The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  He gestured toward the crowd outside the car.

  “They’ll be all over her lawn before she can blink.”

  “I don’t want them anywhere near Mattie,” Kathryn said. “Julia looked pretty formidable to me,” Robert countered. “I’m not sure I’d want to try to get past her.”

  A man banged hard against the passenger door window, and Kathryn flinched. Robert moved the car forward, trying to get as close to the gate as he could. He peered through the windshield, looking for a policeman, and almost immediately, the car was engulfed, men and women shouting through the glass.

  “Mrs. Lyons, have you heard the tape?”

  “Is that her? Wally, is that her?”

  “Move, get her face.”

  “Can you comment, Mrs. Lyons? Do you think it was suicide?” “Who’s the guy with her? Jerry, is he from the airline?”

  “Mrs. Lyons, how do you explain...?”

  To Kathryn, the voices sounded like dogs barking. Mouths appeared magnified and watery, the colors around her heightening and then subduing themselves. She wondered briefly if she was fainting. How could she possibly be the focus of so much attention, she who had lived the most ordinary of lives under the most ordinary of circumstances?

  “Jesus Christ,” Robert said when a camera lens banged sharply against his window. “That guy just broke his camera.”

  Sitting taller to see beyond the crowd, Kathryn spotted Burt Sears, a long, spindly man, stooped with years, pacing behind the gate. He had only the top half of his uniform on, as if he hadn’t been able to find the rest of it in his hurry to get out of the house. Kathryn waved through the windshield, trying to catch his attention, but Burt seemed shocky, his eyes unfocused, as helpless on his side of the gate as they were on theirs. He moved his hands in a slow, unconfident circle, as though he were directing traffic and weren’t particularly good at it.

  “It’s Burt,” she said. “He’s on the other side of the gate. He’s retired, but he’s been called back for this.”

  “You drive,” Robert said. “Lock the door after me. What’s his last name?”

  “Sears.”

  With one fluid motion, so swift it was over before it had registered, Robert stepped out of the car and slammed the door. Kathryn slid awkwardly over the gearshift into the driver’s seat and locked the door. She watched Robert put his hands into the pockets of his topcoat and shoulder his way through the reporters and cameramen. He yelled Burt Sears so loudly that everyone stopped for a moment to look at the man separating the crowd. Kathryn began to move the car forward into the vacuum Robert created as he walked.

  What would happen, she wondered, if the wall of people in front of her simply refused to part?

  She watched Robert unfasten the gate. Everywhere she glanced there were cameras, women in suits, men in brightly colored windbreakers, and still she inched forward, urged toward the gate by Robert’s insistent hand. She worried for a moment that the crowd might simply go with her, move with her to the house like a cortege — a grotesque cortege with the widow trapped inside the car, a beetle under glass. But an unwritten law, one she hadn’t known about and didn’t quite understand, halted the crowd behind the gate when it easily might have overwhelmed Burt and Robert. Once inside the gate, she stopped.

  “Go,” Robert said, slipping into the passenger seat.

  With shaking hands, she put the car in drive and began to inch forward.

  “No, I mean move,” Robert said brusquely.

  She had thought, when she first saw the throng in front of the gate, that her house would be a refuge if only Robert and she could reach it. But she quickly realized that that would not be the case. Four cars she hadn’t seen before were parked in the driveway, one haphazardly, with its door still open, a bell dinging from inside. Four cars meant at least that many strangers.

  She turned off the engine.

  “You don’t have to do this now,” he said.

  “But I’ll have to do it sometime,” she said.

  “Possibly.”

  “Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?”

  “The union’s taking care of it.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Just don’t give these guys any answers you’re not absolutely sure of.”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” she said.

  They were in her kitchen and in the front room, men in black uniforms and dark suits, Rita from yesterday in pale gray. A large man with oval wire-rimmed glasses and excessively gelled hair came forward to greet Kathryn first. His collar, she noticed, cut into his neck, and his face was flushed. He waddled somewhat, in the way of heavy men, leading with his stomach.

