3
Cassie bought a bottle of Advil in a pharmacy on the way back to her own hotel and swallowed three pills without water. She didn’t want to wait until she got back to her room to start treatment. She put the washcloth and soap from the hotel into the trash can on the corner. In another one she threw away the towel and the remnants of the Stolichnaya bottle, including the broken shoulder. But then she realized that the bottom of her shoulder bag was still dotted with shards and smaller pieces of glass. The lining, no doubt, had yet more traces of Sokolov’s DNA. The bag itself was evidence. And so she removed her wallet and passport, her apartment keys and her phone. Her hairbrush. She retrieved her foundation and her mascara, and had a moment of panic when she rooted around inside it and couldn’t find her lipstick. But she couldn’t focus on that now, it was too late. She obviously wasn’t returning to the suite to see if she had left it there. Then she dropped everything she had retrieved into the plastic bag from the pharmacy. A block away, she tossed her shoulder bag into yet a third trash can.
As she walked, she wished she were one of the women lost but for their eyes in the dark folds of their abayas. She thought she might puddle in this crazy desert heat; she wondered if she might liquefy like a Popsicle.
She had been back in her own hotel room barely a moment—she had taken off her scarf and sunglasses and lifted her suitcase onto one of the two queen beds to begin packing, but that was all—when there was a knock on her door and her heart stopped. This was it: Hotel security. The Dubai police. Someone from the American embassy. When she peeked through the peephole, however, there was Megan, the flight attendant already in her uniform. Cassie was relieved, but felt a pang: Was this how she would feel for the rest of her life when there was a knock on her door or the phone rang? Once again she considered returning to room 511 at the Royal Phoenician and pushing restart.
But she didn’t. She opened the door and Megan stared at her for a long moment, studying her, before breezing past her into the room. Inside, the woman leaned against the dresser, appraising her yet again. Then she smiled ever so slightly.
“You know, Cassie, I kind of expected you to look worse,” Megan said. “Can I ask where you were? Dare I ask? I was actually getting worried.”
Cassie shrugged, pulling off her scarf and wedging it into a pocket in her suitcase. She kicked off her heels. Lord, what did it say about her that she continued to wear heels, even when she was planning (or, at least, expecting) to get sloshed? How many times had the combination of sangria and slingbacks turned a flight of stairs into Everest’s Hillary Step? “Seriously?” she asked, trying to make light of Megan’s concern. She stepped out of her skirt and began to unbutton her blouse. “Why were you worried?”
Instead of answering, Megan asked, “Were you with that young guy from the flight here?” She noticed Megan’s use of the word young. He was young. At least he had been. Megan was fifty-one, twelve years older than she was and at least a decade and a half—and very likely two—older than Alex Sokolov. “You know who I mean,” she went on. “The guy in two C.”
Cassie couldn’t risk the transparency of eye contact. Instead she rolled her blouse into a tight tube on the bed, folding it in half and pressing the air out, and placed it in the section of her suitcase she reserved for her dirty clothes. “Two C? God, no. Didn’t he say he worked for some kind of hedge fund? Sounds kind of boring. Not exactly my type.”
“Rich isn’t your type?”
“I have no problem with rich. But aren’t those guys crazy alpha?”
“You two were chatting each other up pretty seriously—especially before we started our descent.”
She sat down on the bed she had napped in yesterday afternoon to climb into the airline’s requisite black pantyhose. “Not really,” she said casually.
“So you weren’t with him?”
“I told you: no.”
“You hungover?”
“I’d nod, but it would hurt too much. Yes.”
“You going to be okay?”
“Of course.” She stood, adjusted her pantyhose, and leaned over gingerly, reaching into her suitcase for her return uniform. When she stood up, she stood up slowly, hoping to avoid (or at least minimize) the wave of nausea that tended to accompany moving her head at moments like this.
“Want an aspirin?”
“I’m good. I had some with me.”
“Of course you did. Can I ask you something?”
