“Not here. Flu or sumthin.” He was beyond curiosity. “She better get well fast. I been takin’ her shift at night and it’s killing me.”
“Has anyone else been asking about her? Besides me?”
“Ex-husband. Shows up every couple nights.”
“What do you tell him?”
“She lives in her van. What else is there?”
Frankie’s throat ached.
“You wanna order something?”
“A small Coke.”
When she opened the car door, Rick had reclined his seat back and was listening to classical music with his eyes shut.
“She’s not here.”
“Well, that’s too bad.” He jerked the seat upright, turned the key in the ignition, and jammed the car into reverse. “I’d like to meet her since she seems to be the most important person in your life.”
“I hate it when you’re sarcastic.”
“I’m trying to understand what it is between you and this woman, this woman who lives in her van.”
“Why is that so important to you, Rick? Why does that bug you so much? She came back from Iraq and she was a little fucked up, not a lot, but considering she’d been raped once and—” She stopped. “Don’t look so shocked. It happens all the time.”
He shifted back into park and turned off the engine.
“Not all the time, Rick. That was an exaggeration. But it’s there, it’s always there.”
On FOB Redline she never walked to the showers alone at night or took the shortcut to the mess, and like most of the female officers, she did nothing to emphasize her femininity. Even now, working at the MCRD, she didn’t wear makeup; and though her hair was still long, she kept it pulled back, braided and clipped down. She was vigilant, always.
Like a prey animal.
“Domino’s five feet three and weighs a hundred and twenty pounds. I’m six feet and as strong as most men. Rape wasn’t a big worry for me, but I stayed alert.”
Like a wide-eyed gazelle in lion country.
“And now?”
“I can’t just turn it off, Rick.”
“In stairwells.”
“Everywhere.”
Constantly.
There was no way to make Rick understand how war exhausted the senses. The smell of an alien spice, the taste of sand, sunlight glinting off a piece of junk in the road ahead. The noise and the heat, always the heat. War exhausted the senses as it focused them to a pinpoint laser. Domino understood this. Frankie didn’t have to sit in a car and explain it to her.
“If she and I had met before the war, maybe we wouldn’t have been friends, not the same anyway. Now we have the girls in common, that’s important. But what makes us friends is…”
She wanted him to understand, but these days the right words were rarely there when she needed them.
“It’s crazy over there, Rick.” No one safe at home could ever understand that. “It’s insane.”
During her ten months in Iraq Frankie had been in the Green Zone only once, with Fatima, to be interviewed for an armed forces radio program about reconstruction efforts, specifically the school the Army and Marine Corps were rebuilding in a community on the edge of Baghdad, a few miles from Redline. After months on the base a visit to the Green Zone seemed like a vacation, and even though they would be gone less than a day, Frankie had been excited.
She was used to the look of the city from the ground, but viewed from above, evidence of years of violence spread to the horizon in every direction. Baghdad was a vastness of biscuit-colored rubble, many streets lined with immense concrete blast walls, rights-of-way obstructed by checkpoints and rolls of concertina razor wire. Darting children played and scavenged among the ruins of bombed-out vehicles, and Frankie would not let herself imagine what their day-to-day lives might be like. The fear, the confusion, and the anger they must feel. She had joined the Marine Corps because of her empathy with the children who were victims of war. At the same time, coalition forces of which she was a part were contributing to the misery of the boys and girls in the ruins. It was a moral conundrum that twisted her mind into knots. She left it alone most of the time.
And yet, in the midst of war, the ordinary chores had to be done. Below and to the west Frankie saw laundry laid out on the roof of a building that had escaped damage. In the midst of the blasted-out scene, a stippled mélange of black and brown and tan and white, she glimpsed a scrap of brilliant tropical turquoise. Perhaps a headscarf, a relic of peacetime. To Frankie’s eyes it was like seeing a pool of clear water, Lake Tahoe on a summer day.
