When She Came Home (2 page)

The president shook Harry’s hand. “We heard about
your accident, son, and Mrs. Bush and I are so very sorry. A terrible thing to happen. Terrible. I understand you’ve decided on a career in medicine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sure you’ll make a wonderful doctor,” Mrs. Bush said.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Whatever he does,” the president said, “he’ll make you proud, General Byrne.”

Frankie glanced at the General, though she did not really expect his expression to show his feelings. In Ms. Hoffman’s English class she had learned the word
inscrutable.
No other word described her father as well. Without looking at Harry, she knew what he was thinking. They both knew he could win the Nobel Prize for Medicine, but the General wouldn’t be as proud as if he wore the uniform of the Marine Corps.

“Mr. President, may I present my daughter, Francine?”

Mrs. Bush said something about soccer.

“Yes, ma’am,” Frankie wasn’t quite sure what she was agreeing to. She stood up straighter and looked right over Barbara Bush’s head, out the window to where the lawn stretched away from the house and the rain fell in silver chains.

“And I understand you have a beautiful singing voice.”

Mrs. Bush had a friendly way about her. Talking to her, Frankie relaxed and it seemed natural to tell her about the Bach cantata the All Souls’ choir was rehearsing.

There were more questions and she must have said and done the right thing because as they all filed into the dining room for a fancy lunch, her mother whispered, “I’m very proud of you, Frankie.”

The praise would have meant more coming from her father.

2001 to 2007—San Diego, California

O
n September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the United States, Frankie and Rick Tennyson had been married sixteen months and had a daughter named Glory and an Irish setter named Flame. When it became clear that American forces would be going back to Iraq for the second time in ten years, she knew what she had to do.

She had Glory with her in the stroller, and the recruiter asked three times, was she sure.

She made her announcement at a family dinner.

Harry spoke first. “Shit. You’re kidding, please say you’re kidding.”

Her mother didn’t bother telling him not to swear at dinner. She sat back and covered her mouth with her table napkin as tears welled in her eyes. “What on earth possessed you?” She pushed her chair back and fled into the kitchen.

“Is this some kind of a joke, Francine? Because if it is…” The General knew it wasn’t a joke. “Why in God’s name would you do such a thing?”

She had been prepared for their shock and initial upset.

“I want to serve our country, sir.”

“What about your family?”

“You’ve got a finance degree,” Rick said, sounding confused. “You work in a bank.”

Her sister-in-law, Gaby, asked, “Is it final?”

“I leave for Quantico in six weeks.” First there would be officer’s training and then months and months of Basic, what she knew would be the most physically and psychologically grueling months of her life. “After that, I don’t know where they’ll send me.”

“They’ll send you goddamn nowhere!” the General roared.

Gaby sighed and reached for Rick’s hand in sympathy.

“I can’t believe you’d do this. What about our daughter?”

Everyone seated at the table looked at the baby in the high chair. Glory stopped stirring her peas into her mashed potatoes and looked back at them.

“Answer your husband, Francine. What about your daughter? I can understand a man enlisting, but a wife and mother? This is wrong. Very wrong. Unnatural.”

Until the General used the word
unnatural
Frankie had not understood the depth and breadth and steel of his opposition to women serving in the Marine Corps. This was more than the shock and anger she had expected. It
was worse than disapproval. As if an iron gate had dropped between them, she felt herself shut out of her father’s heart.

Later Frankie and Rick put Glory to bed together as they always did, Frankie sang to her, and the baby’s eyes never left her face.

Across the crib Rick interrupted. “You only got pregnant to please me. You never wanted her.”

“I wanted to wait.”

Rick was ten years older than she and had felt the need to hurry. Probably because of this, he had taken to fatherhood immediately; but until Glory was almost a year old Frankie had only gone through the motions. Accustomed to being good at everything she committed to, she was determined to master the skills of a good mother in much the same way she had learned to block and kick a soccer ball, by repetition and an effort of will.

