“What’s not there?”
“A bomb.”
“A bomb?”
“Not so loud,” he says as they enter the airport. “I want a bed, not a cell.”
Everything now makes sense. Through the window, the plane is still far removed, kept at a distance on the tarmac.
“Threat,” Delan says when the airline finally fills them in. “Key word. Bomb threat. So really, there was no bomb.” He says this like someone mentioning it wasn’t chocolate in a cookie but carob. Surprise.
“I thought pigeons,” she says.
Half his mouth lifts in a smile. “The way you see the world.”
She feels foolish. Her hope, her innocence, is something she tries to cover like an ill-fitting shirt. Delan is six years older than she is, around the same age as most of her friends, and only recently has she understood that this has her operating from a youthful, inexperienced deficit. “So you knew.”
“Of course,” he says. “But what could we do? Get off the plane? You panic when you have a choice.” With his arm around her, he pulls her toward him, giving her a squeeze, and then turns to the woman behind the counter, taking on a charming smile. “Luggage. Please. Tell me it will find us at the hotel. I have gifts for my family, and I cannot replace them—and I will need to know where the chocolate is.”
His gifts. A movie poster from his first job in the United States—a minor but key part in a huge film, and though he’s not on the poster, his name is—and reviews of plays, which are his real love, though television and commercials and a job at a restaurant pay the bills. Also packed is a playbill from a production he was in last year, from before he and Olivia started dating, his face on the cover alongside that of his costar, a woman with a ski-slope nose and blonde hair that always looked slightly wet, a woman who’d once ended up at the kitchen table for breakfast. As well there are six necklaces, two men’s gold-plated watches, and one watch with leather straps like dampened wood and a compass. When Olivia saw it, she’d known exactly who it was for: Aras, his best friend. An Amir Hez, the head of a large unit of Peshmerga. Those who face death, he’s told her of the word Peshmerga’s meaning. We grew up next door. He’s been there since the start. If I show him a scar, he remembers the blood.
“And we have to pay for the hotel?” Olivia now asks. Already she’s adding up the cash in her wallet. In the Paris airport, she’d spent far too much on a Christmas ornament of the Eiffel Tower, but all things Christmas are her weakness. She’s been known to sing carols in July and to carry around a small twig of fir tree to convince herself of another place and time.
“A bomb threat can happen to any airline,” the woman says, eyes on the line behind them. “Like a blizzard. We don’t pay for that either.” A glance at Delan. “Your luggage will get to you at some point. Don’t worry.”
“And there’s no flight soon to Beirut?” Olivia asks.
“It’s a war there. They close early.”
The perfume. Olivia thinks of it again. From where she stands at the counter, she looks back, toward the plane, feeling the scent that was to mark this trip left behind. Its absence twists with meaning, and there is an illogical worry within her that what’s to come are days that were never meant to happen.
CHAPTER 2
Often Olivia tries to find the start of things. The true start. One that stretches past first meetings. After all, the real beginning is what led to a moment, what drilled the course, and so for everything big in her life—her move to Los Angeles, her love of photography, her relationship with Delan—she likes to revisit the past to find the markers that created the paths.
Her start with Delan began, in a way, with her job. Or, rather, even further back—with her decision to major in English in college, despite an unrelenting and consuming love of photographs that had her spending more time with images than the articles she read. Still, with this decision and a degree that said English, she figured any job in publishing would lead to a chance at writing and the future she’d signed up and paid for.
The first week at the newspaper was magical. The building itself was charged with life and energy and movement, and she sat in a bullpen of cigarette smoke amid phones that rang nonstop and metal file cabinets that clanged open and shut. Everyone’s steps were hurried. To get in the way was a sin. Always organized, the person who dreamed of school-supply shopping, she lined up her stapler and tape dispenser and arranged her favorite pens, Parker’s “Big Red,” in her desk drawer. An ordered desk was an ordered mind, and her mind was nothing if not ordered. She was ready.
But by the end of the week, the glow was gone. She heard them called “office wives,” the women who sat at the desks just beyond the glass, even though they had degrees and ideas and for the most part had taken the job, like she had, as a first step. They were made to order flowers and send gifts and told to be sure the scotch was stocked and the paperweights shone, while privately they listened in on meetings and submitted spec pieces that were shuffled to the bottom of piles. Feminism had taken hold, but the good old boys still held the reins in certain companies, and breaking in meant going through a wall that might be painted a different color but held all the same. That’s a sassy one, Olivia’d heard an editor say about a woman in advertising who’d come in for a meeting. The
