The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  “Tell me about your husband,” the priest said softly.

  “He died yesterday when his plane exploded,” she said. “He was the pilot.”

  Father Paul nodded. “I read about it in the paper,” he said softly.

  Kathryn thought about how to describe Jack.

  “He was a good man,” she said. “Hardworking. Loving. He had a special relationship with his daughter. . . .”

  Kathryn pressed her lips together, and tears instantly filled her eyes. Robert reached over and put his hand on hers. The priest waited patiently for her to compose herself.

  “He was an only child,” Kathryn said haltingly. “His mother died when he was nine, and his father died when he was in college. He grew up in Boston and went to Holy Cross. He fought in Vietnam. I met him later, when he was a cargo pilot. Now he works for . . .”

  She stopped herself, shook her head.

  “He liked to fish and to fool around on the computer,” she said when she could go on. “He played tennis. He spent a lot of time with Mattie, our daughter.”

  These were the facts, she thought, but the real Jack, the Jack she knew and loved, wasn’t in them.

  “He liked risk,” she said suddenly, surprising the priest. “He didn’t like rainy days. He blotted his pizza to get the oil off. His favorite movie was Witness. I’ve seen him cry at the end of sad movies. He couldn’t tolerate traffic jams. He’d get off the highway and go fifty miles out of his way just to avoid one. He wasn’t a particularly good dresser. He wore a uniform for work and never gave much thought to clothes. He had a leather jacket that he loved. He could be very tender and loving . . .”

  She looked away.

  “And what about you?” the priest asked. “How are you?” “Me?” Kathryn asked. “I feel like I’ve been beaten up.”

  The priest nodded knowingly. Like a therapist might, she thought.

  “And your marriage?” the priest asked. “What was your marriage like?”

  Kathryn glanced at Robert.

  “It was a good marriage,” she said. “We were close. I would say that we were in love for a long time, longer than most couples. Well, I don’t how you can ever tell about other people. It’s just something you guess at.”

  “And then what happened?” the priest asked.

  “And then?” she repeated. “And then we just loved each other. We passed out of being in love to just loving.”

  “Just loving is all that God asks of you,” said the priest.

  Not once in her entire marriage, Kathryn thought, had she considered what God wanted.

  “We’d been married sixteen years,” she said.

  The priest crossed his legs. “Captain Lyons has been returned?”

  “Returned?” she asked, at first bewildered.

  “The body,” the priest said.

  “There isn’t a body,” Kathryn said quickly. “My husband’s body hasn’t been found yet.”

  “Then I assume you’re speaking of a memorial service.” Kathryn looked to Robert for help. “I guess so,” she said. “Well,” Father Paul said, “we can do one of two things. We can hold a memorial service for Captain Lyons, in which case I’d advise you to do so before Christmas so that the holiday might become part of the healing process rather than of the tragedy for both you and your daughter.”

  Kathryn contemplated this idea, about which she did not feel hopeful.

  “Or,” the priest added, “we could wait until your husband has been located.”

  “No,” Kathryn said vehemently. “For my daughter’s sake, for my sake, for Jack’s sake, we need to honor Jack now. They’re crucifying him in the papers and on television.”

  She heard the word crucifying and felt embarrassed for having used it with a priest. But wasn’t that in fact what was happening? she thought. They were crucifying Jack’s honor, his memory.

  “They’re saying that he committed suicide, that he murdered a hundred and three people,” Kathryn said. “If Mattie and I don’t honor Jack, I don’t know who will.”

  The priest studied her.

  “Honor him,” she added, though she could not explain herself further.

  “And I...”

  She cleared her throat and tried to sit up straighter. “I doubt very much there will be a body,” she said.

