Before the Fall(99)
Later, after the boy is asleep, Scott calls Gus from the kitchen.
“Was that okay today?” he asks.
“It was helpful, thank you.”
“Helpful how?” Scott wants to know.
“Details. Who sat where. What people were doing.”
Scott sits at the table. There was a moment, after the helicopter departed and Eleanor and Scott were left alone, when both of them seemed to realize that they were strangers, that the illusion of the last twenty-four hours—the idea that the house was a bubble they could hide in—had dissolved. She was a married woman, and he was—what? The man who rescued her nephew. What did they really know about each other? How long was he staying? Did she even want him to? Did he?
An awkwardness arose between them then, and when Eleanor started cooking, Scott told her he wasn’t hungry. He needed a walk to clear his head.
He stayed out until after dark, wandering back to the river and watching the water turn from blue to black as the sun set, and the moon came out.
He was farther than he’d ever been from the man he thought he was.
“Well,” Gus tells him over the phone, “nobody knows this yet, but the flight recorder’s damaged. Not destroyed, but it’s gonna take work to get to the data. I’ve got a team of six guys in there working now, and the governors of two states are calling every five minutes for updates.”
“I can’t help you with that. I can barely open a tube of paint.”
“No. I’m just—I’m telling you because you deserve to know. Everybody else can go to hell.”
“I’ll tell Eleanor.”
“How’s the boy?”
“He’s not—talking, really, but he seems to like that I’m here. So maybe that’s therapeutic. Eleanor’s really—strong.”
“And the husband?”
“He left this morning with luggage.”
A long pause.
“I don’t have to tell you how that’s going to look,” says Gus.
Scott nods.
“Since when does how a thing looks matter more than what it is?” he asks.
“Two thousand twelve, I think,” says Gus. “Especially after—your hideout in the city. How that made the news. The heiress, which—I said find someplace to hide, not shack up in a tabloid story.”
Scott rubs his eyes.
“Nothing happened. I mean, yeah, she took off her clothes and climbed into bed with me, but I didn’t—”
“We’re not talking about what did or didn’t happen,” says Gus. “We’re talking about what it looks like.”
In the morning, Scott hears Eleanor down in the kitchen. He finds her at the stove making breakfast. The boy’s on the floor, playing between rooms. Wordlessly, Scott sits on the floor next to him and picks up a cement truck. They play for a moment, rolling rubber wheels on the wooden floors. Then, the boy offers Scott a gummy bear from a bag and he takes it.
Outside, the world continues to spin. Inside, they go through the motions of daily life, pretending that everything is normal.
Chapter 37
Emma Lightner
July 11, 1990–August 23, 2015
It was about setting boundaries and sticking to them. You smiled at the client, served them drinks. You laughed at their jokes and made small talk. You flirted. You were a fantasy to them, just like the plane. The beautiful girl with the million-dollar smile making men feel like kings as they sat on a luxury jet, talking on three cell phones at once. Under no circumstances did you give out your phone number. You certainly did not kiss an Internet millionaire in the galley or have sex with a basketball star in a private bedroom. And you never went with a billionaire to a second location, even if that second location was a castle in Monaco. You were a flight attendant, a service professional, not a prostitute. You had to have rules, boundaries, because in the land of the rich it was easy to lose your way.
At twenty-five, Emma Lightner had traveled to all seven continents. Working for GullWing, she had met movie stars and sheiks. She had flown with Mick Jagger and Kobe Bryant. One night after a cross-country flight—LAX to JFK—Kanye West chased her onto the tarmac and tried to give her a diamond bracelet. She didn’t take it, of course. Emma had long since stopped being flattered by the attention. Men old enough to be her grandfather routinely suggested she could have anything she wanted if she joined them for dinner in Nice or Gstaad or Rome. It was the altitude, she sometimes thought, the possibility of death by falling. But what it really was was the arrogance of money, and the need of the wealthy to possess everything they saw. The truth was, Emma was nothing more to her clients than a Bentley or a condo or a pack of gum.
To female passengers, wives of clients or clients themselves, Emma was both a threat and a cautionary tale. She represented the old paradigm, where beautiful women in conical bras catered to the secret needs of powerful men in smoky clubs. A geisha, a Playboy Bunny. She was a stealer of husbands, or, worse, a reflection in the mirror, a reconstruction of their own paths to moneyed wifery. A reminder. Emma felt their eyes on her as she moved through the cabin. She endured the steely-tongued jabs of women in oversize sunglasses who sent back their drinks and told her to be more careful next time. She could fold a napkin into the shape of a swan and mix a perfect gimlet. She knew which wines to pair with oxtail stew or venison paella, could perform CPR, and had been trained to do an emergency tracheotomy. She had skills, not just looks, but that never mattered to these women.