“Irene knows everything she needs to know.”

“Are you sure of that?” I open the door, slide out, and slam it shut again. The window’s open. I lean my head inside. “Good-bye, Olle. Tell your wife she knows where to find me.”

The desk clerk can’t suppress a smirk when I walk inside. “Miss Everett! Here you are at last. Have you enjoyed your stay with us?”

“Positively delightful, thanks.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Although, now that you mention it, my upstairs neighbors were making a terrible racket last night. You know how it is. I had to sleep elsewhere, or I wouldn’t have caught a wink. Perhaps you might consider taking it off my bill?”

The smirk fades. The fellow starts to stammer.

“In the meantime, I’d like my room key, please.”

He turns and takes the key from the hook and a small envelope from the pigeonhole beneath. “You have a message too,” he says grudgingly.

Upstairs, my room is neatly made—no surprise there—and really quite attractive, for a rustic beachside sort of hostelry. It’s decorated in blue and white and if you strain your neck out the window at just the right angle, you can glimpse a sliver of ocean. You’ll have to take my word for that, however. I’m frankly too exhausted to do anything except collapse on the bed and pull the envelope from the pocket of my slacks. Inside, there’s a folded note and a five dollar bill. I spread the note between my two hands and hold it up against the ceiling.

Dear Janey,

I enclose your five bucks. The drinks were on the house.

Yours always,

Leo

PS you left something behind

The next thing I know, I’m thrown awake in a panicked sweat. My heart’s chattering, my lungs panting. In my ears, over and over, plays the scream of a doomed engine followed by the metallic smash that jolts every pore. In my fist, Leo’s note is crumpled to a tight, damp ball.

But this experience is not unknown to me. I know what to do when I wake in a thundering panic, when the unexpected crash of an airplane starts the process all over again. You just lie where you are and listen to your breath, you count the beats of your pulse and your respiration until they return to normal, and then, if you haven’t got a body lying conveniently next to you on the bed, you rise and hunt for one.

I strap on my espadrilles and head to the Hanalei Tavern.

“So where’s Leo?” I ask the bartender.

“Bringing in the afternoon boat.”

I lay down my five dollar bill and ask for a pair of whiskey sours. By five o’clock, I’m good and tight, and Leo’s walking in the door, whistling.

“There you are,” he says.

“Here I am.”

“I’ve got something for you upstairs.”

“So I hear.”

“Bill,” he says to the bartender, “cover for me tonight, will you?”

What I left behind at Leo’s place last night was my necklace.

It’s not much, really. A small gold oyster shell containing a small pink pearl, strung on a fine gold chain, not worthless but not priceless, either. Still, it’s got sentimental value. Leo goes to fasten it on my neck, but I swat him away and fasten it myself. Leo’s got nothing to do with my necklace. That’s between me and the person who gave it to me.

“Suits you,” says Leo.

A word about Leo. He caught my eye on the boat from Oahu, not just because he was commanding the ship—there’s something about a sea captain, isn’t there?—but because he’s rather beautiful. I don’t think he’s altogether Polynesian, but he’s not wholly European, either. He has dark hair and hooded light brown eyes that turn up at the tips, and his skin is the color of wood drenched in sunlight. He’s not especially tall, but his proportions are divine, and the maritime life seems to keep his muscles honed. I don’t usually prey on fellows younger than me—in fact, the opposite—but this one made my mouth water, and as I said, it was no hard duty to take him under my wing last night and make him sing.

Now he regards me in the mirror, as I work the clasp of the necklace and finally catch the hook. Suits you, he says, when I turn around at last. He holds out his hand and pulls me back into bed. I’m wearing nothing but necklace, and he’s wearing nothing at all. He stretches my hands above my head and kisses the hollow between my breasts, beneath the tiny pearl snug in its tiny shell. He asks me why my fingers shook as I fastened the necklace.

“Need you ask? A girl doesn’t just snap right back to herself after a ride like that.”

Leo studies me for a bit. “If you say so.”

“I say so.”

“Hungry?”

“Starving.”

He lets me go and rises from the bed to pull on a few clothes. He says he’ll bring up sandwiches from downstairs. (He lives above the bar, you understand.) When he’s gone, I roll on my side and contemplate a search of the premises, but I find I haven’t got the strength to lift a toe. Instead I squint at his bookshelf, trying to make out the titles, and when Leo returns, plate piled high, I ask him if he came straight here from the pier when he brought in the afternoon boat.

“Like a shot,” he says.

“And this morning. When do you leave for your boat?”

“Early. A quarter to seven.”

“So you haven’t spoken to anybody? Just me?”

Though my mouth is full of ham sandwich, Leo reaches out to cup my cheek. “Just you,” he says.

The telephone rings. He doesn’t flinch.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” I whisper.

“No.”

“What if it’s important?”

“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