“Who was I with if it wasn’t that guy from the plane?”
“No. I wasn’t going to ask that.”
She waited.
“Why?” Megan asked. “Why do you always do this to yourself? One of these days you’re going to get yourself killed. I know Dubai is safe. I get it. But we’re still in the Middle East. You’re still a woman. This isn’t Paris and this isn’t New York.” She sat down on the bed, watching as Cassie stepped into the black uniform dress with the slimming blue and red stripes. The word killed echoed inside Cassie in ways that made her shudder. When else, before this morning, had she seen a corpse? At funerals. Not her father’s, because the car crash had necessitated a closed casket. But at her mother’s. And at the pair of funerals for her grandparents who had died and chosen not to be cremated. She recalled Alex Sokolov’s neck. She thought his eyes had been shut, if only because she would have remembered if they had been open, but that did not diminish in her mind the violence of his death.
“I’m fine,” she lied. “I’m fine.” She hoped saying it twice might make it true. Walk the talk.
“You’re not fine,” Megan said, her eyes skeptical. “People who are fine don’t do—”
“Don’t do what?” she snapped, the three syllables lash-like and defensive. Her pique surprised her. “What precisely have I done wrong?”
Megan leaned forward, her hands on her knees, wondering what to say. Cassie couldn’t decide whether her friend—no, she was a work acquaintance really, friend would suggest they were much closer than they actually were—would begin with the drinking or the sex. When she remained silent, Cassie told her, “Don’t judge me. I mean that. You have a great husband and two sweet kids—”
“They’re sixteen and thirteen. They stopped being sweet years ago,” Megan said, a peace offering of sorts.
“But my life isn’t your life. My choices aren’t yours.”
“I know. I get it. Just reassure me: you’re completely sober?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Okay, then, I’ll bite. Who was it? Who were you with?”
“Just a guy I met at the bar.”
“I didn’t see you downstairs.”
Though Megan’s room was next to hers, Cassie was confident that the other flight attendant had still been dozing when she had left their hotel the previous evening. The slightest subterfuge would do. “We met quickly and we left quickly. We went back to his hotel. What did you do?” She reached into the suitcase for the airline’s neck scarf and belt.
“I had dinner with Shane and Victoria and Jada. We went to a Japanese restaurant Shane knows. It was nice. Then we all went back to our rooms and we slept. We rested,” Megan said.
Cassie had the sense that the woman hadn’t meant to sound sanctimonious, but that last, two-word sentence had rubbed her the wrong way. “Good,” she said simply. As she started to tie the scarf around her neck, she stopped. She couldn’t help but recall the horrific gash across Alex Sokolov’s throat. She shivered ever so slightly at the neck’s sheer vulnerability.
Megan saw the involuntary quiver and misread its meaning. She stood up and took both of Cassie’s hands in hers. “Do yourself a favor,” she began.
Cassie said nothing, but felt herself starting to coil inside, prepared to bite back if Megan said something—anything—judgmental.
“Start again,” the other flight attendant said simply, her tone motherly and kind. “Getting dressed, I mean. Put on clean underwear this time. I’ll make sure they hold the van.” Then she released Cassie’s fingers and left her alone in her hotel room.
« «
Stewart, their first officer, was chattering away in the first row of the van as they worked their way through Dubai traffic to the airport. Cassie would have preferred to have the air conditioning on a little higher to help combat her queasiness, but she didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself than necessary. Their flight didn’t leave for a couple of hours, but just in case she thought she better make sure that she had Dramamine in her kit before they boarded.
“Remember, this is Hamburg, and we all know that ground control there is, well, German,” the first officer was saying. He had turned around so he could speak to all of them. The van had fourteen seats, including the driver’s, and every seat but his was taken with the flight crew. She was in the very back row with Megan and Shane, burrowing as best she could against the window in the corner.
