The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  — It depends on the light.

  — How old are you?

  — Eighteen.

  He seems surprised. Taken aback.

  — Why? she asks. — How old are you?

  — Thirty-three. I thought...

  — Thought what?

  — That you were older, I don’t know.

  It lies there between them, the age difference, the fifteen years.

  — Look, he says.

  — Look, she says.

  He puts a hand on the register.

  — I was born in Boston, he says, — and grew up in Chelsea, which is a part of Boston you don’t want to know about. I went to Boston Latin and to Holy Cross. My mother died when I was nine, and my father had a heart attack when I was in college. I had a low lottery number and was drafted and learned to fly in Vietnam. I don’t currently have a girlfriend, and I’ve never been married. I have a one-bedroom condo in Teterboro. It’s too small, and I’m hardly ever —

  — Stop, she says.

  — I want to get this part over with.

  She understands then, in a way she has seldom been allowed to know such things in her eighteen years, that she holds it all in her hand at that moment, that she can wrap her fingers around it and grasp it tightly and never let it go, or she can open her hand, lay open her palm and give it away. Just give it away, as simply as that.

  — I know where Chelsea is, she says.

  Ten seconds pass, maybe twenty. They stand in the hot gloom of the shop, neither of them speaking. She knows he wants to touch her. She can feel the heat from his skin even across the counter. She draws in her breath slowly and evenly, so as not to attract attention to the effort. She has a nearly overwhelming desire to close her eyes.

  — It’s hot in here, he says.

  — It’s hot out there, she says.

  — Unseasonably hot.

  — For so early in June.

  — Want to go for a drive? he asks. — Cool off ?

  — Where? she asks.

  — Anywhere. Just a drive.

  She allows herself to meet his gaze. He smiles slowly, and the smile takes her by surprise.

  They drive to the beach and go swimming in their clothes. The water is frigid, but the air is hot, and that contrast is delicious. Jack ruins his uniform and later has to borrow another. When she comes out of the water, he is standing with his hands in his pockets and a blanket rolled under his arm. His clothes are soaked and hanging off him, and his shirt has gone a translucent flesh color.

  They lie on the blanket on the sand. She shivers against his wet shirt. He keeps the fingers of his left hand anchored, knotted in her hair, as he kisses her and moves his right hand under the tank top and along the flat of her stomach. She feels loose, loose limbed and opened up — as though someone had just tugged at a thread and was unraveling her.

  She covers his hand with her own. His is oddly warm, and rough and sandy and abrasive. She feels happy. It is a pure and undiluted happiness. It is all beginning, and she knows it.

  EVEN BEFORE KATHRYN REACHED THE TOP OF THE stairs, she could hear Mattie walking into the bathroom. Her daughter’s hair had a lovely natural curl, but each morning Mattie would get up to wash her hair and painstakingly blow-dry it to straighten it. It always seemed to Kathryn that Mattie was trying to subdue her hair, as though wrestling with a part of herself that had emerged not long ago. Kathryn was waiting for Mattie to outgrow this stage and had been thinking that any day now her daughter would wake up and let her hair go natural. Then Kathryn would know that Mattie was all right.

  Mattie had probably heard the cars in the driveway, Kathryn thought. Perhaps she had heard the voices in the kitchen, too. Mattie was used to waking up in the dark, particularly in the winter.

  She knew she had to get Mattie out of the bathroom. Already she was thinking that it was not a safe place to tell her daughter.

  She stood outside the door. Mattie had turned on the shower. Kathryn could hear her undressing.

  Kathryn knocked.

  “Mattie,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Mom. . . .”

  The way Mattie said it, in that familiar singsong tone, as if annoyed already.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m having a shower.”

  “Mattie, it’s important.”

  “What?”

  The bathroom door opened abruptly. Mattie had a green towel wrapped around her.

  My lovely, beautiful daughter, Kathryn thought. How can I possibly do this to her?

  Kathryn’s hands began to shake. She crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her hands under her armpits.

