathing to become deep and
regular, the sign that he had gone wherever he went in sleep, the faraway place that kept him until morning, scarcely moving while she tossed beside him. This night he stayed awake and they lay so far apart she felt the wind howl between them.

“Glory’s having trouble in school.” She spoke into the darkness, giving him an abbreviated account of the school conference.

“She threatened that girl? She admitted it? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“They’re making a big deal out of nothing.” She punched her pillow into a backrest. “She’s got spirit. What do you expect? She’s the General’s granddaughter.”

“Frankie, she’s
my
daughter. If she’s having trouble in school I want to know about it. She and I were on our own for almost a year. I know this little girl. She doesn’t go around threatening people for no reason.”

His comment felt like an attack, she had to retaliate. “What about Melanie? Does she know her too? Glory’s crazy about Melanie.”

“Frankie, I needed a babysitter when you were gone. Mel’s young and maternal—”

“And I’m not.”

“I didn’t say that. But Glory needed someone and they bonded. I don’t know why you aren’t happy about that.”

“Use your imagination,
Richard.
”

“She took care of Glory.”

“What about you? Did she take care of you too?”

M
uch later she ran a bath, steamy and deep. Against her skin, the water was silk, the stuff of dreams in Iraq. Half asleep, she laid her head back against the tiles. Through the bathroom window, open above the back garden, the last of the mock orange smelled sickeningly sweet. The fragrance brought back a memory of another sweet-smelling flower, this one growing along a mud brick wall.

Soldiers and Marines, guns and fear and adrenaline: any way they mixed, the combination could be incendiary; but it was known, if only grudgingly acknowledged, that having women along often tamped down a volatile situation. This was not strictly what Frankie had signed on for; she was supposed to be building a school, but during her time in Iraq she learned that when it came to day-to-day military operations, there was a lot of improvising, and it was her job to go with it. The military preferred that women work in teams of two because a secure search required one to search and one
to cover; but there were sometimes no female soldiers available and on this day, Frankie was on her own with Fatima.

A native of Mosul, Fatima had been sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Pittsburgh when she was ten. She was teaching at a small college in Ohio when President George Bush declared victory in Iraq. She had returned to her homeland, hoping like many other expatriated Iraqis, to help rebuild the country. Between then and the time Frankie knew her, Fatima had been in two explosions and one mortar attack. As testament to her experiences, the right side of her face bore a stretch of smooth shiny skin where she had been branded by the end of a metal can exploding from an IED buried in a trash pile at the side of the road. Fatima lived on FOB Redline with her mother and two brothers in one of a few dozen derelict trailers. Beyond this section of the base lay the tents of the sanitation and maintenance contractors, most of whom came from Africa or Asia. Officers and enlisted men and women never entered those areas.

Fatima had told Frankie that if her family were not with her at Redline, they would probably be killed because of her work with the coalition.

“I am ugly now. No man will want me. But my mother and brothers, they think I am beautiful because I keep them safe.”

On the day Frankie remembered, she and Fatima had accompanied soldiers on a routine investigation of an Iraqi compound where there was rumored to be a weapons
cache. Garbage and junk was piled up outside the wall surrounding a house and several outbuildings. The kind of crazy-ass litter that made Marines and soldiers breathe double time because it could conceal any kind of explosive device. The house was in the middle of a small community where every building was constructed of the same dun-colored bricks that had been used in that part of the world for thousands of years.

The military vehicles, two trucks and an unarmored Humvee, were ordered to park in the street outside the wall, facing away from the compound, and a guard was set. Exiting the Humvee Frankie inhaled the familiar smell of Iraq: dust and trash, spices and the ripe smell of meat, burning garbage, and open drains.

Within the walls the courtyard was spacious and remarkably clear of trash. Growing from a stout pot was a bright yellow-flowered vine that smelled in the heat like the mock orange back home. Somehow it had managed to thrive in the ferocious sun and spilled up and over the wall voluptuously, a cascade of yellow. Frankie wanted to stroke her fingertip along the curve of its petals, knew they would feel silky. Like water.

The house had windows secured by iron bars and a flat roof where the family probably slept during the hottest weeks of the year. When snipers were in place up there, Guardian Angels with M-16s, Frankie, Fatima, and the rest of the convoy entered the courtyard. At one end three black-haired boys in blue jeans and rubber sandals
were kicking a soccer ball. As the soldiers entered, the ball scooted out of control and stopped right in front of Frankie. She paused, sized up the distance between herself and the boys, and kicked it back to them with the inside of her left foot, a nice solid hit. They stared at her. Six feet tall in size eleven boots, fully armed and wearing a helmet, goggles, and body armor, Frankie was sure they didn’t know she was a woman.

A soldier, with Fatima just behind him and to one side, knocked on the door of the house. Frankie followed with the Army CO, Major Whittaker. She wondered why a major had come on this patrol when a lower-ranking officer would have served as well. Realizing this might be more than a routine investigation, the knot in her stomach tightened.

Even in full gear it was plain how bowlegged Whittaker was. The soldiers called him Major Cowboy behind his back and he obviously enjoyed the nickname and encouraged it by wearing a cowboy hat to cover his bald head when he wasn’t helmeted. He came from New Mexico and claimed to feel more comfortable riding than walking.