The captain, though he and his family had lived in the Midwest forever, was descended from Germans, and Cassie wondered whether the first officer was having fun at his expense or German would somehow be relevant to this story. This was the first time she had flown with Stewart, so she had no idea. She knew only that he was a very big talker.
“And that means what, precisely?” the captain asked, his tone good-natured. He was in his midfifties, balding, but still lean and handsome in a classic, right stuff sort of way. She’d flown with him perhaps half a dozen times over the last five years, since she had begun flying internationally, and enjoyed watching the passengers nod approvingly when they peered into the flight deck and spotted pilots like him as they boarded.
“All business,” Stewart answered. “You don’t screw around. And the plane’s on the ground now. We’re talking British Airways, so the call sign is Speedbird. Ground control tells Speedbird to taxi to gate alpha two-seven. But the plane? Stops. Stops completely. So ground says, ‘Speedbird, are you having a problem finding the gate?’ And Speedbird replies, ‘Looking it up now.’ ”
“God, I see where this is going,” the captain said, chuckling.
“Yup. Ground is seriously bent out of shape, seriously impatient. They ask, ‘Speedbird, have you really never been to Hamburg before?’ And the Speedbird captain replies, his voice this icy British, ‘I have. Twice. But it was 1943, so I didn’t land.’ ”
Megan and Shane both laughed politely. Megan even nodded a little knowingly. But the captain, who had been Air Force, shook his head and asked, “On what canceled sitcom did you hear that ancient joke?”
“You think it’s apocryphal?”
“Yes. I think it’s…apocryphal. And older than sand. Usually the joke is set in Frankfurt.”
“I don’t know,” Megan chimed in, and she started to say something about a German friend who flew with Lufthansa, but all Cassie could feel now was the impatience of that German controller, real or imagined, in the tower. The van was hardly moving. No one around her seemed all that alarmed since the plane wasn’t going to leave without them, and in the end they would probably get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. But the longer they were here in traffic, the more likely it was that she would still be in Dubai when Sokolov’s body was found. That “Do Not Disturb” sign had bought her a couple of hours, no more. For all she knew, people—including Miranda—had been texting the fellow for ninety minutes, wondering why he wasn’t at some meeting. Any moment now, they might send hotel security upstairs to open the door.
She gazed out the window and saw a police car—one of the force’s new Lamborghinis—stuck in traffic right beside them. The cops here wore dark-green berets and short-sleeved olive shirts. The driver looked up and saw her. He was a young guy with a thick mustache. He tipped his beret and smiled in a way that struck Cassie as more chivalrous than flirtatious. She gave him a small wave in return but was glad she was wearing her sunglasses and scarf. She told herself that perhaps she could still go back to the hotel. Even now. Maybe it wasn’t too late, and in her head she heard herself shouting to the driver to stop here, please, just let her out.
Though that assumed that she really hadn’t killed Sokolov. She didn’t believe that she had—that just wasn’t who she was—but who else could have done it? The self-doubt had been inflating like a balloon for nearly two hours.
And so she said nothing, and the van inched forward and the police car inched forward, and Stewart continued to prattle on, and other small conversations began to bubble up among the crew.
“Do we even need pilots in bombers anymore? I guess we use them, right? But don’t we do most of our damage with drones?” wondered Shane.
“Ask Cassie,” murmured Megan. “Her brother-in-law is in the military.”
“Really? Air Force? Drones? I love drones. I think it’s so cool when there’s a drone at a wedding.”
“He has nothing to do with drones, at least as far as I know,” she answered. “He’s in the Army, not the Air Force.”
“Oh? Where’s he stationed? America or overseas?”
“These days he’s right where my sister and I grew up: Kentucky. That’s how they met. He’s a major at the Blue Grass Army Depot.”
“Sounds almost pastoral,” said Jada.
“Hah! It’s an old chemical weapons facility,” Cassie corrected her.
“An engineer at a chemical weapons plant? That sounds scary,” Shane murmured.
