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George lifted Ivy and Ruth from the pram—she had practiced this over and over, making sure she looked proficient at handling two babies—and then the porters whisked it away to some unknown part of the train.

When they reached Chicago, pram and luggage appeared on the platform.

Another porter took the suitcases, and George pushed the baby carriage to the train to Kansas City, where the process began all over again, until, traveling on a series of trains that diminished in size and amenities with each transfer, she arrived in Oklahoma City.

Along the way, she spoke only when necessary to other passengers, usually in answer to questions about her babies.

“My twins,” she practiced saying, over and over, until it sounded natural.

“Three months old. Yes, both girls.” Other women brought her sandwiches from the club car.

They brought her hot wet towels. They held the babies, her twins, while she “freshened up.” They told her to think nothing of it when she thanked them.

The war was still on, and people had gotten used to helping one another out.

Like everyone else, she’d been elated when the Allies crossed the Rhine.

Victory in Europe seemed likely now. But there was still the Pacific Theater: Bataan, kamikaze pilots.

Tom was somewhere in the Pacific. Over the Pacific.

Flying high enough, she hoped, to turn violence into an abstraction.

Though she knew, from towing the targets for the ack-ack drills, that the sky was far from safe.

Perhaps she should wish him grounded, far back from the front.

Somewhere with warm food and dry socks and regular mail delivery.

Somewhere he could learn that he now had two daughters.

Our twins , thought George as she restored the babies to the pram on the Oklahoma City platform. The air carried the scent of petroleum—just the creosote from the railway ties, but still, it smelled like home.

“You didn’t waste any time, did you?” said Adele once they’d settled the babies in the nursery.

The sight of two white cribs and two matching white dressers, pink-and-white curtains fluttering in the windows, her grandmother’s rocking chair, spruced up with a pink cushion, had George blinking back tears.

It was all so domestic, so sweet, so ..

. unexpected. Adele bustled about, unpacking the babies’ things.

“It’s this war. Children getting married, having babies, hardly knowing each other at all.

Not that that matters. They won’t know each other anyway once the soldiers come home, if the last war is any lesson.

Still, all this rush. As if they’ll cheat death because of it.

Which one is this?” She lifted one of the infants from George’s arms, and George’s heart quickened.

Her babies were so tiny, her mother such a force.

“Ivy. She has more hair.”

“Must get it from Tom’s side. You certainly didn’t have much at this age.” Ivy opened her eyes and batted a fist in the air.

“And this is Ruth,” whispered George.

“Ruth and Ivy. Big for twins, aren’t they?”

“Not really,” said George. “Not that the doctor mentioned anyway.”

“New York doctors don’t know everything. I made you an appointment with Dr. Bristow.”

Before George could protest that her babies were perfectly fine and didn’t need to see a doctor, Ruth awoke and began wailing.

George had lost track of time. The girls were overdue for a feeding.

Ruth would cry until a bottle appeared, but not Ivy.

Ivy would sleep and sleep and sleep. George had to wake her to feed her, and then she drank greedily, burped, closed her eyes, and slept some more.

George had waited to leave New York until her breasts had stopped leaking and throbbing.

“Better go with formula,” the pediatrician said, “if you plan to sleep the next few months.” Not nursing them felt awful at first. Every time one of them—well, Ruth usually—cried, George’s breasts ached and leaked.

But now, they merely twinged. “Here,” she said, handing Ruth to Adele, who sagged under the weight of both babies, “I’ll fix a bottle. ”

She waited for her mother to condemn the use of formula, but Adele was bobbing and shushing and cooing, with a softness in her face that George didn’t recall from her own childhood.

Ruth squalled louder. George rushed to the kitchen, clasping her twinging breasts.

She wondered where Vivian had gone and what she was doing.

“I should have brought you my baby books!” said Helen. “I have all the latest ones. There’s a whole science to child-rearing that our parents—well, they just had no idea.”

“Hmm,” said George. She’d said little more than “hmm” since Helen arrived, with a plump, sticky-cheeked Frank Jr. in tow.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She had gushed about what a handsome boy Frank Jr. was, the spitting image of his father.

It had been the wrong thing to say. Helen’s eyes went flat, as they did any time George mentioned Frank.

George changed the subject to the difficulties of handling infants.

The idea of George having difficulties brightened Helen right up.

To keep her from darkening again, George limited her responses to “Hmm.” With an occasional “Oh yes?” thrown in for variety.

“You must miss Tom terribly,” said Helen.

“Oh yes?” said George. “Oh. Yes. Yes, I do. Terribly.” And she did.

She feared for his safety. Just as Helen surely feared for Frank’s, especially because Frank was being held as a POW in the Philippines.

Was it wrong that George feared for him too?

