6
Usually the drug tests were random: not every flight attendant and member of the flight crew was tested. One or two people would be singled out by an airline employee as they disembarked and asked to take what they called the “whiz quiz.” This was different. They were all tested: the entire crew. And all of their bags were searched.
Everyone passed the drug test. And nothing illegal was found in any of their rollers or kits.
« «
It was odd, Cassie thought, it was strange. It was as if the FBI had no interest in knowing her whereabouts during the flight crew’s overnight in Dubai. It was as if Frank Hammond and James Washburn had no reason in the world to suspect that she might have been with Alex Sokolov when he was killed. Hammond was a handsome guy roughly her age with a countenance that had seemed slightly bemused—as if he had seen it all. His hair was short, the color of cinnamon, and just starting to recede. Washburn was younger, with pale, perfect skin and rather professorial, rimless eyeglasses. The two of them acted as if they were concerned only with what she had seen of the man on the flight, and whether he had said something that might have been revealing. Did that mean they were hoping somehow to entrap her in a lie? It seemed not, because they never asked anything that would have necessitated one. Rather, it was as if they honestly didn’t know that one of Alex’s colleagues had come to the suite in Dubai and had a drink with her.
In hindsight, she realized, her fear had been almost comic. They didn’t even record the interview. Apparently that was FBI policy. Hammond asked her questions and Washburn wrote down her answers using a ballpoint pen and yellow legal pad as if it were 1955. When she had asked about the lack of a recorder—good God, they didn’t even use their phones—Washburn had said later that he’d type it up on some form he called an FD-302.
She wished she had been a little more detailed about Alex’s and her flirting during the interview, but only because there was always the chance that one of the other crew members had mentioned it. Even her friend Megan might have said something. But Megan had insisted that her interview had been cursory, too. The agent who had talked to her was a woman named Anne McConnell, and Megan said that she had asked very little about the rest of the crew.
Probably the real suspects were the employees who worked at the hotel. Or, perhaps, the investors he was supposed to see in Dubai. Or maybe it was the desperate underground that risked Arabian justice to prey upon the scads of rich foreigners who descended upon the city daily. These were the sorts of people the Dubai police most likely were interested in.
And, in truth, it probably was one of them who had killed Alex. She could ruminate forever on why they had spared her and probably never figure it out. It was best to let go of that sort of self-scrutiny. It wasn’t helpful.
But she couldn’t exhale completely because there was still Miranda. At some point, that was the loose end that Cassie feared was going to trip her. As much as the ghost of Alex Sokolov might dog her, she knew if necessary she could drown that specter with an extra shot of Sipsmith or Jose Cuervo. But Miranda? She had shown up in the suite with the bottle of Stoli, glass chips of which were probably still embedded in that plush carpet in a room at the Royal Phoenician. By now she had almost certainly said something to the Dubai police, and no amount of tequila or gin was going to make Miranda go away.
« «
She left her suitcase in the hallway of her apartment and pressed Frank Hammond’s business card onto the refrigerator in her windowless kitchen with a magnet from the animal shelter. She wasn’t sure what else to do with it. Then she went to her bedroom. The apartment was a small one bedroom, but it had a valuable asset: it was on the fifteenth floor and had a magnificent, unobstructed view of New York Life’s pyramidal gold cone and, a little further away, the Empire State Building. She’d come a long way from the bottom bunk in a crash pad in Queens. She kicked off her shoes and collapsed on her bed and gazed for a moment at the two buildings. The sun was just beginning to set. She fell asleep in her uniform when it was still light out.
« «
Terrain, terrain! Pull up, pull up!
The mechanical female voice on the far side of the flight deck door. The remnants of another dream. She knew the voice from the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of landings when she was in the jump seat nearest the cockpit on certain planes. On some aircraft, the ones where the passengers were staring straight at you, they called it the Sharon Stone Seat. The Basic Instinct Bench.
