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Maybe it was just that she was leaving, but on her flight home, tucked into a window seat, Ruth finally understood her mother’s affinity for airplanes.

There was something appealing about being on board.

Not in Cu Chi anymore, but not home (whatever that meant) either.

A peaceful in-between nothingness. A not quite of this earth–ness.

That feeling deserted her the instant the plane touched down at Travis.

By the time she reached Chicago, she was trembling.

It was just exhaustion, she told herself.

It wasn’t the civilian hair and clothing and ways of talking and moving, which seemed in some subtle, undefinable way different from how everyone had talked and moved in Vietnam.

Life had kept on, as it was perfectly entitled to do.

Everything seemed changed, yet just enough the same to be jarring.

She felt passed by, unmissed. It was partly her own fault.

Her father had wanted to pick her up at Travis.

“I’ll bid a flight—bring you home from there myself,” he’d written.

Her mother had offered to meet her anywhere along her route home and fly her back in the Cessna.

But Ruth had told them both no. She didn’t want to spend her first hours back fielding questions about Ivy.

While changing planes in Chicago, she had to detour around a group of teenagers.

They sat in a ring, like they were about to play duck duck goose, blocking the concourse.

All of them—even the boys—wore their hair long.

Everyone had longer hair now. Or maybe that was just a Chicago thing.

Ruth didn’t mind the hair. The protesting didn’t bother her either.

More people ought to protest, as far as she was concerned.

What she hated was that so many of them wore field jackets, painted and embroidered with peace signs and flowers.

Had the boys who’d been issued those jackets made it home?

Had Ruth bandaged them up and topped them off with fresh blood and sent them back to the jungle to be shot up again?

What did these kids, sneering at her dress blues, know about the young men whose jackets they’d defaced?

She hurried past them, swallowed her bile.

She was going to be just fine, she told herself as she gulped deep breaths of air on the flight to Oklahoma City.

The stewardess slipped her a gin and tonic. “My sister was a nurse over there,” she said.

Ruth was about to ask where, but the passenger next to her cut in. “What’s that?”

“Just 7 Up ,” said the stewardess as she faded up the aisle.

The drink was heavy on the gin, and it helped.

Ruth’s breathing slowed, and her hands stopped shaking.

She took the last swallow and began, to her seatmate’s evident irritation, to crunch her ice while gazing out the window.

Cloud cities reared up over sweeping white plains.

Ruth imagined angels gliding back and forth among them.

Her father wouldn’t find the view remarkable at all—he must see this all the time.

Had her mother flown this high during the war?

Ruth had never asked. She and Ivy had been almost malicious in their lack of interest about their mother’s WASP days.

It was one thing to listen to Aunt Vivian and their father talk about flying, but another thing entirely to hear about George’s love of planes, her nostalgia for a time before her daughters existed.

The note of longing in her mother’s voice when she spoke about her WASP days suggested regret.

For not choosing a life more like Vivian’s.

A life without daughters. Especially the one who wasn’t really hers.

Her parents might not want to hear about her war either.

But they’d want to hear about Ivy. Her sister hadn’t answered when Ruth asked when she planned to return.

“Not home, necessarily,” said Ruth. “Stateside.” Ivy merely lifted her shoulders, as if she didn’t care whether she ever saw any of them again.

But just before Ruth stepped into the jeep that would take her to Tan Son Nhut, Ivy had rushed up and hugged her fiercely.

She’d pecked Ruth’s cheek and said, “Be good, Ruthie,” then melted back into the crowd of farewell wishers.

The landing gear shuddered down, and Ruth spooked.

“Nothing to worry about, hon,” said the man next to her. “Just means we’re about to land.”

She considered informing him that both her parents were pilots. That she knew what landing gears sounded like, thank you very much, but she didn’t want to encourage any further conversation. Instead, she smiled softly at him, pretended she was grateful for his reassurance.

She thought of her mother and father again.

“It’s not that I don’t want to see you,” she’d written them.

“I’m just going to need some time.” Time to think about whether she wanted to ask the questions, to seek the answers Ivy had long wanted.

To decide whether she wanted to hear those answers herself.

She knew so little about her parents, not even whether they were actually her parents. “Time to settle in,” she wrote.

She met her father first, because he was easier. He, too, had been deceived. He broiled her a steak and set a wedge of iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island dressing, her favorite, on the plate beside it. “Iced tea?” he asked. Ruth shook her head. “Whiskey, then.”

“I know you want to ask about her,” Ruth said. “It’s okay to ask about her.”

He took his time chewing a bite of steak before he answered. “Let’s start with you,” he said. “Hard to come home?”

She couldn’t answer, as if the very question swelled her throat shut.

“Yeah. That’s not gonna change for a while, just so you know.”

She sipped her drink. Tom swallowed another bite of steak, then said, “War makes people do stupid things—I don’t just mean the fighting. You didn’t get married, did you?”

She nearly choked on her whiskey.

“People do. Your mother and I did. Frank and Helen ... Well, like I said, people do stupid things when there’s a war on. No one’s quite in their right minds. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”

She set down her glass and started to speak, but he interrupted.

“I know what you want to ask—I’d want to ask it too.

So I’ll just say right off, I don’t know.

I made your mother swear not to tell me, and she never has.

And whatever you and Ivy manage to find out, I’ll thank you both to keep it to yourselves.

I have two girls. That’s just that, Ruth. That’s just that.”

She tried Vivian next. Not in person but with a long-distance call. Vivian had moved to Oregon. She hadn’t mentioned this move in her letters, but George had written Ruth about it just before she came home.

I thought she was following a man we knew from the war. But it was the other way around. She wanted to move and he went along. I wish she’d picked somewhere closer. Oregon is so far away.

It certainly was. And the timing of Vivian’s move was ... interesting. It wasn’t a short trip from Enid to Houston, but it was nothing compared to Enid to Oregon.

Vivian’s phone rang for a long time before a man—the follower, Ruth assumed—answered. No, he said, Vivian wasn’t in.

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Couldn’t or won’t?”

“Who is this?”

“This is Ruth Rutledge. Her ...” Her what?

They’d grown up referring to Vivian as their aunt, though she wasn’t—not really.

Their only real aunt, their father’s sister, had died of complications from polio, long before they were born.

Ruth and Ivy never referred to themselves as Vivian’s nieces.

And almost certainly one of them was her daughter.

“Ah, one of George’s girls,” said the follower. “I knew your mother in The War.” His voice supplied the capital letters. As if her own war were lowercase, less than.

“You’re a couple of wars behind,” said Ruth. Then she hung up.