  That night, pacing sleeplessly in Julia’s kitchen long after Julia and Mattie had gone to bed, Kathryn began to wonder if she shouldn’t, after all, tell Father Paul that there was a living relative — Jack’s mother. And wasn’t it wrong of Kathryn not to inform the woman herself that her son had died? she wondered. She suspected that it was, but the thought of Jack’s mother alive, the image of an elderly woman who looked like Jack sitting in a nursing home, caused for Kathryn an unpleasant noise in the air, like the irritating and insistent whine of a mosquito that she wished would go away. It wasn’t simply the discovery that Jack had lied to her that troubled Kathryn; it was the continued existence of the woman herself, a woman Kathryn did not know quite what to do with. Impulsively, Kathryn reached for the telephone on the wall and called information.

  When she had the correct number, she dialed the nursing home.

  “Forest Park,” a young woman answered.

  “Oh, hello,” Kathryn said nervously. “I’d like to speak to Matigan Rice.”

  “Wow, that’s amazing,” said the woman, who was eating, Kathryn thought, or chewing gum.

  “This is Mrs. Rice’s third call today,” the woman added, “and she hasn’t gotten a call in, oh, six months, anyway.”

  The woman made a sucking sound, as if draining a drink with a straw.

  “And in any event,” the woman continued, “Mrs. Rice can’t come to the phone. She isn’t well enough to leave her room, and in addition to all her other problems, she can’t hear very good, either, so a phone call is really out of the question.”

  “How is she?” Kathryn asked. “About the same.”

  “Oh,” Kathryn said. She hesitated. “I was just trying to remember . . .” she added, “when it was exactly that Mrs. Rice entered the nursing home.”

  There was a silence at the other end.

  “Are you a relative?” the young woman asked warily. Kathryn pondered the question. Was she a relative? Jack, for reasons of his own, had chosen not to acknowledge that his mother was alive, and so, for all intents and purposes, she hadn’t been — certainly not to Kathryn or to Mattie. And Kathryn wasn’t at all sure to what end Matigan Rice should be resurrected. Was it shame that had made Jack lie about his mother? Had he and his mother had an irreparable falling-out?

  “No, I’m not a relative,” Kathryn said. “There’s going to be a memorial service for her son, and I wanted her to be informed.”

  “Her son died?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Jack. Jack Lyons.”

  “OK.”

  “He was killed in a plane crash,” Kathryn added.

  “Really? You mean that Vision crash?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, my God, wasn’t that awful? What kind of a man would commit suicide and take all those innocent people with him?”

  Kathryn was silent.

  “Well, this is the first I’ve heard of Mrs. Rice’s son being on the plane,” the woman said. “You want me to try to tell her? I can’t promise you she’ll understand. . . .”

  “Yes,” said Kathryn coolly. “I think you should try to tell her.” “Maybe I’d better talk to my supervisor first. Well, listen, thanks for telling us, and I hope you didn’t have any relatives yourself on that flight.”

  “I did, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry.”

  “My husband was the pilot,” Kathryn said.

  In the days that followed her meeting with the priest, Father Paul and Kathryn spoke often, and twice the priest drove to Julia’s house to visit. At the first meeting at the rectory, Robert had stressed the need for security, and Father Paul ha
d seemed not to think this was beyond his ken, although in this, as it happened, he was overconfident. Repeatedly, Kathryn herself could get little farther than the word honor, though Father Paul did not demand much beyond that, and for that she was grateful. When she thought about Father Paul now, it was with a shudder of relief, for if it had not been for his firm hand, the memorial service would have been a fiasco beyond all proportions.

  As it was, she and Julia and Mattie had had to go to the church an hour ahead of time to insure that they would have clear passage through the streets, which later would become so clogged that nothing — not even an ambulance — could get through. Mattie wore a long gray silk skirt with a cropped black jacket, and shook violently when Father Paul said that her father had now made a safe landing. Julia and Kathryn had worn suits and had held hands. Or rather, Julia had held Kathryn’s hand, and Kathryn had held Mattie’s, and this passing on of strength, this willing of strength from one to the other to the other had helped Kathryn, and she thought Mattie and Julia as well, survive the service. But afterward, when Kathryn stood up from the pew and turned to face the back of the church and saw the rows upon rows of pilots in dark suits, pilots from many airlines, most of whom had never met Jack, and then the rows of students from her classes, some of whom had already graduated and had come back for this event, she faltered, and then stumbled, and it was Mattie, in a sudden reversal of roles, who held her up, supported her. Mattie and Kathryn and Julia had then walked the length of that long aisle, and Kathryn thought now that it had been, possibly, the longest walk of her life. For as she walked, she had the distinct sense that when she reached the door of the church and slipped inside the black car that was waiting for her outside, her life with Jack truly would have ended.