When she awoke, when she understood they were neither landing nor crashing, it was nighttime and the peak of the Empire State Building was colored red. One time when her sister’s family was visiting, she had looked up online what color the building would be that night, hoping she would be allowed to share the view with them and explain to her nephew and niece the reason behind that evening’s selection, but Rosemary had made it clear that they would not be going to Murray Hill and she did not want Cassie alone with the kids.
She wasn’t hungry, but she figured she should eat something and went to the kitchen. She recalled again how Alex had ordered the blanquette de veau at the restaurant in Dubai. She imagined herself telling the FBI agents that the deceased had no objection to eating veal and was a tender and rather exquisite lover in the shower. He read—no, he reread—doorstop novels by long-dead Russian writers. In her head, she heard herself volunteering that for one night, at least, he drank as much as she did, and that had been a lot—enough for her to black out. What would Frank Hammond have said to any of that? She gazed for a moment at the portion of his business card that peeked out from behind the magnet.
The refrigerator wasn’t empty—far from it—but there was still little in there that was edible. It was mostly unfinished Indian takeout that had gone bad, condiments, diet soda, and yogurt that had expired months ago. She found a can of tomato soup in the pantry and some crackers, a little soft with age but edible, and made herself the sort of meal that she recalled her mother might have prepared for her when she was home from school with the flu.
She ate in silence on the living room couch, watching the moon high above the Manhattan skyline. She ate in the dark but for the light from the kitchen. She thought she might look for news stories about Sokolov on her phone when she was finished. She might even boot up the laptop she rarely used. But she feared she wouldn’t sleep if she did, and it was going to be hard enough going back to bed after having slept five hours already that evening.
A sentence came to her: I awoke beside a dead man.
Then another: I may have gotten away with murder.
But then she shook her head because while it was conceivable that she had killed Alex, she continued to feel deep inside that she hadn’t. Oh, there had been moments when she had lost faith and felt waves of debilitating self-hatred: her body actually spasmed ever so slightly once in the elevator in her building. But usually she was able to convince herself that she hadn’t killed him. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Not even in self-defense. For better or worse, that wasn’t how she was wired.
She also reminded herself that it remained highly unlikely that she had gotten away with anything. All she had done so far was make it back to America, where she would at least have a decent lawyer—assuming she could find one who would work for the pittance she really could pay.
Her only definite crime, literal and metaphoric, was leaving the poor guy behind in the hotel room in Dubai. And if she hadn’t killed him, then she was relieved now to have so many time zones between herself and whoever had. Either they had misjudged her and assumed she would call the hotel or the police and wind up a suspect in the homicide—perhaps she would even confess to it—or they had figured she would flee and didn’t care. In this scenario, whoever had killed Alex had been a pro at this sort of thing—an executioner—and knew that she was just in the wrong bed on the wrong night and spared her. They understood that she was uninvolved in whatever nastiness had led Alex to get himself practically beheaded.
As she was putting her soup bowl into the dishwasher, she pondered how someone gets into a locked hotel room. Perhaps when she had the courage to Google Alex Sokolov, she would Google hotel room security. If whoever killed Alex worked at the Royal Phoenician, it was probably simple to unlock the door.
She had a bottle of unopened red wine, a Chianti she rather liked and was saving for a special occasion, but remembered her vow that she wasn’t going to drink. It wasn’t quite eleven o’clock. She considered going to one of the late-night drugstores and getting a bottle of a pain reliever with the letters PM on it, or perhaps some flu remedy with a specifically drowsy formulation to knock a person out.
Instead she thought to herself, fuck it, fuck it all, she wasn’t going to be able to sleep. All that loomed if she stayed here at home was the prospect of tossing and turning and waiting for the lights on the Empire State Building to finally blink out, and then, at two or two thirty in the morning, when she was desperate, uncorking that Chianti. She swiped across a few of the men who came up in her Tinder account, but none of the faces interested her. She thought of the different women she knew whom she could text and see where they were and what trouble they were getting into, moving in her mind first through her friends who tolerated her drinking (some barely) and then those who applauded it and drank with her. She had an equal number of both and needed both in different ways: the former to protect her and apologize to the party hosts and restaurant patrons and wedding guests she appalled with her behavior and her mouth, the latter to goad her on as she took off her bikini top or hurled a pool cue like a javelin. But she didn’t text anyone. Tonight she would be a lone wolf. Sometimes that was best for everyone.
