The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

  The second issue, which Elena knew was painfully clear to everyone, was time. It was absolutely unimaginable what kind of damage a loose cannon like Cassandra Bowden could cause if Alex had told her something or if suddenly she felt compelled to broadcast to anyone who would listen that another woman had come to room 511 that night in Dubai.

  And, of course, the clock was running for her, as well. Certainly there were people in Moscow who were shaking their heads at the way that Dmitry’s overly Americanized daughter had allowed the flight attendant to leave Dubai. They were at best confused and at worst alarmed. For all they knew, Bowden was CIA. Perhaps she was part of some military intelligence task force. And so they were angry, and these were the Cossacks. She knew what happened to anyone who pissed off this clandestine old guard. Her own father would have been appalled at what she had done—or, to be precise, at what she had failed to do. She knew she was on thin ice. Viktor had made that clear, not even masking the threat in a polite understatement.

  A thought came to her. The media still hadn’t identified the woman in the sunglasses and scarf in the Royal Phoenician security camera photos. No one in the Dubai police had leaked the name of the flight attendant. Elena decided she would tell Viktor that she needed that reveal before proceeding: Cassandra Bowden’s suicide would be considerably more plausible if she’d been publicly shamed.

  She picked up her phone and watched the little blue dot. It would be great to take care of this—one way or another—before Bowden flew to Rome tomorrow evening, but now she could wait until the story broke. If Bowden’s name wasn’t online or in the newspapers by tomorrow morning, she’d go ahead and make the phone call to a newspaper or a cable news network herself. She’d offer an anonymous tip.

  And in the meantime? She’d continue to watch Bowden and see if an opportunity of some sort presented itself. She wondered where the flight attendant and her family were having dinner tonight, and whether it might demand that the woman take a subway home.

  18

  Cassie joined Rosemary and her family for dinner Saturday night at a crowded Cantonese restaurant that Rosemary had discovered online. It was a block south of Canal and closer than she would have liked to the FBI building on Broadway and Worth. She guessed she was only a five-minute walk from yesterday afternoon’s debacle.

  The restaurant catered to a tourist crowd that wanted to try dim sum. It was massive and loud and packed. But Cassie was surprised at how delicious the dumplings and pan-fried noodles were, and then felt guilty for having experienced a little culinary snobbishness before they had joined the throngs inside. Yes, she traveled a lot and had eaten all around the world, but just because tourists liked something didn’t mean it wasn’t wonderful. Exhibit A? The peppermint macarons at the bakery near the Eiffel Tower. Besides, she was a flight attendant. It wasn’t as if she was dining in La Pergola when she was in Rome.

  And she appreciated the sheer ordinariness of her sister and her family—the lack of drama—and the way the four of them knew each other’s rhythms so well. There was just such comfort in the predictability. Cassie understood that she would never feel anything like this: love born of certainty and ritual.

  “Do you remember that awful Chinese restaurant in Grover’s Mill?” Rosemary was asking her now.

  She nodded. Her sister rarely brought up their childhood around Tim and Jessica. There were too many land mines, and you never knew when a memory would trip one. “Of course I do.”

  “It’s now a weirdly expensive clothing boutique. Kind of like Anthropologie. I mean, they had tops in there for two hundred bucks.”

  “They must need a place to launder their crystal meth money,” Cassie said, only half kidding. “That’s certainly one possible explanation.”

  “I agree.”

  “I don’t know what’s stranger: the fact the store exists or the fact you know it’s there. Were you actually back in Grover’s Mill recently?”

  “We all were,” said Dennis. “It was when we took the kids to that new amusement park that opened at the end of June. It’s pretty close.”

  “They have the steepest water slide in Kentucky,” Jessica added. The girl was using her spring roll a bit like a spoon to get as much peanut dipping sauce into her mouth as she could with each bite.

  “And then you detoured to Grover’s Mill?” Cassie asked.

  “We did,” her sister answered. “I thought it was time these two saw where their mother grew up.”

  “I think we got the PG version,” Tim said. Cassie couldn’t believe how many dumplings the boy had consumed, but he seemed sated now. He was sitting with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, watching as the waiters wheeled the carts through the narrow spaces between the patrons.

  “Maybe,” his mother agreed. “But at least you saw the house.”

  “It was so tiny,” said Jessica.

  It was, Cassie thought, it really was. It was a small saltbox, shabby with age, on less than half an acre. Their parents kept the booze in a kitchen cabinet, on the bottom shelf, which accommodated the taller bottles. The first time she started watering them down was when she was nine. Her father had come to the elementary school that day in June to watch the end-of-year Field Day contests: The three-legged races. The sack races. The sponge battles. (She never did find out why he wasn’t in the high school where he was supposed to be that afternoon, but he must have had an excuse. Wouldn’t he have been fired if he’d just disappeared or they’d known he was drunk when he left?) It was right after lunch. He had interfered in the egg race—a relay race—meeting her on the center-field grass where they were playing, and trying to coach her on how best to transfer the egg to her partner’s spoon. It was shocking to see her father there, in the midst of the game, instead of with all the other teachers and administrators and a smattering of parents—the other grown-ups—off to the side. As he tried to assist her, breaking the rules in every imaginable way, he accidentally knocked the raw egg in her spoon to the ground, where it broke open, the bright yellow sun of the yolk exploding like a star, a supernova of shame. It had been mortifying, and Cassie hoped desperately that everyone supposed her father was merely clumsy and a cheater—not also a drunk. In her desperate embarrassment, she hoped they thought he was only an idiot.

