“It’s okay to cry, Mattie,” Aida said softly.
“B-b-b-but I never cry.” Tears, however, drowned out her assertion.
Aida shoved a brightly embroidered handkerchief into Mattie’s hands. The cheerful orange-red and turquoise flowers only made her sob harder. How could something be so joyful, sobright, as her world crumbled? Yet the gesture also touched Mattie. She knew that Aida’s grandmother had sewn the beautiful artwork. Aida always carried it with her to remind her of her family, and she was sharing that comfort with Mattie.
Mattie clenched the cloth as she dabbed at her eyes. With her female friends surrounding her, she allowed her emotions to flow.
“Why? Why did he get into that plane?” Mattie asked, even though she knew the answer, knew it all too well. Leo had done it to protect her from her own arrogant belief that she was somehow invincible. She scrubbed her eyes. “It’s all my fault.”
“It isnotyour fault,” Carrie told her sternly. “This is Earl Crenshaw’s doing.”
“Carrie is right.” Vera’s voice, normally so light and airy, sounded fierce. “Don’t blame yourself.”
“Leo tried to warn me.” Mattie clenched and unclenched her fists. “He told me Crenshaw was a dangerous man. I should have demanded that the plane be inspected.”
Aida reached out and squeezed her hand. “You didn’t because the press was there. You know how they would have portrayed it—a nervous female too silly and too stubborn to admit her own fears about flying.”
“Leo and I fought.” Mattie rubbed the bridge of her nose, wishing she could go back and listen instead of angrily digging her heels into the unsteady sand. “Or at leastIfought. I thought his reaction to Crenshaw was just another example of his overprotectiveness and that his concerns were overblown because of my sex.”
“There’s nothing more maddening than a man who thinks he knows more about your business than you do.” Sadie leaned around Lily to address Mattie solemnly.
“If fellows spent as much time supporting us as they do trying to hold us back, imagine how far we gals could go,” Lily said. Her statement was met with a chorus of agreement. Mattie thought of the Earl Crenshaws of the world, men who had such anger, such rage, toward women who had the audacity to think themselves equal. Crenshaw’s anger had become so intense, so irrational, that he had not only tried to kill her but also risked the lives of countless spectators.
Then Mattie considered her older brothers, who believed that their solemn duty was to keep their younger sister from all harm. But if she had been born a little brother, they would have seen it as their obligation to teach her to be a daredevil like they had Alfred.
Yet Leo...Leo didn’t seem to fit either mold.
“I don’t think Leo was trying to hold me back,” Mattie confessed. She thought of the fear she’d felt, theterroras his plane had hurtled to the earth. Did he experience something similar when she did stunts like purposely stalling in the air without warning him? What thoughts had ripped through him when her engine actually had failed all those months ago in Missouri?
“I don’t think Leo wants to limit your flying either,” Aida said softly.
Mattie turned toward her in surprise. Aida was normally the first to point out how perceived social constructs guided so many human actions.
“You don’t?” Mattie asked.
Aida idly tapped her purse like she normally would her notebook as she entered what Vera termed herscholarly mode. “There is a natural human instinct to protect each other that is distinct from society’s particular views of the roles each sex should play.”
“In what way?” Vera tilted her body forward so she could see Aida around Mattie.
“Think of the ancient hill forts in the British Isles, this need to encircle the village and all the people with jagged rocks. There is this deep desire to keep loved ones safe, which then extends to the community. Consider how we as humans care for our injured and sick. Birds will peck, kill, and stomp out weaker members, even push them from the nest, but we humans,webuild hospitals. This instinct has propelled us throughout history, from the first evidence of a healed life-threatening fracture to the ancient Incas, who developed brain-surgery techniques.”
An image of Leo’s spiraling plane whirled into Mattie’s mind, coupled with her memory of guarding his body during the blast. She understood now that powerful drive to protect, the need to wrap someone she loved in her arms and try to keep tragedy at bay. After all, she’d wanted to catch a falling aircraft, and if Vera hadn’t grabbed her, she likely would have tried.
But Mattie didn’t think of Leo as weak. Far from it. He was one of the strongest people she knew. The desire to defend didn’t necessarily correlate with the belief that the intended beneficiary was frail.
“Leo seems to possess an extraordinarily powerful urge to protect.” Aida’s fingers had stopped dancing across her clutch, indicating she had reached a logical conclusion.
“He does,” Mattie agreed in a whisper as her mind flashed back to pulling Leo from the wreckage.
“You. Okay?”
Even lying in the dirt, flames roaring around him, his body mangled after a fall from the sky, Leo’s first words had been an inquiry aboutherwell-being. And it wasn’t just her whom he’d sought to save. He’d turned the Fabin, knowing it would most certainly stall, in order to not risk the lives of the people on the bleachers.
“Men are always saying women like to fuss over their partner,” Aida said, “but men have similar desires and tendencies. It is one of the things that I find magical about society as a whole—our ability to care for each other.”
“I’m not used to anyone tending to me.”Leo had confessed those words to Mattie in the cooling room at the Geyser View Sanitarium. He’d grown up alone, in an orphanage that he’d only described ascold. Yet he had not become frigid himself.“When I got older, I tried to protect the younger ones from his punishments.”Leo made up for his lack of receipt of affection by, conversely, devoting himself to the care of others.
Before anyone could say more, a woman in a white lab coat entered the room, her dark-brown eyes solemn.