  “Mrs. Lyons,” he said, holding out a hand. “Dick Somers.” She let him take her hand. His grip was tentative and damp. The phone rang, and she was glad Robert didn’t leave her to answer it.

  “From?” Kathryn asked.

  “I’m an investigator with the Safety Board. Let me say how very sorry I am, we all are, for your terrible loss.”

  Kathryn could hear a low, steady male voice on a television in another room.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I know this is a difficult time for you and your daughter,” he added.

  Her face must have registered wariness at the word daughter, for she saw him make a quick scan of her features.

  “But I do have to ask you some questions,” he said.

  There were Styrofoam coffee cups on the kitchen counter, and two bright pink Dunkin’ Donuts boxes on the table. Kathryn had a sudden and powerful craving for a donut, a plain donut dipped in hot coffee, disintegrating from the coffee as she brought it to her mouth. She remembered she hadn’t eaten anything for more than thirty-six hours.

  “My colleague, Henry Boyd,” Somers said, introducing a younger man with a blond mustache.

  She shook the colleague’s hand.

  Four other men came forward to be introduced now, men in Vision uniforms, with their caps tucked under their arms, the uniform, with its gold buttons and braid, its familiarity, causing Kathryn to catch her breath. They were from the airline, from the chief pilot’s office, they said, and Kathryn thought how strange these greetings were, these niceties, these condolences, these cautious condolences, when all about them there was the palpable strain of waiting.

  A man with iron-filing hair stepped more forward than the rest.

  “Mrs. Lyons, I’m Chief Pilot Bill Tierney,” he said. “We talked on the phone briefly yesterday.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Let me once again express for myself and for the entire airline how deeply sorry we are for the loss of your husband, for your personal loss. He was an excellent pilot, one of our best.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The words how deeply sorry seemed to float on the air in the kitchen. She wondered why all the expressions of sympathy sounded so tired, so very much the same. Was there no other language with which to express one’s sorrow? Or was the formality the point? She thought about how many times the chief pilot must have imagined himself saying these very words to the widow of one of his pilots, perhaps even practiced saying the words aloud. The newish airline had never had a fatal crash before.

  “What can you tell me about the tape?” she asked the chief pilot.

  Tierney pursed his lips and shook his head.

  “No information about the tape has been officially released,” said Somers, stepping forward.

  “I understand that,” Kathryn said, turning to the investigator. “But you know something, don’t you? You know what’s on the tape.”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said.

  But behind the wire-rimmed glasses, the investigator’s glance was skittish and evasive.

  Kathryn stood in the center of her kitchen, in her boots and jeans and jacket, the subject of intense scrutiny. She felt vaguely embarrassed, as if she had committed a grievous social error.

  “One of you left your car door open,” she said, gesturing toward the driveway
.

  “Why don’t we go sit in your living room?” Somers suggested.

  Feeling unfamiliar with her own house, Kathryn walked into the front room and squinted at the six oblongs of diffuse light from the windows. There was only one seat left, an oversized wing chair facing the windows, Jack’s chair, not hers, and she felt dwarfed by the chair’s upholstered appendages. The television, she noticed now, had been turned off.

  Somers appeared to be in charge. He stood while the others sat.

  “I’m just going to ask you one or two questions,” he said, putting his hands into his trouser pockets. “This won’t take a minute. Can you tell us anything about how your husband was behaving just prior to his departure for the airport on Sunday?”

  Kathryn saw that no one had a tape recorder out or was writing anything down. Somers seemed almost excessively casual. This couldn’t be official, then, could it?

  “There’s not a lot to tell,” she said. “It was routine. Jack took a shower around four in the afternoon, got dressed in his uniform, came downstairs, and shined his shoes.”

  “And where were you?”

  “I joined him in the kitchen. To say good-bye.”

