Marian had stared at Zip, waiting to be overcome, but felt only pressure and heaviness, then nothing. Jamie’s death had rent and torn her in such a way that she was no longer watertight; her emotions drained out, leaving her empty. So passed her grief for Ruth—she was too ruined to hold it. Guilt, though, lingered. For the first time since she’d started flying, she found no solace in being airborne. She picked up her chits, collected her planes, took them where she was told. Her own existence oppressed her.
After Caleb left with the invasion force, she had started saving money without knowing why. She took the bus instead of riding her motorbike. She left the Polygon Hotel for cheaper digs. Once the Germans began to retreat, she started getting ferry assignments to Europe and devised a minor smuggling operation. If she was flying to Belgium, she would leave her parachute behind and instead fill its bag with tins of cocoa, which wasn’t rationed in England but was in short supply for the liberated Belgian bakers. She would sell the cocoa and buy things that were rationed or unavailable in England—sugar, clothes, leather goods—and then sell those on the black market in Britain.
After Ruth died, she understood why she was saving up: She didn’t want her old life, but she couldn’t imagine a new one. The money was to buy time in between.
* * *
—
As soon as she opens the door, Eddie grabs her up and swings her like the pendulum of a gigantic bell, back and forth, tolling. When he sets her back on her feet, she squints against the sun’s glare, trying to see if he’s changed. It’s been six years.
He touches her shorn head with a big, gentle hand. “Look at this.”
“You’re two minutes early.”
“My watch much be fast.”
“That’s yours?” A royal blue convertible Cadillac coupe gleams at the curb, top down. Its buffed, elongated curves look like they’ve been formed by the wind.
“Homecoming present to myself. I got a deal from an old friend. I’m getting rid of it before we leave.”
She catches a trace of sadness on his face. “No, don’t! Put it in storage.”
“No, I don’t want her to get lonely. Here, let me get my bags.”
In the house, they babble too brightly about things that have only just happened, the past so recently traversed it’s still unsettled, as though by a wake. His square, horsey face and long, sturdy forearms are tan. He’d lingered on the drive, he says, followed whims and detours. He has his same old affable charm, but something is different, something nebulous but pervasive. He reminds her of a statue that has been broken and glued back together, its shape the same but its surface spiderwebbed with cracks.
She talks about flying cargo to keep in practice. She’s always at the bottom of the roster, has been told she can’t fly passengers because the idea of a female pilot makes people nervous. None of it matters: not her thousands of hours, not the Spitfires and Hurricanes and Wellington bombers she’d flown, not her landings on high glaciers and frozen lakes and narrow sandbars. But so far the cargo hasn’t complained that she’s a woman. The engines and hydraulics she’s worked on haven’t minded. （She has her mechanic’s license now, too.） Had he heard? Helen Richey killed herself back in January—pills. They say she did it because she couldn’t get any flying work.
He hadn’t heard. He remembered Ruth had liked Helen.
（The first mention of Ruth, made so casually.）
She shows him into the bedroom, tells him it’s his. She will hear none of his protests. She herself will sleep on the couch. She insists. “You couldn’t fit half yourself on that couch,” she says.
“I don’t want to displace you.”
She is already moving away, down the hall. “Come see the war room.”
* * *
—
It had been a small second bedroom when she moved in, and she’d enlisted the landlord to help her carry the bed out to the garage.
“What if your mother comes to visit?” the landlord had said from his end of the mattress, walking backward. “Or a friend?” He seemed like a nice man. Bushy eyebrows and heavy jowls, a Hawaiian shirt patterned with hula girls.
“I don’t have a mother,” she’d told him, and he left it alone.
Maps paper the walls and bury the small dining table her landlord had loaned her. Rolled charts stand dense as bamboo in crates and wastebaskets. There is a general shambles of heaped-up paper: checklists, invoices, aerial photos, notes on winds and weather, inventories, catalogs, letters of advice, survival manuals, correspondence with navy contacts, correspondence with Norwegian explorers and whalers, correspondence with the leaders of the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition （which will carry fuel for her）， lists of radio stations and beacons, correspondence and contracts with Liberty Oil, order forms for airplane parts, addresses and phone numbers of contacts in all the places where they might need contacts, paperwork for visas, scraps and scribbles, and on and on and on and on.