The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  — We’ll have our own home now, he says. — You’ll be on the water. You’ve always wanted to be. Mattie will go to school here. You’ll get a teaching job when you finish your degree. Julia is excited that you — we — will be near her.

  Kathryn nods slowly.

  He lifts the hair off her neck and runs his tongue along the top of her spine and into her hairline. She shivers with the sensation, as she is meant to do, and sets her champagne upon the windowsill. She leans forward and braces herself against the frame of the window. In the glass, she can see a faint reflection of the two of them.

  “I WISH YOU’D EAT SOMETHING.” Across the table, Robert Hart was finishing the last of a bowl of chili.

  “I can’t,” she said. She studied his empty bowl. “But you were hungry.”

  He nudged the bowl to one side.

  It was late, and Kathryn had no clear idea what time it was. Upstairs, Mattie and Julia were still asleep. In front of Kathryn, in addition to the chili, there was a loaf of garlic bread and a salad and a cup of lukewarm tea. Earlier, she had made an effort to dip the bread into the chili and taste it, but her throat had refused to swallow. She had on clean clothes — jeans and a navy sweater, ragg socks, a pair of leather boots. Her hair was still wet. She knew her eyes and nose and mouth were swollen. She thought she had probably cried more on the floor of the bathroom than at any other time during the day. Possibly her life. She felt drained, emptied, simply from the crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” she asked. “For eating?”

  He shrugged. “For all of it.”

  “Your job is unimaginable,” she said suddenly. “Why do you do it?”

  He seemed startled by the question.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked. “I could go outside, if you’d rather.”

  Jack had hated smokers, couldn’t tolerate being in a room with them.

  “It’s fifteen degrees out there,” she said. “Of course you can smoke in here.”

  She watched as he turned and reached into his jacket on the back of the chair for a pack of cigarettes.

  He sat with his elbows on the table, his hands folded under his chin. The smoke curled in front of his face.

  He gestured with his cigarette.

  “AA,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Why do I do it?” he asked, clearing his throat nervously. “For the money, I suppose.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “Truthfully?”

  “Truthfully.”

  “I suppose I’m drawn to moments of intensity,” he said. “In the range of human experience.”

  She was silent. Aware for the first time that there was music in the background. Art Tatum. While she had been in the shower, Robert must have put on a CD.

  “That’s fair,” she said.

  “I like watching people mend,” he added. “Do they? Mend?” she asked.

  “Given enough time, the women usually do. Unfortunately . . .” He stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sick of people saying they’re sorry. Really, I am.” “Children don’t heal as well,” he said slowly. “They say that children are resilient, but they’re not. They change...they mutate with disaster and make accommodations. I hardly ever see grief-stricken men because not too many women are pilots. And when I do see men, they’re fathers, and they’re angry, which is another story.”

  “I’ll bet they’re angry,” Kathryn said.

  She thought of Jack as a father and how insane with rage and grief he’d have been if it had been Mattie on the plane. Jack and Mattie had been close. With Jack, there had seldom been any of the whining or bristling that had sometimes characterized Mattie’s exchanges with Kathryn. For Jack, the givens, the parameters, had been different right from the beginning: They weren’t as fraught.

  Soon after the three of them had moved to Ely, when Mattie was in kindergarten, Jack had “hired” her as his assistant while he worked on the house — painting, scraping, fixing broken windows. He talked to her continuously. He taught her to ski and then took her on father-daughter skiing trips each winter, first to northern New Hampshire and Maine, and then out West, to Colorado. Indoors, the two of them watched the Red Sox or the Celtics or sat for hours together at the computer. Whenever Jack came home from a trip, he went first to Mattie, or she to him, and they seemed to have that rarest of parent-child relationships: They were easy together.

  Only once had Jack ever lashed out at Mattie. Kathryn could see even now the fury in Jack’s face when he discovered that Mattie had shoved a playmate down the stairs. Mattie and her friend were how old? Four? Five? Jack had grabbed Mattie by the arm, whacked her once hard on the butt, and then nearly dragged her to her room and slammed the door with such ferocity that even Kathryn had been shaken. His actions were so instinctive, so swift, that Kathryn imagined that he had himself been punished that way as a child and that he had, for one brief moment, lost his usual control. Later, she tried to talk to him about the incident, but Jack, whose face still bore a deep, rosy flush, would not discuss it, except to say that he didn’t know what had come over him.

  “You specialize in this,” Kathryn said to Robert.

  He glanced over at the counter, searching for something that might function as an ashtray. She took the white saucer from under her teacup and slid it across the pine table. He propped the cigarette on the saucer and began to pick up his dishes.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Let me do this,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

  He hesitated.

  “Please,” she said. “I’m capable of washing dishes.”

  He sat down and picked up the cigarette again. She walked to the sink and flipped open the dishwasher. She turned on the water.