The Green Zone had once been a riverfront compound, embraced on two sides by the syrupy caramel-colored Tigris River. The Americans and their allies had expanded the elite area to include the convention center and Hotel Al-Rasheed and surrounded the entirety with blast walls almost twenty feet high, surmounted by coiled razor wire.
The driver of the white GMC Suburban that picked them up at the helipad was an Army corporal named Ansten from Yakima, Washington, with yellow hair and eyes the shade of washed-out denim. In the vehicle the air-conditioning was cranked so high that Frankie was actually chilly. Ansten was a talker and nothing, including a direct request from a Marine Corps captain, could silence his ebullient chatter for long. He seemed to regard himself as the Green Zone’s official tour guide. The car stereo played classic rock.
Over the vocals of “Sugar Shack” Ansten told her they were listening to Freedom Radio, 107.7. “On the FM dial, ma’am.”
In front of the Republican Palace, the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority, their Suburban proceeded at a crawl under the scrutiny of heavily armed military guards. Frankie and Fatima gazed at the palace like tourists.
Fatima said in her slightly accented English, “When I was very young, before my parents sent me to live in Pittsburgh, the enclave was only for the rich and powerful. My mother told me that there were no stray dogs here, no trash. Not even a cat without a home.”
Further along the road Frankie saw three men in white shirts and ties talking together at a shaded shuttle stop, anonymous behind expensive sunglasses, pistols strapped to their thighs. Several signs identified restaurants serving Chinese food. Burger King welcomed them to Baghdad. A young man with a clipboard stood under its awning wearing a T-shirt that asked “Who’s Your Baghdaddy?”
Suddenly Frankie was ravenous for a fast-food hamburger. “After the interview we’ll come back here.”
“Whatever you want, Captain,” Ansten said. “We got everything here. You like salsa, there’s dance classes two nights a week. Bible studies too. It’s Little America, you know? There’s booze and cafés and just about anything you want if you got the cash. You can even go to movies in Mr. Bad’s palace. What about that, huh?”
Checkpoint Three, the main entrance to the Green Zone from the city of Baghdad, was directly in front of the convention center where the broadcast studios were located. Hesco barriers—containers the size of Volkswagens filled with rock and dirt—created a protective wall shielding soldiers at the checkpoint. Concrete slabs blocked off what had once been an eight-lane expressway. What Frankie thought must once have been a grandly impressive entrance to the convention center was now lined with dead trees where flocks of crows perched and observed. Trash of all kinds was everywhere—scrap metal, punctured tires cooked by the sun, plastic bags, and candy wrappers on the ground or caught in the barbed ringlets of wire. Between the S curves of concertina wire, extending back from the checkpoint, hundreds of Iraqis waited in line to pass into the Green Zone.
“Did you ever see anything so crazy in your life? It’s the same every day.” Corporal Ansten pointed at the lines of people making their way through the checkpoint into the zone. “They all want something, ma’am.” He had never acknowledged Fatima. “They come for a job or information or they got something to report. And the reason it takes so long is, they gotta show double ID and they get frisked two, three times. Plus there’s sniffer dogs and Iraqis
aren’t crazy for dogs. Can you believe that? Man’s best friend but they don’t care for them.” Pointing at the blast wall marking the perimeter of the zone, his tone became serious. “Can’t keep the rockets out though. We get hit almost every day. And it don’t matter how high the wall is, if a guy can get in with a bomb stuck up his—”
“We get the picture, Corporal.”
“Hang around long enough, you’ll see stuff in the zone like you never expected. This place is cray-zee.”
Frankie thought about telling Corporal Ansten that his irrepressible opinions were out of line, but he was harmless and not a discipline problem for her so she let it go. And, anyway, he was right about the zone. It had a Disney-gone-terribly-wrong quality that managed to be simultaneously funny and disturbing. No wonder some called it, derisively, the Emerald City. It made her halfway nostalgic for the overall cruddiness of Redline, which at least looked like what it was.