She had felt foolish making conversation with a baby who didn’t understand a word, but she did as all the books said she should, pointing out and naming things until her conversational skills deteriorated to the simplest sentences, just nouns and verbs with a modifier tossed in when she was inspired. She read all the recommended childcare books and followed all the prescriptions for a happy healthy baby. Eventually and without Frankie noticing how it happened—by hourly, daily increments, she supposed—the love had come. Now, like Rick and the rest of the family, she was completely smitten with Glory, who was certainly the brightest and prettiest baby who had ever lived.

“You wanted a baby and I wanted you to be happy,” Frankie said. “I love her now. Isn’t that what matters?”

Glory followed the conversation, her sleepy eyes looking back and forth between her mother and father.

“Anyway, I’m doing it for her.”

“That is such a load of crap.” Glory’s eyes opened wider. “How can you even say it? You should be gagging on the words.”

“Rick, there were children on those planes. Glory could have been one of them.”

He exhaled in disgust.

Rick was doing fast and furious sit-ups on the far side of the bed, his toes tucked under the chest of drawers. He jumped to his feet and faced her. The tendons in his neck stood out like the roots of an old tree.

“Just tell me why.”

“Don’t poke your finger at me.”

“I want to hear the truth. No more bullshit.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Frankie, don’t you know yourself better than that? Have you so little insight?”

He used his condescending, I’ve-lived-longer-and-know-more-than-you voice, and her desire to cooperate froze.

“I told you. I’m doing it for her.”

“The hell you are. You’re doing it because you’re a twenty-five-year-old woman who’s still trying to get her father to love her.”

On the soccer field if someone elbowed Frankie out of the referee’s line of sight, she waited for the right moment and got her back. In games and life, the impulse to retaliate came to her as naturally as breathing. But this was Rick and part of her understood his anger and even sympathized with it. If their positions had been reversed, she too would be confused and heated; however, she would eventually accept his decision to serve and defend because she had been raised to believe that this was what military families did when the country was threatened.

“It would be different,” she said from the closet doorway, “if it were you who wanted to go.”

“But it’s not me, Frankie. It’s you, the mother of my daughter.”

“I’m a woman, so I don’t get to do what my conscience tells me? There has to be some deep dark Freudian explanation?”

“Shall we pursue that idea? Do you think you’re up for that conversation?”

She ignored his challenge. “This war is about who we are as a nation.”

“Stop.” He held up his hand. “If we’re going to talk about this, you have to do one thing for me. Stop the spin. Stick to the truth. You enlisted because you’re the General’s daughter and you’ll do anything, even leave your family to fight in some godforsaken desert, just to hear him say you’re a good girl and give you that look.”

“What look?”

“The one he gets on his face when he starts talking about his father and his uncle and grandfather. All the bully Byrnes who risked their lives so America can be free.” He looked disgusted. “If you knew how tired I get of listening to that crap.”

His vehemence stung her. “I thought you loved my father. He loves you.”

Rick laughed. “But he’d love me so much more if I were a Marine.”

They had always talked in the dark. It had been their way from the beginning.

“What are Glory and I supposed to do without you?”

He was calmer than he had been, more hurt than angry. But this was harder to bear. She wanted so much for him to understand.

“On the plane that hit the Pentagon there were a bunch of kids on a National Geographic field trip. And there were two little girls. Sisters. I imagine I’m their mother and I know they’re going to die and I can’t help them.”

He rested his index finger on her mouth. “Just stop. It isn’t your fault those children died and it’s not your job to save the world.”

“Your folks live in Massachusetts, Rick. We’ve flown in and out of Boston ourselves.”

“There are dozens of flights every day.”

“But it could have been us. We could have been at your
folks and had Glory with us….” She sagged under the weight of the images. “It can’t happen again. Ever.”

War was men’s business and the General knew how to call in favors. Though he could not undo her enlistment, he made sure that after officers’ training and the Basic School, his daughter was separated from her unit and posted to the small finance office at the Marine Corps Recruitment Depot in San Diego, about twenty minutes from Ocean Beach. Most nights she was home from the shop in time to fix dinner. She became a fixture at the MCRD, and every day it rankled, it gnawed, it galled her that while her friends were in Iraq and Afghanistan, she was a paper pusher in her hometown.