“I think he helps supervise the elimination of things that are scary. Our stockpile,” she answered, but she honestly had no idea. They didn’t talk about it. For all she knew, he supervised the production of sarin gas. Then, just as the traffic was finally starting to move, she heard the sirens. They all did.
“That can’t be good,” Stewart said.
“Fire trucks?” asked one of the other flight attendants, a fellow her age with whom she was flying for the first time. She hadn’t gotten to know him at all on the two flights here because he was working the economy cabin while she was in first.
“No,” the driver said. “Those are police sirens.” Almost on cue, the police car beside the van turned on its lights and started trying to extricate itself from the quagmire and perform a U-turn. “They’re south of us. They’re on Jumeirah.”
She felt herself growing flushed because the Royal Phoenician was on Jumeirah, and she had to reassure herself that Jumeirah was a main thoroughfare in the city and the driver was only speculating. All they really knew was that the sirens were heading for a destination behind them.
“I guess I shouldn’t have left a box with a little ISIS flag and a ticking clock in the lobby,” Stewart said.
“I really wouldn’t make jokes like that, Stewart,” Jada told him, reproachful and a little appalled. The flight attendant had a beautiful heart for a face, but now it registered only displeasure. “Certainly not these days and certainly not here—and certainly not if you want any of us to be your friend.”
“Too soon?” Stewart asked.
“Too tasteless. Too offensive. Too stupid.”
Megan turned toward her and whispered, “Did you forget your purse?”
Cassie rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t say that she lost it: she still had her passport and wallet and phone. “It’s a long story.”
“Tell me.”
“I spilled a glass of red wine on it. So I pitched it.”
“You threw it away?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Does it matter? Let it go.”
“You okay?”
She nodded. “Of course. Why?”
“You snapped at me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And you look a little clammy.”
“I’m fine.”
Nevertheless, she was relieved when Megan called to the front of the van and asked the driver if he could please get them a little more air here in the back.
« «
The traffic wasn’t much better on the Sheikh Zayed, the highway, even when the loudspeakers on the minarets started to broadcast the muezzin’s midday call to worship. By the time they arrived at the airport, they had to rush straight to the plane. It was ready and, almost miraculously, they still had a shot at an on-time departure. Megan was the cabin service director on this flight and Shane was the purser. Once more, Cassie would be in first class. Her July bid included both the route (Paris, Dubai) and the cabin (first). The sky marshal, a heavyset American in a nondescript windbreaker with an aisle seat in the last row of the first-class cabin, seemed to be watching her as he settled in for the flight, but she took a breath and told herself that she was being paranoid.
The safety briefing was a video, but she was still expected to remain alert in the front of the aisle to encourage the passengers to actually pay attention. In this cabin, none ever did. Some wouldn’t even take off their headphones or look up from their tablets or newspapers. It wasn’t merely that they were all frequent flyers and knew the drill, it was that there was a certain machismo to not watching: to look up and listen suggested you were either afraid of flying or an outsider at thirty-five thousand feet. You were a newbie.
She started to turn back to the galley as the unduly cheerful video prattled on and caught the heel of her pump on the tacking strip, and stumbled. A Saudi executive in a pristine white thobe caught her with his left arm before she fell.
“Thank you,” she said. She was embarrassed. She couldn’t recall ever tripping on a plane when they were still parked at the gate. It was one thing to lose your balance when you were flying and there was turbulence. But on the ground? This was new. “That was unexpected.”
“I’m happy I could help,” he told her. He had a wide, magnanimous smile. He adjusted the gutra that covered his neck and hair, its iqal a thick, black halo. Then he returned to the business magazine he was reading on his tablet.
When she was back on her feet and standing with the galley and flight deck behind her, the only person watching her was the sky marshal. She wondered if he could sense, rather like a lion, her fear.
