“Had to. Anyway, what difference does it make?”

The commandant’s quarters were small and bare, just a washstand and a narrow camp cot, a tiny lavatory attached. Sam said he would sleep on the floor and went to get their kit bags from the hangar. Irene sat on the camp bed and closed her eyes. Her ears felt as if they’d been stuffed with rags, but she was used to that sensation. Silence, that was the only luxury she cared about now. Silence and darkness. There was a blackout curtain hanging in the window; she got up and pulled it shut, then lit the paraffin lamp, just enough to see by. She took off her flight suit for the first time in two days and washed herself as best she could in the basin. When Sam opened the door she turned. He didn’t see her right away. He set down the kit bags and the pair of blankets and said something about filling their canteens from the sink. His voice trailed away in the middle of a sentence. In the hollow glow of the lamp, his expression changed from shock to wonder to despair. His mouth gaped open, trying to make words again.

“Does George know?” Sam said at last.

“He does now. I left him a letter.”

The room was small, and they were only a few yards apart. Irene stood with her hands straight down her sides, wearing only her underwear, her plain silk undershirt and silk drawers, silk not for luxury but because Irene found it the most comfortable fabric for long flights.

Sam asked if he could touch her. She said of course.

He stepped forward and stretched out his blistered fingers to measure the shape of her abdomen. How long? he asked, and she said Six months, and he said No, I mean when will it be born, and she said About the beginning of August, and he started to sob. She gathered him in her arms while he wept into her hair. Between them, the baby jerked and stirred like a grasshopper.

Sam did not sleep on the floor that night, after all. Somehow they found a way to wedge together in the cot. When dawn broke, and Irene started from some dream, she smelled cigarettes and knew he had been awake for some time, turning everything over in his head.

“Well?” she said. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that if it’s a boy, you should name him for your father.”

“What about your father?”

“I don’t remember my father. He left my mother soon after I was born.”

“Oh, Sam.”

The room was hot and stuffy, and they were both naked, stuck to each other like a pair of coals that had burned out together. Irene loved the way her belly fit into the curve of Sam’s side. She didn’t want to rise. Every part of her felt heavy and grafted onto Sam. She didn’t think she could move. She asked, “So what if it’s a girl?”

“No girls. After Pixie? No, I can’t take another girl, Irene. I can’t take that kind of hurt again. It’s got to be a boy. That’s all I ask, a son.”

“You’ll find her again, Sam. She’ll come back to you. She will.”

“I don’t get it,” he said. “How could your own husband not know you were pregnant?”

“Because he hasn’t seen me naked in months.”

“Still.”

“Well, the flight suit’s baggy. And I’m tall, so it doesn’t show that much, anyway. If you’re not looking for it, if you don’t want to see it, you don’t see it.”

He stubbed out the cigarette and kissed the top of her head. “Fair enough. But all the same, we’ve got to get you out of here. The sooner the better.”

When they got down to the hangar fifteen minutes later, they were amazed to find that it was full of children. The Republicans wanted to evacuate them from this strip of war zone bordered by the Bay of Biscay on one side and the Nationalist-held territory to the south. At the ports they were loading children on steamers, bound for England and Mexico and the Soviet Union. But these ships were filling fast, so someone had decided that the children with relatives in the eastern regions—those still under government control—should be transported there by air.

“It’s too dangerous,” said Sam. “What if some German patrol bumps into us? They won’t give a damn that we’re a civilian aircraft.”

But the Republican officers insisted. Whatever the danger, it was worse here in Biscay, which Franco was determined to bomb into submission and then take by force. Irene just shrugged. “I can fly them to Valencia in less than two hours. We can take three planeloads in one day, maybe four if we leave right away.”

Sam said darkly, “Can I speak to you for a moment, Se?orita Foster?”

But Irene got her way. It was her airplane, after all; she could do what she wanted with it. And what she wanted was this: she wanted to fly her airplane for some decent cause, some noble cause like evacuating the Basque children; she needed to work herself almost to death in order to purge this unspoken guilt that she was somehow complicit in the bombing of Guernica because she flew airplanes, because she had, in her na?ve enthusiasm, so relentlessly pushed the frontiers of aviation, and it had all led to this, the dropping of bombs, the machine gunning of civilians from the air. Sam threw his fist against the wall of the hangar but Irene crossed her arms and held firm.

“All right,” he said. “But I’m flying too. If we both fly, we can finish sooner. And when these children are safe in Valencia, Irene, you’re done. Is that clear? You stay in Valencia with them.”

“Only if you stay in Valencia too,” she said.

“Irene, I have to go back. I can’t just desert.”

“The only thing left to do is to fight to the death, and you promised you weren’t going to fight. Remember? Back in California, you said you’d had enough of fighting.”

“That was before I saw what happened here.”

“You promised. You swore to God, remember? If you stay here and fight, then I’ll stay here and fight, right beside you, so you can keep your promise to me. You can die in my arms.”

“Jesus, Irene. How do you remember these things?”

“That’s my deal, Sam.”

She stared him down, until she could see him weigh the scales in his head: on the one side, his death wish; on the other side, Irene and the small grasshopper they had made together. Finally he shook his head. The grasshopper won.

Outside, Raoul was readying his airplane to fly, checking the skin for any holes or ruptures, checking the propeller blades and the wheels. Irene noticed that his eyes were red and she stopped to ask him if there was any news, had he heard anything.

“Yes,” he said. “They have found her body at last. She was killed in the first wave. A building collapsed on top of her.”

“Oh, Raoul! I’m so sorry.”

He turned to climb into the cockpit and stopped, with his hand on the edge of the wing. He spoke into space, but just loud enough that Irene could hear him.

“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why God should have killed her and the child, when the sin was mine. Why he did not just kill me instead.”

“God did not kill them, Raoul. The German bombers did.”

Raoul turned to her and kissed her hand. “Good-bye, Se?orita Foster. I fly back to El Carmoli now. May God watch over you and my friend Mallory.”

All that week they ran to Valencia without incident, not a single German airplane in sight, though the sky was wide and blue and cloudless. Sam flew the only spare airplane he could find in Bilbao, a French-built Potez bomber that could barely manage a hundred miles an hour. In the air, flying the Sirius next to this ramshackle ship, Irene felt like a Thoroughbred trying to keep pace with a Shetland pony. In the back of the Sirius was a woman who was supposed to be chaperoning the twenty-two children crammed in the fuselage, which was not equipped for the transportation of any animal at all, let alone a human child, let alone twenty-two of them. By the final trip, the woman seemed to be drunk. Irene was so relieved when they arrived safely in the municipal airport in Valencia and handed the children over to some supervisor, she nearly threw up. It was the middle of May and the weather had turned hot. Sam followed her into the ladies’ waiting room, which was empty, and waited until she came out of the washroom.

“I have to go back to Bilbao,” he said.

“No, you don’t. You’re done, remember? You promised.”

“Well, there was a radio message from the commandant, and another bus full of children just turned up at the airfield. If I leave now, I’ll get there just before sunset. Then I fly back first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Not without me, you’re not.”

“For God’s sake, you’re pregnant! Don’t do this to me, Irene. If I lose you, I’m done for.”

“No. We fly together, Sam. That’s the deal. And if we take my ship, we’ll be there and back in half the time.”

“Irene,” Sam said wearily, “you are the goddamn most stubborn woman in the world.”