Riptide
Frank Whitmore did not unfold the photograph right away. He held it flat against his chest with two fingers, the way a man holds a hymnal he already knows by heart, and looked at my sister until she stopped smiling.
“Brianna,” he said. “How much do you know about the word you just laughed at?”
“It’s a nickname, Uncle Frank. It’s, I mean, it’s from the Navy.”
“It’s from a night in the Gulf of Aden in March of 2016.” He said it quietly. “Would you like to hear about it? Or would you like Lieutenant Commander Keane to tell it? She won’t. So I will.”
Derek had gone very still. His father lowered his glass an inch from the tablecloth and left it there, as if setting it down would make a sound.
I said, “Frank, you don’t have to.”
“Yes, Commander,” he said gently. “I think I do.”
My name is Monica Keane. I’m thirty-five, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, and a surface warfare officer, which in plain language means I drive ships and I’m responsible when they do something I didn’t intend. I’ve been at sea for eleven of my last thirteen years. I’m good at it. I’m good at it the way some people are good at piano: I stopped noticing the effort a long time ago.
I grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, in a four-bedroom colonial with a basketball hoop nobody used. My father, Ray, sold commercial insurance and watched golf. My mother, Linda, ran the household with a warm, brisk efficiency that left no room for weather. We had two daughters. I came first, in 1990. Brianna came four years later, in a hospital in Reston, and my mother held her up to the window of the nursery and said, to my father, “Look. She’s perfect.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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