  The next day, in the newspapers, there was a photograph of Kathryn emerging from Saint Joseph’s, and she was surprised not only by the repetition of her image on the front page of several papers in the stand outside Ingerbretson’s, but also by the image itself: Grief transformed a face, she saw, carved hollows and etched lines and loosened muscles, so that the face was almost unrecognizable. In the picture, clutching her daughter’s arm for support, Kathryn looked dazed and stricken and years older than she was.

  She winced now to think of that picture, and of others, the most unfortunate being that of her and Robert in the shelter at the beach, Robert pulling at her sleeve, both of them looking momentarily cowed and cornered. It was, she thought, a particularly painful picture because in actuality Robert had been incensed by the photographer’s shameless opportunism, and even now she could hear Robert shouting at the man as he climbed up the rocks and chased the photographer across the lawn. And then Robert’s anger and the chase had so filled Kathryn with righteous confidence that she had been moved to make her pronouncement when she’d entered the house — the pronouncement that had so quickly disintegrated when Somers had told her of Jack’s mother.

  After that day at Ingerbretson’s, Kathryn had stopped looking at newspapers or watching television. A visit to Julia’s that was meant to last only the night following the memorial service extended through Christmas and beyond. Kathryn, like Mattie, could not reenter her own house, and she could not reasonably ask Mattie to return with her to their home until it had been cleared of any artifacts that might send Mattie spinning out the door. Only once, at Julia’s, had the television inadvertently been left on, so that before Kathryn had quite realized what was happening, she found herself looking at an animated rendition of the events following the explosion in the cockpit of Vision Flight 384. According to the sequence, the cockpit broke away from the body of the plane, which itself disintegrated into smaller fragments during a second explosion. The animation showed the trajectory of the various parts as they fell into the ocean. According to the reporter, the descent would have taken approximately ninety seconds. Kathryn could not move her eyes away from the screen. She followed the arc of the small animated cockpit to the water, where it made a little cartoon splash and sank.

  The cloud layer, its milky swirls gradually thickening, dimmed the light in the window of the spare room. Kathryn sat up in the daybed, determined to begin the cleaning now. She heard footsteps in the hallway and swung her legs over the side of the bed. It would be Julia, she thought, coming to help after all. But when Kathryn glanced up, she saw that it was not Julia, but Robert Hart who was standing in the doorway.

  “I went to your grandmother’s,” he said straight away, “and she said you were here.”

  He had his hands in the pockets of his sport coat, an indistinct smooth color, taupe, maybe. He looked different in jeans. His hair was windblown, as though he had just combed it with his fingers.

  “I’m not here officially,” he said. “I have a few days off. I wanted to see how you were doing.” He stepped into the room.

  She wondered if he had knocked on the back door, and if he had, why she hadn’t heard him.

  “I’m glad to see you,” she said, surprising herself.

  And it was true. She could feel a weight — not all of the weight, but something small and gelatinous — slide off her shoulders.

  “How’s Mattie?” he asked, crossing the room and sitting down on the red lacquered chair.

  It would make an interesting photograph, Kathryn thought suddenly, the man on the red lacquered chair against the lime green paint. An attractive man. An arresting face. The widow’s peak and the dust-colored hair, combined with the way he sat slouched with his hands in his pockets, made him look vaguely British, like a character in a World War II movie. Someone who would have been in ciphers, she thought.