« «
They were held at the gate and lost their on-time departure. She hadn’t seen a conga line on the runway, but the minutes ticked by. Then the captain told the crew and then he told the passengers the reason for the delay: thunderstorms across the eastern Mediterranean and southern Europe. They would be here perhaps half an hour. She tried to believe this was the case, that all that was holding them up was the weather. But her anxiety only grew more pronounced. Still she worked. She and Megan brought the first-class cabin drinks and more drinks, and then they brought them mixed nuts they warmed in the ovens. The passengers in economy could only suffer in silence and fret that they would miss their connections at Charles de Gaulle. Cassie would glance out the windows, half expecting to see police vans converging upon the plane from the tunnels that snaked underneath the airport. She would pause before the front cabin door, fearing there was someone on the other side signaling her to open it, open it right now—there in her mind was the captain, emerging from the flight deck, nodding, giving her permission—because airport security was about to pull somebody off the plane. Occasionally she checked her phone to see if there were news stories of a hedge fund manager from America found dead in a Dubai hotel room, but there seemed to be nothing on Twitter or any of the news sites—at least the English sites that she could Google and read.
Finally the jet bridge was retracted and Stewart instructed them to make sure that the cabin was prepared for takeoff. He said it was time to strap in. They began their taxi, and then they were rolling down the runway and she felt the shimmy that suggested they were seconds from wheels up, and then they were. They were climbing, airborne, and they were leaving Dubai. They were, once more, leaving behind the indoor ski resort, the massive, man-made marinas in the shape of palm trees you could see from space, and the skyline with its towering, futuristic needles. The vending machines that sold gold. They were soaring over the endless rows of oil wells and oil rigs—from the sky, they looked like industrious black ants chained in place to the ground—and then the desert, endless, flat, and unfurling in waves and ripples and hillocks to the western horizon.
And with that came the tears. They were as unexpected as they were unstoppable, and she allowed them to slide down her face and muck up her mascara. She cried silently, aware that none of the passengers could see her here in her jump seat. Megan might look over and wonder at what a hot mess she had become, but Megan had flown with her enough to know that she would rally. She cried, she guessed, in some small way because she was so deeply relieved: she was leaving the Arabian Peninsula, where it was hard enough to be a woman and probably a disaster if you were a woman that men believed had nearly decapitated some poor money manager in an inexplicable fit of arak-fueled postcoital madness. But she was crying mostly, she realized, out of grief and sorrow and loss. Now that the self-preservation that had gotten her this far had begun to dissolve, she thought about the man she had left behind, and for the first time—the shock evaporating like the morning haze she’d recall as the sun would rise over the Cumberland Mountains—she began to feel the despair that walks hand in hand with bereavement.
She made a litany in her mind of the little she knew of Alex Sokolov’s personal life: He was an only child. His parents in Charlottesville were starting to toy with the idea of retirement, though it was still a good ways off. (God, that only reminded her of how young he was: his parents had yet to retire.) He said he had been with the fund nearly four years—and that’s what he called it whenever it came up, “the fund”—and before that he’d worked for Goldman Sachs. But he had worked in money management since getting some sort of master’s in math—quantitative something and finance something—in Durham. (In the same way that he only offered the name of his employer when she asked, he only said Duke when she pressed for more details.) He preferred Tolstoy and Turgenev to Dostoevsky, but encouraged her to reread all three writers “as an adult, instead of as a student pulling an all-nighter.”
He had not simply gotten them a table for two at the French bistro a couple of blocks from his hotel, he had paid off the maître d’ to seat them in a corner and not seat anyone else at the table beside them. At first she’d viewed the move as pretentious male swagger, but as they were approaching their table he had whispered into her ear that he viewed romance as a totally private matter, and he wanted to romance her that night. Later he would pick up a tab that dwarfed what she usually spent over three nights in Paris and Dubai; it was more than she spent most months on groceries. He had ordered the blanquette de veau and she had ordered the coq au vin, joking that after all the arak they had consumed, it only made sense for her to eat chicken in wine (though of course, he reminded her, the alcohol would have cooked away). They had enjoyed their meal, savoring the seclusion, and taken their time. They finished a bottle of wine and then ordered still more arak. And yet despite how far down the alcohol rabbit hole they fell there, they never lost sight of the fact they were in Dubai. They both had been here before and knew that the penalties for public drunkenness were not pretty. The two of them were far from raucous. They flirted in their own little alcove, but didn’t touch. He kept his voice low as he told her the things he wanted to do to her in his hotel room once he joined her there. He slid his room key across the tablecloth, and she shivered ever so slightly when their fingertips touched.