  He had left soon after that, mumbling something about having to get back to the high school.

  That night was the first time that Cassie had crept from her bed while everyone else in the house was asleep and opened the cabinet where her parents stored the liquor. There was Jack Daniel’s, of course, but Cassie knew that was reserved for “special” occasions. Mostly her father drank a Scotch whiskey called Black Bottle, and the level of liquid was about at the top of the label. It was three-quarters full. She poured out an inch and then added an inch of tap water. She did the same with the vodka and the bourbon and the gin. She wished she could do the same with the beer in the refrigerator, but each can was sealed and so that was impossible.

  “But I had my own bedroom there,” Rosemary said, and Cassie felt herself wincing inside at the word there. Rosemary would go from there to the foster home, where she would share a strange bedroom with a strange girl—another teen in the foster care system—who was angry and violent but could dial it down just enough in front of their foster parents to stick around. It was hard to believe that the saltbox with the watered-down gin and their father’s drinking and their mother’s weeping and their weekly fights about money and booze was a well with sufficiently happy memories that Rosemary wanted to share the house with her children. How many evenings had Cassie tried to drown out their fights by cocooning inside her Walkman headset? How many nights had poor Rosemary crawled into bed with her, sobbing and scared?

  “More tea, Cassie?” Dennis was holding the pot near her teacup.

  “Yes, please,” she said, though she would have preferred a Long Island iced tea: tequila, gi
n, vodka, rum, triple sec. The whole damn cabinet in a highball glass. At the table beside them, everyone had a bottle of Tsingtao beer. She wanted one of those, too.

  “And we actually had a very nice swing set and playhouse in the backyard,” Rosemary went on. “It was made of wood—not metal that rusted out as soon as it rained. My friends and I used to play Little House on the Prairie on it. The timbers were so thick and sturdy, they looked like they belonged on a log cabin.”

  “That sounds like the lamest game ever,” her son said.

  “Oh, it was,” Rosemary agreed. “Totally lame. But we were little.”

  Cassie sipped her tea and recalled that moment after college when she broke her vow of alcohol abstinence. She was twenty-three and was at the swimming pool at a hotel in Miami. There were afternoon thunderstorms in the Northeast and their flight back to New York had been canceled, and so the crew was sent to a hotel. It was in Coral Gables and had a rooftop pool. There were crews late that afternoon from three different carriers because the hotel filled its rooms in the summer—the off-season—with airline employees. Everyone was drinking, except her. The flight attendant on the chaise beside her, a motherly veteran who had been flying twenty-five years, was sipping a piña colada, and it smelled heavenly. Cassie considered ordering a virgin colada, but the waiter wasn’t nearby, and the idea of getting up and going to the bar seemed like a lot of work at five in the afternoon, the temperature still in the mid-eighties. And so she had taken a sip. And it was good. Better than a virgin colada, the taste sharper, the tingle deep, deep inside her. She inhaled the aromas of coconut and pineapple, yes, but there was also something else. Something more. Rum. Had there ever been rum in her parents’ kitchen in Kentucky? Probably. But she had no memory of watering down a bottle or of her mother cascading rum down the sink. It felt different and new, and though she sensed she was flirting with something so wonderful but—for her—so reckless that it would kill her, she pushed herself to her feet and walked to the pool bar in her bikini. She ordered a piña colada for herself. Did she even bother to nibble on the pineapple wedge? Probably not. She drank it fast because it was sweet and she could feel the way it warmed her insides and made her worries go away. Suddenly, she wasn’t fretting about her hips. They were fine. She was fine. She was no longer that girl who was scared in the backseat of the car as her drunken father tried to control their hideous robin’s-egg-blue Dodge Colt on the winding road between Landaff and Grover’s Mill, her mother yelling at him to please, please, please, for God’s sake let her drive. She wasn’t that anxious college student, awake at four a.m. at the college switchboard, praying to herself that her kid sister would be okay in the foster home. She wasn’t that diligent, joyless, unremittingly responsible twenty-three-year-old flight attendant who strove for perfection in all things, because anything else was the start of the downward slope that would lead her back to the small, sad village where her father drank and her mother cried and she was pouring Black Bottle down the sink. She was…free. And she liked that. She enjoyed the taste, sure, but more than that she liked the sound of her laugh when the first officer made a joke (not especially funny, but he was cute) about the way a particular cloud in the sky over Miami looked like a puppy with a cigar. That evening he would seduce her, or she would seduce him; in hindsight—even the next morning—she really hadn’t a clue. She learned quickly that music sounded better, people were nicer, and she was prettier when life’s rough edges had been smoothed over with a little alcohol. Or, better still, with a lot. What fault could anybody possibly find in any of that? God, it was good, it was all good, and it was all Cassie could do that very moment in the Chinese restaurant not to violate Rosemary’s Rules and summon the waiter to bring her a Tsingtao, too. Or, better yet, a gin and tonic made with Beefeater or Sacred or Sipsmith, if they had it.

  “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.

  “Hi, this is Cassie Bowden,” Paula said when someone answered. “I met Alex last week in Dubai and I want to speak to him right now! I want to know why he hasn’t called me!”

  She watched as Paula’s drunken eyes went wide and her jaw actually went slack in disbelief. She said nothing more, nothing at all. She just handed the phone back to Cassie, as Suzanne released her arms.

  Cassie looked at the screen and saw the connection was gone.