  The word good-bye triggered a quick jolt of sadness, and she bit her lip. She tried to remember Sunday, the last day Jack had been home. Occasionally, she had fragments, dream bits, like the fluttering glints of silver in the dark. It seemed to her that it had been an ordinary day, nothing special about it. She could see Jack’s foot on the pulled-out drawer, the old green-checked rag in his hands as she passed through the kitchen on the way to the laundry room. The length of his arms, lengthened even more by the weight of his bags as he walked to the car in the driveway. He’d said something over his shoulder. She’d had the rag in her hand. Don’t forget to call Alfred, he’d said. And tell him Friday.

  He’d shined his shoes. He’d left the house. He would be home, he said, on Tuesday. She was freezing in the doorway, slightly annoyed he hadn’t done it himself. Called Alfred.

  “To your knowledge, did Jack call anyone that day?” Somers asked. “Talk to anyone?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  She wondered: Could Jack have talked to someone that day? Of course he could have. He could have talked to twenty people for all she knew.

  Robert had his arms crossed over his chest. He seemed to be studying the coffee table with great interest. On the table were art books, a stone plate Jack and she had brought back from Kenya, an enameled box from Spain.

  “Mrs. Lyons,” Somers continued. “Did your husband seem agitated or depressed that day or the night before?”

  “No,” she said. “Nothing out of the ordinary. The shower was leaking, I remember, and he was a bit annoyed at that, since we’d only recently had it repaired. I remember he said to call Alfred.”

  “Alfred is?”

  “Alfred Zacharian. The plumber.”

  “And when did he ask you to call Alfred?”

  “Twice, actually. Once upstairs about ten minutes before he left. And again as he was walking to the car.”

  “Did Jack have a drink prior to his departing for the airport?” “Don’t answer that,” Robert said, sitting forward on the sofa. Kathryn crossed her legs and thought about the wine Jack and she had had with dinner on Saturday night and had continued to have after dinner, and she quickly calculated the number of hours between his last drink and his flight. At least eighteen. That was all right then. What was the phrase? Twelve hours from bottle to throttle?

  “It’s all right,” she said to Robert. “Nothing,” she said to Somers.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Did you pack his suitcase?” he asked.

  “No, I never do.”

  “Or his flight bag?”

  “No. Absolutely not. I virtually never looked in there.”

  “Do you usually unpack his suitcase?”

  “No. That’s Jack’s responsibility. He takes care of his own bags.”

  She heard the words, takes care of. Present tense.

  She looked around at the men in the room, all of whom were examining her intently. She wondered if the airline would want to question her, too. Perhaps she ought to have a lawyer with her right now, she thought. But if that were true, wouldn’t Robert have said so?

  “Did your husband have any close friends in the U.K.?” Somers asked. “Did he regularly talk to someone there?”

  “The U.K.?”

  “England.”

  “I know what U.K. means,” she said. “I just don’t understand the relevance of the question. He knew a lot of people in the U.K. He flew with them.”

  “Have you noticed any unusual withdrawals from or deposits into any of your bank accounts?” Somers asked.

  She wondered where they were going with this, what any of it meant. She felt herself to be on shifting ground, as though at any moment she might step unthinkingly into a crevice.

  “I don’t understand,” she began.

  “In the last several weeks, or at any time, have you noticed any unusual withdrawals from or deposits into your bank accounts?”

  “No.”

  “In the last several weeks did you notice any unusual behavior in your husband?”

  She had to answer this one, for Jack’s sake. She wanted to answer it.

  “No,” she said.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing.”

  Rita, from the airline, stepped into the room, and the men looked up at her. Beneath her suit, she had on a jewel-necked silk blouse. Kathryn couldn’t remember the last time she herself had worn a suit. At school, she almost always wore pants and a sweater, sometimes a jacket, occasionally jeans and boots when the weather was bad.