  “I like to think of myself as forming a cocoon around the family,” he said, “insulating them from the outside world.”

  “Which has so grotesquely intruded,” she said.

  “Which has so grotesquely intruded.”

  “Containment,” she said. “That’s what you do. Containment.” “Tell me about your job,” he said. “What do you teach?” “Music and history. And I’m in charge of the band.” “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. There are only seventy-two students in the high school.”

  “You like teaching?” he asked.

  She thought a minute.

  “I do,” she said. “Yes, I like it a lot. I’ve had one or two truly outstanding students. Last year, we sent a girl to the New England Conservatory. I like the kids.”

  “It’s a different life being married to a pilot,” he said.

  She nodded. She thought about the odd hours, about never celebrating a holiday on the day itself. About Jack’s wanting breakfast at seven o’clock in the evening, or dinner and a glass of wine at seven in the morning. Theirs had been a life different from that of other families. Jack might be gone for three days, home two, and that schedule would continue for two or three months. And then, the next month, he might have four days off, six days on, and Mattie and Kathryn would adjust to that rhythm. They didn’t live by routine, as other families did — they lived in segments. Bits of time when Jack was home, longer bits of time when Jack was gone. And when he was gone, the house would seem to deflate a bit, settle quietly in on itself. And no matter how much attention Kathryn paid to Mattie or how much they enjoyed each other’s company, it always seemed to Kathryn that they were suspended — waiting for real life to begin again, for Jack to walk back in the door.

  Kathryn wondered, as she sat across from Robert, whether she would feel like that now — suspended in time, waiting for Jack to once again walk in the door.

  “How often did he commute?” Robert asked.

  “From here? About six times a month.”

  “Not too bad. It’s what? Fifty minutes?”

  “Yes. Do you have a suitcase packed in your office?” she asked. “Packed and ready?
”

  He hesitated.

  “A small one,” he said.

  “You’re going to the inn tonight?”

  “Yes, but I could sleep here on the sofa if you’d rather.”

  “No. I’ll be fine. I’ve got Julia and Mattie. Tell me another story,” she said.

  “How do you mean?”

  She put the last dish in the dishwasher and closed it. She dried her hands on a towel, threaded it through the drawer pull.

  “About what it’s like when you get to the house.”

  He scratched the back of his neck. He was not tall, but he gave the impression of height, even when sitting down. She imagined him as a runner.

  “Kathryn, this is . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “It helps.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “How would you know?” she asked sharply. “Are we all the same, the wives? Do we all react the same?”

  She could hear the anger in her voice, an anger that had been there sporadically throughout the day. Bubbles of anger rising to the surface of a liquid and then popping. She sat down again at the table, across from him.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “What if it isn’t true?” she asked. “What if you got the news and told the wife and found out later it wasn’t true?”

  “That doesn’t happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “I spend a fair amount of time standing at the end of driveways with a cell phone in my hand, waiting for absolute confirmation. You may find this hard to believe, but I don’t ever want to tell a woman her husband has died if in fact he has not.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought that was banned.”

  She smiled.

  “Do you mind these questions?” she asked.

  “I’m concerned about why you’re asking them, but no, I don’t mind.”

  “Then let me ask you this: What are you afraid I’ll say to the press?”

  He loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. “A pilot’s wife is naturally very distraught. If she says something, and the press is there to hear it, it goes on the record. A new widow, for example, might say that her husband had been complaining about the mechanics recently. Or she might blurt out, I knew this would happen. He said the airline was cutting corners on crew training.”

  “Well, wouldn’t that be OK? If it was true?”

  “People say things when they’re distraught they wouldn’t say later. Things they sometimes don’t mean at all. But if it becomes part of the record, there’s no backing away from it.”

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Jack was forty-nine.”

  “I know.”

  “While you’re waiting, you know, for a crash, what do you do?”

  “I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” he said, shifting in his chair. “I don’t wait around for a crash. I have other responsibilities.”

  “Such as?”

  “I study the crash investigations pretty closely. I do a lot of follow-up with the pilots’ families. How old is this house?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “It was built in the 1860s. As a convent originally. A kind of retreat.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you. It needs work. It always needs work. It falls down faster than we can repair it.”

  She heard the we.

  There was never anything not to love about the house, which seemed constantly to change, depending on the light, the seasons, the color of the water, the temperature of the air. Even its eccentricities Kathryn had come to appreciate: the sloping floors in the bedrooms; the shallow closets that had been designed for nuns’ habits; the windows with the old-fashioned storms that had to be painstakingly put up each fall and taken off each spring (Jack discovering that, like snowflakes, no two were precisely alike, so, until he learned to label each window, the task was like that of fitting puzzle pieces together while standing on a ladder), but which when cleaned were beautiful, lovely objects simply in themselves. Indeed, it was sometimes an effort to pull away from the view through those windows when there were chores at hand. Kathryn had often sat in the long front room and allowed herself to daydream. She’d daydreamed particularly about how easy it would be, in such a house, on such a piece of geography, to retreat from the world, to take up an existence that was solitary and contemplative, not unlike the vocation of the house’s earliest inhabitants: the Sisters of the Order of Saint Jean de Baptiste de Bienfaisance, twenty nuns ranging in age from nineteen to eighty-two, wedded to Jesus and to poverty. Often, when she was in the front room, she imagined a long wooden refectory table with a bench set along one side so that the sisters could see the ocean while they ate. For though the nuns had taken vows of poverty, they lived within a landscape of breathtaking beauty.