Glory was just finishing first grade when the opportunity arose for a ten-month deployment in Iraq, what the Marine Corps called Temporary Additional Duty. Frankie would be posted to a Forward Operating Base as part of a joint effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. She told herself, she told Rick and her father, that the TAD was only ten months.

“I have to do this.”

Rick looked grim and clenched his jaw. The General stopped talking to her.

October 2008—San Diego, California

F
rankie had been home from Iraq for almost two months, back at the MCRD, a captain now and adjutant to the chief financial officer, Colonel Walter Olvedo. She and Olvedo were meeting in his office on the day the call came from Glory’s school. Frankie’s phone vibrated against her thigh but she didn’t touch it.

The situation in the office had reached near critical, and she and the colonel had been trying to have this meeting for weeks. The surge announced by the president had created problems for the previously insignificant San Diego Office of Financial Affairs. It had tripled in size and now handled not only payroll for the MCRD but other bases in southern California as well. Also—and this was new—a number of sensitive classified matters came across Frankie’s desk. Seven of the nine young Marines in the office had
inadequate clearances and insufficient financial training to deal with these and were inclined to be careless unless Frankie rode them hard and constantly. Olvedo had sent a dozen messages up the pipeline requesting more qualified personnel, but with everything that was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one had time for anything as far from the line of fire as Frankie’s shop.

“Is that your phone buzzing, Captain?” Olvedo had heavy black brows that made him look cross most of the time despite his pleasant and easygoing disposition. “It sounds like a killer bee.”

Olvedo’s wife had once been a career Marine but after their third child was born she left the service to go back to school to become a teacher. His mother-in-law lived with them and helped out with childcare. He knew Frankie couldn’t ignore a call from Arcadia School.

“We’re done here.” He waved his hand toward the office door. “Do what you have to do.”

Thirty minutes later she was hurrying across the parking lot to her Nissan.

“Captain Tennyson, please, wait up. Please.”

At the car she turned to see a young man in chinos and a blue blazer hurrying toward her.

“I’m glad I caught you,” he said, panting a little. He handed her a card.

“You work for Senator Belasco?”

“I’ve been trying to reach you for the last three days.”
He added in the tone of a parent to a willful child, “You haven’t returned my calls.”

“If I wanted to talk to you, I would have called back.”

“Then you did get my messages.”

“I’m in a hurry, Mr. Westcott.” She unlocked the Nissan and threw her tote across to the passenger seat. “I don’t have time for you or your boss.”

“There are things you don’t know, Captain.”

“I’m late for a meeting at my daughter’s school.”

“Have you been following the hearings, Captain?”

Senator Susan Belasco’s investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing by the private contracting firm Global Sword and Saber Security Services, G4S, had been front-page news for the last several weeks.

“I have nothing to say to the committee.”

“A boy was killed at Three Fountain Square. He was ten years old.”

“Don’t call me again.” She slammed the car door and revved the engine as she shifted into reverse, muttering as she backed up. “Move your toes, you son of a bitch.”

Taking the back road out of Mission Valley, she used her cell phone to call her therapist, Alice White. As expected, she got her voice mail. Frankie’s situation could not honestly be called an emergency so she hung up without leaving a message. What good was a therapist if she never picked up her phone?

The Arcadia School secretary had sounded vaguely
accusatory, or maybe Frankie had imagined that. Lately she felt like everyone was trying to pick a fight or poke a finger at her. Dr. White said stress made it hard to read people and situations correctly.

Walking fast across the asphalt parking lot to the school entrance, her breath fluttered at the base of her throat and she wished she were wearing her service uniform, not the utility camouflage that was blousy and comfortable as pajamas. More officially dressed, she would not feel so much like a schoolgirl about to be called on the carpet for kicking a soccer ball through a school window.