Page 69

From the start, Vietnam enchanted Ivy. The moisture, the heat, the green, the flat diamond light held her in thrall, and she thought, So this is what home feels like.

Home felt like freedom. Freedom from handling others so delicately.

All those brittle porcelain men in California—now she was free of them.

Free of Sam Benson, too, apparently. Though Benson seemed impervious to any sort of damage.

She didn’t have to be delicate with him.

“Where did you go to school?” she asked him once.

His mouth twitched as if he were stifling a laugh and he said, “Not Yale.”

“But where, then?”

“Louisiana State. Baton Rouge.”

Ivy must have looked surprised. “Now, Miss Enid, Oklahoma, you of all people should know talent doesn’t only exit through the doors of the Ivy League. Talent can be found in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It can be found on buses to New Orleans.”

Ivy no longer had to handle anyone delicately except sources and potential sources.

Because she couldn’t always be certain, at first, who those were, she often kept quiet.

Many of the stateside rules that had chafed and fettered her didn’t exist in her new enchanting home.

And she could usually work around the rules that did.

On the face of it, she knew she shouldn’t have been good at the job.

She stood out. She was female. She was tall.

Her hair, like Vivian’s, caught the sun at any angle, lighting up like a halo around her face.

She intentionally carried herself with a calm certainty that made people look.

But it also steadied the people she talked to, relaxed them, loosed their minds and then their tongues, so that they told her things without realizing or remembering it.

The sources she recruited trusted her. The radiomen especially liked her.

They kept her up to date on troop movements, skirmishes, supply communications, anything they thought she might like to hear.

Her French had taken on a Viet inflection. And she had taken classes back in California, getting the basics of Viet and Lao. “I don’t need you to speak them,” Sam Benson told her before she left. “Might be better if you don’t. But it can’t hurt you to understand them, even if it’s just a little.”

After she arrived in Vietnam, she rarely heard from Sam.

He’d passed her along to Ned Pennywell—quiet, steady, not at all fragile despite his Princeton tie.

Ned kept an office in a newsroom in Saigon, where he wielded an editor’s pencil.

He invited her to embassy parties, where he mostly ignored her presence.

He suggested a tailor just off Tu Do Street.

She went in and came out with coded messages slipped into her pocket by Mr. Anh as he measured her for yet another dress.

That’s how she’d learned, nearly two years ago now, that Ruth was on her way to Vietnam.

One of these messages—not in code and signed SB—said, “Your sister’s coming. ”

Which had set Ivy’s heart cantering around in her rib cage.

She knew Sam had backgrounded her before she started working with him.

But somehow, she’d imagined that he would leave it at that—just background, just history—not continue watching her family.

What did he know about her mother and father?

About Vivian? About Adele? About Ruth? What did he know, she’d wondered for the first time, about who she really was?

And what would bring Ruth to Vietnam? Had Sam approached her? Recruited her? Lured her to California? But why would he? Ruth had no facility for languages. And she lacked the essential unobtrusive curiosity to do what Ivy did. No, there must be another reason.

Ivy’s heart had settled to a trot. There weren’t many American women in Vietnam.

But when you looked closely, you did see them around.

And why were those women in Ivy’s enchanting country?

She knew of four possibilities: Ruth was a WAC, Ruth was a journo, Ruth was a nurse, or Ruth, like Ivy herself (ostensibly), was a Donut Dolly.

Her heart had slowed to a walk now, ambling through untroubling pastures.

She’d begin with the most likely possibility (Donut Dolly) and finish with the least (journo and nurse).

Ruth’s preference for not knowing—her natural inclination to mind her own business—made her unsuited to a journalism career.

And Ivy suspected she lacked the stomach for nursing.

Especially the sort of nursing required in a combat zone.

Ned Pennywell’s office had three desks and three phones.

One for Ned and only Ned. Two for a rotating cast of journos, both of which were currently in use.

Ivy sat on a window ledge, smoking, waiting for Ned to acknowledge her presence.

Which, after much scribbling with his blue pencil, much head shaking and sighing, at last he did.

“Shaw. You are here and yet I did not summon you.”

“Hello, Ned. Just popped in to do some research.”

“Will I be interested in this research? Will it in any way assist me with filling my requisite copy needs?”

“No.”

Ned pulled another sheaf of paper from his inbox, raised the blue pencil and his eyes to heaven.

Ivy lit another cigarette. “I was wondering,” she said, provoking a mournful sigh from Ned, “how one might go about finding a list of all the journalists working in or on their way to Vietnam.”

“That’s a rather wide net, Shaw.”

“Well, I do have a specific name.”

“Let’s hear it, then.”

Ivy had found herself suddenly reluctant to reveal Ruth’s name to Ned. As if he would care, she’d told herself. As if he would concern himself with Ruth’s identity at all.

“Rutledge. Ruth Rutledge.”

“Never heard of her.” Ned returned to his papers and his blue pencil.

“That’s it? You’ve never heard of her, so she’s not here? And not coming?”

Ned released a sigh of Shakespearean proportions. “There aren’t that many females in this profession. And especially not in this country. So no, she’s not here. Or I would have heard of her. And if she were good enough to be here, I would have heard of her too.”

She may very well not be good enough, thought Ivy as she dove for the now-free phone.

In two quick calls, she’d eliminated Ruth as a WAC or a Donut Dolly.

With one more call, during which she smoked two cigarettes while on hold, she learned that Ruth Rutledge, RN, would report for duty at Pleiku in less than a month.

Ivy could have easily steered clear of Pleiku.

Ruth never would have known they were in the same country.

Which, the more Ivy thought about it, was unacceptable.

Here was Ruth doing something utterly un-Ruth-like, taking her by surprise.

She wanted to spring the same surprise on her sister.

It would mean exposing herself. As soon as Ruth got a letter out, the whole family would know where she was.

But what did it matter? They couldn’t exactly come get her.

She was an adult. She made her own choices now.

If they wanted her to come home, they could tell her the truth.

Ivy ignored the journo hovering behind her. She picked up the receiver and made another call.

Ivy hung back from the airfield. She liked watching Ruth during triage.

She was efficient. Competent. The nurse in charge kept an eye on some of the other women, but never Ruth.

Ivy had been watching Ruth more often of late.

Spying on her—she should just admit it. Soaking her in, as if that would make things any easier when Ruth went back to Enid.

Just the other night, she’d watched Ruth stumble out of the O Club in the arms of a surgeon. They headed toward the motor pool, no doubt looking for a back seat and some privacy. Everyone needed an occasional distraction.

For a time, Ivy had had a distraction of her own.

A USAID worker (officially). Married, which was how she preferred them.

(Was Sam Benson married? She’d never noticed a ring.) She and the AID worker had often crossed paths in Saigon.

In hotels with crisply pressed sheets. A pitcher of water on the bedside table.

The ceiling fan revolving slowly above them.

But a year ago, he’d come too close to a tripped land mine.

The soldier five feet behind him was only nicked by shrapnel, but her AID worker wasn’t as fortunate.

Ivy had found him in the hospital—in the curtained-off section where the nurses put the ones who weren’t going to make it.

She held his hand until he stopped breathing.

She kissed him one last time and then took everything unrelated to his USAID work or his family out of his pockets and burned it to ashes in a coffee can.

She was doing just fine without distractions for now. At least until Ruth left or Sam Benson found a reason to make an appearance.

Down at the airfield, Ruth shouted, “Go! Go!” as she jogged alongside a stretcher to the hospital. Maybe Ruth would re-up again. Don’t be greedy, Ivy chided herself. Ruth had already stayed for an extra year. Who in their right mind would stay for a third?

Besides me, thought Ivy.