“Irene,” he said, “there’s nobody for miles. This is the desert, the badlands.”

“You should try.”

“Can’t leave you here alone. Might be days.”

“Then at least you’d save yourself.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, stroking her hair, “don’t worry. They’ll send someone out to look for us. Just sit tight, all right?”

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, believe me.”

He laughed and kissed her forehead and said she was the same old Irene, the same good sport, game for anything. What he didn’t say was that his bum ankle was actually broken in several places, and that his left ear was nearly torn off, and a deep gash cut through to the bone of his left thigh, narrowly missing the femoral artery. No, he wasn’t going anywhere, and certainly not miles out into the scorching desert. Not unless he had to.

Still, when night fell again, Sam managed to drag her back into the fuselage, which had settled deep enough in the earth that it was not such a great height, just a ledge. In the darkness, she couldn’t see the blood, or his mangled face, so she didn’t know how much effort this required. She went to sleep, and sometime during the night she dreamed that they were outside, the three of them, alone in the night, Sam and Irene and their dead child, who was wrapped in a bundle in Sam’s arms so she couldn’t touch him or see him. She tried to scream, to give some voice to her anguish, but the peculiar paralysis of dreams had stiffened her so she could neither move nor speak. The stars twinkled coldly at her grief. Even though she couldn’t actually say the words, she heard her own voice ask Sam where they should bury the baby, and he replied that when the sun rose he would dig a hole beneath a boulder nearby that reminded him of a bear.

She realized she was awake. She asked Sam to repeat what he had just said.

“I buried him with my own bare hands in the graveyard next to the airfield,” Sam said.

“Him,” Irene said.

“Yes. The commandant promised to put up a headstone when the bombing stops.”

As he spoke, Sam made some rustling movements. Irene didn’t know he was binding up his thigh and his ankle with some gauze in the medical kit. The iodine and the morphine he saved for her, because he knew that burns were the most painful wounds of all, and the most susceptible to infection.

“Did you give him a name?” Irene asked. “Will there be a name on the stone?”

“Henry Foster Mallory. Is that all right?”