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She waited a few minutes and then cautiously opened her eyes.

She’d heard all of it before and plenty more like it at Camp Davis.

Except for the last bit, the bit about not being able to go home again.

The word “unwanted” rang in the empty ready room.

She was already unwanted at home. And if what she feared was true, she’d be doubly unwanted.

When she finally took off, lifting up away from Ohio, away from men who believed her diseased in body, soul, and mind, her gorge rose with the plane. Another sign—because she never suffered motion sickness—that there was something wrong with her body.

The CO at Liberty Field welcomed Vivian and the other transferred WASP pilots.

The male pilots didn’t seem bothered at all by sharing flight time.

Some of the WASPs experimented with flying drones.

Vivian and the rest mostly ferried planes.

The ferrying meant she never had to stay in one spot too long; she could always plead the need for rest or an impending assignment to escape socializing.

George wrote Vivian regularly from Otis Field. Her letters were vague—George clearly didn’t want the censors catching on to her predicament. But Vivian knew what she was driving at.

I’ve never been so glad to be tall. I’m filling out around the middle—must be all that good Army food. Or something ...

Vivian attempted several responses:

I’m filling out around the middle myself. Because of something.

So happy for your good news. I have similar news that you will find surprising. I know I did.

What’s done is done, and can’t be helped, and I’ve decided to make the best of it.

She set a match to each of these letters. When the housemother yelled out that she had a phone call, “Long distance!” she hid in the john until the caller—it could only have been George—gave up.

Whenever her sister Elizabeth was pregnant, everyone coddled her, insisted that she take it easy. As if the womb were a precarious place, all too easily abandoned by its inhabitant.

Vivian did the opposite of taking it easy.

She signed up for every flight possible.

She took brisk walks in all weather. She swam in freezing ponds.

She ate spicy peppers. Her inhabitant fluttered but held.

Her belly swelled against her waistband.

Every town had a woman who might help with “female troubles,” but finding her meant admitting to having such troubles.

An admission that would get her kicked out of the WASP if it reached her CO.

By October, the worst of the heat had passed. In the cooler weather, no one found it odd that she wore her flight jacket all the time. The jacket provided extra camouflage for what Vivian knew she couldn’t camouflage much longer.

When the news came down that the WASP, despite the lobbying efforts of General Arnold and Jacqueline Cochran, would be deactivated in December, all Vivian wanted to do was talk to George.

Once the line for the barracks phone dwindled—one morose woman after another calling someone to say she’d be home soon—Vivian put the receiver to her own ear.

“Otis Field,” she said to the operator. The line clicked and buzzed, and as she waited, Vivian passed a hand over the swell of her abdomen.

It was inadvertent, this maternal gesture.

She found herself making it several times a day.

If others were nearby, she quickly returned her hand to her side.

If she was alone, she sometimes allowed her hand to linger there and tried to quell the revulsion she felt at what was happening—at what had happened—to her body.

She always failed. She was as ashamed of this revulsion as she was by her condition.

She didn’t see how anyone, even George, could ever understand.

By the time the operator said, “I have Otis Field for you,” Vivian had hung up.

A few days later there was a letter from George.

Dear Vivian, what on earth is going on? This silence of yours is alarming.

It’s been months! Are you angry with me?

Have you broken your right arm? Write me.

Call me. Fly up here. But don’t sit down there in Georgia making me wonder if you’re grounded, or if you’ve gone home, or .

.. worse. My CO won’t let me near the planes anymore.

I couldn’t hide it any longer. Now that they’ve scuttled us, I’m keeping out of his way, but I’m guessing I’ve got about two weeks left before I’m out.

So if I don’t hear from you in a week, I’m taking a plane and flying down there, come hell or high water. What have I got to lose?

Vivian kept her hands firmly at her sides as she marched out to the hangar. She signed out an A-24 on the log sheet. “Are the tanks full?” she asked the mechanic.

“Yep. Going far today?”

“Yep,” said Vivian. Officially, she was going as far as Washington, to deliver the latest reports on the drone research program.

Then she was supposed to turn around and fly straight back to Liberty.

They would be furious when she didn’t show up.

They would be more so when they learned she’d flown on to Otis Field.

But, as George wrote, what did she have to lose?

What could they do? Throw her out of a program they were shutting down?

“You’re a long way from home,” said the airman who took charge of the plane after Vivian landed at Otis. She shrugged and asked if he knew where she could find Georgeanne Ector.

“Ector?”

“I mean Rutledge.” How long, she wondered, would it take for George’s new name to stick in her head?

“Should have guessed. You her sister?”

“Well,” he said as Vivian shook her head, “you might as well be. She’s over at HQ.

Filing, she says. But most days she stops by, says hello, tries to sweet-talk me into letting her take just a little bitty flight.

” He leaned toward Vivian and confided, “And I would, but the CO’d have my hide.

Yours must not be so strict down at Liberty, letting you fly all the way up here in your condition. ”

This, along with George’s startled blink when Vivian appeared before her, confirmed that, flight jacket or no, Vivian wasn’t hiding anything from anyone.

Later, after they’d found a relatively private bench behind the exchange, and Vivian had explained, and they had dried their eyes, George said, “I remember him. He seemed like a nice man ...”

This, Vivian thought, more than money, more than upbringing, was the primary difference between George and herself. George’s life had been full of nice men.