She turned away to pick up her satchel. When she looked back, she saw one wolflike eye open a slit, regarding her silently.
“Where you going?” he slurred.
“Home,” she heard herself say.
“The lake?”
Nina sighed. “I’m not a rusalka, Papa.”
“Then where are you going?”
“The sky.” I never knew I could have the sky, Nina thought. But now I know.
His snores started again. Nina almost leaned down and brushed her lips over his forehead, but instead, she took the half-empty jug of vodka from the kitchen table and set it by the bed. Then she flung her satchel over her shoulder, hiked to the station in Listvyanka, and slept on the platform waiting for the next train. The ride was cold and malodorous, dumping her into Irkutsk the following twilight. At any other time she might have gasped at the sheer grubby expanse that was a city and not a ramshackle village—there were more people visible here in the blink of an eye than she was used to seeing in the course of an entire week. But she was honed sharp and straight as her razor on only one thing. It took all night, but after being laughed at or shrugged off by half the people in Irkutsk, she found it: an ugly block building off the Angara River.
At dawn, the director of the Irkutsk air club came to work yawning and found someone had beaten him there. Bundled in her coat, blue eyes barely visible between rabbit-fur cap and scarf, Nina Markova sat curled in a ball on the top step. “Good morning,” she said. “Is this where I learn to fly?”
Chapter 7
Jordan
May 1946
Boston
You deserve a grander honeymoon,” Dan McBride objected.
“A weekend in Concord is all we need,” Anneliese insisted. “It wouldn’t be fair to leave the girls alone too long.”
Jordan and Ruth were swiftly becoming the girls—Jordan could see her father’s smile deepen every time he heard it. Anything was worth seeing him this happy. In truth, Jordan was happy too. She’d thrown herself into wedding preparations: clearing space in her dad’s closet for Anneliese’s things, pressing his wedding suit. Anneliese would stay the night before the wedding, sharing the guest room with Ruth, and then two different cabs would take them to the church the following morning. “You can’t see your bride dressed for the wedding, Dad. You take the first cab, and Anneliese and Ruth and I will follow.”
“Whatever you say, missy.” He squeezed her cheek. “I’m proud of the way you handle things. There aren’t many seventeen-year-old girls I’d trust with their new sister for a weekend alone.” He twisted his old wedding ring, moved to his other hand. “I used to worry I hadn’t done right by you, after your mother died. I didn’t handle it as I should have.”
“Dad—”
“I didn’t. Little girl with a wild imagination, taking her mother’s death hard—I worried I wasn’t enough to raise you right.” He took her in now, approvingly. “I don’t know if I did anything right or if it was all you, but look at you now. All grown up with a good head on your shoulders.”
I don’t feel it, Jordan thought. Every time she met Anneliese’s opaque blue eyes over the dinner table, speculation began raging inside, even as she chided herself. This is ridiculous, J. Bryde. You like Anneliese. (She did.) She’s lovely. (She was.) She didn’t even tell Dad on you when you were rude enough to go prying about her past. (She had not.) So why are you still . . . ?
Because you’re still jealous, and still trying to find fault, Jordan told herself with a mental kick, and kept doing her level best to squash the feeling out of existence.
“You’re so distracted,” Garrett said a few days before the wedding, when Jordan’s dad had all but ordered her to stop cleaning and go out for a date. “Do you even want to make out?”
“Not really,” Jordan confessed, and Garrett sat up as Jordan finger-combed her hair back into place. Ten minutes of kissing in the backseat of his Chevrolet had pulled it out of its blue band. “Sorry.”
“You’re killing me,” he said with big soulful eyes, but he hopped out of the backseat fishing for his keys. He wasn’t one of those boys to keep pushing if a girl said no; he groaned, but he backed off. Maybe this year we . . . Jordan thought, trailing off.
“What’s on your mind?” Garrett asked as they rearranged themselves in the front seat and he turned the car for home. “Wedding stuff?”
“It’ll be easier when it’s done,” Jordan admitted. Surely it would. Anneliese Weber would be Anneliese McBride, her stepmother. They’d be a family. That would be that.
THE WEDDING MORNING dawned bright and beautiful. Jordan was up first, pressing her dad to swallow some toast. He looked so sweetly nervous as she slipped a white rosebud into his buttonhole, smiling from under those straight dark-blond brows just like her own. “I thought I’d be the one walking you down the aisle.”
“Not for a while yet, Dad.” She stood back. “There.”
“You’ve been a brick, welcoming Anneliese like this. It means a lot.”
“Better catch your cab,” Jordan managed to say despite her choked-up throat. “If Father Harris shows up tipsy, pour some coffee into him. No postponing this wedding; I’m not stuffing you into this suit twice!”
She snapped a few shots off, then saw her father into his cab before dashing up to the guest room.
Ruth answered her knock, putting a smile on Jordan’s face. “Ruthie, you look like a princess! Twirl for me?” Ruth twirled solemnly, blond hair brushed out over the lace collar of her new blue velvet dress. I’m going to get a laugh out of you this weekend if it’s the last thing I do, Jordan vowed.
“There you are.” Anneliese stood before the mirror patting her face and neck with a powder puff, perfectly composed in her pink suit and broad-brimmed cream hat, not a bridal nerve in sight. “We’re almost ready.”
“You’re a vision,” Jordan said. “Dad will be speechless.”
“You look lovely too.” Anneliese turned, looking Jordan over in her blue dress, and for once she seemed to speak impulsively. “I look forward to making you things, Jordan. I make all our day clothes, Ruth’s and mine—I could run up a summer dress for you if you liked. Something not fussy, you aren’t a fussy girl. Three-quarter length, nothing floral printed . . .” Anneliese stopped herself with a laugh, looking suddenly rueful. “Du meine Güte, I swore I wouldn’t start offering to dress you, like you were a child! It’s the opposite, you see—it would be a pleasure to make a dress for someone who isn’t a child and wanting everything ruffled.”
Jordan felt herself startled into genuine laughter. “It sounds like we’d better set up the sunroom for you as a sewing room, then. But first”—she reached into her blue clutch for something she’d meant to offer days ago but hadn’t quite been able to manage—“I thought you might like to wear this today.” She held out the gold bracelet her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday.
“I would be honored,” Anneliese said quietly.
The last knot in Jordan’s stomach melted away. “Now you have something borrowed—”
“Something old—” Anneliese patted the string of gray pearls around her neck.
“Something new—” Jordan fastened the bracelet around her soon-to-be stepmother’s wrist. “Your pink suit—”
“And something blue,” Anneliese finished, lifting her bouquet of creamy roses with stems wrapped in pale blue satin ribbon.
Jordan smiled. “The cab’s waiting.”
Anneliese straightened her hat and glided downstairs. She glided into the chapel with the same silent grace, and Jordan saw tears in her father’s eyes. This makes it all worth it, she thought. Father Harris’s voice rolled across the chapel, and it was done.
THERE WAS CAKE and champagne in the vestry afterward, corks popping as friends crowded around. Soon the newlyweds would take a cab to South Station and be off to their honeymoon; Jordan had already prepared little bags of rice to throw. Anneliese chatted with some neighbors, and Jordan’s father swung Ruth up to his shoulder. “You want to hold your mama’s bouquet?”
“Don’t, she’ll drop it,” Anneliese began.
“She’ll be careful, won’t you, little missy?” He plucked Anneliese’s bouquet from her hands and settled it into Ruth’s. Jordan got an adorable snap of Ruth in his arms, burying her face in roses, looking cautiously thrilled with her new life.