When the police would follow his credit card to the restaurant, people would recall he had been with a woman who was likely from America because the two of them had spoken English like Americans. Someone might recall that she was older than he was. But had they stood out? A bit, yes, because they had indeed ordered arak and wine and then more arak. But she was confident that at least half, perhaps even two-thirds, of the diners in the restaurant were Westerners. They hadn’t made a scene.
He liked soccer, she remembered, and had played it at college. He liked squash even more, and played it still.
The notion that he, too, was a boozer—at least for one night—caused her to feel a deep, wistful ache in her heart. Everyone who drank the way she did had a reason, she supposed, and she had never pressed him for his. Did he have one? Now she’d never know. Certainly he had never wondered about her own private pain.
He smoked. She hadn’t kissed a man in a while who did, and with Alex it hadn’t been like kissing an ashtray. It had felt decadent in all the right ways. He said he only smoked when he traveled overseas.
In his hotel room, they had started on the bed as soon as he’d returned, atop the crimson bedspread, but then he had brought her to the shower. She’d been surprised, unsure whether she should be more stunned by his astonishing willpower that moment or insulted in some way that she didn’t quite want to parse, but she had gone along and she was glad. They had made love there, her knees on that marble bench, his hands and fingers around her, between her legs, and then he had washed her hair.
And that recollection made her choke on a small, audible sob right there in her jump seat.
“God, you’re crying,” Megan whispered, her tone walking the tightrope between solicitous and annoyed. “Can I do something?”
“No.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
Cassie sniffed and wiped her face with her fingers. “I don’t know,” she lied. “I swear I don’t. But I’m fine. Or I’ll be fine.”
Afterward, Miranda had arrived. Then Miranda had left and Cassie had planned to leave, too. But Alex had led her instead back to that astonishing bedroom, where they had made love again. They polished off the little bottle of arak they found in the minibar. (At least she believed at the time they had finished it; when she had wiped the blue glass down with the washcloth in the morning, she had heard some liquid sloshing around the bottom.) Then they went back to the vodka. For some reason, he’d had trouble unscrewing the cap and accidentally broken the bottle on the side of the nightstand. (Or had he smashed it on purpose in frustration?) Instead of cleaning it up, they’d just laughed. She thought she had gotten dressed to leave. But it was less than a blur, it was a void. She’d been naked when she awoke. What the hell happened to climbing back into her skirt and blouse and returning to her hotel?
God, it was just like so many of the other times she had woken up naked and hungover in bed with a guy, with only the slightest idea how she had gotten there—except this time the guy was dead.
She took stock once more, trying to make sense of what she had done. What she might have done. Had he attacked her and she had defended herself? Possibly, but not likely. They’d had sex twice that she could recall. Still, no means no. Passed out isn’t consent. What if behind the blackout is this: He is trying to have sex with her and she is resisting? They’re drunk, they’re both drunk. He is upon her, he won’t stop, and she is pounding him on his head, his face, his back. She is trying to scratch him, and he is just growing angrier and more violent. She sees nearby the remnants of that bottle of Stoli. Perhaps some of the broken pieces are even on the nightstand. She reaches for one—that jagged shoulder, maybe, gripping the neck like a knife—and she lashes out at him. She slashes him across his throat. She can see in her mind the backhand motion, the resultant gash.
And then she falls back to sleep.
She wished she had looked more closely at the body that morning. She hadn’t. She saw Alex’s neck and that was enough. She had seen his eyes were closed, but otherwise she hadn’t studied his head or his back or his arms. She honestly didn’t know precisely where else she might have stabbed him.
