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.
On the bigger jets there would be three to five girls working. On the smaller plane it was just Emma, in a short blue skirt suit, handing out drinks and demonstrating the safety features of the Cessna Citation Bravo or Hawker 900XP.
The exits are here. The seat belts work just so. Oxygen masks. Your seat may be used as a flotation device.
She lived her life in turnaround time, the hours and days spent between flights. The travel company kept apartments in most major international cities. It was cheaper than buying hotel rooms for the crew. Anonymously modern with parquet floors and Swedish cabinetry, each apartment was designed to resemble the other — the same furniture, the same fixtures — in the words of the company handbook, “in order to lessen the effects of jet lag.” But to Emma, the uniformity of the space had the opposite effect, increasing her feeling of displacement. It was easy to wake in the middle of the night and not know which city you were in, which country. Occupancy of any company safe house usually hovered around ten people. This meant that at any one time there might be a German pilot and six South Africans sleeping two to a room. They were like modeling agency apartments, filled with beautiful girls, except in one room there’d be a couple of forty-six-year-old pilots farting in their sleep.
Emma had been twenty-one when she started, the daughter of an air force pilot and a stay-at-home mom. She had studied finance in college, but after six months working for a big New York investment bank had decided she wanted to travel instead. The luxury economy was exploding, and jet companies and yacht companies and private resorts were desperate for attractive, competent, bilingually discreet people who could start right away.
The truth was, she loved planes. One of her first (and best) memories was of riding in the cockpit of a Cessna with her dad. Emma couldn’t have been more than five or six. She remembers the clouds through the tiny oval windows, towering white shapes her mind transformed into puppies and bears. So much so that when they got home Emma told her mother that her dad had taken her to see the zoo in the sky.
She remembers her father from that day, seen from a low angle, strong-jawed and immortal, his close cropped hair and aviator sunglasses. Michael Aaron Lightner, twenty-six years old, a fighter jet pilot, with arms like knotted ropes. No one in her life would ever be a man the way her father was a man, sharp-toothed and steely-eyed, with a dry Midwestern wit. A man of few words who could cut a cord of firewood in ten minutes and never wore a seat belt. She had seen him once knock a man out with a single punch, a lightning strike that was over before it began, the knockout a foregone conclusion, her father already walking away as the other man crumpled to the ground.
This was at a gas station outside San Diego. Later, Emma would learn that the man had said something lewd to her mother as she went to the restroom. Her father, pumping gas, saw the exchange and approached the man. Words were had. Emma doesn’t remember her father raising his voice. There was no heated argument, no macho chest bump or warning shove. Her father said something. The man said something back. And then the punch, a whip crack to the jaw that started at the hip, and then her father was walking back to the car, the man tipping backward and toppling, like a tree. Her dad lifted the nozzle from the gas tank and set it back on its arm, screwing the gas cap in place.