And so—certainly not proud of herself, but not precisely disgusted either—she showered, slipped into a pair of tight, come-hither jeans and a white blouse that was perfect for the last Saturday night in July, and went out into the dark. She wore the shade of lipstick the airline preferred for her, a deep scarlet that would help the hearing impaired read her lips in the event of an emergency.
« «
Was she too old to have kicked off her heels and danced barefoot on a floor sticky with spilled beer in a dark club in the East Village, courting a noise-induced hearing loss because the band’s amps were set to jet engine? Probably. But she wasn’t the only woman who was suddenly barefoot. She was merely the oldest. And she didn’t care about her age or her feet, because she was doing this sober and that left her unexpectedly pleased. This was the foolishness the heart craved. She’d found a bar with a band and a party, it was still the middle of summer, and the people were beautiful. She was nowhere near Dubai. The guy she was dancing with, an actor with Gregg Allman hair, honey-colored and lush, had just finished doing six weeks of Shakespeare in Virginia. He said he was thirty-five and was here because one of the dudes on the stage that moment had been in a show with him that spring in Brooklyn. The musical had needed someone who could play the guitar as well as sing and act.
“You’re sure I can’t get you a beer?” he shouted into her ear. His name was Buckley, which she had told him was the best name ever for a Shakespearean actor, and he had agreed, but he was from Westport and that was the name he got—and it hadn’t been a great name when he was doing a musical about the 1970s punk scene last year at the Public. And Buck, he had reminded her, was far worse: if you were a performer named Buck, you were either a cowboy or a porn star.
“Positive!” she reassured him. She jumped and spun and had both of her hands over her head, the bass from the stage thrumming inside her, and then Buckley’s fingers were on the small of her waist, pulling her into him, and when she brought her hands down she rested them on the back of his neck and suddenly they were kissing and it was electric.
When they were at the bar catching their breath a few minutes later, she asked one of the bartenders, a young thing in a tight denim shirt and straight black hair that fell to her waist, to bring him a shot of tequila.
“Oh, man, I shouldn’t,” he said, laughing, his cheeks flushed, but he took the small glass.
“Of course, you should,” Cassie told him. “It’s well after midnight.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Witching hour.”
He took one of the drapes of his hair and pushed it back behind his ear. “Seriously?” He had asked the question sincerely, as if he expected he was about to learn something. It was almost sweet.
Still, she was surprised at his reluctance to go from tipsy to drunk. It was a shot of tequila. One shot. They weren’t talking about heating a spoonful of crack. She expected more from an actor, even one who had grown up in Fairfield County, Connecticut. She was holding her shoes, and she put them down on the seat of the empty barstool near them. Then with one hand she reached out and took a rope of that magnificent mane of his, not at all surprised at how soft it was. With the other she took the small glass she’d ordered for him and swallowed the shot of tequila. The burn was deep and hot and seemed to ooze out from her chest like an oil spill. It was heavenly. So much for not drinking tonight.
“And yet you passed on the beer,” he said, smiling. His grin was childlike, his eyes impish.
“I like tequila.”
“But not beer.”
“I’m a flight attendant, remember? The uniform is unforgiving.”
“Do airlines still worry about weight? Can they do that?”
“It’s vague. Weight must be proportional to height. But you really can’t do your job if you’re fat. I’ll be in the gym again tomorrow.”
“Because you fly?”
“Because I’m vain.”
“Tell me the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“As a flight attendant?”
“Yes. You hear stories that are just insane.”
She nodded. She honestly couldn’t say whether flying made people weird, or whether people were inherently weird and a closed cabin just made it more apparent.
“You hear them,” she said. “We live them.”
“I know! Tell me some. Tell me one.”
