First Class Killing

Chapter 8

“ALEXANDRA!”

Tristan screeched down the jetbridge and onto the quiet aircraft. I jumped and clanged the coffee pot against the coffeemaker. Fortunately, onboard coffee urns are nearly indestructible.

“You startled me.”

“Is that you? Oh, my God, dear, you are ablonde! But when did you do this?”

I stuck the pot on the burner, reached up, and plowed my fingers through my new do. It was a familiar habit through unfamiliar territory. I wasn’t used to wearing products on my hair.

“Last night, and I’m not a blonde, I’m merely highlighted.”

“Look at you, all poofed and moussed. You look fabulous.”

“Do you really think so?” If I had been unsure before, now I was totally convinced-I had made a terrible mistake. It was too much. “Is it too much?” I knew I shouldn’t have done it myself. What was I thinking taking fashion advice from Dan? “Do you like it? Is it a good color? Is it okay?”

“Better than okay. Is that new makeup, too?Look at those nails. Girl, what got into you?”

He turned me around, and I had to admit, it was nice to be noticed. “It’s your influence,” I said. “I knew I couldn’t show up with you at a Hollywood party without looking anything less than fully buffed.”

I’d had no luck arranging my own swap to LA-apparently, it was the place to be for flight attendants this evening-so I’d had to enlist Tristan, with his seniority and his pull and his vast number of sources around the base. He got the job done, but the price was that he insisted on coming with me. In my heart of hearts, I was relieved. I hated parties. The sound of ice tinkling in glasses or the smell of a Sterno can burning under a fondue pot was enough to trigger the party vapors, the inability to function in large gatherings of schmoozing people, all of whom knew each other, none of whom knew me. This particular confab, put on by a Hollywood producer, had the potential of being the most intimidating party I’d ever attended.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.” He stowed his bag in the first-class coat closet. “My days of jetting out to LA for a party are long over. But this might be fun. Did you turn on the ovens?” He reached past me to check. “Still gun-shy, I see.” After opening the doors to make sure no ice buckets were hidden inside, he turned them on. “Tell me again why going to this party is so important to you.”

“I told you last night.”

“I know you did, but I want to hear it again. I am so excited for you.”

“There’s someone there I want to see.” Not exactly a lie…

“A passenger, right?”

“He is, yes.” Still not really a lie. There would be passengers there.

“Oooh, a handsome prince. Did he invite you? Tell me everything about him. Did you meet him on a flight? You must have. Does he live in LA? You have to be careful of handsome princes from LA. Mostly, they’re starving gay actors. I can help you scope that out. Introduce me, and I’ll tell you within thirty seconds if he’s gay. Unfortunately, it’s the toads that have all the money, and if you kiss them, they will still be toads, albeit wealthy ones. You don’t have to worry about them, anyway. Most of them are only interested in jailbait. Boys and girls. Oh-” He checked quickly to see if he had offended me. “I didnot mean you were old. Thirty-four is not old except by the standards of Tinsel Town.” He put his arm around me. “Don’t worry, Cinderella. I’ll take care of you.”

That was one of the nice things about Tristan. I often didn’t have to fill in the details for him, because he did it himself.

Work began with the sound of the first-class passengers stampeding down the jetbridge, racing each other for overhead bin space. Boarding went smoothly, and after a slow but steady procession, Tristan worked with the gate agent to close out the flight while I checked in with the cockpit for beverage orders. Behind me, I heard the telltale signs of runners, passengers huffing and puffing as they leaped aboard after an all-out sprint down the concourse. Eventually, the door closed, the jet-bridge retracted, and we were set, sealed in for the long flight west.

As we pushed back and started our taxi, I did a pass through the cabin to prepare for takeoff. My focus was on empty cups and seat belts, so mostly what I saw were elbows and laptop keyboards and wristwatches and cuff-links, and then I got to the guy in 4B, who must have been one of the runners, because 4B had been empty last I’d seen, and for some reason I looked at his face and not his elbow, and I saw who it was, and everything stopped, and I started to say something from the shock alone but caught myself because he didn’t see me, and my next thought in a flood of them was that I didn’t want to be seen.

