Cosmic Hotel (6 page)

CHAPTER 7

In Phoenix, the elevator let us out on the rooftop party of the New Sun Hotel. The day was at midmorning, a morning filled with Arizona sunlight, mimosas and the babble of voices, and the crinkling police
report in my jacket pocket. I was going to have to pretend that this was business as usual, but I couldn't even smile, kept checking my phone as if that would be the source of good news from Dallas about the violin.

Everyone at the party wore sunglasses, a few women in hats, sipping drinks and rolling foamy yellow earplugs between fingers as they chatted and waited for the main event. The hotel world wasn't that large, and so there were some of the usual people, and it was only strange to see them one week in Miami and then the next week in Phoenix. I noticed an attractive shape blanched by sunshine and inappropriately dressed in blue polyester-blend pants and a white short-sleeved shirt. It looked like my cousin, and only when she picked her phone up and aimed it at me did I realize it
was
Ursula.
Ursula?
Her empty epaulets hunched like inchworms on her shoulder as she aimed the phone at me, her smile crooked. I hadn't seen her in a month, was trying to comprehend why she was here, and also why she suddenly struck me as an Ann-Margret look-alike even down to the nose. I had Ann-Margret on the brain. My legs wouldn't move toward her as she smiled and snapped pictures of my expression.

“You can't inform me that she would be here?” Elizabeth said from behind me.

“I didn't know she was here,” I said.

“She has developed a bad habit . . . ” Elizabeth was saying, but I found I could move.

“That was a classic face,” Ursula said, showing me the picture on her phone. I hugged her, feeling the crush of the aviator sunglasses hanging on her shirt's pocket. She swallowed awkwardly against my ear but didn't lift her arms to hug me back. “Jesus, don't crush me.”

When I let go, she caught the sunglasses before they fell. “The look on your face when you saw me . . . ” she said, shaking her head, and she wobbled.

I said, “You okay?”

Her dark red hair was pulled back. Her necktie was in the airline's required ugly double-Windsor knot. A pin held the black tie
down, the tie's tip flapping, and I tugged the end. “Stop,” she said, batting my hand away, repositioning the black zeppelin tiepin.

She blinked at me, then inspected the liquid in the bottom of her plastic cup. “I came to see you, dumbass. It's about time y'all got here.”

“Good to see you, darling,” Elizabeth said behind me.

“Yes, you seemed overwhelmed with joy,” Ursula said. She leaned to return Elizabeth's kiss on the cheek.

“I am. You know that I always am. But surprises are awkward.” Elizabeth touched her own elbows, but said, “You look tired. You must have been flying.”

Ursula stuck her glasses on her nose. I saw by the way her head bobbed that she was tipsy.

Elizabeth made a big obvious sigh, but Hal Beauvais from Resort Life in Charlotte came over to speak to her.

“How do you know we were going to be here?” I asked Ursula.

“Educated guess. And Dubourg told me.” She indicated the party, the sky toward the old Sun Resort building in the distance that was gutted and hollow, no windows, the whole place ready to be destroyed.

The copper-colored hairs on her arms changed blond when sunlight found them. Her rubber watch dangled loosely on her wrist.

“I'm on standby,” she shrugged, “and I kind of wandered over here.” She let her head roll to port, and I could tell even behind her glasses that her eyes were shut as if she'd fallen asleep, and suddenly I had this image of her and the other cousins hopping around on one foot, heads tilted to get water out of their ears after swimming in the springs back home in Wakulla County. She opened her eyes behind the glasses. “I've always wanted to see one of these things.” She pointed her cup to the tops of buildings around us.

Some young guy stepped to her, his hair too long to be anything but an intern, collar too big for his neck, and he apologized and held a pen out to her with a New Sun Hotel napkin and said something to her. She handed me her cup and indicated for me to spin around. She put the napkin on my back, and I felt her swishing her signature as I
watched half the party watching Ursula Dunbar using my back as a desk, Elizabeth eyeing me with disappointment. I'd heard Elizabeth's diatribe about the unreality of reality shows, but she'd always ended it with a whistle of appreciation at the amount of money she thought Ursula must have made from
Flight 000
. I happened to know it wasn't much money.