She closed her eyes and saw Alex Sokolov in the bed beside her. She saw once again the deep, wet furrow across his neck. She saw herself crouched against the drapes in the hotel room in Dubai, naked, his blood on her shoulder and in her hair.
“You should have a shot, first,” she said.
“That bad?”
“I’ll have another one with you.” She slipped her shoes back on, trying not to focus on how filthy her feet had become, and took his hand and led him to the bar. She wasn’t going to share with him the tale of the young hedge fund manager who had died in the bed beside her on the Arabian Peninsula. There wasn’t enough tequila in the world to get her to tell him that nightmare. And so instead, as they dared each other to keep downing shots—a second, a third, a fourth—she told him of the passengers who had tried to open exit doors at thirty-five thousand feet and the couples who honestly believed they were being discreet when their hands were under the blankets while the rest of the cabin was asleep. She told him of the man who had tried to climb over the beverage cart—he got as far as one knee on the top and his foot on the bag of ice on the shelf—because he wanted to get to the bathroom and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) wait.
She shared with him her encounter with the rock star who purchased the entire first-class cabin for himself and his entourage: “I wasn’t allowed to speak to him. I had to whisper the drink and menu options into his bodyguard’s ear. I wasn’t even allowed to make eye contact with him. The flight was an overnight to Berlin and he didn’t sleep a wink. Even though the lights were dimmed and his party was sound asleep—his bodyguard, too—he went into the lavatory and changed his clothes three times, each outfit more outrageous than the one before it. For about an hour and a half he was in a gold sequin jumpsuit and platform heels, and his only audience was me.”
She told him the different locales on the plane where they tended to stow the tough cuffs, and the different occasions when she had needed them to restrain a passenger.
And then she told him about Hugo Fournier. She wasn’t sure he would know the name, but he would know the story. He probably presumed it was an urban legend. But it wasn’t. She’d been there. She’d been on the flight.
“So, we’re flying from Paris to JFK. It’s a route I bid on a lot. I was younger then and so I got it less often. This was eight years ago. And when I got it, I usually had business class.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“No, it’s just that sometimes it can be a difficult cabin. On some aircraft, in first everyone has a flat bed and is out like a light pretty soon into the flight. In coach, there’s really not a whole lot you ever have to do. But business has thirty-two seats and there’s almost the same cabin service as first. And they sleep less. So, some flight attendants feel it’s a little less desirable, which means that whoever’s working in it might have less seniority.”
“Okay.”
“So, this particular flight is packed. Not a single empty seat. Maybe an hour west of Ireland, when we’re on dessert in business, this guy who has been flying with the airline forever pushes past me to get to the chief purser, who is working in first. He is oozing adrenaline, and the idea crosses my mind that there is some mechanical disaster. I literally think, an engine is on fire. No more than thirty seconds later, I hear the chief purser on the intercom asking if there is a doctor or nurse on board. She sounds pretty cool, but I hear just a quiver of desperation. Of course, I’m also relieved that we’re not about to ditch in the ocean.”
“Of course.”
“There is a doctor. There are, in fact, two. One in coach and one in business, and they both rush to seat twenty-four E, where Hugo Fournier, old and diabetic and obese, has just had a massive heart attack. The doctors, one female and one male, and the flight attendants lay him out on the floor in front of the galley and emergency exit row, because that’s where they can find the most room. They get out the defib and work on the guy, and they work him hard. The doctors try everything, and they don’t call it for at least forty minutes. Everyone in the cabin knows what’s going on. His wife is freaking out. She is shrieking and pleading and crying. Can you blame her? It’s not a dignified performance, but it’s a real one.”
“God…”
“Yup. But now we—you know, the crew—have to do something with the body. We can’t put him back where he was. He’s in the middle of economy and while those are the cheap seats, people still don’t expect to sit next to a corpse. Plus, he’s covered in vomit, and while we could clean that off his shirt and pants, we couldn’t clean off the stench. And the body did what bodies do when they die. Poor Hugo Fournier had crapped his pants.”
