The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Jack lied about his mother,” Kathryn said.

  “So?”

  “He didn’t sleep in the crew apartment,” she said.

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Someone put a bomb on the plane,” she said.

  “If it was a bomb, someone put it there. I’ll grant you that.” “And Jack must have known about it,” she said. “It was his flight bag.”

  “I won’t grant you that.”

  “The Moroccan pilot committed suicide,” she said.

  “That was entirely different.”

  “How do we know it was different?”

  “You’re just playing devil’s advocate,” Robert said to her with some heat. “You don’t really believe Jack did this.” Robert sighed with frustration and turned his back to her.

  “You wanted to know about the tape,” he said, “and so I told you.”

  She unfolded the fax that she’d tucked under her arm. There were a great many names, nine or ten pages of names, beginning with Jack’s most recent crew and receding in time until 1986, the year he had started with the airline. She looked at the list: Christopher Haverstraw, Paul Kennedy, Michael DiSantis, Richard Goldthwaite... Occasionally, a face would appear, a man or woman she and Jack had once had dinner with, or someone she’d met at a party, although most of the names were unknown to her, and half of them lived in England. In that way, she thought, the life of a Vision pilot was an odd one, an almost antisocial profession. Members of a crew Jack flew with might live fifty miles away or across the ocean.

  And then, on a list dated 1992, she saw the name she hadn’t even realized she’d been looking for, the unusual name that rose right up from the paper and traveled through her bones with a charge.

  Muire Boland.

  Flight attendant.

  Kathryn spoke the name aloud.

  Muire Boland.

  She was pretty sure it was a woman’s name. She wondered if it was French and whether she was pronouncing it correctly. Kathryn reached down in front of her and opened the large drawer of Jack’s desk. The junk-mail envelope with the name penciled in a corner wasn’t there, but she could see it just as clearly as she could see the typed name on the list she held in her hands. Muire 3:30, the hastily scrawled note had read. On an envelope, a solicitation from Bay Bank.

  Knowing instinctively that if she hesitated she’d be paralyzed with indecision, Kathryn took the lottery ticket out of her pocket and laid it on Jack’s desk. She lifted up the telephone and once again punched in the number written on it. A voice answered, the same voice as before.

  “Hello,” Kathryn said quickly. “Is Muire there?”

  “Who?”

  Kathryn repeated the name.

  “Oh, you mean Muire,” the voice at the other end said, and Kathryn heard the corrected pronunciation: Meur-ah, with a bit of a drumroll on the R. “No,” the woman said.

  “Oh, sorry,” Kathryn said, feeling a tremendous rush of relief. She wanted only to get off the phone now.

  “Muire was here,” the English voice said, “but she’s gone back to her own place. Are you a friend?”

  Kathryn couldn’t answer her. She sat heavily in the chair. “Who is this?” the woman in London asked.

  Kathryn opened her mouth but couldn’t say her name. She pressed the receiver to her chest.

  M at A’s, the lottery ticket in front of her read. Muire 3:30, the junk-mail envelope had read. Two notations, in Jack’s hand, written four years apart and connected with a phone call.

  Robert took the receiver from her and placed it back on its cradle.

  “What made you ask for Muire?” he asked quietly. “You’ve gone white.”

  “Just a guess,” she said.

  Who was the woman called Muire? And what was Jack’s connection to her? Might he have spent his last night with this woman? Had Jack been having an affair? The questions pushed against her chest, threatening to suffocate her. She thought about all the jokes people routinely made about airline pilots and flight attendants. She had always dismissed the jokes, as if no real pilot would be so obvious.

  “Robert, can you find out anything more about one particular name?” she asked. “Where a person lives?”

  “If you’re sure that’s what you want,” he said.

  “This is hell,” she said.

  “Then leave it alone.”

  She thought about the possibility of leaving this alone. “Would you be able to?” she asked.

  “She wanted to watch TV,” Julia was saying. “I had to think of something else instead. Someone once gave me Witness for Christmas.”

  Robert had left the office. Kathryn thought he might be washing dishes.

  “Jack did.”

  “Well, she seems involved. She woke up at two. She’s eaten.” “Don’t let her watch the TV,” Kathryn said. “I’m serious. Cut the cable if you have to.”

