The Flight Attendant

  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.

  * * *

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  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, yo
u’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.

  4

  Elena supposed that among the reasons why she was good at what she did was the simple reality that she was neither beautiful nor homely. She could look pretty when she dressed well and wore the right makeup—and so she tried to do both—but the goal was not to stand out. She was five-foot-four with deep brown eyes and chestnut-brown hair, which she kept parted in the middle when she wasn’t working and in a French twist when she was. She rarely wore sunglasses in America and Russia, because she thought that sunglasses made you more noticeable. She realized here in Dubai that the opposite was true: it was the Westerners who didn’t wear sunglasses who were the most memorable, and so she bought a first pair soon after landing and a second pair at one of the hotel stores right after finishing her iced tea with Viktor.

  She was walking through the souk, her head scarf pulled tight, and she rath
er liked the absolute anonymity. She stood in a narrow aisle of spices, unsure whether the smell nearest her was the cumin or the merchant. Elena didn’t cook much, but she had used cumin just enough to know that the stench could be either. He was standing behind the long buffet of containers rich with the phosphorescent colors of saffron and curry. On the racks behind him were small glass replicas of the most prominent new buildings in Dubai, each a little reminiscent of a chess piece. She’d loved chess as a child. She’d played it at school and at home with her father until she was sent away to a boarding school in Switzerland. She was rather good at it. Beside the trinket buildings were a variety of ornate, ocean-blue hookahs. She appreciated the way the market seemed to cater to both locals and tourists, though she could imagine tourists bringing home spices as well as a souvenir Burj Al Arab, the iconic Dubai hotel that looked like a gigantic—as in fifty-six-story gigantic—sail. She thought of the Eastern Market near the apartment she’d had when she’d been in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, and how you could find there fresh local fruit as well as paper-weight-size Washington Monuments and snow globes of the White House.

  Now she looked up because the spice vendor was asking her if she spoke English. She nodded and smiled.

  “What would you like?” he inquired. He was an older man, his beard trim and gray. His thobe was spotless: as white as the cherry blossoms and not a stain on it, despite the spices that surrounded him.

  There really was nothing here that she wanted, at least today. The apartment they had given her had a tidy kitchen, but she didn’t know yet how long she would be in Dubai. A week or two, she expected, but the next few days would tell. They wanted to be sure there was no fallout from Alex Sokolov that she would need to clean up.