From somewhere above our heads, we heard chopper blades.
Mary Lou looked at the ceiling. “That’ll be the medevac team.”
We stood and walked back to the infirmary, where Wilson and a corpsman were readying Bobby and Kenny for transport. A few minutes later, a couple of medics arrived, and together they worked to get the two men transferred from hospital gurneys to stretchers. Wilson gave the medics some final instructions, then nodded in Laura’s direction. “Mrs. Carpenter has special permission from the commodore to accompany Lieutenant Carpenter to Naples.”
Mary Lou handed Laura her purse and the overnight bag I’d hastily packed for her, and we followed the transport team to the helicopter pad, where a gleaming SH-3 Sea King sat waiting for them.
While the stretchers were loaded into the chopper, Laura took Mary Lou’s hands in hers. “I won’t forget this,” she shouted. “Thank you.”
“You’ll be all right,” said Mary Lou, which was different than promising Bobby would be.
Laura turned to me, and I gave her a huge hug. “I’ll get to Naples as soon as I can.”
She nodded, then started to move toward the chopper, where a medic was waiting to help her inside. At the last minute, she turned and shouted at me, “Hey, Eileen!”
“Yeah?”
“You might be a shitty navy wife, but you’re a really good friend.”
158.
MARY LOU AND I TOOKthe captain’s gig back to the pier. I had wanted to stay and try to talk to Paul, but Mary Lou made it quite clear that was not going to happen.
Apparently, when the valve busted, Paul panicked, and in his haste to get the injured out of the containment room, he threw every protocol he’d ever been taught out the window. Now the whole field was contaminated, and the submarine was on lockdown while they tested every surface and tried to figure out what to do next.
After we’d disembarked and were walking in the direction of Mary Lou’s Caprice, I worked up the nerve to ask what she thought would happen to Paul.
“He’ll face some sort of disciplinary action,” she said. “For sure.”
I thought of Roberta Stearns, who wanted that tour in Hawaii so bad. “Is this going to affect Joe, too?”
“It’s going to affect everyone—all the way up the chain of command.”
I glanced at her. “Even Jim?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “Jim’s weathered some pretty bad storms. But if he doesn’t survive this one, it won’t be the end of the world.”
I was surprised to hear her sound so glib, and I told her as much.
“We’ve been doing this a long time, and he’s had a good career. But I like to think we’re still young enough that we could start all over. Make a different kind of life.”
“Definitely,” I said, although I don’t know if I was old enough at the time to really believe it.
159.
IT WAS STILL DARKwhen I arrived at Teo’s apartment building, but the lavender light of morning was pushing against the horizon, and already I could hear birdsong.
The intercom crackled when I hit the button for S. Manca, and I closed my eyes, picturing Teo asleep, then waking to the insistent buzz. The receiver was installed on a wall near the front door, so it would take him three, maybe four seconds to get out of bed and across the apartment. I counted one, two, three, four, but there was nothing.
I hit the button again. And again. Still nothing.
I looked down the hill in the direction of town, wondering where he could be if not here at his apartment. It was too early to wake Francesca and ask if she’d seen him, so I sat on a retaining wall in front of the building, and I waited for the island to come to life.
Morning came in tiny increments. Across the street, a man kick-started his moped and puttered down the hill; above my head, I heard the slap of a mop, heavy with water, on the tile floor of a balcony. Soon I heard someone turn on a radio, and then it was the garbled voices of children, who did not know or care that it was Sunday morning and their parents preferred to sleep. The sky turned pink and then orange and then, finally, blue.