Buckley put his hands on his face and shook his head. “I do know this story.”
“Of course you do.”
“You put him in the bathroom for the rest of the flight.”
“Well, I didn’t. But, yes, the crew did. I actually lobbied that we try and get one of the people in first to give up their flat bed, but our chief purser wouldn’t have it. I suggested we put him in one A or one L, so almost no one would see him or smell him. But she wouldn’t even ask. So, yes, one of the doctors and two of the male flight attendants wedged him into the starboard, midcabin lavatory. The doctor—a pretty judgmental guy, in hindsight—said it was like getting a size ten foot into a size eight shoe.”
“And you didn’t turn around.”
“The plane? No. We were already over the mid-Atlantic. We didn’t want to inconvenience two hundred and fifty-eight people. And so instead we inconvenienced one. She just happened to be a widow. A loud widow.”
“Amazing.”
“Or appalling.”
“You got that Scheherazade thing down,” he said.
“Most of us are pretty good storytellers,” she agreed. “We are the kings and queens of the degrading.”
“Where did you say you just flew in from? I can’t remember.”
“I didn’t say.”
“Okay, then: where?”
Such a simple question. It demanded but a one-word answer. Two syllables. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to say it right now: it would be like waking in the middle of the night in a dark room and switching on klieg lights. “Berlin,” she lied. She was prepared to embellish the trip, if she had to. If it came to that. But it didn’t.
“And you still like the job?” he asked.
She rolled back her head, lolling in the heaviness that came with the fourth shot. Perhaps because she’d just lied, she felt an acute need to admit something—to give him something real. The need to confess was irresistible. “When you start as young as I did—right out of college—it’s usually because you’re running from something. You just have to get out. To get away. It wasn’t a career change for me. It wasn’t even a choice, in some ways. It was just a road somewhere.”
“An escape?”
“You could say that.”
“From?”
They were sitting down now and it was a quarter to one. They were on stools side by side at the bar, but they were facing each other. She reached over and hooked her fingers just inside the front pockets of his jeans, locking him gamically to her. His eyes had the fuzzy drunk stare she liked. She wouldn’t have been surprised if hers were a little loopy, too.
“There’s a town at the edge of the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky called Grover’s Mill. Pretty quaint, right?”
“Whereabouts?”
She shook her head and purred, “Shhhh,” her voice the wind in the night. Then: “I’m Scheherazade.”
He nodded.
“It’s small and quiet,” she continued. “Not a lot happens there. Imagine a girl in sixth grade with strawberry blond hair. It’s up in a bun because she fancies herself a dancer and she does nothing in moderation. Never has and, alas, never will.”
“This is you.”
“So it would seem. And today is her birthday. And while Grover’s Mill doesn’t have much, it has a creamery that makes ice cream. Really good ice cream, at least this eleven-year-old thinks so. And so her mom has a big idea for her birthday, because they really can’t afford a whole lot in the way of presents and her birthday has fallen smack in the middle of the week, and so there sure as hell isn’t going to be a party. Of course, there probably wouldn’t have been a party even if her birthday had fallen on a Friday or a Saturday, because you just didn’t dare bring kids over to the house on the weekend, because that was usually when Dad was most likely to get seriously and impressively hammered. Anyway, Mom goes to the creamery and buys a tub of her daughter’s favorite flavor.”
“Rum raisin?”
“Cute. But, no. Chocolate chip cookie dough. And she buys her daughter a two-gallon tub. Do you how many pints that is? Sixteen. She stops by the creamery on her way home from work—she’s a receptionist at this creepy electrical wire factory in this otherwise forgotten ghost town next door to Grover’s Mill—and buys this restaurant-size two-gallon tub of ice cream. Just so you know, the girl’s birthday is in September and it was one freaking hot September that year. You can look it up.”
“I trust you.”