  Kathryn swiveled in the office chair and gazed out at a rising snow line on the outside windowsill. It looked like water in a fish tank. Muire was here, a voice had said.

  “Robert is with you?” Julia asked.

  “Yes.”

  “He came here, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Then you know about . . . ”

  “The crew apartment? Yes.” Kathryn drew a leg up, wrapped an arm around her knee. Two notations, four years apart, connected by a single initial. Kathryn felt a squeeze of anxiety, one that immediately produced beads of sweat on her forehead.

  “Don’t lose your faith,” Julia said.

  “What faith would that be, exactly?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “They’ve revised the forecast,” Julia said. “Ten to twelve.” “I’d better come now,” Kathryn said, wiping her forehead with her sleeve.

  “Don’t be silly. Don’t go out if you don’t have to. Have you got food?”

  Just like Julia to think of food.

  “I’ve eaten,” Kathryn said. “Can I talk to Mattie?”

  There was a silence at the other end of the line.

  “You know,” Julia said carefully, “Mattie’s occupied. She’s fine. If you talk to her, she’ll just get sad and distant again. She needs to rest for a few days, just watch videos and eat popcorn. It’s like a drug, and she needs it for as long as possible. She needs to heal, Kathryn.”

  “But I’d like to be with her,” Kathryn protested.

  “Kathryn, you’ve been with her every minute of every day for ten days. You understand that just by your presence, you’re tearing each other apart. You can’t bear her grief, and she can’t bear to think of how much you’re hurting. You don’t normally spend time with her like that.”

  “This isn’t normally.”

  “Well, maybe we could all use a bit of normally right now,” Julia said.

  Kathryn walked to the window and wiped away the condensation that had formed on the panes. The snow was indeed thick, and the driveway had not been plowed. There must have been eight inches already on the cars.

  She sighed. It was always difficult to refute Julia’s wisdom, especially as Julia so often turned out to be right.

  “Don’t leave the house,” Julia repeated.

  Through the long afternoon, the snow fell steadily, thickening as it did so. From time to time, the wind whistled and howled but then seemed almost immediately to subside, as though the storm were giving up its attempt to become a blizzard. While Robert made calls from Jack’s office, Kathryn meandered from one room to another, looking at the walls and out the windows, crossing her arms, uncrossing them, then wandering into a different room and standing in it and staring at the walls or out the windows again. Lately, just standing and thinking had sometimes been all she could manage.

  After a time, she found herself in the bathroom. She took off her clothes and turned on the shower, letting the water heat up until it was almost scalding. When she stepped in, s
he bent the back of her neck to the spray and stood in that attitude for a long time. It was such a pleasurable sensation that she stood there until the hot-water tank had emptied itself and the water turned cool.

  When she shut the water off, she could hear music. Not a CD, although it was piano music.

  She adjusted the collar of a long gray bathrobe, a brushed cotton that fell to her ankles. An ancient woman stared at her from the mirror, a washed-out face with hollow eyes.

  Brushing her hair as she walked, she followed the music down the stairs and into the front room, where Robert was playing the piano.

  She knew the piece: Chopin. She lay down on the sofa, folding the robe closed over her lap and legs.

  She shut her eyes. Fantaisie Impromptu was a lavish piece, unabashedly pretty, with an extravagant number of notes. Robert played it as she seldom heard it, without sentimentality, yet it carried with it the delicious weight of stirred memories and forgotten secrets. When she heard the glissandi, she thought of scattered diamonds.

  The piano stood in the corner, sideways to the windows. Robert had rolled his sleeves, and she watched first his hands and then his forearms. There was something about the hush of snow that improved the acoustics in the room, or perhaps it was that there was no competition from any other noise; the piano sounded better than she remembered, even though it had not been tuned in months.

  It must have been like this years ago, she thought, listening to Robert play. No television, no radio, no videos, just the space of a long white afternoon in which to make one’s own time, one’s own sound. And it was safe. She could put her mind elsewhere, not think about the crash or Jack or Mattie. The piano hadn’t been something she and Jack had ever shared. It had been Kathryn’s alone, a solitary pursuit, though a link to Julia, who was also safe.

  “I had no idea,” she said when he had finished.

  “It’s been a while,” he said, turning to her.

  “You’re a romantic,” she said, smiling. “A closet romantic. You play wonderfully.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Play something else?”

