The Flight Attendant(23)

“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.