Corporal Ansten dropped them off outside the convention center. “This is as far as I go, ma’am. I’ll be here when you get done.” He added, “In case you’re nervous on account of what I said about attacks? The broadcast center’s the safest place around. Right in the middle of the building. It’d take a nuke to blow the radio off the air.”
The interview had gone well. Asked about the relationship between a Marine Corps officer and her interpreter, Fatima replied that trust was the essential ingredient. When Frankie remembered the interview later, these were the words that hurt.
Now Fatima was in Damascus and Frankie was home, except that she wasn’t completely. A big part of her was still back in the crazy.
Chapter 16
In a brilliant blue sky, the autumn sun was warm at eight a.m. on Saturday when Frankie and Glory walked down the hill and into what Ocean Beach called its downtown. Crossing the boulevard, she reached for her daughter’s hand, but Glory pulled away.
“I’m not a baby, Mom.” These were almost her first words that morning. She would not talk about what was going on at school and she was noncommittal about kickboxing. There were many ways to say “get out of my face.” “I’m not a baby” was one of them.
The Ocean Beach business district smelled like breakfast: toasting bread, warming muffins, frying bacon and ham, sizzling griddles, coffee. Edging the sidewalk, paving stones inscribed with names—memorials and tributes to friends, pets, and loved ones—made entertaining reading for those waiting in the lines outside the diners. Ocean Beach was between tourist seasons now, and the customers were probably locals, happy to have their streets and sidewalks to themselves for a while. Frankie stopped in at the Moonglow, a coffee bar that had refused to shut down despite the competition of a Starbucks across the street, and got a cappuccino for herself and cocoa for Glory.
In the next block, Murray, the owner of Trashy Cans, a local head shop that had done a rousing business since the mid-sixties, was dragging out a rack of neon-colored T-shirts as Frankie and Glory passed. Murray had inherited the business from his father, a flamboyant hippie with hair to the middle of his back, and he and Frankie had known each other as neighborhood kids who congregated on the pier to smoke pot during long summer twilights. Standing with the bright T-shirts between them, they spent a few minutes catching up on the high points of their lives while Glory read the inscriptions on the sidewalk stones.
There had been a time when Frankie knew the names of everyone who owned a shop along Newport, and if she misbehaved in plain sight, word was certain to reach her mother before she got home, and then there would be hell to pay because she wasn’t just anyone, she was Francine Byrne, the General’s daughter. Rick and Mrs. Greenwoody could object and argue about the community’s homeless population and, by extension, the kids’ clinic, but Frankie did not want to change grungy old Newport Avenue with its resale shops and seedy antique stores, the cafés and head shops, surf shops, and tattoo parlors. The Korean-owned doughnut shop on the corner where she could still buy Glory an ice cream cone for under a dollar was one of the places that told Frankie she was home even if she no longer had much to say to Murray and recognized only a few of the names tiled in the sidewalk border.
At the beach end of Newport the public parking lot was full of cars. Surfers were coming up from the water in their wet suits speckled with sand, boards under their arms, their hair still plastered to their heads. Others prepared to go out, pulling on their black neoprene suits, shielded from public view behind the open doors of their cars.
“Melanie says Daddy should learn to surf. She says it would relax him.”
Melanie should jump off the pier and forget to come up.
They turned the corner onto Abbott Street.
The clinic was at the end of the block, separated from the corner by an old beach hotel, newly painted and refurbished with natty red canvas awnings at the windows, cement benches with a beach view bookended by Italianate pots full of ferns and blue marguerite daisies. Farther down the street, a few people were lined up on the sidewalk outside the clinic, but across the pavement on the sandy side of a low wall, between two orange plastic cones, a long line had formed. Glory was quick to notice a black-and-white parked in midblock with two officers in the front seat.
“How come the police are here?”
“For security. Same as always.”
“What kind of security?”
“You know there are some people in town who don’t want the clinic to stay open. They might cause trouble.”
“Like what? Like shooting?”
