But as a flight attendant, Marissa labored under the perpetual tyranny of having no time to waste, serving drinks and collecting trash in a workplace in which the most minor jolt to normal procedures (a passenger’s bag popping open in the aisle, a lav door spontaneously deciding not to close) could send tremors of inconvenience that might grow to shake the entire system: planes in the air waiting to land, planes on the ground waiting to board, passengers sitting at gates and parked in No Standing zones across the country, if not around the world. In other words, she was always in a rush. And having flown in that morning from Seattle, after having flown to Seattle from New York the previous afternoon, Marissa found it hard to keep on with the rushing when there was no more at stake here than the annoyance of a husband who’d be annoyed with her anyway, the irritation of in-laws she doubted liked her very much to begin with. What she wanted—all she wanted—was to let herself fall facedown on the hotel room bed, close her eyes, and worry about the consequences in ninety minutes or so.
But though she might fantasize about doing this, she wouldn’t. The most she allowed herself was to fold her trench coat over her rollaboard in the entryway of the dayroom VentureJet had provided her and Delia before the turnaround to Sea-Tac that night, sit down on the bed, take off her shoes, and rub the arches of her feet through her nylons. The room was not so bad, as these places went: tidy, spacious, neutral smelling. Yet something about looking around it hardened her exhaustion. Maybe it was simply that she’d seen it all before, so many times, if not in this particular hotel, then in the hundred hotels like it: the drab colors of the thin carpeting, the plastic sheaths around the plastic cups by the ice bucket, the flaccid neatness of the made-up bed, with its white bed skirt, white duvet, white pillowcases all bleached and starched to lifelessness. Hotel rooms started to look a lot like hospital rooms, she’d realized: Whatever happened there, the expectation was you would not be staying long.
Thinking of hospitals seemed to make her nauseous. She dropped her foot from her hands and closed her eyes. Don’t lie down, she warned herself. Don’t lie down, or you’ll fall asleep.
She took her phone out of her purse at her feet, and for the first time since getting on the airplane the previous night, turned it on. Robbie had sent her a text at some point.
I’m not angry anymore. Let’s enjoy the holiday. I love you.
It took her a few moments to put together what he was talking about. The long-haul flights effected a sort of mental suspended animation, in which the realities of life on the ground fell away, her mind as bare as the cloud cover out the window. It was something she’d learned to like about her job. But everything ignored or forgotten was always there when you landed. The fight before she’d left had been bad, escalating from the usual assurance that “It’s not a big deal, but” all the way to screaming and tears. They’d gotten into it this time because he announced he was hurt she was “skipping” the better part of the holiday with his family to work.
Yes, she had agreed to swap onto flights on the holiday, but it was time-and-a-half, and they needed the money. What argument could be more compelling than that?
But he said he didn’t understand why she’d become a flight attendant in the first place. And when she answered that it was because she wanted a job with a pension, he rolled his eyes and told her if it ever came to that, they could count on his parents for money.
But she didn’t want money from his parents. She wanted to be independent.
Independent from what? You’re always leaving! he complained, like always.
I don’t have a choice! was all she could ever say back.
They’d been fighting daily lately, like it was a setting in their relationship they didn’t know how to turn off. It’s just a hard time, he’d tell her in the intervals, when they were okay to hold each other or even just sit beside each other on the couch and talk. It’s a hard time, so what could you do? If you fought, you had to make up, over and over and over, as many times as it took. But even the making up required emotional labor it took Marissa another couple minutes to summon. Finally, she texted him.
Got 2 BDL. Hope you & yr parents having a good morning. Be there soon. Love you too.
She sat on the bed, staring at the phone. The little bubbled messages stared back, as unchanging as if they’d been carved in stone. She didn’t know what she was waiting for. It didn’t mean anything if he didn’t write back. He’d been the one who’d sought to make peace, and she’d agreed. This fight was over, officially. But there was still some reassurance she craved, some confirmation that wherever he was, that whatever they’d put each other through most recently, Robbie still loved her, right then. She had no right to this reassurance anymore. But God, she craved it. She felt a pang of something that was either visceral need for him or more nausea, she couldn’t tell the difference.
