The Flight Attendant(70)

“I’m reading a book about a pilot,” her niece was saying to her, and Cassie turned to her and tried to focus.

“Oh? Tell me about it,” she said.

And her niece did and she tried to pay attention, but a part of her was recalling the denial that marked her drinking in her early and midtwenties, and how she convinced herself that she wasn’t her father’s daughter and she wasn’t repeating his mistakes. She wouldn’t let alcohol destroy her the way it had destroyed him. And for over a decade and a half—until Dubai—on some level she had even believed that. Because it wasn’t until Dubai that she had really become one with her father by allowing her addiction to lead her to the dead. You can repair anything but dead. You can’t fix that.

So you buried the dead and moved on.

You burned the carbons.

The proof was in the proof.

And yet she wanted that gin and tonic. Even now. Even as she waited for a phone call from Ani Mouradian or Frank Hammond. She wanted it badly.

“Can I borrow the book when you’re done?” she asked Jessica.

“Sure, but it’s a kids’ book.”

She shrugged. “A lot of the best books are kids’ books. Charlotte’s Web. The Giver. Matilda. It’s a long list.” She smiled at the girl and then told the table that she was going to the ladies’ room. She planned to drop a ten with the bartender on the way there, curl her tongue into a funnel, and drain a shot glass of gin.



* * *



? ?

Dennis didn’t mind driving in New York City. He rather liked it, in fact. His big complaint was the cost of parking. But the hotel where they were staying in White Plains was reasonable, and so he had driven to the Bronx Zoo, which had made it easy for them all to drive to Chinatown. Then, after dinner, he insisted on chauffeuring Cassie back to her apartment. She invited them all upstairs, but it had been a long day and Dennis really didn’t want to park again. So she said her good-byes in the car and exited at the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street, waving at Noah the doorman the moment she emerged from the car. She was in her apartment by eight o’clock.



* * *



? ?

If she hadn’t had a shot of gin at the bar at the restaurant in Chinatown, would she have stayed home once she had settled down inside her apartment? Probably not, because Paula phoned, her siren song drawing Cassie once more toward the rocks: the magical cubes that added such beauty to the luminescent brown of Drambuie and transformed the waters of arak into clouds. Briefly she considered not answering when she saw Paula’s name on her phone’s screen, but willpower had never been her strong suit. And so she did answer, which meant that by nine she was drinking at the bar at a Mexican restaurant near Union Square with her friend and a woman from Paula’s ad agency named Suzanne, and by ten she was telling the two of them a version of her nightmare in Dubai in which Alex Sokolov himself didn’t appear, but instead she slept with a fictional commodities trader named Alex Ilyich—a surname she commandeered on the fly from Tolstoy. But she was certainly imagining the real Alex as she spoke, giving her fictional one that same peculiar jones for the Russians and Russian literature. Alex, she said, had told her that he would be back in the States and visiting his parents in Virginia this week. The man, she added, had promised to call her when he was stateside but never had. Never even texted.

Which, perhaps, was why now she was allowing them to prod her to call him at his parents’ place in Charlottesville.

“Do it!” Paula said raucously over the sound of the crowd and clinked glasses and the thrum of the bass from the speakers on the far side of the bar. “Do it! Call him! Give him shit for fucking and forgetting!”

Cassie gazed at her friend and at her friend’s friend. Their eyes hung heavy with tequila, and their smiles had that Saturday-night smirk, thin-lipped and derisive, but also eager for a rush to cap the weekend with a pulsating vibrato of hilarity and chaos.

“I don’t have his number,” she said.

“So? Call Charlottesville! Call his parents! How many people there have unpronounceable Russian last names?”

And so to appease them she pretended to search for Ilyich in that Virginia city, but actually looked up Sokolov. She found that name instantly. She pressed in the digits, let it ring once, and then hung up. She felt at once mournful and brutish. She knew she would be unable to endure the sound of Alex’s mother’s or father’s voice on an answering machine, or the voice of whoever was screening calls at the house the night after the funeral.

“Busy,” she said.

“Like hell it was!” said Suzanne, rapping her knuckles on the wood of the bar, then laughing and moaning at how she had banged them so hard that she’d hurt herself. “You’re a coward and a wimp.”

“No, it was busy,” she insisted. “It really was!”

“No way!” Paula laughed, rolling back her head. With the speed of an attacking snake she grabbed Cassie’s phone and pressed on the number that Cassie had just dialed. Cassie tried to wrestle the phone away, but Suzanne held down her right arm and then her left, and then bear-hugged her and giggled. Cassie didn’t struggle, not because she feared making a scene—she never feared making a scene—but because a part of her had to see where this speeding train was going to crash and just how cataclysmic would be the carnage.