  For years, Kathryn tried to find the place where the sisters had kept their chapel. She had searched the lawn and the adjacent orchard, but had never located a foundation. Had the chapel been inside the house, she wondered, in the room they used as a dining room? Did the sisters dismantle a homespun altar before they left, taking with them a statue of the Virgin Mary and a cross? Or did they travel across the large expanse of salt marsh between Fortune’s Rocks and the mill town of Ely Falls so that they could attend services at Saint Joseph’s Church with the French-Canadian immigrants?

  “You’ve been here eleven years?” Robert asked.

  “Yes.”

  The phone rang then and startled them both. It seemed that it had been twenty minutes, perhaps thirty, since the phone had last rung, the longest break since the first summons in the morning. She watched Robert answer it.

  She had been only twenty-three when she and Jack had moved back to the Ely area. Kathryn had worried about resentment from the people of the town. She would have a house on the water and a husband who was a pilot for Vision. She would no longer be living in Ely proper, but rather at Fortune’s Rocks, an ephemeral, transient world of summer people who, for all their patronizing of her grandmother’s shop and all their inevitably condescending curiosity about the small town with its quirky charm, remained essentially anonymous. Sleek, tanned bodies with seemingly inexhaustible reserves of ready cash. Although Martha, who owned Ingerbretson’s, the only grocery store at Fortune’s Rocks, could tell more than a few cautionary tales of men in khaki shorts and white T-shirts who charged up enormous sums — for vodka, lobsters, potato sticks, and Martha’s homemade chocolate konfetkakke — and then vanished into bankruptcy proceedings, their only legacy a For Sale sign stuck in the sand in front of a $400,000 beach house.

  But the local reserves of goodwill toward Julia Hull had been deep and had spilled over onto Jack and Kathryn. She thought about the way Jack and she had merged into the life of Ely, had shepherded Mattie through the schools. Jack’s job had taken him away from the town, but still he had managed to play tennis in a town league with Hugh Reney, the vice-principal of the middle school, and Arthur Kahler, who ran the Mobil station at the end of the village. Surprisingly, considering how easily Mattie had been conceived, Jack and Kathryn seemed not to be able to have other children. They had told themselves that they were happy enough with Mattie to forgo the extraordinary measures it might take to conceive again.

  Kathryn watched Robert at the phone. He turned once quickly and glanced at her, then turned back again.

  “No comment,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.

  “No comment.

  “No comment.”

  He hung up the phone and stood looking at the cabinet above it. He picked up a pen from the counter and began to flip it back and forth.

  “What?” she asked.

  He turned.

  “Well, we knew this was going to happen,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This will have a shelf life of twenty-f
our hours max. Then it will be history.”

  “What?”

  He looked at her hard and took a deep breath.

  “They’re saying pilot error,” he said.

  She shut her eyes.

  “It’s just speculation,” he said quickly. “They think they’ve found some flight data that doesn’t make sense. But, trust me, they couldn’t know for sure.”

  “Oh.”

  “Also,” he said quietly, “they’ve found some bodies.”

  She thought that if she just kept breathing in and out slowly, she would be all right.

  “No identification yet,” he said.

  “How many?”

  “Eight.”

  She tried to imagine. Eight bodies. Whole? In pieces? She wanted to ask but didn’t.

  “There’ll be more,” he said. “They’re bringing up more.” British? she wondered. Or American? Women or men? “Who was it? On the phone?”

  “Reuters.”

  She got up from the table and walked through the hallway to the bathroom. For a moment, she was afraid she might be sick. It was a reflexive reaction, she thought, the inability to take it in, the desire to cough it out. She splashed water on her face and dried it. In the mirror, her face was almost unrecognizable.

  When she returned to the kitchen, Robert was on the telephone again. He had one arm across his chest, his hand tucked under the other arm. He was speaking quietly, answering Yes and OK, watching her as she walked into the room. “Later,” he said and hung up.

  There was a long silence.

  “How many of them are pilot error?” she asked.

  “Seventy percent.”

  “What error? What happens?”

  “It’s a series of events leading to the last one, and the last one is usually called pilot error because by that time the pilots are deeply involved.”

  “I see.”

  “May I ask you something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Jack...?”

  He hesitated.