The phone didn’t beep or ping or vibrate in her hand. Through the wall behind her, she could hear the permanently delighted chatter of a TV morning show. She put the phone down on the bed, stood up. The curtains in the room were drawn, which meant there wasn’t much to see behind them, but sunlight would help her feel more alert. A few flight attendants she’d flown with popped Adderall in the lav during red-eyes; she understood the appeal, but even if she’d been open to messing around with prescription pills (and she wasn’t), her feeling was that at thirty-one, she ought to be able to stay on her feet without pharmaceutical assistance.
She pulled the curtains apart: Half the view was filled by the concrete wall of the adjacent parking garage; in the other half of the window, she could see the stubby cream buildings of an office park, casting rectangular shadows across an empty lot. It had an abandoned, failed sort of look, but of course this was only because everybody who worked there was home for Thanksgiving. Thinking of the holiday filled her nostrils with the smells of stacked turkey slices and gobs of mashed potatoes, and now the nausea clenched her stomach and wouldn’t let go. She raced into the bathroom, knocking over her rollaboard, flung up the toilet seat, and vomited stomach acid and orange juice into the bowl. Then she dry heaved for several minutes, at last slumped against the wall, leaned her temple against the cold tile.
She never threw up. Saint Marissa, her friends in college used to call her, because she wouldn’t have more than one beer at a party, and so they could count on her to rub their backs, hold their hair, talk them through whatever they might be crying about when they were in this position; by the time she graduated, anything a Syracuse undergrad had to sob into a toilet bowl, she’d heard it before.
Marissa wanted to believe it was the Red Lobster she’d eaten in Hartsfield. That was a week ago, though, and here she was, still puking in the mornings. And then the ominous timeline: four months since Robbie’s birthday, the last time they’d had sex; two months since her last period; and six weeks since Brendan. The morning sickness had to confirm it. So what would Saint Marissa do now?
She closed her eyes, leaning further against the wall. She could hear her mother’s cackling Boston accent: “The Cavanos aren’t lucky people, so you expect the worst.” It was maybe the best advice her mother had ever given her. But what was the competition? Don’t talk to cops? In the darkness behind her eyes, a scene filled in: tidy rows of houses along thin, placid streets. It was what she saw out the window during descents. The height made the scenes on the ground—the highway clovers, the shopping malls, the parks with their dirt baseball diamonds—look so benign, toylike, like a still life.
She jerked her head up in a panic—she’d fallen asleep. The shadows of the bathroom seemed to have stretched, darkened. It was nighttime—she’d missed her return. She brought her watch to her face so fast she banged herself on the nose. But no, she’d slept only a couple minutes. “Thank God,” she muttered. And she got to her feet.
She retrieved her toiletry bag from her rollaboard, brushed her teeth furiously to clear away the stomach acid taste, arranging her uniform with her free hand: pulled the button-down shir
t taut on her shoulders, smoothed the front of the skirt with her palm. She would drive up to Vermont in what she had on, she decided. She could change when she got there, wash the uniform in her in-laws’ machine. Then in a few hours, it would be back here to Connecticut, change in the dayroom, catch the shuttle back to Bradley, and—but she knew better than to get ahead of herself. One trip down the aisle at a time, as Delia would say from the other side of the drinks cart, in the hopeless middle of a five-leg day.
She washed her face, rubbed moisturizer from the little amenity bottle on the sink into the pinched corners of her eyes, spread it over her cheeks down to the cleft in her chin. Then she released her hair from the bun she wore for work, letting the black, unruly tendrils fall down her back. It’d be nice to wash it before she saw her mother-in-law—but it’d be nice to do a lot of things she didn’t have time for this morning. She retied the knot in the scarf at her throat: down-up, down-twist-up, forming the furrowed triangle that they were supposed to call the “Skyfarer knot” if a passenger ever asked (they never did).
