“Did Marian change the dew point?” Eddie said. “Is she the god of weather?”
“Almost,” said Ruth.
“Marian must be the sun, then. She came and burned away the cloud.”
“No, but she had taught me a few things about flying on instruments.”
“I didn’t think you were listening!” Marian said. She turned to Eddie, explained, “She would only let me try to teach her in pubs and was always changing the subject. I barely told her anything.”
“You told me that if I got caught in cloud, I should straighten up, get back on course, turn very slowly and shallowly around to the reciprocal, and then try to dive under.”
“Anyone could have told you that.”
“But no one bothered except you. So I did it, but the only problem was that I got down to five hundred feet and the mist hadn’t thinned at all. So then I thought I’d go over, but the cloud went up forever. I went to seventy-five hundred feet, and I was still in it.”
“You should have bailed out,” said Eddie.
“I thought about it,” Ruth said, “and I might have, except I’d been late to catch the taxi plane and hadn’t had time to change into my trousers, so I was wearing my uniform skirt and, just between us three, I’d run out of clean undies and wasn’t wearing any.” She looked between them. “You see the problem.”
“Ruth,” Eddie said, “given the choice between death and gliding down with your unmentionables out, you should have chosen the latter. Actually, I’m almost surprised you didn’t relish the opportunity to be a scandal.”
“Me too,” Ruth said thoughtfully. “In retrospect, I think I didn’t want to be so helpless. Anyway, I just…flew along, hoping a hole would open up.”
“I’m on the edge of my seat,” Eddie said, “even though it appears you survived.”
“I saw a thinning. Or, I thought I did. I might have imagined it. I had no idea where I was. When I dove, I could have been plowing right into the balloons or a hillside.” She stopped talking. Eddie took her hand.
“You had the windup,” Eddie said.
“I did. I really did.” Ruth’s voice wavered. “You know, when it’s happening you’re concentrating so hard you can’t really feel anything, but later it hits you, and it’s like you have a chill and can’t get warm again.”
“Give me a bit of advice, Marian,” Eddie said. “Anything. For luck. What do I need to know? What will save my life?”
“It was only common sense, what I told Ruth.”
“That’s not advice. Come on.”
Marian considered, said, “My first flying teacher told me to learn when to ignore my instincts and give in when I wanted to resist, and resist when I wanted to give in. He wasn’t really talking about flying, though. And he died not long after in a crash.”
Eddie laughed. “My strong instinct is to ignore this terrible advice, but maybe that means I should take it. You’ve given me a conundrum.”
* * *
—
A week later: word that Eddie’s plane had been shot down. He was classified as missing. Ruth lay on her bed, the telegram discarded on the floor. “His seventeenth mission,” she said to Marian, who sat stroking her back. “How can they expect anyone to survive twenty-five? It’s inhumane. You should have seen them look at me when the telegram came, like I was being rude for crying. Why doesn’t anyone cry here?”
“People are afraid if they start they’ll never stop.”
A few days later, when Ruth was delivering a Spitfire, she detoured and landed at Eddie’s base, feigning a mechanical problem. In the hangar and the ops room, she badgered anyone she could find for information. Crew members in other planes had reported seeing three parachutes before Eddie’s plane exploded, she learned. But no one could know whose they’d been.
Pacific Ocean
June 1943
A few weeks later
A troopship slid under the Golden Gate Bridge, heading to sea. From where Jamie stood at a high railing, the decks looked mossed over with men, a carpet of khaki-and-green bodies as dense as sod. They didn’t know their destination. A piercing evening brightness glanced off the whitecaps and the wheeling seabirds and the Golden Gate’s orange-red towers, one of which was about to be swallowed by a bank of fog pouring down over the Presidio. The water glowed milky jade until the fog caught the ship. Jamie went below.
The ship had once been an ocean liner, but all the furnishings and fittings had been removed; in their place, bunks were stacked everywhere, tight as baker’s trays. The windows and portholes had been boarded over or painted black. On the decks, where couples might once have strolled arm in arm, heaped-up sandbags encircled outdated antiaircraft guns. It wasn’t a new ship, nor fast enough to rely on speed for defense—not like the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth—and so a destroyer dogged along with it. The hull and superstructure had been painted gray, effacing the vessel’s name on the bow and stern, and it was not until the second day, when he saw some soldiers using an old life ring to keep their dice from rolling away, that Jamie learned the ship’s name. Maria Fortuna.