And yet when she looked back on her history, it just didn’t make sense that she would have attacked him if he was trying once again to have sex with her. A part of her life was—dear God—blackout sex. It happened. She knew from too many mornings with too many creepy guys that it did. She presumed (and the idea caused her stomach once more to churn) that she was more likely to allow herself to be raped.
To. Be. Raped. The awfulness of the expression led her to groan softly to herself.
Even if she hadn’t killed Alex Sokolov, however, she had cut and run. That was a fact. The poor guy had parents and friends, and he had bled to death in the bed right beside her. And she had left him.
“You’re not fine,” Megan murmured. “This is different from your other, I don’t know, stunts. Something happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
“People don’t cry over nothing.”
But then there was the plane’s chime and they were above ten thousand feet, and she could no longer cry. She had to start work. She had to wash her face and reapply her makeup. She unstrapped and stood, resolved to be as charming and efficient as ever.
And yet as she stared at herself in the small mirror in the small bathroom, as she looked at the lines she was hiding under her eyes, the lines she artfully concealed beside her eyes, as she noted the way that the blue of her iris seemed a little less vibrant than it had when she was young—even surrounded by the moth-silk lines of hangover red around them—she felt the tears welling up once again. She recalled something her father had said to her when she was a little girl: you bury the dead and move on. It was a few years before he was so hammered that he crashed the Dodge Colt into a telephone pole with his younger daughter in the backseat; it was long before he accidentally (at least she presumed it was accidental) killed himself and a couple of teenagers who were driving home from Lexington and happened to be in the right lane when he—drunk again—was in the wrong one. She’d been eight at the time he’d given her this piece of advice, and she hadn’t, as she had hoped, been allowed to ascend to the next-level ballet class with two of her friends. The teacher didn’t believe she was ready.
Her father had tried to console her. Well, he said, sometimes you just have to bury the dead and move on.
Her father, alas, never took that advice. After his wife—her mother—died, he only drank more. And Cassie had neither forgotten nor gotten over the counsel he had offered her when she was in the third grade. She would think of it when her mother would die when she was fifteen and when her father would die when she was nineteen, and often after bidding farewell to the men she had seduced or been seduced by, especially those times when she would be so drunk that she hadn’t insisted they wear one of the condoms she carried with her wherever she went. The truth was, there was nothing casual about casual sex. When it worked, it was intense. When it didn’t, it was particularly unsatisfying. Either way, it left scars, some that were similar to the blackout scars, but some that were different: the violation was less pronounced, but the self-loathing could be fierce. (One time she had shared her father’s wisdom with a stranger in bed. It was another morning after, and they were agreeing rather amicably that the night before had been a drunken, God-awful mistake. They might have become friends and should never have slept together. He, in return, had observed that as dark and inappropriate as the advice might have been, it was about what you might expect from a dad who had named his first daughter Cassandra.)
Likewise, there was no longer anything casual about her drinking, and there hadn’t been for years.
There was a knock on the bathroom door and then Megan’s voice. “Cassie, I hate to be a pain, but you are either okay to work this flight or you’re not. This is the last time I am going to ask.” Cassie imagined this was what Megan sounded like when she was urging one of her daughters to buck up and behave. The other flight attendant had beautiful children and a husband who was a management consultant in Washington, D.C., and a lovely house in northern Virginia. The woman had it all, she really did. “Cassie?”
She stood up straight in the bathroom. “I’ll be right out,” she said. “I’ll be ready to rock and roll.” Then she brushed her mascara back onto her eyelashes and ran the new lipstick she’d bought at the airport over her mouth. Landing lips, they called it. She was quick, but careful. The shade was similar to the one she had lost in Dubai. And then she emerged, promising herself that if somehow this all turned out okay, she was never going to drink again. Never. She made this promise or one like it monthly, but this time—this time—she told herself that she meant it.