“You like me a lot,” Jordan went on. “I like baseball and we always had fun in the backseat of your car, and I didn’t push for a ring or tell you to stop flying. You liked that.” So many things had crystallized this week, down here in the red glare of the safelight as she worked. So many things. “I like you, Garrett. I really do. You’re kind and sweet and you make me laugh, and you never told me I had to stop taking pictures . . . or thought I was a tramp because I liked rolling around in the backseat as much as you. But—”
“What are you getting at?” Garrett said.
“We’re good together.” Jordan made herself go on before she lost her nerve. “But is it love, or is it habit?”
A long silence. Jordan looked at him, steadily. Garrett looked at his folded arms. Finally he looked up.
“I’d like my ring back.”
Well, Jordan thought, that answers that. She pried the diamond off her finger, feeling a lump in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she began, but he turned around and started for the stairs, back straight and angry.
He stopped at the door, looking down from the top of the stairs. “I’ll break it to my family if you break it to yours.”
“Tell your mother I’m sorry. She’s been wonderful to me, I—” Jordan stopped before guilty babbling set in. She looked away, down at A Pilot at Work. “Garrett . . .”
“What?” His voice was as stiff as his back.
“When you took me flying, you looked so happy.” She pointed to the photograph of him. “That’s the real Garrett Byrne. The one in the overalls, not the one standing in front of me now in a suit. You should go back to flying, not—”
“Take your advice and shove it,” Garrett said and slammed out of the darkroom.
Jordan let out a long breath, looking down at her naked ring finger. Her eyes burned, and she wondered if she was going to cry. Five years, she thought. Five years.
“Back to work, J. Bryde,” she said aloud, blotting her eyes. “This career isn’t going to start itself.”
Chapter 34
Nina
July 1944
Polish front
The Germans are falling back! Clear into Poland—” But the Fritzes fought, clawing for every step.
A frigid winter had gone by, teeth chattering behind mole-fur masks on night runs; Nina’s navigator, Galya, lost a toe to frostbite, trying to laugh it off: “How are my dancing sandals going to look?” Yelena got clipped through the calf by ground fire soon after the year turned, and Nina’s heart climbed up her throat to see her lover come limping off the field with one arm around her navigator Zoya’s neck for support. “It’s nothing,” Yelena reassured even as Nina crashed to her knees and began running her fingers over the exit wound. “Straight through the muscle and out, stop fussing!”
Spring melted into summer, less flying, more sleep, but they all seemed to have lost their ability to sleep longer than a few hours at a stretch. “I get such headaches,” Zoya cried, and Nina tried not to feel the prick of jealousy when Yelena hugged her tight and crooned reassurance. You were close to your navigator when you were a pilot; it was inevitable. You loved her. Don’t love her more than me, Yelenushka. Red-haired Zoya, whose husband had died fighting in Stalingrad, who had two children in Moscow living with her mother—children whose pictures Yelena exclaimed over wistfully . . .
She doesn’t love anyone more than you, Nina told herself. They still crept off to lie together under the Rusalka’s wing, kissing and talking nonsense. Nothing had changed.
Only because you don’t bring up anything that might upset the balance.
They were flying over Poland by summer: a land of smoke and ruin and mud. A land that had been raped, Nina thought. The summer rains had churned the ground into a deep, malevolent glue that sucked on U-2 wheels and bogged fuel trucks. In their crude dugouts, the walls streamed water and the mud came up to the shin. “But look at this—” Yelena held out a fragile red flower. “Corn poppies. I found some blooming in the field behind the airdrome.”
Touched almost to tears, Nina stared at the poppy already wilting on the stem. I’m so tired.
Does anyone care, rusalka? Nina’s father sneered. So she kissed Yelena, threaded the poppy through her overall front, swallowed another Coca-Cola tablet, and kept going.
“IT SHOULD BE a crystal glass, not a soup can—”
“We don’t have a crystal glass. We’re lucky Bershanskaia let us have the vodka!”
The Night Witches laughed, oil smeared and radiant, exhaustion evaporated. The word had come down as they trooped into the canteen at dawn: Nina Markova and four other pilots were to be made Heroes of the Soviet Union.
