The Flight Attendant(3)

And now here she was, naked again.

Finally she took a breath, cringing against the spikes behind her eyes, and turned 180 degrees in the bed to face Alex.

And there he was. For a split second, her mind registered only the idea that something was wrong. It may have been the body’s utter stillness, but it may also have been the way she could sense the amphibian cold. But then she saw the blood. She saw the great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. He was flat on his back. She saw his neck, the yawning red trench from one side of his jaw to the other, and how the blood had geysered onto his chest and up against the bottom of his chin, smothering the black stubble like honey.

Reflexively, despite the pain, she threw off the sheet and leapt from the bed, retreating into those drapes against the window. It was while standing there, her arms wrapped around her chest like a straitjacket, that she noticed there was blood on her, too. It was in her hair and on her shoulder. It was on her hands. (Later, when she was in the elevator, she would surmise that the only reason she hadn’t screamed was self-preservation. Given the way her head was pulsating, the sound of her own desperate, panicked shriek might have killed her.)

Had she ever seen so much blood? Not from a human. A deer, maybe, back when she was a kid in Kentucky. But not a person. Never.

On the other side of the body, on the far side of the bed, was the clock. It was digital. It read 9:51. She had not quite ninety minutes to be in the lobby of another hotel and ready to leave for the airport and the flight back to Paris and then, tomorrow, home to JFK.

Her back against the drapes, she slid first into a baseball catcher’s pose and then onto the floor. She tried to focus, to make decisions. Her mind only slowed when she spotted the swath of broken glass on the floor, a constellation on the carpet between the foot of the bed and the elegant credenza inside which was the TV. Once upon a time, it had been the bottle of Stoli that Miranda had brought; now it was mostly slivers and triangular fragments that were almost pretty, though the neck was still attached to the shoulder and the shoulder was a jagged edge. And then, when she realized what that might mean, she felt the nausea rising up inside her. She raced to the bathroom with her hands on her mouth, as if her fingers really had any chance—any chance at all—of damming such a gravity-defying waterfall, and made it to the toilet. But just barely.

She sat with her back against the bidet, facing the shower, and watched the nozzles from the ceiling and the walls sway. She started to make a list in her mind of all she could remember from last night, but she was beginning to realize just how much was on the far side of that curtain of arak and vodka and whatever else they had drunk. She tried to imagine what might have led her to take a broken bottle and slash open the guy’s neck as if she and her father were gutting a deer. She wasn’t a barroom brawler. She’d never hurt anyone—at least not physically. But her behavior when she was drinking, when she had drowned all reason in tequila or gin, was legendary. In theory, there was a first for everything, though it made no sense to her that she would have killed him. Most of what people told her she did during blackouts was degrading and caustic and (on occasion) dangerous to herself. But it wasn’t violent.

She realized that the very first thing she had to do was make sure that the “Do Not Disturb” sign was on the hotel room door. She needed to keep housekeeping at bay while she figured out what the hell to do. She blinked. She blinked again. She was astonished at how fast the body of Alex Sokolov had sobered her up and made the pain of yet another tectonic hangover and the remorse from yet another one-night hookup seem rather inconsequential.



* * *



? ?

She stared for a moment at the hotel phone in the living room of the suite, and the button for the front desk. In the end, she didn’t pick it up.

Instead she showered. She shampooed the blood from her hair and scrubbed it off her shoulder and hands as if it was tar. She didn’t know the specifics of the death penalty in the United Arab Emirates, but presumed it was more civilized than next door in Saudi Arabia. (She had a vague sense from the TV news that public beheadings were only a little less popular than soccer in Saudi.) Still, she didn’t want to find out.

She really had two choices: either she called someone the moment she emerged from the shower or she didn’t. She was either here for a long time—a very long time—or she was on the flight to France in a couple of hours. The words echoed inside her: a very long time. Good Lord, she recalled some poor American college student who spent years in a prison in Italy awaiting trial for a murder she swore she didn’t commit. She shuddered to think what loomed for her here in the Middle East, especially since she presumed no one would believe that someone else had come into the suite, nearly decapitated Alex Sokolov, and spared her. And if she did choose the first option, alerting people to the corpse in the bed where she’d slept, did she call the front desk or did she call the airline? Did she call the American embassy?

The choice hinged in part on whether she really had killed this young hedge fund manager. Despite the evidence, a part of her—the biggest part of her—honestly believed that she hadn’t. Certainly she had done other batshit crazy things when she was in the blotto zone: when she was blackout crazy drunk. She’d hear the next morning about the things she had said. She’d hear the next day about the things she had done. Sometimes she’d hear when she was back at a particular bar.