She dug her fingers a little deeper into his pants pockets, kneading the flesh of his thighs ever so slightly. “So Mom has all this ice cream in a bag, along with some groceries, in the trunk of her car. She’s going to get home just about the same time as her husband. Her eleven-year-old kid is already home, a kind of classic latchkey little despot. She has a kid sister who’s eight, but that day the kid sister was at her weekly Brownie meeting. Their father was picking her up on his way home from the high school where he was a P.E. coach and driver’s ed teacher. As Mom is nearing the street where her family lives, she sees a police car. It’s maybe a quarter mile from her house. It’s parked, but its lights are on. And then she sees her daughter.”
“You.” Even in that one syllable, she could hear the slight catch in his throat as she teased him through the thin strip of fabric that comprised the inside of his pants pocket.
“No, silly. That eleven-year-old is home, remember? She sees the eight-year-old. The child is still wearing her Brownie sash with all of these very colorful badges. And then she sees her husband’s crappy Dodge Colt. Robin’s-egg blue. A hatchback. And it’s wrapped around a telephone pole. She stops, absolutely terrified, her heart sinking. But thankfully no one’s injured. Her little girl is stunned, scared, but mostly fine. A couple of bruises on her arm. And her husband? He’s in the backseat of the police cruiser. Handcuffed. Drunk. So she follows the police car to the police station and uses all the money in their pathetic little savings account at their pathetic little bank to bail him out. This takes a while.”
“Of course it does.”
“And by the time she gets home with her drunk of a husband and their adorable Brownie of a daughter…by the time they pull into the driveway and pop the trunk…all that ice cream for the older girl’s birthday is gone.”
He reached down and lifted her fingers from his pockets and held them tenderly in his hands. “Someone stole the ice cream? At the police station?”
“Nope. It melted. It melted through the cardboard tub and then through the paper bag. Some of it seeped into the fabric of the trunk and some of it just sloshed around the back of the car like the fluid inside a snow globe.”
“God, that’s so sad.”
She raised an eyebrow. Sharing with him the moment hadn’t made her sad at all. It actually had made her rather happy. It was something to get off her chest. It was a memory from a place she’d never, ever see again. She looked at the other bartender, a young guy with a string of silver piercings the length of his ear on the other side of Buckley. She gazed at the neon signs for beer and the white lights over the ice trays behind the thick mahogany counter, and she found herself smiling.
“Nah,” she said to him. He was gently rubbing the part of her hand between her thumb and her index finger. “Sad is when the Easter Bunny comes on a Monday. That was way worse.”
“How is that possible?”
She hesitated. Just how much could she wallow in this before it really would ruin their buzz? But then she decided that she didn’t care and plowed ahead. “The Easter Bunny arriving the day after Easter? One year my grandfather had a stroke and my mom had to race to the hospital in Louisville. She was gone the Friday and Saturday before Easter, then Easter Sunday and Monday. And my dad just…just didn’t cope. The good news? With all the chocolate and jelly beans on sale the next day—you know, half and two-thirds off—he bought my sister and me a hell of a lot more candy than the Easter Bunny was ever going to bring.”
Buckley lifted her hands and kissed her fingertips.
“So,” she said. “Are we going to my place or yours?”
« «
In the morning she awoke and saw a strip of the Empire State Building through the vertical blinds of her bedroom window. She sensed Buckley beside her in bed, and for a moment she held her breath to listen. She recalled initiating their retreat to his place or hers at the bar, viewing it as a dare of sorts: regardless of where they wound up, she wanted to see if she had become some sort of alcoholic assassin as forty neared, and suddenly she was killing the men with whom she slept. It had been a private challenge of sorts, a deliberate provocation of the soul.
He exhaled and she felt him move, and a little wave of relief left her momentarily giddy. He reached his arm across her hips and belly and pulled her against him.
“Good morning,” he murmured. “But don’t roll over. I have a feeling I have serious morning breath. Serious hangover breath.”
“I probably do, too,” she said, and rose to get them both Advil. She knew he was watching her.
“You’re beautiful naked,” he said.
“I’m glad you think so.”