Last, she put on her eyeliner and mascara, and surveyed herself. Better, she thought—then clenched her teeth with furious frustration that threatened to swell over into tears. Because God almighty, who was she kidding? She looked not an inch different from what she was: a woman who’d been up all night, hadn’t showered in days, had just vomited, made an attempt to hide it all with mascara and hotel room moisturizer, and was scared shitless she was pregnant.
Well, knowing for sure couldn’t make it worse. She went back out to her rollaboard and fished out the pink-and-purple cardboard box Delia had bought her at Sea-Tac. She would have gotten it herself, but under the circumstances, she didn’t think she could handle the dirty looks she’d inevitably get from passengers in the airport shop. She hadn’t understood these looks until Delia explained them to her: If passengers see you doing anything but going to or from an airplane, they assume you’re delaying a flight, and they figure it’s probably theirs. She didn’t really blame the passengers, either. She agreed that the first priority in any airport was to leave it as soon as possible.
It was a digital test, $39.99 before tax (Delia had given her the change and the receipt). And it would leave no ambiguity: The one-inch screen on the stick would display either “yes” or “no.” She opened the flaps—carefully, as though she would need to reseal the box—ripped open the pink plastic sheath, removed the stick’s pink cap. All this pink struck her as idiotic. The makers of these devices had to know they were used as often in panic as in girlish delight.
She hiked up her skirt, sat on the toilet, and waited. But she didn’t have to pee. Or rather, she did have to pee, she just—wasn’t. The image flashed in her mind of a bride at the altar, the groom and the priest and all the guests waiting in awkward silence for her to say the words “I do.”
“C’mon, c’mon,” she said. She looked at her watch again—it was almost nine thirty. On top of everything, she didn’t have time for this.
There was only one thing she could think of that had never once failed to make her need the bathroom. She went out to the minibar, took out a Bud Light, and returned to the toilet. This was a pretty white trash moment, she reflected, taking a long swig, skirt at her thighs, panties at her ankles—but rather than crying about it she laughed. The whole mess was pretty white trash—pretty Cavano, finally, in its tight braiding of stupidity, absurdity, and yes, bad luck. Her mother would have been gratified to have been proven right; might’ve been proud, even, in her way.
Marissa heard the pee before she felt it—stuck the stick into the stream, held it there for a couple seconds, and put it down on the edge of the sink. She wiped, flushed, threw the three-quarters-full beer bottle in the trash can (and nine dollars with it), and washed her hands twice, an essential survival technique for any flight attendant. On the stick’s screen was a flashing message: “Thinking.” “Thinking.” “Thinking.” This time the image that came to mind was a cartoon fuse, burning down toward a stick of TNT.
“If you’re not, then you’re good,” Delia had told her when handing her the box. “And if you are, you get it taken care of and he never has to know.”
“He’s my husband,” she’d said.
“It’s a little late for that, honey,” Delia answered.
“I’m a Catholic,” added Marissa. Delia looked at her as if she’d declared the voices in her head had promised her she would be the mother of the messiah.
The stick was still “Thinking.” Each flash seemed a drumbeat of rising dread.
Could she do that to Robbie: lie about where she was for an afternoon, “get it taken care of,” and simply never tell him? How would honesty ever be possible between them again? How would anything genuine be possible? Or was it already too late, like Delia suggested? The thought of losing Robbie sent panic shooting up the sides of her head, as if she were falling. He never has to know, she repeated to herself. She’d find a way to bury it and move on. But even if she could manage that, could she do this to—she tried to evade the phrase that came roaring to mind—“her baby.”
Her first year out of college, she’d taken Plan B after the condom Robbie was wearing broke. He was practically giddy that a pill was all they’d needed to ensure that they were “safe.” But she hadn’t been able to shake a sense of foreboding. What if they never got another chance?
“It wasn’t a chance,” he told her, “it was an accident.”