  “Mrs. Lyons?” Rita said. “Your daughter is on the phone. She says she has to talk to you right now.”

  Alarmed, Kathryn spun out of the chair and followed Rita into the kitchen. She glanced at the clock over the sink: 9:14.

  “Mattie,” she said, picking the phone up from the counter.

  “Mom?”

  “What is it? Is everything OK?”

  “Mom, I called Taylor. Just to talk to someone. And she was acting funny?”

  Mattie’s voice was tight and high, a tone Kathryn knew from previous experience indicated strenuous control over imminent hysteria. Kathryn shut her eyes and pressed her forehead to the cabinet.

  “And so I asked her what it was,” Mattie said, “and Taylor said it’s in the news about its being suicide?”

  Kathryn could picture Mattie’s face at the other end of the line, the eyes uncertain and wide and panicky. Kathryn could imagine how the news would have bruised Mattie, how her daughter must have hated hearing about the rumor from Taylor. How Taylor, being a normal teenage girl, would have been slightly puffed up to be the one to break the news to Mattie. How Taylor would then feel compelled to call all of their mutual friends with a detailed description of Mattie’s reaction.

  “Oh, Mattie,” Kathryn said. “It’s just a rumor. The news media, they get an idea and they go with it before they’ve even checked it out. It’s awful. It’s irresponsible. And it isn’t true. It absolutely isn’t true. I’m here with the airline safety board, and they would know, and they’re denying the rumor very strongly.”

  There was a silence.

  “But, Mom,” Mattie said. “What if it is true?”

  “It’s not true.”

  “How would you know?”

  Kathryn heard the note of anger in her daughter’s voice. Unmistakable. Why hadn’t she told Mattie the truth that morning during their walk?

  “I just know,” Kathryn said.

  There was another silence.

  “It’s probably true,” Mattie said.

  “Mattie, you knew your father.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Maybe I didn’t know him,” Mattie said. “Maybe he was unhappy.”<
br />
  “If your father was unhappy, I’d have known.”

  “But how do you ever know that you know a person?” she asked.

  The query momentarily stopped the volley of questions and answers between them, allowing a wave of uncertainty to rise up in front of Kathryn. But she knew that Mattie didn’t want uncertainty now, however much she might have been challenging her mother. Kathryn was sure of this.

  “You feel it,” Kathryn said with more bravado than conviction. “Do you feel that you know me?” Mattie asked.

  “Pretty well,” Kathryn said.

  And then Kathryn realized that she had fallen into a trap. Mattie was good at this, always had been.

  “Well, you don’t,” Mattie said with a mixture of satisfaction and dread. “Half the time you have no idea what I’m thinking.”

  “OK,” Kathryn said, backing off, conceding. “But that’s different.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Kathryn brought the heel of her hand to her forehead, massaged it.

  “Mom, if it’s true, does that mean that Daddy murdered all those people? Would it be murder?”

  “Where did you hear the word?” Kathryn asked quickly, as if Mattie were a child who had just uttered an obscenity she’d learned at school or from a friend. Yet the word was profane, Kathryn thought. It was appalling. More appalling for coming from the mouth of her fifteen-year-old daughter.

  “I didn’t hear it anywhere, Mom. But I can think, can’t I?” “Look, Mattie. Just hang on. I’ll be right there.”

  “No, Mom. Don’t come here. I don’t want you to come. I don’t want you to come here and try to tell me a lot of lies to make things better. Because I don’t want lies right now. It can’t be made better, and I don’t want to pretend. I just want to be left alone.”

  How did a fifteen-year-old girl come by such unflinching honesty? Kathryn wondered. The truth was more than most adults could tolerate. Perhaps the young were better at reality, she decided, having had less time to dissemble, create fictions.

  Kathryn stifled the impulse to raise her voice, to simply overpower her daughter’s fears and doubts, but she knew from experience not to press Mattie now.

  “Mom, there are men here,” Mattie said. “Strange men. All over the place.”