  “Terrible,” Kathryn said, feeling relieved to have someone to talk with about Mattie. Julia’s fatigue had been such that Kathryn had not wanted to burden her grandmother too much with her private worries. Julia’s were harrowing enough, more than any seventy-eight-year-old woman should have to bear.

  “Mattie’s a mess,” Kathryn said simply to Robert. “She’s jumpy. She’s nervous. She can’t concentrate on anything. Sometimes she tries to watch television, but that’s not safe anymore. Even if it isn’t a news bulletin, there’s always something that reminds her of her father. Last night, she went over to Taylor’s house to be with some of their friends, and she came back inconsolable. A friend of Taylor’s father who was at the house asked Mattie if there would be a trial, and Mattie apparently just dissolved. Taylor’s dad had to drive her home.”

  Robert, Kathryn noticed, was studying her intently.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m worried, Robert. Really worried. Mattie’s brittle. She’s fragile. She doesn’t eat. Sometimes she breaks into hysterical laughter. She doesn’t seem to have the appropriate reaction to anything anymore. Although I’d like to know what is appropriate. I told Mattie that life doesn’t just dis-integrate, that we can’t break all the rules, and Mattie said, quite rightly, that all the rules had already been broken.”

  He crossed his legs the way men do, an ankle resting on a knee.

  “How was Christmas?” he asked.

  “Sad,” she said. “Pathetic. Every minute was pathetic. The worst was how hard Mattie was trying. As if she owed it to Julia and me. As if she owed it somehow to her father. I wish now we had canceled the whole thing. How was yours?”

  “Sad,” he said. “Pathetic.”

  Kathryn smiled.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked, looking around the room as though something in it might provide a clue.

  “I’m trying to avoid having to clean the house. I’ve always used this room as a kind of retreat. I hide in here. What are you doing here? is a better question.”

  “I have a few days off,” he said.

  “And?”

  He uncrossed his legs and put his hands in the pockets of his trousers.

  “Jack didn’t spend his last night in the crew apartment,” he said.

  In the room, the air went thick and heavy.

  “Where was he?” Kathryn asked quietly.<
br />
  How quickly a person could ask a question she didn’t want the answer to, Kathryn thought, and not for the first time. As though one part of the psyche dared the other to survive.

  “We don’t know,” Robert said. “As you know, he was the only American on the crew. When the plane landed, Martin and Sullivan got in their cars and drove home. We do know that Jack went to the apartment, however briefly, because he made two phone calls, one to you and one to a restaurant for a reservation for that night. But according to the maid, no one slept there Monday night. Apparently, the Safety Board has known for some time. It will be on the news today. At noon.”

  Kathryn lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. She hadn’t been home when Jack had called, and he’d left a message on the machine. Hi, hon, he’d said. I’m here. I’m going downstairs to get something to eat. Did you call Alfred? Talk to you soon.

  “I didn’t want you to be taken by surprise,” he said. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”

  “Mattie . . . ,” she said.

  “I’ve told Julia,” he said. He got up, crossed the room, and sat at the bottom of the daybed, at its edge, barely sitting at all. His shirt was a darkish cotton, possibly gray, although Kathryn wondered if it, too, could be called taupe.

  Her mind felt pushed, compressed. If Jack hadn’t slept in the crew apartment, where had he been? She shut her eyes, not wanting to think about it. If anyone had asked her, she would have said that she was certain her husband had never been unfaithful. It wasn’t like Jack, she wanted to tell Robert. That wasn’t him at all.

  “This will end,” Robert said.

  “It wasn’t suicide.” She felt compelled to say this at least. She felt it absolutely.

  He reached over and put his hand on hers. Instinctively, she started to pull her hand away, but he held on to it.

  She didn’t want to ask, she didn’t, but she had to, and she could see that he was waiting for the question. She sat up slowly, withdrawing her hand, and this time Robert let it go.

  “The reservation was for how many?” she asked as casually as she could.