Her Last Flight(21)

“This is important.”

But when I reach for the buttons of his trousers, he stops me. “Hold on, sweetheart. That was my last rubber.”

“That was what?”

“My last rubber.”

“How can you be out of rubbers already?”

“Well, I don’t usually need so many.”

“Can’t you get more?”

He laughs. “Sweetheart, this is Hanalei. I can maybe buy more tomorrow, on Oahu.”

“Tomorrow!” I flop myself back down on the pillows. “Why didn’t you think of that today?”

“I did think about it. But I didn’t want to push my luck.”

I roll away and reach for my dress. He rolls after me and takes me by the waist and nuzzles my skin. “You don’t have to leave, you know. I’m not some one-trick pony.”

“I know that already.”

“Or we could go to sleep. I know how to make you sleep.”

I stare at my fingers, which have stopped trembling, at least for the moment. Leo pulls, ever so gently, at my waist.

“Don’t be scared, Janey,” he says. “I don’t bite.”

“Oh, yes, you do.”

“Not where it hurts, though.”

I shut my eyes and force myself to my feet. As I pull the dress over my head, I know he’s watching me, and I think how easy it would be, how comforting, to change my mind. To slide back into his bed and fall asleep between a pair of strong arms. He’s right, he knows how to make me sleep. That’s what men are for, to help you sleep, to form a barrier between you and your phantoms. If I return to my bed at the inn, I might lie awake for hours. I might never sleep at all.

On the other hand, there are dangers aplenty in Leo’s bed. There is the danger I felt when he took my hand an hour or two ago and led me up the narrow back staircase to his room; the danger I felt in my own disappointment when he stopped me at the button of his trousers. The fact that I want nothing more than to fall asleep with Leo is reason enough not to sleep with Leo.

He doesn’t try to hold me back, though. For such a young fellow, he’s got sense. He just sits on the edge of the bed, and when I’ve finished dressing he stands up to kiss me good night. He has this trick of smoothing my hair back with both hands, like I’m a cat.

“I forgot to ask,” he says. “Did you find Irene?”

“I did, as a matter of fact. We had a nice chat. And then we went to the airfield and watched a plane crash.”

Leo’s hands fall away from my hair. He steps back.

“What? When? Whose plane? Is she all right?”

“Oh, Irene’s just fine. It was the brother-in-law who got hurt. Kaiko? She flew him to the hospital on Oahu.”

“Uncle Kaiko?” he shouts.

The telephone rings again.

“I think you’d better get that,” I whisper.





Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)





March 1928: California



The human brain does strange things in extremis. As Irene lifted her skirt and ran across the grass to the cloud of dust that obscured Papillon, she thought about Sandy, of all things. Who was going to take care of the kitten? Sam’s wife? What if she didn’t like cats? Irene’s legs pumped, her heart thundered, and she wondered if she could take Sandy home herself, if her father would care, and where was Mrs. Sam Mallory anyway, and then she arrived at the settling cloud, the throng of men, and saw a wing tilted to the sky.

Years later, after everything had passed, Irene’s fingers still turned cold at the memory of that wing. At the time, she was too shocked to be afraid. She saw the wing, saw where it attached to the fuselage, saw that the wheels had partially collapsed and that the other wing had folded neatly against the ground. None of that mattered, though. The only thing that mattered was the cockpit, and the cockpit—the cockpit—she couldn’t see, somebody was climbing on the wing, it was Mr. Rofrano—reaching his hand—grasping—the cockpit—an arm—a cheer, a roar from the crowd—and God save us all there was Sam, Sam Mallory, shoulders straining against an oil-stained flight suit, standing on the wing next to Mr. Rofrano, waving, jumping down to the grass. People started to climb on the wings. Sam shooed them off, but he was still laughing. Irene wiped the tears from her cheeks. He was talking to Rofrano. Another man shook his hand. A trickle of blood came down the side of his face. He took off his glove and wiped it with the back of his hand, went around to the broken wing and lifted it up, and Mr. Rofrano lifted the other wing, a few other men took hold of the wings, the fuselage, and Papillon started forward again on her remaining wheel, headed toward the hangars, trailed by her public.



Sam Mallory had a cut on his forehead and a broken finger, which some doctor in the crowd splinted for him. They stowed the broken Papillon in the hangar, and Irene retrieved Sandy from the crate where they had left her, together with some newspaper and a dish of cream.

“He should have been killed,” Mrs. Rofrano said cheerfully, “but he’s just too lucky a pilot.”

Everyone had gathered in the cafeteria—everyone being the pilots and mechanics, the community of flight that was Rofrano’s Airfield—where the cook served up plates of sandwiches while Rofrano himself poured something that looked like whiskey from a plain, unmarked bottle. Irene had lost count of the number of rounds in Sam’s honor, the old war stories, the strange, overblown laughter that seemed to come not from the whiskey, as that kind of laughter usually did—at least in Irene’s experience—but from something else. Not that the whiskey wasn’t helping.