Not like this. Not by him.

I spun around and lurched back to the galley, where Tristan was organizing the catering cart. “We don’t have enough beer,” he said. “They never give us enough beer. We’ll be lucky if we make it to the Mississippi on what they gave us.”

When I didn’t respond, he looked up at my face. “What? What’s the matter?”

I could barely get the words out. My feet felt heavy, because all my blood had drained down and collected there. “I can’t work up front on this leg. I have to go to the back.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“The passenger who just boarded, the one in 4B, I know him. I can’t work the cabin with him there.”

“ ‘Him’?” He turned instantly puckish. “Let me see, who could that be? Ex-husband?”

“You know I don’t have one of those.”

“Old boyfriend who came home to find you in the shower with your neighbor’s husband? That could be fun. Or maybeyou came home and foundhim in the shower with your neighbor’s husband. Even more fun, for me at least, although probably not for you-”

“Tristan, please stop.” I was unhinged enough that he knew I wasn’t joking. My heart was up inside my skull, pounding against my eardrums. “I can’t believe this. Where’s the…” I reached for the manifest, but he grabbed it first and scanned it. With the start of a big grin, he stepped outside the galley and checked out 4B. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe it. Dear, he looks just like you.”

I pulled him back in. He looked at me with eyebrows raised. “James P. Shanahan?”

“Jamie. He’s my brother.” Maybe I could sit in the lav for four hours. “Where did he come from? He wasn’t there earlier.”

“He was a runner.” He clipped the manifest back to the wall. “And an upgrade. He showed up at the last minute.”

“Figures. He never could be on time for anything. What is he doing here? He lives in New York.”

“How would I know? He’s your brother. Wait, you didn’t know he was in Boston?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He wasn’t sure what to make of that, and I didn’t feel like expounding. “Well, what are you doing here? Go out and say hello.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? Don’t you want to see him?”

“It’s more the other way around.” I folded my arms across my chest and backed as far as I could into the galley. “He doesn’t know I’m a flight attendant. The last he heard, I had left my job at Majestic and was looking for another management assignment.”

“You’ve been flying for almost two months, in training for almost as long. Don’t you two talk?”

I reached down and straightened my name tag. “Not lately.”

“I see.” He started setting up his clipboard to take breakfast orders. “How long?”

“Eight months. Since the day before Christmas.”

“Christmas was ten months ago. Hello? What’s going on with you two?”

“It’s a long, boring story.” Which I didn’t want to discuss. I was busy thinking ahead, trying to figure out how to work the entire flight without ever leaving the forward galley. Maybe the captain would let me sit in the cockpit for the duration of the flight. “Tristan, would you do the safety demonstration?”

“Under one condition.”

“Anything.” The thought of standing in front of my estranged brother demonstrating how to buckle a seat belt made my skin vibrate.

“You have to promise to tell me that long, boring story the second we get the chance.”

“Fine. Done.”

“You also have to do color commentary for the briefing. I can’t do both.”

I was mildly concerned that Jamie would recognize my voice if I read the safety briefing, but there was only so much work I could weasel out of. Besides, no one ever listened, and he was no exception. As I recited the instructions, he kept his head down, working on his laptop.

When the demonstration ended, Tristan made a last sweep through the cabin to take drink orders, which I was supposed to have done. I peeked around the corner to look again. Jamie’s hair was shorter than I remembered. We hadn’t spoken for eight-ten months, but the last time I’d seen him had been six months before that. Could it have been that long? I stole another peek. When he lifted his eyes, I pulled back.

Seeing him after so much time, seeing that he had changed while I wasn’t looking, even if it was just a haircut, caused a sharp pain in my heart. It made me wonder what else had happened without me. Not much had ever happened in his life that I hadn’t known about.

