uncomprehending: girls like Tania mocking her flyaway hair or provincial accent. But this laughter was merry, and looking around, Nina saw that a good many of the girls looked every bit as ridiculous in their own enormous uniforms.
“We can cuff and stitch the hems, but you are out of luck on the boots.” Yelena shook her head. “Have you got some cloth to stuff into the toes?” Nina’s scarf went into the right boot, as Yelena unwound her own.
“I can’t take yours.”
“Nonsense! What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine, Ninochka.”
Another reflexive bristle—Nina never heard fond nicknames except from men trying to get her into bed. But Yelena had finished stuffing Nina’s boots and was making introductions, and everyone seemed to be on a first name basis. “Lidia Litvyak, we call her Lilia . . . Serafima here is from Siberia like you—”
“Not as far off as the Old Man, though!” came the friendly reply. Cautiously, Nina smiled back. Yelena kept rattling off names, and Nina knew she would hardly remember any of them, but there was a similar look to these women Raskova had recruited, no matter how different they seemed on the surface. Some looked barely eighteen and some approached thirty; some were little like Nina, others tall and strapping; some had city accents and some had provincial burrs . . . But they all looked like they were used to the feel of engine grease under their nails, Nina thought as they crowded around her bright-eyed and friendly, welcoming her to the ranks.
Questions were pelting now, as they asked Nina how she had come to flying. “I saw my first plane, and I fell in love with it.” Heads nodded.
“My father was furious when I went to pilot school in Kherson,” one girl said. “The women in our family all work in the steel factory—”
“I told my mother I’d fly someday,” another said. “She asked me ‘Where, from the kitchen stove to the floor?’”
Something in Nina’s chest expanded. Sestra, she thought, giving the plain word the twist that had made it something unique when she heard it in Yelena’s voice. Nina had not felt this burgeoning warmth since the day she walked singing with Vladimir and the other pilots to enlist—the warm feeling of belonging. Only these women would not leave her behind.
Nina’s fellow pilots hauled her off to find a meal then, talking away, and they were still talking three days later on the train platform, on their way out of Moscow. To some unknown airdrome for training, where the first female pilots of the Red Air Force would learn to be lethal.
Chapter 13
Jordan
October 1946
Selkie Lake
The end of October meant autumn leaves and duck-hunting season, and Anneliese seemed enthusiastic when Jordan’s father proposed a day at the cabin. Now Jordan watched her stepmother look at the red and gold trees reflecting in the surface of Selkie Lake, exclaiming, “Beautiful!”
“Our first time here as a family.” Dan McBride fished out the big square key that locked the cabin. “I thought you’d like it.”
“Don’t count on me to bag anything,” Anneliese warned. “I can’t hit a target to save my life.”
“Now, I don’t believe that—”
“Would I lie?” She made a rueful face. “Kurt tried over and over to teach me, but I’m hopeless. You’ll get far more ducks without me.”
“Ducks?” Ruth’s brows furrowed as she climbed out of the car after Taro. “Dead ducks?”
“You don’t need to see them, Ruthie,” Jordan reassured. “They can take the guns out to the far side of the lake, and you’ll stay with me. The only thing we’ll shoot is pictures.”
Ruth looked relieved. Still too quiet for a little girl, Jordan thought, but after a summer’s worth of diner sundaes and trips to the movies, at least she was talking and smiling at the dinner table.
“How lovely!” Anneliese was enthusing as her husband unlocked the hunting cabin his father had built on the shore. She went inside, looking at the stock of firewood, the narrow cots and blankets, the kerosene lamps. “Everything necessary if one needed to hide.”
“Who needs to hide?” Jordan asked, following her inside.
A shrug. “It’s the way someone who has been a refugee continues to think, even when danger is over. Wanting a place with a door that locks and something to protect oneself with.” Nodding at the rack of hunting rifles on the wall. “I suppose those will need cleaning after a season on the wall. That’s what Manfred always used to say.”