  “Put on a robe, Mattie,” Kathryn said, feeling herself beginning to cry. She never cried in front of Mattie. “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

  Mattie slipped her robe off the hook and put it on, stunned into obedience.

  “What is it, Mom?”

  A child’s mind couldn’t take it in, Kathryn decided later. A child’s body couldn’t absorb such grotesque facts.

  Mattie flung herself down onto the floor as if she had been shot. She flailed her arms furiously all around her head, and Kathryn thought of bees. She tried to seize Mattie’s arms and hold tightly onto her, but Mattie threw her off and ran. She was out of the house and halfway down the lawn before Kathryn caught her.

  “Mattie, Mattie, Mattie,” Kathryn said when she had reached her.

  Over and over and over.

  “Mattie, Mattie, Mattie.”

  Kathryn put her hands behind Mattie’s head and pressed her face close to her own, pressed it in hard, as though to tell her she must listen, she had no choice.

  “I will take care of you,” Kathryn said.

  And then again.

  “Listen to me, Mattie. I will take care of you.”

  Kathryn folded her daughter into her arms. There was frost at their feet. Mattie was crying now, and Kathryn thought her own heart would break. But this was better, she knew. This was better.

  Kathryn helped Mattie into the house and made her lie down on the couch. She wrapped her daughter in blankets and held onto her and rubbed her arms and legs to stop the shivering. Robert tried to give Mattie some water, which made her gag. Julia, Kathryn’s grandmother, the woman who had raised her, was called. Kathryn was vaguely aware of other people in the house then, a man and a woman with suits on, standing at the kitchen counter, waiting.

  She could hear Robert talking on the telephone and then murmuring with the people from the airline. She hadn’t realized that a television was on, but Mattie suddenly sat up and looked at her.

  “Did they say a bomb?” Mattie asked.

  And then Kathryn heard the bulletin, in retrospect, the way one realizes that subliminally all the words have been heard and are there in the mind just waiting to be called forth.

  Later Kathryn would come to think of the bulletins as bullets. Word bullets that tore into the brain and exploded, obliterating memories.

  “Robert,” she called.

  He came into the living room and stood next to her. “It’s not confirmed,” he said.

  “They think a bomb?”

  “It’s just a theory. Give her one of these.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a Valium.”

  “You carry these?” she asked. “With you?”

  Julia moved through the house with the stolid presence of a relief worker in an emergency zone: disrespectful toward death and seemingly unwilling to be cowed. With her matronly bulk and poodle perm — her only concession to age — she had Mattie off the couch and upstairs within minutes. When Julia was certain that Mattie could stand up by herself in a room alone and pull on a pair of jeans, she came back downstairs to attend to her granddaughter. She stood in the kitchen and made a pot of strong tea. She laced it generously with brandy from a bottle she had brought with her. She told the woman from the airline to be sure that Kathryn drank it
down, at least one mug. Then Julia went back up to Mattie and made the girl wash her face. By then the Valium was kicking in, and except for small sudden bursts of surprise and grief, Mattie was winding down. Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

  Julia made Mattie lie down on her bed and then returned to the front room. Sitting beside Kathryn on the couch, she peered into Kathryn’s cup to see how much tea she had swallowed, then told her to drink some more. She asked straight out if Kathryn had any tranquilizers. Robert volunteered the Valium.

  Julia said, “Who are you?” and Robert told her, and then she asked him for a pill.

  “Take this,” Julia said to Kathryn.

  “I can’t,” Kathryn said. “I’ve had the brandy.”

  “So what. Take it.”

  Julia didn’t ask Kathryn how she felt or if she was all right. In Julia’s way of thinking, Kathryn knew, there wasn’t an alternative to being a certain level of all right. Nothing else would work now. The tears, the shock, the sympathy — all of that could come later.

  “It’s awful,” Julia said. “Kathryn, I know it’s awful. Look at me. But the only way to the other side is through it. You know that, don’t you? Nod your head.”

  “Mrs. Lyons?”