It wouldn’t be official until the ceremony, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make the traditional toast. Yelena and four others had been the first to get their HSUs a few months back; now they jostled to the front and stripped off their stars. Yelena dropped hers with a clink into the small empty soup can in Nina’s hands, and Nina’s four fellow pilots held out soup cans to receive borrowed stars too. The entire regiment filed past grinning, everyone bearing a tin cup with the daily two hundred grams of vodka allotted to pilots. Normally they let the alcohol go to the men, Bershanskaia’s orders, but today the Night Witches poured all their vodka into the cans of the incipient Heroes, until the gold stars were covered to the rim.
“Drink, drink!” The cry went up, and Nina downed the canful of vodka in one gulp, Yelena’s gold star clicking against her teeth. She surfaced dizzily, and Yelena and the other Heroes lifted cans of their own, crying “Welcome, sestra!” and bolting down the rest of the regiment’s vodka. The others didn’t grudge it, they all crowded around cheering—Nina felt herself kissed so many times her cheeks glowed. She was dizzy with vodka and love. It’s just a medal, she thought as she tried to press the star back into Yelena’s hand, but Yelena pinned it crookedly to the breast of her flight overalls, laughing. Wear it for the day, get used to the weight! Yelena looked so beautiful with her cheeks flushed like corn poppies—“You’re beautiful too,” Yelena whispered back. Nina realized she must have said it aloud . . .
When the alarm blared, she looked up almost sleepily, too warm and content to be startled. But the canteen doors flung wide and there were three panting ground crew shouting. “Fighters coming over the field, the U-2s haven’t been camouflaged yet, get them up—” and pilots and navigators alike jostled out of the canteen, sprinting into the pink-streaked dawn. Nina dropped the soup can and ran blindly after her pilot’s flying dark hair. Yelena was already in the cockpit and the Rusalka’s engine roaring when Nina toppled herself nearly headfirst into the rear. Someone shouted, and the first spider shape of a Messerschmitt appeared. A U-2 to their left took off east over the nearest line of trees, another lifted to the north and dived up for cloud cover, and then there were U-2s rising into the sky in every direction. No orderly conveyor belt; everyone simply flinging the planes into the air and escaping every which way. The Rusalka rose like a bird, straight into the rising sun.
“Do we have the night’s coordinates?” Nina nearly asked, sheer rote habit, and blinked. Something wasn’t right here. She fumbled with the interphones.
“Whazzat?” Yelena sounded curiously fuzzy. The Messerschmitt passed over the airdrome; the strafing roar of its fire followed, and Yelena was yanking the Rusalka upward as fast as she could. “What?”
“Oh.” Nina figured it out. “I’m in the wrong plane.” Galya had headed for their U-2, but Nina had tracked blindly after Yelena and the Rusalka. It struck her as funny, and she giggled.
“Nina?”
Nina’s ears buzzed. Was the plane weaving? “Fuck your mother,” she called out. “I’m drunk.” She’d always been able to hold her vodka like a Siberian, like a Markov, but she hadn’t swallowed a drop in months. The whole world was slipping and sliding. “Are you drunk?”
“No,” Yelena called back.
The Rusalka was definitely weaving. The airdrome had fallen away rapidly below, they were rising into tatters of pink cloud. Disappear in the sky and they’d be safe from any more Messers; they had the fuel to wait it out in the air, not like the time they were chased down. Safe, Nina thought as the airfield disappeared. “What heading are we on?”
Pause. “I don’t know.”
“The compass—”
“The compass is all blurry.” Another pause. “I’m drunk,” Yelena said, and suddenly they were both howling with laughter in their cockpits. A canful of vodka on an empty stomach after a long night’s flying and no sleep . . . We’re drunk as polecats, Nina thought, and that was even funnier. Flying with Yelena instead of Galya; flying in the day instead of the night; everything was upside-down. Then Nina realized they actually were upside-down; Yelena was looping over a tail of cloud. “Got it!” she whooped.
They were up above the cloud floor now, flying along in the rosy morning. Nina squinted over the side of her cockpit, wondering how long it would be before the Messers abandoned the attack. “’Nother U-2 below.”