The captain came on with his prelaunch announcement. Tristan arrived, bounced into the jumpseat next to mine, and strapped in.

“He’s adorable, Alexandra. Just like you. Polite. Considerate-”

“You talked to him?”

“Yes, I did. I said, ‘I love your suit. Is that Joseph Abboud, and did you know your sister is cowering up in the forward galley?’ ”

“You’re such a comedian.”

“His eyes are a really cool shade of dark blue. Yours are blue, aren’t they?” He turned to me, leaning forward and away so he could check.

“Gray. Jamie looks more like my mom. I look like my father.”

“He has that smoldering boy-next-door thing going on. How does one do that, I wonder? The boy-next-door thing I get, being from Wyoming. It’s the smoldering I can’t seem to master.” Tristan reached up and adjusted the knot of his tie. “Does he work out?”

“I thought you were in a relationship.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t look.” He smoothed his hair behind his ear. “Is he straight?”

“Happily married with two kids.”

“To a woman?”

“Tristan-”

“What does he do?”

“He’s an investment banker. Very successful for his age. Last I heard, he was up for partner at his firm.”

“The plot thickens. Let me see if I can get this right.” He tipped his head back and did the Freud chin stroke. “He thinks you’re still a master of the universe. Mistress of the universe? In the meantime, little brother has turned into a Wall Street whiz kid. He’s never seen you in your cute little uniform, and now you have to serve him his first-class orange juice.” He looked at me with unabashed delight. He had nailed it, and he knew it.

“Tomato juice,” I said. “He likes tomato juice.”

“If it wasn’t you, dear, I would say this is all rather delicious.”

“I don’t know what to say to him.”

“ ‘Hello. Nice to see you. Oh, by the way, I’m a flight attendant now. Can I freshen that drink for you?’ ”

I brushed my hand across my skirt. A single wayward thread poked up to mar the smooth cotton expanse. What would I say to him? That I had become a flight attendant without telling him would be obvious. Not so that I was an investigator pretending to be a flight attendant, which, of course, I hadn’t told him, either. Could I even tell him that? He was not one step behind but two, which is what happens when you don’t speak to each other.

“Or we can cut two holes in one of the trash bags, and you can wear it over your head while you do the service. What are you so ashamed of?”

What a complicated question that was, made more so given who was asking. There was just enough arch in Tristan’s tone to remind me he had an investment in my answer.

“I’m not ashamed to be a flight attendant. Great people do this job and love this job, including you, and so many people do it so much better than I do. It’s not that. It’s the going backward part. I used to run a big airport operation with hundreds of people reporting to me. I had responsibility and authority that I worked hard to get. Now I don’t. He’ll think I gave up, that I got scared and threw in the towel, because…because that’s how he thinks. Jamie is very driven. You gave up a management job. You know what that’s like. Some people don’t get it.”

“I always preferred to think of it as making a better choice for myself.”

Okay, here was the further complication. Jamie would think I had lost my mind if I told him the real choice I had made. It might be hard to convince him otherwise, since I spent the first five minutes of every day trying to convince myself that I hadn’t.

“I don’t know if Jamie would accept my choice.”

“Does it matter?”

“What?”

“He’s your brother, not your husband. It would be a shame if he didn’t support you, but he’s got his life, and you’ve got yours, right? At some point, even families end up going their separate ways.”

“I guess so.” We were in a lineup on the taxiway, so every once in a while, we would inch forward and stop. Mostly we were idling in one spot. “It’s just…he’s my only real family now.”

“Yet you’re not speaking. Isn’t that interesting? What’s it about, anyway?”

There was no point in trying to resist him. He would be relentless until he pried it out of me. “Jamie and his wife invited me to come down for Christmas dinner last year, and I didn’t make it, and he got angry, and I got angry, and we never really made up.”

“That’s it?”

“It seemed big at the time.” I stared down at the worn rubber floor covering, where a thousand flight attendants before me had rested their feet. “It has to do with my father.”