  Kathryn turned from the window. Rita, a small blond woman from the chief pilot’s office, was sliding her arms into her coat.

  “I’m going to go now, to the inn.”

  Rita, who wore oak-colored lipstick, had been in the house all day, since four in the morning, yet her face was oddly dewy, her navy blue suit barely wrinkled. The woman’s partner, Jim something, also from the airline, had left the house hours ago; Kathryn couldn’t remember exactly when.

  “Robert Hart is still here,” Rita said. “In the office.” Kathryn was studying the perfect part in Rita’s straight hair with a kind of fascination. Rita, she was thinking, bore a striking resemblance to a certain newscaster on a station out of Portland. Earlier in the day, Kathryn had minded the strangers in her house, but she’d quickly seen she couldn’t cope alone.

  “You have rooms at the Tides?” Kathryn asked.

  “Yes. We’ve taken several.”

  Kathryn nodded. She understood that the Tides Inn, which in the off-season was lucky to have two couples for a weekend stay, would be full now, full of the press and people from the airline.

  “You’re all right?” Rita asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I get you anything before I go?”

  “No,” Kathryn said. “I’m fine.”

  It was an absurd statement, Kathryn was thinking, watching Rita leave the kitchen. Laughably meaningless. She would probably never be fine again.

  It was not yet four-fifteen, but it was nearly dark already. In late December, the shadows started as soon as lunch was over, and all afternoon the light was long and stretched thin. It made soft, feathery colors she hadn’t seen in months, so that nothing seemed exactly familiar anymore. Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.

  She crossed her arms and leaned forward against the lip of the sink, looking out through the kitchen window. It had been a long day, a long, terrible day — a day so long and so terrible it had hours ago passed out of any reality Kathryn had ever known. She had the distinct feeling she would never sleep again, that when she’d woken early that morning she had emerged from a state of being that could never be reentered. She watched Rita walk to her car, start it up, and head out the driveway. There were four of them in the house now — Mattie asleep in her room, with Julia and Kathryn taking turns watching over her, and Robert, Rita had said, was in Jack’s office. Doing what? Kathryn wondered.

  All day, down the long gravel drive and behind the wooden gate, there had been people looking in and other people keeping them away. But now, Kathryn imagined, the reporters and cameramen and producers and makeup artists were probably all headed over to the Tides Inn to have a drink, tell stories, discuss the rumors, have dinner, and sleep. Wasn’t this just the end of a normal workday for them?

  Kathryn heard on the stairs a heavy tread, a man’s tread, and for a moment she thought it was Jack coming down to the kitchen. But then she remembered almost immediately that it couldn’t be Jack, it wasn’t Jack at all.

  “Kathryn.”

  The tie was gone, the cuffs of his shirt rolled, the top button of his shirt open. Already she had noticed that Robert Hart had a nervous habit of holding his pen between the knuckles of his fingers and flipping it back and forth like a baton.

  “I thought you should know,” Robert said. “They’re saying mechanical failure.”

  “Who’s saying mechanical failure?”

  “London.”

  “They know?”

  “No. It’s just bullshit at this point. They’re guessing. They’ve found a piece of the fuselage and an engine.”

  “Oh,” she said. She combed her hair with her fingers. It was her own nervous habit. A piece of the fuselage, she thought. She repeated the phrase in her mind. She tried to see the piece of the fuselage, to imagine what it might be.

  “What piece of the fuselage?” she asked. “The cabin. About twenty feet.”

  “Any...?”

  “No. You haven’t eaten all day, have you?” he asked.

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not all right.”

  She looked over at the table, which was covered with dishes of food — casseroles, pies, entire dinners in separately marked plastic containers, brownies, cakes, cookies, salads. It would take a large family days to eat all of that.

  “It’s what people do,” she said. “They don’t know what else to do, so they bring food.”

  Throughout the day, individual policemen had periodically walked the length of the driveway carrying yet another offering. Kathryn understood this custom, had seen it happen over and over again when there was a death in a family. But it amazed her the way the body kept moving forward, past the shock and the grief, past the retching and the hollowness inside, and kept wanting sustenance, kept wanting to be fed. It seemed unsuitable, like wanting sex.

