“Don’t sulk, she’s good!”
“Not as good as me.” Jealousy pricked Nina, seeing Yelena head off to fly with someone else while she lay in bed. Two weeks grounded, just because a shard of windscreen went through her forearm! “If she doesn’t bring you back without a scratch, I’ll knock her buckteeth down her throat.”
That got a laugh from Yelena. The dormitory was empty besides the two of them—Nina fuming on her cot, arm in a sling, Yelena perched at the other end in her fur overalls. The others had trooped out for the evening’s briefing. “Keep the hole in your arm warm,” Dusia had said, ruffling Nina’s hair. “Matches the hole in your head, you crazy rabbit.” They all made jokes, but over sympathetic eyes. They all understood how much it hurt to be forbidden the air.
Yelena took a deep breath, and Nina braced herself. “I nearly killed us both—”
Nina leaned forward and kissed her, warm lips lingering in a cold room. “Stop that, Yelena Vassilovna.”
“For an instant I thought the landing flares were lights from a Messer. I knew they weren’t but it looked so real for a moment. I couldn’t stop—” A shudder went through her. “If I’d thrown us into one more spin—”
“You didn’t.”
“Because you banged my head off the seat.” Yelena tried to smile, but her eyes were more shadowed than ever in her narrow face. When did you get so thin? Nina wondered, a lurch in her stomach.
“You had a panic, Yelenushka. A hallucination. Everyone has them.” Even the best pilots, the best navigators. It was just a question of whether a moment’s panic was fatal or not.
Yesterday, for them, it was not. As far as Nina was concerned, that was an end to it.
“You didn’t tell Bershanskaia,” Yelena said. “If she’d known, she might have grounded me too.”
“You need to get back in the air.” Nina knew her pilot down to her fingertips, every last doubt and worry. “You stay on the ground even one night, you’ll brood. Get in the air, fly ten good runs with no mishaps, and you’ll be right as rain. Now go join the others, before Bershanskaia notices.”
Another kiss butterfly light across Nina’s lips, and Yelena was gone. Nina thumped back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. She closed her eyes, but all she saw was Yelena in a borrowed U-2, taking off into the night sky without her.
Are you sure she’s all right to fly? the thought whispered.
NINA STRUGGLED OUT of her cot at dawn, making her way to the airfield past a notice for a Komsomol meeting (Mutual Help in Combat Is the Komsomol Member’s Law!). The U-2s had returned; they were already being covered over with camouflage drapes. Nina grabbed the nearest of the ground crew. “Where’s Yelena Vetsina?”
The girl turned, red-eyed, her lips trembling. Nina suddenly realized that the entire field was hushed, ground crew working with hunched shoulders. From somewhere, she heard the choked sound of someone weeping. The quarter moon above was disappearing into a beautiful dawn, but the world had telescoped into something nightmarish.
Nina heard her own voice and couldn’t tell if it was a roar or a whisper. “What happened?”
Chapter 25
Jordan
May 1950
Boston
To you, O Lord, we commend the soul of Daniel, your servant . . .”
Dan McBride’s coffin was covered with lilacs and roses. It was the lilacs that smelled strongest, wafting up into the warm spring day like someone had smashed a bottle of perfume. Jordan’s throat tightened in nausea. Who ordered a huge wreath of lilacs for a coffin, like a hoop of sickly purple tissue paper?
“In the sight of this world he is now dead; in your sight may he live forever . . .”
In fact, Jordan thought, eyes roving blankly over the flower-heaped coffin, over the bowed and black-hatted heads around the graveside—who decided flowers had to be heaped on a coffin in the first place? Her father’s coffin should have been heaped with fishing lures, scorecards from Red Sox games, flasks of his favorite scotch. Jordan should have dragged down the Minton dishes that they had used for Sunday lunch as long as she could remember and lobbed each plate one by one to go smash on the coffin’s lid . . .
“Forgive whatever sins he committed through human weakness, and in your goodness grant him everlasting peace . . .”
Peace, Jordan thought. Peace. What good was that to her dad when she didn’t have it, when Ruth and Anneliese didn’t have it? He was the hub of the family, the one who brought peace. They were still standing grouped together around the place where he should have stood: Anneliese a step away as though standing on his right arm, a slender column in black, a swathe of netting descending over her face from the brim of her black hat; Ruth trembling on what should have been his left side, hand in Jordan’s. “It’s almost over, cricket,” she managed to whisper, as the priest intoned, “We ask this through Christ our Lord” and a ripple of Amens echoed. Followed by a ripple of another kind as the coffin was lowered down into the earth.
I lied, Ruth, Jordan thought of telling her sister. It’s never going to be over. This day is going to last forever. After this would be the graveside condolences, then the somber drive back to the house where cake and casseroles, whiskey and coffee would be served. More condolences and reminiscences and dabbing of handkerchiefs, everyone wanting to know what happened, everyone wanting the details, such a tragedy. How many times today were Jordan and Anneliese between them going to say it? A hunting accident. No, no one’s fault. His shotgun exploded . . .
“Did your father look after his own weapon, miss?” the policeman had asked Jordan that day in the hospital corridor—Anneliese had been too upset for questions, frozen beside her husband’s bed, listening to the rasp of his breath.
“Yes.” As long as she’d gone to the lake with him, Jordan could remember him wiping down his shotgun, cleaning it carefully before hanging it back on the wall. “It was my grandfather’s. He treasured it—he never let it go back on the wall in less than pristine condition. How did it—”
“The problem wasn’t the shotgun, miss, it was the ammunition. It looks like he bought smokeless powder shells—with an old LC Smith twelve-gauge like he had, Damascus barrels, that soft old steel shreds apart if you use the newer ammunition. There are plenty who don’t know that, I’m afraid. The rounds look alike, and people just don’t realize. Did he buy his ammunition himself?”
“Always.” Jordan fiddled with a crooked hook and eye at her waist. She’d torn herself out of that ivory bridal gown at the boutique and back into her summer dress so quickly, all the fastenings were crooked. “I don’t shoot, and Anna doesn’t either.”
“Then he either bought the wrong variety or didn’t realize the newer kind wouldn’t suit his shotgun. I’ve certainly seen it happen before.” A sympathetic glance. “I’m very sorry, miss.”
Everyone was very sorry.
“Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,” Father Harris finished at last. Jordan joined the unison reply. “May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”