That she could so easily call up their furtive moments in the back seat?

“We’ll all be so relieved when they come home, won’t we? ”

“I suppose you and Tom will head to Kansas?” The hope in Helen’s voice told George those back-seat encounters hadn’t been as furtive as she’d believed.

And then—it happened so suddenly, even though she’d received a letter telling her he was on his way—Tom was there.

Standing in the doorway of her mother’s house.

Adele mentioned something vague about a lunch out, about errands, about not waiting for dinner on her account, and disappeared, leaving just Tom and George. And the girls.

Would he know? George wondered. Would he see right away that one of them wasn’t his?

By this time, both girls were so fully hers that she went days without remembering Vivian’s role.

She was prepared, in the event of Tom’s knowing, to fall to her knees and beg, to remind him that when they’d first met, he’d spoken of chivalry.

What could be more chivalrous than protecting and raising an innocent child?

But Tom had only marveled at his daughters, noting with awe the similar shapes of their ears and noses, the differences in their eyes, the way Ivy crawled like an infantryman, while Ruth scooted around the room on her bottom.

Only when the girls went down for their nap did George think to marvel at her newly returned husband.

Tom pulled at his collar. Worry crept across his face. George took a deep breath, ready to launch into her speech, but he said, “So strange being in civvies again. Don’t feel like myself.”

“You must be exhausted,” said George. “Naturally.”

He chuckled. “Not too exhausted. I wouldn’t mind lying down, Georgie. I wouldn’t mind that one bit.”

“God, I missed you,” said Tom, after he and George rolled apart.

George giggled. “I could tell,” she said, pressing herself back against him.

She shook thoughts of Frank from her mind.

She’d inflated those furtive back-seat moments in her imagination.

Tom was home. Uncomfortable in his civvies, exhausted, but not too exhausted, and not at all suspicious, thank God.

“I wish I’d been there when they were born. I’m sorry you had to do it all by yourself.”

“I had Vivian.”

“Oh, I know. You always have Vivian.”

“But I wish you’d been there too.” Except, of course, she didn’t. Because if Tom had been there, she might have only one of them. And she couldn’t imagine a life without both her babies.

The girls stirred, and George rose to dress. “You rest,” she said.

“No, I’ve got phone calls to make.” He’d flown with a pilot who had an in at American Airlines.

The pilot thought his in might extend to Tom, and Tom wanted to remind him of that before the pilot extended it to anyone else.

There wouldn’t be enough jobs for all of them—any fool could see that.

Not with the munitions plants and the airplane and tank manufacturing lines shutting down.

Not with more than fifteen million soldiers demobbed and needing to support their war brides.

He couldn’t sit around resting. He had his own war bride.

He had two daughters. “And we’ll want to get out of your mother’s hair,” he said. “Get a place of our own.”

George envied him. No matter who she knew or how little she rested, TWA and Pan Am would never hire her to fly their planes.

Adele had sacrificed George’s own plane to the war effort years before.

“Well, you weren’t flying it anymore,” said Adele.

“And I could hardly justify just keeping it parked at the airfield, not when, as you always made such a point of saying, you were flying much bigger and better things.”

Her mother was right. Her J-2 would have seemed puny and dull after her months of flying jets and bigger, more powerful planes.

Flying wasn’t in her future, and she decided not to let it color her present.

She turned her focus to more suitable goals.

Tom landed a job with American Airlines.

He’d earn a good salary, buy them a house, keep up his end of the postwar bargain: to come home, pretend he’d never seen anything awful, and live a productive, middle-class life.

George would keep up her end of that bargain, too, by taking superlative care of her husband and her daughters.

She was determined to be a more motherly, more feminine , example to her daughters than Adele had been to her.

She learned to cook a roast and bake a soufflé.

She browsed the shops for just the right throw pillows, for cute outfits for the girls.

Helen sewed the most adorable things for Frank Jr., but George knew there was a limit to her own domestic abilities.

That limit appeared to be the sewing machine—the one machine that refused to yield to her mechanical aptitude.

This didn’t escape Helen’s notice. “I don’t know how you manage to find such sweet things for the girls,” Helen said.

“The boys’ clothes are just not quality.

One touch and I can tell they won’t hold up.

But I suppose girls aren’t so hard on their clothes. ”

“Hmm,” said George, wondering where Vivian might be. Vivian had become itinerant. George never knew when to expect a call, or where it would come from. Only that she’d hear engines in the background. The roar of a takeoff, the falling pitch of a landing.

“Just a minute,” Vivian would say, and then, when the plane had taxied farther away, or cut its engines entirely, she’d say, “Okay, I’m back.” Vivian got to fly those planes. “Just Cubs, mostly,” said Vivian. “Nothing like what we flew before.”

“Hmm,” said George.