The mechanical female voice on the far side of the flight deck door. The remnants of another dream. She knew the voice from the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of landings when she was in the jump seat nearest the cockpit on certain planes. On some aircraft, the ones where the passengers were staring straight at you, they called it the Sharon Stone Seat. The Basic Instinct Bench.
When she awoke, when she understood they were neither landing nor crashing, it was nighttime and the peak of the Empire State Building was colored red. One time when her sister’s family was visiting, she had looked up online what color the building would be that night, hoping she would be allowed to share the view with them and explain to her nephew and niece the reason behind that evening’s selection, but Rosemary had made it clear that they would not be going to Murray Hill and she did not want Cassie alone with the kids.
She wasn’t hungry, but she figured she should eat something and went to the kitchen. She recalled again how Alex had ordered the blanquette de veau at the restaurant in Dubai. She imagined herself telling the FBI agents that the deceased had no objection to eating veal and was a tender and rather exquisite lover in the shower. He read—no, he reread—doorstop novels by long-dead Russian writers. In her head, she heard herself volunteering that for one night, at least, he drank as much as she did, and that had been a lot—enough for her to black out. What would Frank Hammond have said to any of that? She gazed for a moment at the portion of his business card that peeked out from behind the magnet.
The refrigerator wasn’t empty—far from it—but there was still little in there that was edible. It was mostly unfinished Indian takeout that had gone bad, condiments, diet soda, and yogurt that had expired months ago. She found a can of tomato soup in the pantry and some crackers, a little soft with age but edible, and made herself the sort of meal that she recalled her mother might have prepared for her when she was home from school with the flu.
She ate in silence on the living room couch, watching the moon high above the Manhattan skyline. She ate in the dark but for the light from the kitchen. She thought she might look for news stories about Sokolov on her phone when she was finished. She might even boot up the laptop she rarely used. But she feared she wouldn’t sleep if she did, and it was going to be hard enough going back to bed after having slept five hours already that evening.
A sentence came to her: I awoke beside a dead man.
Then another: I may have gotten away with murder.
But then she shook her head because while it was conceivable that she had killed Alex, she continued to feel deep inside that she hadn’t. Oh, there had been moments when she had lost faith and felt waves of debilitating self-hatred: her body actually spasmed ever so slightly once in the elevator in her building. But usually she was able to convince herself that she hadn’t killed him. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Not even in self-defense. For better or worse, that wasn’t how she was wired.
She also reminded herself that it remained highly unlikely that she had gotten away with anything. All she had done so far was make it back to America, where she would at least have a decent lawyer—assuming she could find one who would work for the pittance she really could pay.
Her only definite crime, literal and metaphoric, was leaving the poor guy behind in the hotel room in Dubai. And if she hadn’t killed him, then she was relieved now to have so many time zones between herself and whoever had. Either they had misjudged her and assumed she would call the hotel or the police and wind up a suspect in the homicide—perhaps she would even confess to it—or they had figured she would flee and didn’t care. In this scenario, whoever had killed Alex had been a pro at this sort of thing—an executioner—and knew that she was just in the wrong bed on the wrong night and spared her. They understood that she was uninvolved in whatever nastiness had led Alex to get himself practically beheaded.
As she was putting her soup bowl into the dishwasher, she pondered how someone gets into a locked hotel room. Perhaps when she had the courage to Google Alex Sokolov, she would Google hotel room security. If whoever killed Alex worked at the Royal Phoenician, it was probably simple to unlock the door.
She had a bottle of unopened red wine, a Chianti she rather liked and was saving for a special occasion, but remembered her vow that she wasn’t going to drink. It wasn’t quite eleven o’clock. She considered going to one of the late-night drugstores and getting a bottle of a pain reliever with the letters PM on it, or perhaps some flu remedy with a specifically drowsy formulation to knock a person out.
Instead she thought to herself, fuck it, fuck it all, she wasn’t going to be able to sleep. All that loomed if she stayed here at home was the prospect of tossing and turning and waiting for the lights on the Empire State Building to finally blink out, and then, at two or two thirty in the morning, when she was desperate, uncorking that Chianti. She swiped across a few of the men who came up in her Tinder account, but none of the faces interested her. She thought of the different women she knew whom she could text and see where they were and what trouble they were getting into, moving in her mind first through her friends who tolerated her drinking (some barely) and then those who applauded it and drank with her. She had an equal number of both and needed both in different ways: the former to protect her and apologize to the party hosts and restaurant patrons and wedding guests she appalled with her behavior and her mouth, the latter to goad her on as she took off her bikini top or hurled a pool cue like a javelin. But she didn’t text anyone. Tonight she would be a lone wolf. Sometimes that was best for everyone.
And so—certainly not proud of herself, but not precisely disgusted either—she showered, slipped into a pair of tight, come-hither jeans and a white blouse that was perfect for the last Saturday night in July, and went out into the dark. She wore the shade of lipstick the airline preferred for her, a deep scarlet that would help the hearing impaired read her lips in the event of an emergency.
* * *
? ?
Was she too old to have kicked off her heels and danced barefoot on a floor sticky with spilled beer in a dark club in the East Village, courting a noise-induced hearing loss because the band’s amps were set to jet engine? Probably. But she wasn’t the only woman who was suddenly barefoot. She was merely the oldest. And she didn’t care about her age or her feet, because she was doing this sober and that left her unexpectedly pleased. This was the foolishness the heart craved. She’d found a bar with a band and a party, it was still the middle of summer, and the people were beautiful. She was nowhere near Dubai. The guy she was dancing with, an actor with Gregg Allman hair, honey-colored and lush, had just finished doing six weeks of Shakespeare in Virginia. He said he was thirty-five and was here because one of the dudes on the stage that moment had been in a show with him that spring in Brooklyn. The musical had needed someone who could play the guitar as well as sing and act.
“You’re sure I can’t get you a beer?” he shouted into her ear. His name was Buckley, which she had told him was the best name ever for a Shakespearean actor, and he had agreed, but he was from Westport and that was the name he got—and it hadn’t been a great name when he was doing a musical about the 1970s punk scene last year at the Public. And Buck, he had reminded her, was far worse: if you were a performer named Buck, you were either a cowboy or a porn star.
“Positive!” she reassured him. She jumped and spun and had both of her hands over her head, the bass from the stage thrumming inside her, and then Buckley’s fingers were on the small of her waist, pulling her into him, and when she brought her hands down she rested them on the back of his neck and suddenly they were kissing and it was electric.