I saw at the bottom of Ursula's cup dregs of brown liquor.

Ursula finished letting the guy's friend take a picture of them together.

I took Ursula by the arm to a corner of the roof. “Tell me you aren't on standby. What are you drinking?”

“Did I say I was on standby? I'm not. Eight hours from bottle to throttle. Always. Sacred. I keep up with it down to the second.”

“You're drinking in uniform.”

“I'm not in uniform, asshole. These are my personal clothes. Do you see any insignia?”

She looked over the roof's edge and studied the gutted hotel building at the end of the long, deserted street beyond the barricades where official vehicles were parked with yellow flashing lights. The old hotel building faced us like an empty beehive, and by a trick of the eye, appeared to be already listing.

“It's a plain red cup,” she said.

“People recognize you, Ur. They know you're a pilot, that pilot, any pilot.”

She tried to look at herself. “This is all the clothes I have, thank you. Some people don't have a wardrobe. This is comfortable.”

I started to tell her that if you ever defend what you are wearing with “it's comfortable,” then you are wearing the wrong thing, but I stopped myself. “How did you even get up here?”

“I told security I was with y'all,” she said. “The uniform helps,” she fiddled with her tie clip, the black zeppelin on it. “And my charm,” she said.

“Dubourg knew you were going to be here, didn't he?”

“I guess. He thinks I've flipped out or something. I'm trying to keep away from the network. They want the follow-up interviews, you know. I don't want to do them.”

She'd gained some weight, but she still had the Dunbar good looks. It was hard to believe the two of us shared a common great-grandfather and great-grandmother. Over by the banquet table I saw her suitcase standing straight up, her coat and captain's cap resting on the extended handle like an empty scarecrow, her pilot self. “Your mother hates me.”

“She doesn't
hate
you,” I said. “It's actually quite the opposite. But she thinks I'll end up in some pub with you or sprawled on the hood of your rental car at the end of the runway watching the belly of jets.”

“HA! And you had fun.”

“Yeah, and I'm glad you're here, but I really have to work, and I can't upset her anymore. You have to give me a heads-up when you are going to show up.”

“And miss that priceless face you made?” She raised her eyebrows. “And if I'd called you, you would have told me some bullshit about working and blown me off.” She put a hand on the red railing that went all the way around the roof of this new hotel. “Don't resist, you know you're going to ditch this . . .” Ursula's glasses reflected the sky.

“I can't,” I said. “I'm on probation and walking a thin line already, trust me.”

This hotel we were on, the New Sun Hotel, was perfect, even the painted concrete of this deck was spotless, and the rails glistened with red glossy paint that still looked wet.

“There's a lot going on,” I said. “I lost her violin.”

“Her violin?” She turned up the last sip from her cup, tapping the bottom with a finger.

“Yes, her violin. I lost it in Dallas. Do you have any connections at DFW?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Doesn't she have another one?”

“
No
,” I said, “this was her violin since she was a kid.”

“
Elizabeth
was once a child?” Ursula said. “I thought she came into the world exactly like that.” She pointed to Elizabeth talking in a group.

“I should go mingle,” I said but didn't move, and she said nothing because she knew I wasn't going to move. I felt the wonderful shape of
a triangle diazepam pill in the secret corner of my pocket. I slipped it in my mouth and when Ursula saw me, she said, “I just noticed . . .
you're
a wreck.” She pushed her glasses up on her forehead where they stuck. “What's the matter with you?” I could see in her brown eyes the specks of black decorating her irises.

“
I lost her violin!
”

“Oh,” she said. “Buy another one. What's the problem?” She wiggled her watch to see the time. “Du is in Seattle by now.”

“He told me you were in Salt Lake City.”

“He told me to come see you. I can get anywhere on a moment's notice, remember. Call and I'll be there. God, why can't the three of us have more junctions?”

“Junctions?”

“Conjunctions or something, what word am I looking for?”

