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Whether or not Ivy wrote their parents, Ruth didn’t know, but at the next mail call she received a thin letter—a single airmail sheet—addressed to Ruth and Ivy Rutledge.

Dear Girls,

I hope you are reading this together.

They weren’t. But Ruth hadn’t seen Ivy in days and she wasn’t going to wait around for her to find out what her mother had to say.

I wish I didn’t have to write this letter.

Laying the guilt on rather thick, thought Ruth. Not that they didn’t deserve it.

Your grandmother passed away two nights ago in her sleep.

The doctors believe it was her heart. They say she never felt a thing, but I don’t entirely believe them.

I hate to think she was lying there in the dark, needing me, and unable to call.

Her service will be this weekend. I wish you girls could be there.

There’s more to be said, but I just don’t have it in me right now.

Ruth had no time to cry. Hueys were descending with a beautiful delicacy that belied their horrible racket and cargo. Ruth put the letter in her pocket and jogged out to meet them. Hours later, when she stepped out of the hospital, she found Ivy waiting for her.

“Where have you been?” asked Ruth. Ivy’s only response was a hardening of her jawline.

“Forget it,” said Ruth. “Honestly, I don’t care where you go and what you do. Whatever it is, it just brings in more business.” Ruth jerked her head at the hospital behind them.

“Is that what you want?” asked Ivy. “To know what I do?”

“I think I know what you do.”

Ivy’s laugh was low. “I put on a pretty pastel dress and smile for the GIs.”

“Okay, Ivy. Good night, then.” Ruth turned to go.

“Fine. Here’s what I do. I watch. I listen. Mostly to find out where people are and where they aren’t. And I put on a pretty pastel dress and smile for the GIs. Sometimes I do all of that at once.”

Ivy slouched against the frame of the tent.

Ruth wondered if she’d been drinking. But no, she didn’t smell like she’d been drinking, and her eyes were clear.

She recognized a gleam in them that meant Ivy wanted something.

Ruth didn’t know what she wanted, but no doubt it was the reason she spoke so freely.

“I’ll give you an example,” said Ivy. “A village might be there one day, and then we move them out.”

“Meaning you burn them out.”

“But come back two weeks later, and it’s there again. Or it’s there, but the residents are VC—fresh down from the trail.”

“Not if it’s been naped,” said Ruth, thinking of the blistered lesions she’d seen on the locals she’d treated recently. Horrible wounds that could never possibly heal enough to make their sufferers whole again.

“I keep tabs on who’s moving where, mostly,” said Ivy. “That’s it in a nutshell.”

“I don’t know how you can stand it,” said Ruth.

“Working to keep all this going.” She’d had a bad week—first the nape victims, and then more Hueys, disgorging one wounded man after another.

They lifted them onto the operating tables and repaired them and then sent them back out to the jungle.

Where the insatiable maw of the war devoured them.

The lucky ones were injured enough to be sent home to a fractured existence. Ruth was disgusted.

“I don’t want to keep this going any more than you do,” said Ivy. “I’m working to make it end. As fast as possible. So they can all go home.”

And what about you? wondered Ruth. Because her sister seemed oddly content in Cu Chi.

Would Ivy go home? It was difficult to picture her back in Enid.

Difficult to picture her in anything but her fatigues or the occasional cocktail dress.

The Donut Dolly uniform didn’t count—it was so patently a costume.

Ruth had been on her feet for ten hours, and the news of Adele’s death, submerged beneath her focus on the wounded, suddenly shot to the surface. She pulled the letter from her pocket and handed it to her sister.

Ivy scanned it and said, “Oh, Ruth. I’m so sorry.”

Ruth turned and strode toward the hooches. Ivy had been waiting for her. She wanted something. To get it, she’d have to do better than that.

Ivy caught her arm. “Really, I am. She was ... she was a great lady, wasn’t she?”

Ruth yanked her arm away. “For God’s sake, Ivy, what do you want?”

“I’ve found someone. Someone who knows everything. Come with me. You’ll see.”

“I go back on duty in four hours. I’m not going anywhere except to bed.”

“I already worked it out with Stanich. She put you on a later shift.”

“Screw you, Ivy. You don’t get to work things out with my boss. I’m not going anywhere. Our grandmother just died. ”

“I doubt she’s my grandmother.”

“How can you be so stupid?!”

“Stupid is letting people fool you with lies. I want the truth. I want to know who I am.”

“You’re Ivy Rutledge. You’re my sister. That’s who you are.” Ruth stopped herself from adding: Why isn’t that enough? She blinked rapidly, determined not to cry. Why was she always the weak one? Where did Ivy get the strength to remain so ... unmoved?

But maybe she wasn’t. Ivy’s own eyes looked damp. She brushed her sleeve across them.

“Why can’t you see that that’s true?” pleaded Ruth.

“Why are you so afraid?” asked Ivy. “Why are you so afraid to hear what’s real? I’m the one who should be afraid.”

“You know we’re sisters,” insisted Ruth. “Maybe not by blood, but you know it all the same. Same with Adele. She’s our grandmother, and you know it.”

“Come with me,” begged Ivy. “Come with me, and we’ll find out for sure. It took me forever, but I found someone who knows.”

Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe it was the grief. Or the novelty of seeing Ivy cry. Or just her lifelong habit of giving in to her sister. But for whatever reason, Ruth went.

Ivy led them to the Officers’ Club. Ruth wasn’t much of a drinker, but some days obliterating the images of the preceding hours was absolutely necessary if she was ever going to set foot inside the hospital again.