“Not shooting. Honey, all these people want is a vaccination or a flu shot.” They could not afford a weapon if they did want one.
“Melanie says homeless guys give her the creeps.”
“That’s her opinion, it doesn’t mean you have to agree.”
“Me and her were watching the news one night—”
“She and I,” Frankie corrected automatically. “Where was Daddy?”
“At work. I was sleeping over with Melanie and we saw this thing on TV about suicide bombers.” Glory’s blue-green eyes searched Frankie’s face. “Do you know about those, Mommy?”
It was an important question, an important moment. Somewhere Frankie had read that children opened up to their parents when they were ready, not when it was convenient.
“I do.”
“Did you ever see one?”
“I never did, Glory.” But she had seen the ruin of an ancient city, its schools and homes and marketplaces. She had seen eight-year-old kids throwing rocks at a donkey dying at the edge of the road. And she had seen everything that happened at Three Fountain Square.
Glory asked, “Why would anybody want to get blown up on purpose?”
“Some people think that’s the way to get to heaven faster.”
“That’s so dumb.”
Frankie’s throat hurt and she didn’t want to be having this conversation in the middle of a crowded street, but Glory had chosen the moment.
“People believe all kinds of things, Glory.”
“Melanie goes to a church where if you’re in a family when you’re alive you get to be in the same family in heaven too. She said she wished I was in her family so we could be in heaven together.”
Melanie, always Melanie.
“Do you believe that, Mommy? About heaven?”
“I don’t.”
“What about Daddy?”
“You’ll have to ask him.” She smoothed Glory’s hair back from her forehead, thinking hard for the right words. “It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you, even if they sound absolutely sure they’re right. No one knows anything about heaven. The people who say they do, really, they’re mostly hoping.” She put her arms around her daughter and held her close, resting her chin on the crown of her head in the fluster of cowlicks and curls.
“But if you’re dead you know. Those suicide bombers, they know.”
“Yeah. I guess they do.”
“In the war, did you think you were going to die?”
At the
beginning she had been frightened all the time, but she pretended she wasn’t and sometimes managed to fool herself.
“Are you scared now?”
“No. Why do you ask that?”
Glory shrugged as if to say, Let’s drop the subject. She picked a bud off the marguerite plant and began to pull it apart like an artichoke until she reached the heart and let it drop to the sidewalk.
“I want to go home. What if someone from school sees me? Maybe they’ll think I’m homeless. What if they say I am and someone believes them?”
Frankie stepped back, looking at her daughter in her glittery T-shirt and cropped denims from the Gap, and she almost laughed at the idea that anyone would mistake her for a girl without a home.
“Listen to me, Glory. If people tell lies about you, call them liars and then ignore them. If they say mean things to you, think stinky-dinky and ignore them. I’m not saying you can’t be mad. You have a right to be furious. But be smart. Go ahead and scream or cry when you’re on your own or with me or Daddy. Don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing how they can get to you. Don’t make them that important, Glory. Learn to walk away.”
“You never walk away from Grandpa.”
“What do you mean?”
“He says mean things to you.”
A note sounded in Frankie, a waspy buzzing that was unmistakably a warning. “It’s not the same thing, Glory. He’s my father.”
This conversation was over.
Chapter 17
There were children of all ages and descriptions waiting to enter the clinic, which did not officially open until nine, but as soon as Frankie and Glory passed the square front window, Marisol, a short dark-haired woman in cartoon-patterned scrubs, let them in. Behind the desk Frankie found her name tag in a cluttered drawer. Marisol handed her a blue smock, she slipped it on, and pinned the name tag to the collar. She glanced out the window.
“It’s going to be busy around here. More than usual, I think.”
“Middle of the week folks just wander in whenever, but even if you haven’t got a job, there’s something about a Saturday….” Marisol pursed her lips and exhaled. “I’m guessin’ it’s gonna be a nut house. I’ve just got a feeling.”
When She Came Home Page 10