If she was pregnant now, and did the only sensible thing about it, could she expect a second chance, a third chance? Robbie’s attitude about having kids had drifted over the course of their marriage from ambivalence to something approaching opposition. In the elevator after meeting the newborn of some friends—who, granted, looked more dead than alive from sleep deprivation—he’d declared, “They are crazy to do that to themselves.”
“Thinking.” She turned the stick over and shut off the light, left the bathroom. She could just go down to the lobby, leave the test on the sink, not find out for at least a few more hours. But a few more hours wouldn’t save her—and she had to stop acting like the kind of girl she had spent her whole life trying not to be. She returned to the bathroom and turned on the light, lifted the stick a quarter inch with her fingernail.
It was as if she felt a blast of heat and the walls shake around her as she read, “Yes.”
Christmas music was playing in the lobby. They’d started playing it on the VentureJet planes now, too, as the passengers were shuffling on, lifting their bags into the overheads, grunting, swearing, shoving, farting. She’d stopped hearing the music at some point, the way she no longer heard the engine noise. But as she surveyed the lobby—the clusters of empty, square-armed club chairs, the idle luggage carts, the table arrayed with copies of yesterday’s USA Today—the threadbare cliché melancholy of “White Christmas” struck her as brand-new, so poignant she had to bite her tongue between her incisors to stop herself from crying.
Christmas was a holiday she felt she’d never gotten right—never had, in the fullness Bing Crosby at least used to know. Growing up, Christmas could mean a trip to a church soup kitchen, her mother insisting they take the food and eat it on the bus, in her pride refusing to sit down at the tables. Or, in years when they were faring better, she and Caitlyn might spend the whole day watching the Grinch and Charlie Brown Christmas on TV in whatever apartment they’d landed in for the winter, while their mother went off and did whatever it was their mother did. The Christmases with Robbie’s family in their house in Vermont had many of the conventional yuletide flourishes: a fire in the brick fireplace, stockings hung above, eggnog served without rum, a ceiling-high tree with an Amazon warehouse’s worth of presents radiating from its base. But in the six years she’d been married to Robbie, she’d never managed to think of herself as a real member of the Russell family, and she was reasonably certain the Russells didn’t think of her that way, either. She was someone they tolerated, for Robbie’s sake. As she conside
red it, her best Christmas was probably the one she and Robbie spent in their first apartment, in Syracuse their senior year—improvised, no family, just the two of them and lights they’d strung around the bedroom door, Chinese delivery and It’s a Wonderful Life on his laptop. At the time, she felt like they were half-assing it, missing out on something—only now she realized that that Christmas contained everything she’d always been seeking.
She took out her phone and called Robbie. The call went right to voicemail. It didn’t mean anything. Maybe his battery was dead; maybe he was driving through somewhere with bad coverage. As she lowered the phone, a pair of Lufthansa flight attendants were rolling their bags by her, chatting happily in German. Marissa pulled her shirt straight again. The international attendants always looked so glamorous, so blond, so put together. One of the two glanced at her, gave her and her uniform a thin smile of recognition. In the high school hierarchy of these things, the Emirates attendants were at the top, followed closely by the Europeans. As for the crews of domestic discount airlines like VentureJet, well, they were the aviation equivalent of the short bus.
Marissa’s phone chimed in her hand—but before her hopes could surge she saw that the voicemail wasn’t from Robbie, but her younger sister, Caitlyn. She listened: “Hi, Marissa. It’s your sister. Hope you’re doing okay.” The tone was to-the-point, unemotional—typical of Caitlyn. “So I know what you’re going to say, but Mom said we could do Thanksgiving this afternoon if we came to her place. And it’d be really nice for Jade if you were there. We won’t stay long, but I wanted . . . I don’t know, whatever, Thanksgiving. Like I said, it’d be nice for Jade if you were there, and for the record, it’d make my life easier, too. Mom’s actually gotten a little mellower lately, if you can believe it. Anyway, I know it’s a long shot. But if you want to, call me. I’m working a double but I’ll get the message when I finish. Okay, happy Thanksgiving, Marissa.”
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