  “We should have sent it back out to the end of the drive,” Kathryn said. “To the police and the press. It’ll just go to waste in here.”

  “Never feed the press,” Robert said quickly. “They’re like dogs looking for affection. They’re hungry to be let inside the house.”

  Kathryn smiled, and it shocked her, that she could smile. Her face hurt, the dryness and the salt of the crying.

  “Well, I’ll be heading out now,” he said, unrolling his shirt-sleeves and buttoning his cuffs. “You probably want to be alone with your family.”

  Kathryn wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be alone. “You’re going back to Washington?”

  “No, I’m staying at the inn. I’ll stop by tomorrow before I go.” He reached for his jacket on the back of a chair and put it on. He took his tie out of the pocket.

  “Oh,” she said vaguely. “Good.”

  He slid his tie through his collar. “So,” he said, when he had knotted the tie. He gave it a small tug.

  The phone rang. It seemed too loud in the kitchen, too abrasive, too intrusive. She looked at it helplessly.

  “Robert, I can’t,” she said.

  He walked over to the telephone and answered it. “Robert Hart,” he said.

  “No comment,” he said.

  “Not as yet,” he said.

  “No comment.”

  When he hung up, Kathryn started to speak.

  “You go up and take a shower,” he said, cutting her off. He began to remove his jacket. “I’ll heat something up.”

  “Fine,” she said. And felt relieved.

  Upstairs in the hallway, she was momentarily confused. It was too long a hallway, with too many doors and too many rooms. Already the memories of t
he day had begun to taint the rooms, to overlay previous memories. She walked the length of the hallway and entered Mattie’s bedroom. Both Mattie and Julia were in Mattie’s bed, sound asleep. Julia was snoring lightly. Each had her back to the other, sharing the double bed’s sheets and comforter. Kathryn watched the covers rise and fall over the humpy mound, caught the sparkle of Mattie’s newest earring in the cartilage of her left ear.

  Julia stirred.

  “Hi,” Kathryn whispered, so as not to wake Mattie. “How is she?”

  “I hope she sleeps all night,” Julia said, rubbing an eye. “Robert’s still here?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s going to stay?”

  “I don’t know. No. I imagine he’ll go to the inn with the others.”

  Kathryn wanted to lie down with her grandmother and her daughter. Periodically throughout the day, she’d felt the strength in her thighs giving out and had been overwhelmed with the need to sit down. There was a hierarchy at work here, she thought. In Kathryn’s presence, Mattie could be a child. In Julia’s presence, Kathryn found herself wanting Julia’s solace and embrace.

  Downstairs, on a table in the hallway, there was a photograph of Julia, an evocative photograph from another era. In the picture, Julia had on a narrow, dark skirt that fell just below the knees, a white blouse, and a short cardigan sweater. There were pearls at her throat. She was long waisted and thin, and her glossy black hair was parted to one side. Her features were strong, what people meant when they said a handsome woman. In the photograph, Julia was sitting on a sofa, leaning forward to reach for something out of the frame. In her other hand she was holding a cigarette in the sort of pose that had once made cigarette smoking seductive: the cigarette held casually in slender fingers, the smoke curling around the throat and chin. The woman in the photograph was perhaps twenty years old.

  Now Julia was seventy-eight and wore baggy jeans that were always slightly too short, loose sweaters that attempted to camouflage a prominent stomach. There was no longer any trace of the young woman with the glossy hair and slender waist in the woman with the thinning silver hair who was now with Mattie. Perhaps in the eyes there was a resemblance, but even there time had destroyed beauty. Julia’s eyes were sometimes watery now and had lost nearly all their lashes. No matter how often Kathryn observed the phenomenon, she found it hard to comprehend: the way nothing could remain as it had been, not a house that was falling down, not a woman’s face that had once been beautiful, not childhood, not a marriage, not love.