“No nightmares?”
“Not lately, no.” With practice every day and a lesson every time Mr. Graham could squeeze one in, Ruth was blossoming. “You’ll want a proper teacher for her soon,” Mr. Graham had said after the last lesson, just after he’d come back from his driving trip. “I can give her scales and simple melodies, but she’s soaking it in like a little sponge. She’s even trying to piece her way through tunes she’s heard me play, or remembered from the radio.”
If Ruth has music, Jordan thought, she’ll adjust just fine when I leave in the fall. Which meant Anneliese had to be told. Soon. Not yet.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Jordan had asked her stepmother over the telephone, hearing strain in Anneliese’s voice.
“Making plans.” Anneliese sighed. “It’s been quite a summer for plans, hasn’t it?”
And the summer was going so fast, Jordan thought, coming out onto the airfield. Soon fall would be in the air; she’d be packing for New York. No more evenings in the shop, watching a famous war correspondent teach her sister to play a simple, haunting lullaby from Siberia where Nina Graham had grown up. No more informal chats afterward as Mr. Graham made tea and told a story in his deadpan English baritone about how Maggie Bourke-White was so focused during her camera work that once her halter-neck shirt fell down around her waist and she didn’t even notice. No more Tony . . .
He looked over his shoulder with a grin, pointing at the blue-and-cream biplane named Olive now rising from the runway into a slow loop around the field. Jordan couldn’t stop her stomach from flipping at that grin, and she didn’t try. Enjoy it now, enjoy it all. Before summer ends.
“Gary took Nina up for a spin.” Tony was laughing. “He said she could take a turn on the student controls. This is going to be good.”
Overhead, Olive came out of her sedate loop with a sudden swoop downward, took a screaming turn around the airfield, then flipped inverted and clawed up steep and fast. The plane nearly disappeared into the blue, then came roaring back a matter of feet over the hangar roof, painted belly flashing overhead seemingly close enough to touch. A final hammerhead turn, then Nina brought Olive down using about half the runway Garrett had used taking off.
Jordan looked at Tony. They both burst out laughing. She barely managed to get control of herself by the time Garrett climbed out of the instructor’s cockpit, looking a little green around the gills. Nina hopped out in one lithe movement like a cat jumping from a roof, stripping off her flying cap. “. . . a little heavy on the controls,” she was saying as Tony and Jordan approached. “But good little plane. Nice.” Patting the wing, business-like. “You have anything faster?”
“Um. Well, not yet, we’re a small operation—” Garrett pulled himself together, expression warring between chagrin and admiration. Admiration won out as he asked, “Could you show me a few things, Mrs. Graham?”
“SHE WAS A PILOT with the Red Air Force?” Tony had discreetly filled Jordan in on a few things after dropping Nina off at the Scollay Square apartment.
“Sure. We don’t spread it around, not as Commie crazy as people are here.” Tony pulled up in front of Jordan’s house, hopped out of the car. “Here you go. I take it you’re disappearing into the darkroom for a few hours to develop all that film?”
“How’d you guess?” But Jordan paused. Ruth was playing at a neighbor’s house; it would be hours before she’d have to be picked up. Hours, Jordan thought, eyeing Tony.
He handed her out of the car, quirking an eyebrow at her considering gaze. “What’s on your mind?”
Nothing at all proper, Jordan thought. But the hell with proper. She was tired of the stepping-stone path of dates and doorstep kisses and white-gloved visits to meet the parents; the sedate junior-league progression of approved stages that had made her feel so caged in with Garrett. She wanted something private and wicked and just for her, something absolutely, gloriously improper. She took a breath. “Would you like to see my darkroom?”
He gave his slow, eye-crinkling smile. “I’d be honored.”
It was the first time Jordan had taken him—taken anyone outside the family, really—down these steep, separate steps under the front stoop to her private enclave. She threw the switch, pointing out Gerda and Margaret looking down from the wall, her equipment. Tony wandered around, looking at everything. “So this is where you spend all your best hours.”
“Some bad hours too. Whenever I cry about Dad, it’s always here.” Not quite as often, now—grief was beginning to be overlaid by the first layer of skin and time. Jordan supposed that layer would get thicker and thicker, and in a way she was sorry. Grief cut, but it also made you remember. “Whether good or bad, everything that’s important happens here,” she said, inhaling the familiar smells.
Tony touched the long table, looked up at the lights. “I like it.”
“I want something twice the size. I want printing assistants, I want other photographers to share it with.” Jordan slipped out of her shoes. “There are so many things I want.”
“I’d tell you I’d give them to you, but you want to earn them.” Tony leaned against the wall. “Go ahead, get to work.”
“I start working, I lose track of time,” she warned.
“I’ve got time. Nina’s taking over a shift of work from Ian, and he’s hogging our only telephone. I’ve got nothing to do but watch you.” Tony linked his hands behind his head. “And you are an unbelievably tempting sight when you are lost in work.”
“Really, now.” Jordan turned for the scrap of yarn she used to keep her hair out of her face. Lifting her hair off her neck, she felt his eyes on her nape like a kiss and looked back over one shoulder with a smile. “It’s dull, watching film get developed. You’ll be bored to tears.”
“You nibble your lower lip when you’re concentrating,” Tony replied. “I can be happy for hours watching you do that.”
“You’re a charming liar, Tony Rodomovsky.”
His smile faded. “I try not to be.”
Part of Jordan wanted to cross the floor and drag his head down to hers on the spot. Part of her was enjoying the rising anticipation too much to hurry. “Well, let’s see how well I can work with someone watching and thinking impure thoughts.”
His grin returned. “Very impure thoughts.”
She switched on the red safelight, pulled out her film, and got started, happily conscious of his eyes. Lifting the prints out and clipping them to the line one by one, she stood back.
“Verdict?” Tony asked behind her.
“That one, maybe. Possibly that one.” Pointing. “I need to enlarge it, focus on just the hands against the propeller blade.”
He wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, looking at the prints over her shoulder. “How do you know?”
“How does anyone know how to do anything?” Jordan caught her breath as his jaw scraped the side of her neck. “Classes. Practice. Years of hard work.”
He nipped her earlobe. “Fair enough.”
She tilted her head back against his. “Tell me a secret.”