And there had been nights when she’d been so lonely, when she’d needed someone’s arms around her, and given the unbalanced gender ratio and the fact that pretty much everyone in Cu Chi at one time or another needed someone else’s arms around them, sitting alone at the O Club bar was an invitation that never went unaccepted.

Ivy’s quarry wore civvies. He was stationed at a table near the back with the camp CO and a visiting officer whose bearing (Ruth couldn’t make out the insignia in the dark) suggested a rank of colonel at minimum.

The civvies—clean and well pressed and seemingly unaffected by the damp heat—caught Ruth’s attention right away.

The man wearing them saw Ruth and Ivy almost as soon as they saw him.

He blanched and then recovered himself. Ruth’s stomach dropped.

“We’ll get something to drink first,” said Ivy. “On me.”

“Who is he?” asked Ruth. Before Ivy could answer, the man had joined them at the bar.

“Ladies,” he said, touching an imaginary hat brim. “May I get you anything?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Ivy, “you may.”

Without asking what they preferred, the man ordered three scotches with rocks from the bartender.

“If you’re not the Rutledge girls,” he said, “I’ll eat my hat.

” Ruth giggled. Exhaustion, the man’s insistence on his imaginary hat, the fact that she was in Vietnam at all—the scotch couldn’t come soon enough.

“I go by Shaw now,” said Ivy. The man’s face revealed nothing. “Ruth, this is Mr. Quigley. He was with our ... with Georgeanne and Vivian at Camp Davis. He’s at Lockheed now. Corner office, or so I hear.”

“My wife warned me that you girls were the spitting image of your mother.” He raised his glass to them. “How is she? Besides worried sick about you two.”

“If you mean Georgeanne, she’s been better,” said Ivy. “Her own mother just passed.”

He mumbled apologetic sounds into his drink. Ruth struggled to keep up. Who was this man, and how would his wife know what she and Ivy looked like?

Ivy went on: “If you mean Vivian, who knows? She writes, but I don’t read her letters. Ruth probably does. She’s good about things like that.”

Mr. Quigley signaled the bartender for another round. His glass was empty. Ruth’s was close behind. Ivy hadn’t touched hers. What the hell, thought Ruth, and tossed back the rest of her drink.

“Attagirl.” Mr. Quigley pushed another glass toward her.

“Fancy running into the Rutledge girls halfway around the world. Although, in the aviation business, you do tend to run into people where you least expect it. Saw your dad at Travis on my way over. Dropping off a transport. Looked sharp in that American Airlines uniform.”

Halfway through her second scotch, it hit her. “You’re married to Joyce Elliot,” she said.

“Oh, bravo, Ruth.” Ivy scowled.

“Guilty as charged,” said Quigley. He asked if she wanted another drink. Ruth declined. “Suit yourself. I should get back to the brass. Bad for business to leave ’em hanging. But what a treat. Wait till I tell Joyce. She won’t believe it. Give my best to your mom.”

“Mr. Quigley,” said Ivy. He was someone who gave orders rather than took them now—anyone could see that. But Ivy’s tone rooted him to the spot, his hands clutching a bouquet of scotches for the brass, his eyes suddenly wary and tired. “Which one of us is whose?”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. Your wife said you helped them. In their time of need. Which was exactly when they would have been pregnant with us. We already know that much. So: Which one of us is whose?”

He stood there, the ice in the drinks melting, watering down the booze. Then he nodded as if he’d made a decision and that decision was final—one to be lived with, regardless of where it led. “Does it matter,” he asked at last, “at this point?”

“Facts always matter,” said Ivy.

Quigley emitted a harsh laugh. “Oh, sweetheart. If facts mattered, none of us would be anywhere near this place.”

“They matter to me,” Ivy insisted softly. “They matter to us.” Ruth shook her head no, thinking, Not to me, thinking, Please, please, please, whatever secrets you have, please keep them.

Perhaps Quigley understood, because after another pause, he said, “Sorry, sweetheart. I don’t know.

And I’m not sure I’d tell you if I did.” And then, without seeming to move at all, he was back with the brass, passing the drinks around, saying, “Daughters of a pilot I knew at Camp Davis. Spitting image. Now the fuel capacity in these new models ...”

Lewis—the beautiful one—was the first nurse in Ruth’s hooch to rotate out.

They went through two bottles of gin celebrating her departure.

Then another nurse left, and another—more empty gin bottles, more miserable hangovers, more grousing from the ones left behind about how much longer they had to go.

But Ruth never groused. She thrived on the adrenaline rush of it all.

Yes, she saw awful things. Yes, she was exhausted.

But none of this made her long for home.

Home wouldn’t quite be home with no Adele there.

New nurses rotated in. Ruth was now the one with the patinated, worn-in fatigues.

The one they looked to for reassurance and advice and comfort.

She gave it when she had it in her to give.

Which was why it was right to leave when your time was up, she knew, because at some point you wouldn’t have a shred of reassurance or comfort left in you.

Stanich rotated out, replaced by a woman who was her exact mental replica encased in a different physical form.

This one tall and rangy where Stanich had been short and all curves.

The Donut Dollies went home and were replaced too. All of them except Ivy.

Ivy never pestered Ruth again about their parentage.

On the occasional evening when they had a drink together, they spoke of other things entirely.

Usually the present, sometimes the future, rarely the past. No longer on the defensive, Ruth sometimes allowed herself to wonder, Was she her mother’s daughter?

Was she Vivian’s? Unwanted by one? Wanted—was she?

—by the other? Could she trust herself not to demand the truth from them when she saw them again?

When the paperwork came through for her return, she tore it in half and signed up for another tour.