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Summary
Chapters Twenty-Three—Twenty-Nine
Chapter Twenty-Three
In April 1971, the war rages on in Vietnam. Frankie is 25 and living with Barb and Ethel in a remodeled bunkhouse-turned-cottage on the farm. Barb has a day job as a bartender but has also become active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Ethel is in her third year of veterinary school and is in a serious relationship with a man named Noah Ellsworth. Frankie works as a trauma surgical nurse and rides horses, just as Ethel promised. Barb invites Frankie to a major protest in Washington with the VWAW, to which Frankie agrees reluctantly. At the protest, the male veterans around them dismiss their service. The protest makes national news. Henry Acevedo, a psychiatrist who is also there protesting, invites Frankie for a drink.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Frankie asks a skeptical Barb to join her at a fundraiser. It’s mostly for Navy wives but the cause is for the families of prisoners of war (POWs) At the event, a POW advocate named Anne Jenkins tells the audience that many POWs are publicly classified as missing or killed in action rather than imprisoned. Frankie is shocked and wants to help raise awareness. She speaks to Anne, who mentions that she knows Frankie’s mother and that Bette has had a stroke. Frankie rushes home and goes straight to the hospital, finding her father at Bette’s bedside. After several days, Bette is discharged. After a lot of pressing from Frankie, Connor admits he struggled to get back to normal after Finley died. Before her stroke, Bette had insisted to Connor that Frankie would come back to Coronado and that they should fix up a small cottage near the family home. Connor gives her the cottage and a car.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Frankie has moved into the cottage and is volunteering at an organization called the League of Families to raise awareness about the plight of POWs. She obsessively writes letters for the cause. In June, she hands out flyers and sells bracelets at a local shopping center when she runs into Henry Acevedo, who is with his nephew, Arturo. Henry donates to their cause before leaving. In July, Ethel writes excitedly to say she and Noah have eloped.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The war seems never-ending by 1972, especially as news of more atrocities like the My Lai massacre continue to surface. Frankie attends a party at her parents’ house that Bette (now almost recovered) throws. During the event, Connor toasts to men in army service, which hurts Frankie’s feelings. She’s surprised to see Henry at the party, but quickly needs his help when the sound of a firecracker causes her to have a flashback and throw herself on the ground. He walks her back to the cottage, and they have sex. They begin regularly seeing each other and attending protests together.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In December Frankie learns she is two months pregnant, despite being on the Pill. She doesn’t know if she wants to keep it, but when she assists in a surgery for a twenty-seven-year-old with gastric cancer she begins to worry her life is slipping away. She decides to tell Henry about the pregnancy during her birthday party, and he immediately proposes and offers to move to Coronado. Frankie doesn’t feel ready, but she accepts, hoping for a son who looks like Finley.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Henry and Frankie plan their wedding and begin preparing a nursery for the baby. They set the date for the 17th of February, and Frankie writes to Barb and Ethel to invite them to be in her wedding party. Frankie and Henry have weekly dinners with Connor and Bette. During one of these visits, Frankie pushes Connor on why he won’t include her military photo on the heroes’ wall. He tells her to stop asking and that McGrath women only ever get their wedding photos displayed. The two begin to argue about it when Henry interrupts to announce that President Nixon has signed the peace accord. A week before the wedding, Frankie watches news coverage of returning POWs getting off planes at Manila airport in the Philippines on their way to the US. She’s flabbergasted to see Rye among them. She tells Barb and Ethel and the group drive to the air station where he’s supposed to arrive. When Rye arrives, Frankie’s shocked to see him being lovingly greeted by a woman and a little girl. It becomes instantly clear that Rye has been married the entire time, and that he lied to Frankie about everything.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Frankie feels shattered by Rye’s betrayal but tries to continue to prepare for her wedding to Henry. She feels like she’s walking through a fog of misery. A sharp pain in her stomach sends her to the hospital, where she learns she has miscarried her baby, a little boy she had planned to name Finley. Bette is unexpectedly sympathetic and eventually tells Frankie that she also miscarried when she was around the same age. She lost a daughter she would have called Celine and started taking pills to dull the pain. She recommends them to Frankie. Realizing she can’t marry Henry Frankie tells Barb and Ethel to go home. She cancels the wedding when she gets home from hospital. She sadly tells Henry that she is still in love with Rye, and they end their engagement.
