When She Came Home (13 page)

“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.

I
n 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.

T
here 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.”

Cray-zee

The clinic’s waiting room was an area roughly twenty by fifteen feet with one large plateglass window facing across Abbott Street to the beach. A rainbow of plastic
chairs with contoured seats lined two walls. Wherever there was space on the pale yellow walls, posters illustrated basic health information about good nutrition, dental health, obesity, and childhood vaccinations. The children’s area was in front of the window: chairs and a low table on which were big boxes of drawing paper, crayons, and pencils. On the floor stacked plastic bins were full of toys and books.

For the busy Saturday clinic Harry and Gaby employed a total of three nurses, a physician’s assistant, and a lab technician who could do a quick screen of blood and urine samples. Two retired internists helped out and a handful of other volunteers advised the parents of children being treated about local housing and employment resources. Sometimes this help was rejected but more often than not the clients seemed grateful, for the attention if nothing else.

Frankie hoped to see Domino and Candace that day. She had promised herself that she would get Harry to look at the bruise on Domino’s forehead whether or not she wanted the attention. Midmorning there was a tussle in the children’s corner over a particular red crayon, but generally the boys and girls were well behaved through the long wait to be seen. They demonstrated a touching stoicism with regard to their bug bites and stomachaches. At odd times different staff members came up front to speak to Frankie and to report on how Glory was behaving. She was
being allowed to watch Marisol give shots and occasionally swab the puncture points with alcohol—wearing gloves, of course, and closely supervised. This was surely a violation of some kind of law but no one seemed concerned.

After lunch the clinic treated a twelve-year-old boy whose home tattoo oozed infection.

A two-year-old with a dog bite.

Several cases of pink eye.

Head lice, fleas, runny noses.

A dozen tetanus shots.

Four babies with earaches.

A disoriented teenaged girl wandered in without a parent or guardian, her clothes stinking, her hair matted.

On the street a trio of protesters appeared with placards saying variations of “get the homeless out of OB.” A scuffle between the police and several men and women yelling insults at the clinic patients lined up on the beach brought another black-and-white to the scene, but in the end the demonstrators dispersed. A man threw a bottle, shattering it. The police went after him and the protesters reappeared, taunting the old drunk. Those waiting in line observed the dramas but kept their distance. They had brought their children to the clinic to be seen by a nurse or doctor and not to cause trouble.

Late in the afternoon Domino and Candace came through the door. Domino wore a flag-patterned bandanna headband, but it wasn’t enough to control her thick, dark
hair or completely cover what remained of her bruise. Like her mother Candace wore jeans and a tee, rubber-soled flip-flops on her feet. As always her dark hair had been tamed into a complicated French braid.

With a delighted cry Glory leapt up and she and Candace grabbed hands and jumped up and down, shrieking, the classic greeting of eight-year-old best friends. In another moment they were at the table whispering and coloring earnestly, their heads—one fair, one dark—almost touching.

“I’ll take a break.” Frankie asked Mirasol to cover the desk. “We’ll be outside on the wall.”

Arno, the security guard, had left early for a dentist appointment, but the cops in the cruiser were still parked nearby.

“Show me your forehead.”

Domino removed her sunglasses and lifted the fold of her bandanna. The bruise had faded to a jaundiced yellow. “Almost back to my own gorgeous self.”

“What happened about the room you went to look at?”

“Way too small.”

Frankie laughed. “Dom, you live in a Dodge Caravan. There’s nothing smaller than that.”

“Shows what you know. It was the size of a closet and it felt like a jail cell. One pissy little window looked onto the next-door wall. And the bathroom was down the hall with rules on the door. Even Dekker said I shouldn’t take it.”

Domino had grown up in a white house with yellow trim and shutters, a mile outside Scanlon, Kansas, population roughly five thousand. It had two stories and a dormered attic, and sat at the end of a gravel road on a gentle rise overlooking a meadow and a broad shallow creek. From Domino’s bedroom window she could see the steeple of the Lutheran church where her family worshipped several times a week. She could see the main street where her father operated the only pharmacy for miles, the high school where she met Jason, and beyond that, the road out of town.