Dubourg and Ursula lived across from each other their whole lives on the misnamed Harms Road in Wakulla County, Florida, along with all my tanned, brown-kneed cousins: Holly, Marissa, Jenna, Good John, and Bad John, their houses scattered not more than a short ATV ride away. If someone had asked them, Ursula and Dubourg would say they were first cousins, which was true if Dubourg's adoption to the Dunbar side of the family trumped the fact that he was Charles's biological son by another woman who gave him up for adoption to Van Raye's first cousin, Louis and his wife Lucy. It's complicated, but if you do the math—divide by pi, carry the remainder, multiply by an estranged father—Dubourg and I know we are half brothers and sons of Van Raye but call each other cousin, and the skin on my knees was pale and the skin on his knees was brown, a peculiar trait of my Sopchoppy cousins I silently studied but could not explain as simple wrinkles or old scars or just the shadow of predominate patella bones. No one seemed wise to their brown knees but me.

Ursula glanced across the party to Elizabeth talking to Susanne Lund who was the banker who worked at least half the properties we dealt with. They saw me, and Susanne waved.

“Are you glad to see me or not?” Ursula said.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Ann-Margret?”

She wrinkled her nose like something stank and her sunglasses returned to her nose, and she became more interested in the wind and the gutted hotel in the distance. “I used to get it in college some. Stop looking at me. You've seen me all your life.”

I said, “We just watched
Viva Las Vegas
last night. Ann-Margret is on my mind.”

She pushed the glasses up on her nose with a knuckle. “Lay off it, okay? I don't like it.”

Around our rooftop party, white tulips drooped over their vases, and I forced myself out of the cousin bubble, and it felt horrible outside it. I felt invulnerable when I was around my cousins.

“I'm really very glad to see you, but I'm on the job.”

“
Job
, please.” She crushed the cup with one hand, but it was one of those brittle plastic cups whose sides split but popped back into a destroyed shape of itself, and she considered its defiance. “I need to tell you something,” she said, “but not here, okay?”

Please God
, I thought,
don't tell me you are getting married
. I wanted badly to tell her what Van Raye had claimed. “I got something I want to tell you too,” I said. “What do you want to tell me?”

“Did I just fucking say
not here
?” she said.

“Okay, okay. Give me a second, okay?” I stepped away and found the number to DFW's lost and found and called, and they passed me off through several numerical choices.

I watched a middle-aged woman in a beautiful blue dress approach Ursula with a pen and a pad ready. Please, I didn't want to go to a wedding. She had been dating a guy from Charlotte but that hadn't been that long, had it? Why wouldn't I want her to get married? Probably the same reason I didn't want Dubourg go be a priest. I would lose them.

Ursula didn't have the normal light complexion of a redhead. I guess it was all those years in the Wakulla sun, but she looked like an
airline pilot, straight, true, and smart. She had wanted to be a pilot since she was a little girl, nothing else. I think those looks and earnestness were why the network and the airline had chosen her for the reality show about the crazy cross-country flight,
Flight 000
.

Regular people auditioned to be passengers aboard Flight 000 from Los Angeles to New York, and the airline cooperating with the network was the unknown Shenandoah Airlines. It was promoted as a “test flight” with four crewmembers (pilot, copilot, two flight attendants) and twenty passengers. When the network and the airline chose the “volunteers,” they signed a waiver and a confidential agreement that the company could do basically anything to the aircraft and the occupants during the flight. This was the catch: The passengers and crew could never tell anyone what had happened on Flight 000.

The only known flight plan was that the plane would be out of contact with the ground except for normal flight communications, but there were to be no cell phones, no cameras, no recording devices. When the flight was completed, by agreement, the passengers and crew would be given physical exams, would be debriefed and released, and no one could reveal what had happened during the trip. In return, the passengers and the four flight crewmembers, including Ursula (pilot in command), were given guaranteed lifetime gate passes to fly. Any of the Flight 000-ers could walk up to Shenandoah or one of its affiliated airlines, show her ID, and the airline would immediately issue a first-class ticket, bump a passenger if necessary. It was a deal that even airline employees didn't enjoy, guaranteed flight, no reservation, no pre-notification. The only catch was that if one person broke the confidentiality agreement, then everyone—passengers and the four crewmembers—lost their lifetime passes.