Purple Hearts(49)

“Get the fuck out of here,” I said, still reeling from pain.

“You know what else this article said, though? Said you got a wife. Little Boricua situation? Thinking I might need to look her up.”

I didn’t have the energy to respond. I just closed my eyes, hoping he’d go away, like a bad dream. When I opened them again, he was gone, but metal spikes were still grinding into my leg, relentless. The ache and the stabbing combined.

He was right, I guessed. I would get a Purple Heart. To be forever reminded of that moment at the jeep, of pulling Frankie’s body toward mine, leaving a trail of blood in the road. The third pain, always there, always hooking me back.

Tara arrived in bright pink scrubs, her bangs freshly permed, strapping on her latex gloves and starting a story about the officer down the hall.

“Hey, Tara?” I asked, swallowing, trying to block out the semicircle of faces I’d seen at my last Narcotics Anonymous meeting at Austin Universalist, smiling at me with bright eyes. Telling me to stay strong.

“What is it, hon?” she said, bending my good leg.

“Tramadol isn’t working. I’d like to up my medication.”





Cassie


George and Louise Cucciolo held Frankie’s memorial service under the hundred-foot-tall arches of St. Mary’s Cathedral, dwarfing the fifty or so of us who were invited. Luke could stand with the help of a few nurses, but he could barely put any weight on the leg, and the cathedral’s only wheelchair-accessible entrance was through a back door, up a noisy wooden ramp. I’d picked him up in San Antonio this morning, and we drove here in silence. It was like neither one of us knew what to say now. I hadn’t really imagined what it would be like when he came home. I certainly hadn’t imagined it like this.

As we rattled through the door, we realized that the ramp led not to the back of the church, where everyone was entering, but to the area behind the pulpit. We had wheeled right into the middle of an operatic rendition of “Ave Maria.” We had to steer around the casket and a blown-up photo of Frankie as the tear-stained eyes of the attendees followed us in confusion. He would have found the whole thing hilarious, probably.

? ? ?

Once we were back in the van, Luke took off the leg brace he had to wear for certain time intervals throughout the day and asked me to hand him the bottle of painkillers. His second dose, at least since I’d been with him.

“Are you sure you should take two this close together?”

“It says ‘as needed,’ doesn’t it?” Luke replied.

“I guess.” I checked the bottle.

“Well, there you go.”

“Trying to numb the pain?” I joked weakly.

“Of my leg, yeah,” Luke said, his eyes out the window.

“K,” I said. We’d joked in other serious moments. It was kind of one of the only ways we could communicate. But he’d ignored it.

“But seriously,” I started. “Are you okay?”

Part of why I asked was to make sense of my own feelings.

Frankie was the one who brought us together, after all. I wanted to talk to the only other person who knew how it felt to lose him in the same way I did. I wanted to know that there was still a common goal, even if our link was gone.

I looked at Luke. He was resting his chin on his hand, eyes drifting.

“Luke?” I said.

“Hm?” He blinked a few times. “Oh. It was sad.”

It was sad? “Is that it?” I asked.

Luke’s face transformed in an instant to anger. Angrier than I’d ever seen him. “What, you want me to cry? I can’t just turn it on and off. That’s not how grief works.”

“I know. But Frankie was my friend, too. I mean—I can relate. Believe me.”

He looked back out the window. “No, you can’t. You weren’t there.”

That one got me in the gut. Of course I wasn’t there. But I had been there in spirit, listening to him, writing to him. Bearing witness. If not being a true wife, then something like a friend.

I opened my mouth to respond, but stopped. This was bigger than this moment. I understood. He could stew. He could hurt. He could be angry at me now, even though I was trying to help. But not forever.

After the procession wove through Austin, Frankie was buried in Texas State Cemetery under a dull January sun. Beside me, Luke had remained hard-jawed in his dress blues. When the officers fired ceremonial shots, he twitched in his wheelchair.

Elena had tossed a turquoise necklace into the grave, one Frankie had given her before he left. Louise, a license plate that spelled FRNKIE and three white roses. George had dropped in a stack of Marvel comics. The three of them held one another and wept.

Christmas had been last week. I thought about standing up to speak with a few of his other friends, telling one of the many stories we’d shared as kids, but none of them was self-contained—if I was going to tell the story of the Barbie car, then I had to start with the Christmas of 1995 to give context, and if I told about Christmas of 1995, I’d have to compare it to the previous Christmas, the one where my mom caught us dressing in his parents’ clothes.

The nurse who had driven us to the funeral waited in the van, hooking and unhooking Luke in and out like a kid to a car seat, popping handfuls of Corn Nuts. I thought I saw him crack a smile as I struggled to push Luke’s chair through the grass of the cemetery.