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Ivy had begun to think Ned Pennywell was wrong, that she had been forgotten. So many people were. Sam Benson had a great deal of cargo, human and otherwise, to extract from Vietnam. Just because he was so often at the top of her mind didn’t mean she was on his.

This Saigon wasn’t her Saigon anymore. The boy selling cigarettes outside the Caravelle hadn’t been seen in weeks.

The empty tailor’s shop off Tu Do Street had been torched.

A message? If so, to whom, exactly? Because wasn’t the dire state of the entire city of Saigon a message at this point?

One her country had been particularly obtuse in decoding.

She unwrapped the silk scarf and scanned the old letters from her family.

Their professions about missing her and longing to see her, their pleas for her to stay safe no longer read like words of obligation.

Maybe they were still writing to her. Maybe they had been all along.

Letters that sat at the bottom of some censor’s inbox, that clogged file cabinets in San Diego or Saigon.

Letters charred to ashes in a burn pile near Tan Son Nhut.

She replied to this phantom correspondence, writing her sister, her mother, her father, Vivian.

Imagining the censor’s black marker hovering over her words.

Careful not to mention things like the vanished cigarette boy, the torched shop.

Not to write anything of any relevance at all except for variations of: I’m sorry.

I’m coming. As soon as I can. She doubted her letters made it out.

Probably the mail clerks checked them for cash, then tossed them in the burn piles, atop the contents of the embassy file cabinets. She wrote them anyway.

She stopped by the press office daily, but Ned had no pale-blue envelopes for her, no assignments, no instructions.

She began chatting up American pilots, doling out marijuana cigarettes—packaged just like regular cigarettes—to anyone with a flight license. Anyone who might be able to get her to a ship. To Manila. To Tokyo.

Because that spring, everyone who could was bugging out.

The Sam Bensons of the war effort were bringing out the interpreters, the scouts, the people with the right credentials, and also plenty of people with no credentials at all (the call girls, the supposed orphans, the cigarette boys and tailors).

There hadn’t been any parties in weeks—nothing she considered a party anyway.

Just hotel rooms full of increasingly despondent journos and diplomats moping over their increasingly watered-down drinks.

Ivy showed up anyway. If you wanted to be remembered, you had to make yourself seen.

Finally, one night Ned caught her by the elbow and murmured, “It’s time, Shaw. ”

She strapped one child after another into the cargo hold of the C-5.

Then she fastened herself in and waited for the plane to take off.

Outside, palms clacked in the wind, and men shouted over the engines, and the gut-punch miasma of defeat drove everyone into a nauseated panic.

Ivy took a deep breath and thought maybe, after she saw her family (she couldn’t think about her mother dying—there was no way it could be true), she’d turn around and head to Hawaii.

Or Malaysia. They’d want her to stay home, but Enid wasn’t home.

She no longer allowed herself to think of Vietnam as home, because how would she ever return to it?

She placed a soothing hand on the frightened toddler beside her, recalled the touch of her mother’s steady, cool hand.

She remembered being little and feeling that steadiness transmit itself deep within her, soothing whatever troubled her.

She remembered being older and dodging her mother’s hand, shaking off her touch.

When she reached Enid, she would let that hand linger for as long as her mother wanted. Maybe, just maybe, that touch was home.

The engines fired, and the plane began its slow taxi. She wished she had a window, regretted volunteering for the cargo hold over the passenger bay. For her there would be no last long look, between liftoff and the moment the plane punctured the clouds, at the beautiful, wrecked country below.

She wasn’t particularly worried about what would come next.

When she left Enid, she’d never imagined she’d end up in Vietnam.

Her life had been spontaneous, not planned.

Not by her, anyway. Now people would expect her to have a plan.

They’d start by asking, Where have you been?

The bolder ones might add, Why did you go?

And everyone would want to know, What will you do now?

The plane tipped. The child beside her fussed. “Don’t worry. It’s okay,” she murmured in Vietnamese. The plane tipped some more. The smaller children cried out. The older ones’ eyes steeled over with resignation. The other adults in the cargo hold clutched their harness straps.

“Shhh,” soothed Ivy, keeping her hand on the child beside her. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

She closed her eyes and felt her mother’s cool, steady touch.

And then the plane tipped one last time.