“Doesn’t it always? Go on.”

“We hadn’t had anything close to a family holiday gathering in ages. I’ve worked in airports forever. You know what that’s like. Christmas at the airport.”

“Or at thirty-five thousand feet.”

“Right. But I didn’t have a job last year, so I was excited. I bought gifts for the kids and for Jamie and Gina. I got them this really neat…anyway, I ended up sending the gifts.”

“Why didn’t you go? This doesn’t sound like you at all.”

“Because after I accepted their invitation, he invited my father.”

“You said it was a family dinner. What am I missing?”

“I can’t stand my father.” The sharp pain in my heart was now a stabbing pain in my gut. “I can’t remember the last time I was in the same room with him.”

“My goodness, you have a lot of estrangement in your life. Are you sure you’re not gay? Who in your familyare you speaking with? Your mother?”

“My mother is dead.”

“She is? Oh, dear. I’m sorry.” He reached for my hand in my lap, gave it a quick squeeze, and let go. He always seemed to know just the right grace note to hit.

“It was a long time ago.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“And that made Jamie how old?”

I always had to think about it. For some reason, instead of just subtracting five from my own age, I always did it by taking the year she died and subtracting the year he was born. “Nine. He was nine.”

“So you’re his mom-sister. Complicated. Did he beat you?”

“Jamie?”

“Your father, ninny. Is that why you hate him? Or maybe he molested you.”

“No. Nothing like that. My dad’s a bully. He’s intellectually abusive. He loves to club you in the head with his massive intellect. He convinced Jamie he was stupid.”

“How stupid can he be if he’s a big cheese in a Wall Street firm?”

“He’s not at all stupid. He has a learning disability, and before it was diagnosed, he had a hard time in school. Really hard. My father used to make fun of him, of how hard he tried. Called him lazy, stuff like that.”

“Sounds as if Daddy is the one who was fucked up.”

“Once Jamie was diagnosed, he learned how to compensate. He might even overcompensate.”

“Thus the whiz kid stuff.”

“Yeah. But back then, he was just this little kid with no friends and no mother and a miserable, self-loathing prick for a father who got his kicks by picking on him. My stomach is seething right now just talking about it.” Which was exactly why I hated rehashing the stuff.

“Why would Jamie invite his prick of a father over for Christmas?”

“I have no idea. Honestly, I don’t know why he invited him.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“I got pissed off, and then he got pissed that I was pissed, and we had a big fight and hung up and never called each other back. This is the first time I’ve seen him since.”

I felt the aircraft turn. We were in the pause between taxiing and blasting down the runway. The captain hit the gas, the aircraft surged, and the g-forces pushed us forward against our harnesses. I didn’t much like flying backward. The two of us sat quietly as the aircraft lifted off and settled into a steady climb.

“I have the solution,” he said finally.

“What?”

“Apologize.”

“No way. I didn’t do anything. I mean, I did, but…” That all came out much too fast, and I started feeling how I probably sounded-like a ten-year-old. “I know I need to, but I can’t right now. It will turn into a big thing. Everything is a big deal between us these past few years. It takes so much time and energy and-”

“And he’s not worth it.”

“I didn’t say that. What I’m saying is I can’t deal with it right now.”

“Then when?”

“It’s on my list.” I said it quietly. Maybe I really didn’t want him to hear it.

He shook his head. “You’re an idiot. Truthfully, Alexandra, I’m not trying to be mean, but who else do you have in your life? I know I’m wonderful, and Reenie is, too, and we love you, but shouldn’t you have some connection to some member of your family? It’s cold out there without them. Take it from someone who knows.”

The aircraft was banking left, making a grand, sweeping turn west. It would be time to go to work soon.

“What,” he asked, “did you end up doing for Christmas, anyway?”

“I ate a frozen pizza and half a pint of ice cream and went to the movies by myself.”

“I rest my case.”