In the bathroom mirror she looked at the red lines in her eyes and the bags below them. She didn’t feel beautiful. But at least this hangover was a piker compared to the one that had welcomed the morning after in Dubai. She wondered if Buckley would want to go to brunch. She rather hoped not. She liked him, but she really wasn’t hungry. The fact was, she was almost never all that hungry. After years of boozing it up, it was as if her body craved its calories from alcohol. There was a reason she was likely to have canned soup and stale crackers for dinner.
She considered bringing him two or three of the red pills, but then wondered if he was similar to her and downed them like peanuts or the sort who followed the instructions on the label and would begin with just one. So she brought the whole bottle along with a glass of water. She opened the blinds and squinted at the way the cone of the New York Life Building shimmered in the sun, and then crawled back under the sheets. She watched a plane as it crossed the skyline outside her window, flying north before banking east to LaGuardia.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“No.”
“You sound sad.”
“One syllable gave all that away? Nah. Just not hungry.”
She heard him put the glass and the bottle down on the nightstand on his side of the bed.
“When you’re in Germany, do you ever begin the day with eggs in mustard sauce?”
“No. Never. And what in the name of God made you think of Germany just now?”
“You were in Berlin yesterday.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Doesn’t sound like you’re a fan of eggs.”
“Not with mustard.”
“They’re hard-boiled. And delicious,” he insisted. Then: “I like your apartment.”
She wished she could will into existence the woman she had been last night. The one who danced barefoot and made this very gentle actor happy. The one who wasn’t repulsed by the idea of brunch and his hints about eggs and food. But that person didn’t exist in the morning. Most of the time, that person didn’t exist sober. It was almost fascinating how rapidly her resolve not to drink could dissipate: it was like the thin coat of ice on a Kentucky pond in late January, there one day and just gone the next. And yet she knew in her heart that she wouldn’t drink today. That wasn’t how it worked for her. She’d send Buckley on his way, go to the animal shelter and nurture the depressed cats—the new arrivals that had just been deserted by their owners for one reason or another and were shocked to be living in a cage in a loud, strange world—and then finish the day at the gym. Tonight she would cocoon, her body clock happily adjusted once again to Eastern Daylight Time. She would read and she would watch TV. She would see no one tonight. She would be fine. She had until Tuesday here. Then, with a crew full of strangers—not even Megan and Shane would be on the plane—she would fly to Italy. The August routes she had bid on were Rome and Istanbul. Both were direct flights from JFK. No Dubai.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked. She needed to scare him away to get on with her day and, more importantly, with her life.
“Sure. But this sounds ominous. Will it be as sad as all that melted ice cream?”
“No. Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t know yet what I’m going to tell you.”
“Wow. It sounded like you had something in mind. Usually when a person begins, ‘Can I tell you something?’ they’re thinking of some pretty specific revelation or pretty specific bit of news.”
She was still on her side. She brought her knees closer to her stomach and rested her hands together under the pillow as if she were praying. “I was just thinking about my day and what I’m going to do this afternoon. The main thing is I’m going to the animal shelter. I love the shelter. I go when I’m home because my mother wouldn’t let me have pets as a girl, and now I’ve managed to pick a career where I travel too much to have one—at least in good conscience.”
A moment ago, he had sat up to swallow the Advil and drink the water. She imagined if she rolled over, she would see he was watching her. Perhaps he was propped up on his elbow, looking down at her.
“I mean, we did have a pet when I was little. Very little. We had a dog. My parents had gotten him before I was born. Years before I was born. But when I was five, my father ran him over. The dog was old and asleep in the grass beside the driveway, and my dad was so drunk when he came home that afternoon, he missed the pavement and—quite literally—ran him over. Didn’t just hit him. Crushed him. And so we never had pets after that. My mom was afraid something would happen to them.”