Analysis
This section of the novel is its saddest stretch, and that’s not only because of the horrible betrayals Frankie experiences. It seems like everything Frankie tries to do in these chapters is negatively tainted by a lingering shadow from Vietnam. Her friendships and her love life are all affected by the way her trauma shapes her day-to-day. Sharing a home with Barb and Ethel provides her with community, and she seems to be doing a lot better when she’s able to take up nursing full-time again. The pills her mother recommended she take also seem to be having a mostly positive effect. However, being with the people she experienced her trauma with also brings it into her present reality, and the reliance she develops on the pills and on alcohol makes this worse.
Recovery is not linear, but Frankie has no way of knowing that fact. She also feels frustrated that the people around her seem to be moving on faster than she’s able to. Barb’s activism in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Ethel’s dogged pursuit of marriage and of veterinary school give them a sense of purpose. Both women are dealing with grief and trauma of their own, but Frankie doesn’t feel the same until she starts to campaign for POW awareness. Channeling her anger and frustration into helping people was how Frankie got through her nursing days, and she applies that same logic to her volunteer work. She doesn’t seem to be able to do anything by halves; she writes letters obsessively and devotes all her spare time to the cause.
Frankie’s anti-war activities still feel emotionally complicated to her, but she’s mostly buoyed up by the presence of other veterans at the rallies and protests. This isn’t always the case, though. Even in spaces where veterans should be coming together to support one another, Barb and Frankie are often discriminated against by male members of the armed forces. When Barb and Frankie join a march, only to be told that they can’t be there because there “were no women in Vietnam,” Frankie has to endure being erased from history by the very people she risked her life to save. It only adds insult to injury when the march is violently broken up by police with tear gas. It’s a literal embodiment of the figurative pain Frankie endures while trying to assert herself as a veteran of Vietnam. The police do not want the protesters to continue to demonstrate, and so they fire gas canisters at them to force them to dissipate. Just like the women of Vietnam were temporarily erased from history, the protesting veterans in Washington and other major cities were forced to disappear when their pain was no longer of use to their country.
Frankie’s conversation with Anne Jenkins shows another parallel between her experience of erasure and those of other veterans. Because news was unreliable (or in some cases because it was more convenient) prisoners of war in Vietnam were often reported dead or missing rather than captive. This complicated the release of military benefits to the families of those classified as missing or killed in action. It also provided no incentive for the US to campaign for the POWs to be released from the often-torturous conditions they endured. The parallels between this governmental neglect and the erasure of women’s service amplify Frankie’s frustration with how her country has treated her. Although she’s not a prisoner of war in the same way, Frankie is trapped by her anger and resentment as much as her PTSD. She fights for the rights of POWs because she feels a kinship with them, in addition to her sincere belief that they must be freed.
Frankie struggles with how much proof the people around her require in order to believe something is important. Even given irrefutable evidence, they often seem to avoid the truth. It takes Bette having a medical emergency for Connor to admit to Frankie that he found Finley’s death an insurmountable challenge. No matter how Frankie prompted him or how much she would have valued sharing their grief, he remained indifferent to hear and emotionally closed off. However, his toast to “all the men who serve” during the July party reveals that his inability to fully recognize Frankie’s contributions had only temporarily dissipated. By toasting to the “men” only, Connor is publicly disavowing everything Frankie has done.
Frankie’s so caught up in her father’s lack of emotional connection that she fails to see she’s committing a similar cruelty with Henry. Henry believes she loves him and wants to help her move on, but Frankie is not willing to let go of the past. It almost doesn’t matter that she believes Rye is dead when they begin dating; he’s so alive in her mind that the point is moot. Just like Connor, it takes a medical emergency for Frankie to address the problems in front of her with honesty. Her miscarriage is the tipping-point for her relationship with Henry. Discovering that Rye is alive, has been married the entire time, and has a child devastates Frankie. She realizes how unfair marrying Henry would be to him, and insists she let him go. Despite how much better for her a marriage with Henry would presumably be, she’s too addicted to the pain and loss of her Vietnam memories and her betrayal by Rye to change.