She recalled her parents’ fights about pets—about cats and dogs. She and her sister would cry, and her father would lobby with slurred words on their behalf. And he would fail. Did her father feel demeaned? Emasculated? She assumed so now. Her mother once said if her father stopped drinking, they could consider a cat or a dog, but that was never going to happen, even after his DUI or after the high school fired him as the driver’s ed teacher. (Much to everyone’s astonishment, he was still allowed to teach P.E.) As a girl, she had felt only the unfairness of her mother’s edict. It was as if she and her sister were being punished for their father’s misbehavior.
“I think it’s really sweet that you go to the shelter on your day off,” said Buckley.
“I guess I do it for me.”
“And for them.”
“I should get dressed,” she told him.
“Is that a hint?”
“Yes.”
“Got it. You know, if you want me to leave, there are easier ways than dredging up a horrible memory about a dead dog. I’m pretty chill, trust me.”
She didn’t roll over. “Oh, I never seem to do things the easy way.”
“No?”
“No.” Then: “And I’m sure you have someplace you need to be, too. Right?”
She felt him swinging his feet over the bed. She expected him to stand up. But he didn’t. He sat there a long moment and then said softly, “Just so you know, I don’t usually do this. I don’t sleep with strangers when I’m on tour or in a theater out of state, and I don’t when I’m home here in the city.”
She sighed. “I do.”
“Okay, of all the things you’ve told me in the last twelve or whatever hours, that’s got to be the saddest.”
And with that he finally stood. He picked up his clothes from the floor by her closet, his body angular and taut. She heard him go into the bathroom to throw some water on his face before going home, but she kept her hands under her pillow, her knees bent, and tried to lie there as quiet and fixed as a corpse.
« «
And in the night, she wept. It was, she tried to convince herself, because of the cats. They always got to her. The thirteen-year-old calicos that had lived together their whole lives, discarded because their owner had a new boyfriend and he insisted he was allergic to them. The rough and ruddy orange tom, dropped off because the family was moving. He probably weighed twenty pounds, all muscle, and now was unwilling to lift his head and emerge from his cage. There were rail-thin black cats from a crazy hoarder, one with her ear half gone from a fight, all of them awash in fleas and ticks when they arrived.
She was too depressed for the gym. Instead she went to a bookstore and browsed the shelves of paperback fiction, pausing in the aisles that held Chekhov and Pushkin and Tolstoy. She considered a Turgenev collection because Alex had mentioned him and she was unfamiliar with his work, but the only title the store had was Fathers and Sons, and that relationship held little allure for her that afternoon. Eventually she bought a small book by Tolstoy (small for Tolstoy, but still nearly four hundred pages), because the first story in it was called “Happy Ever After.” She suspected the title was likely ironic, but she could hope.
At home, however, she discovered the book was quite possibly the worst choice she could have made (which perhaps shouldn’t have surprised her, given her predilection for bad choices). At least the first story started out badly given her own personal history. On the very first page the narrator, a seventeen-year-old woman named Masha, shares that she is mourning the death of her mother. Cassie had been a teenager, too, when her mother had died. Masha also has a younger sister. Cassie didn’t get beyond the fourth page before putting the book down and taking a lint brush to her clothes, removing the evidence of her day at the shelter. But she didn’t change. Nor that night did she drink. Not a drop.
And so she was still dressed and sober and sad when she got the call from a fellow who introduced himself as Derek Mayes. She couldn’t put a face to the name, and she presumed it was a lover or Tinder score who didn’t realize or didn’t understand that she didn’t want to see him again and confront what they’d done, but hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings.
“I’m with the union,” he explained, his tone clipped, a trace of a New York accent. He said that two other members of the cabin crew on the flight to Dubai had reached out to him and he had already met with one of them: Megan Briscoe. He, in turn, had called the FBI, and it was clear that he needed to see her, too, and get up to speed fast on whatever she knew about the passenger in 2C. “I want to know what really went on between you two on the flight and what really happened in Dubai,” he said.
And with that there was a sudden ringing in her ears, her legs grew wobbly, and she wondered if this—this, not waking up beside the cold, still body of Alex Sokolov—was the demarcation between before and after. This, she thought with a terrible certainty, might really be the moment she would look back upon as the point where it all began to unravel.