  She saw then, in a way she hadn’t quite before, that Robert was a man with a past — of course he was. He had an entire life she knew almost nothing about, a life during which he’d mastered the piano, learned to fly, become a drunk, married, had children, divorced his wife, and then had somehow become involved in his extraordinary job.

  She recognized the tune: “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Changing the mood in an instant.

  When he had finished, he scratched the back of his neck and looked out at the snow. “There must be a foot at least out there,” he said.

  “The driveway’s not plowed,” she said. “What time is it?”

  He looked at his watch. “Three,” he said. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”

  “In this?”

  “Just to the end of the driveway and back. I need some air.” “I hope you know you don’t have to go to the inn tonight. There are plenty of beds in this house. A lot of rooms. You can sleep on the daybed in my spare room,” she added. “It’s comfortable there. That’s what it’s for.”

  “For hiding, you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “The information you asked me for is on Jack’s desk,” he said. She started to speak, but he shook his head.

  “Of all people,” he said, “this should not have happened to you.”

  Kathryn dozed on the couch for a few minutes and then somewhat groggily climbed up to the bedroom with the idea of slipping into the bed and taking a long nap. She took the book of poetry with her.

  She lay on the bed on her stomach and began to turn the pages, halfheartedly looking for the lines. She read bits of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wordsworth and Keats. About halfway through the book, the word betrayals suddenly caught her eye, and she realized she had found the correct poem. But then almost immediately, before she could even read the lines through, she saw a faint notation along the inner margin.

  M!

  Written in pencil, lightly, with an exclamation point.

  And there. Unmistakably there.

  She sat up sharply and looked closely at the poem, reading it through. The poem was called “Antrim” and was written by Robinson Jeffers. It seemed to be about ancient struggles on one small patch of land, presumably Antrim. About blood spilled for many causes, various ambushes and betrayals, the patriotism itself and the bodies sacrificed, all turned now to dust, the dust waiting for a resurrection.

  What did it mean?

  She let the book fall over the side of the bed and onto the floor. She lay down again and rolled her face into the pillow. She felt as though she had traveled a thousand miles.

  When she woke, she glanced instinctively at the clock on her bedside table. It was three-thirty in the morning. She had slept nine hours. What day was it, anyway? The twenty-eighth? The twenty-ninth?

  She twisted herself off the bed and half staggered out into the hallway. The door to the spare room was shut. Robert must have returned from his walk and gone in there to sleep, she thought. Or had he had a meal? Watched television? Read a book?

  In the kitchen, there were no signs of anyone having cooked a meal. Kathryn made a pot of coffee and poured herself a cup. Through the windows over the sink, she could see it had stopped snowing. She moved to the back door and opened it and was immediately hit with a chilled spray of fine powder that fell from the eave. She blinked and shook her head. Adjusting to the darkness, she saw that the world was shrouded in a thick quilt of white, a candlewick quilt with shallow stitching, so that the trees and shrubs and cars were simply mounded humps. Indeed, there seemed to be so much snow that she wondered if the predictions of twelve inches hadn’t been wildly optimistic. She closed the door and leaned against it.

  M at A’s.

  Muire 3:30.

  M!

  Drawing her robe more tightly around herself, Kathryn quickly climbed the stairs to Jack’s office, its dusty emptiness still a surprise. She saw the paper Robert had spoken of on Jack’s desk.

  Muire Boland, she read, had left the airline in January of 1993. Trained by Vision in London, she had been a flight attendant with the airline for three years. There was an address, a phone number, and a date of birth. Muire Boland was now thirty-one.

  Robert had written a note beside the phone number. Tried this, it said. When I called, no one had ever heard of her. Beneath this information was a list of phone numbers. There were seven

  M. Bolands listed in the London directory.

  Kathryn tried to formulate a question, a reasonable request.

  Did the person answering the phone know of a Jack Lyons? If so, could Kathryn ask a question or two? Was that such an unusual thing to ask?

  Kathryn glanced around at the office, at its metallic blandness, its masculine aesthetic. She would not allow herself to believe that Jack had been having an affair. How could she, when she had seen firsthand what happened when a sensational story was woven around only a few facts, as had happened with the press when the CVR tape was leaked?

  She picked up the telephone and dialed the first number. A man answered, and he sounded as though she had woken him. She quickly calculated the time in London — nine-forty in the morning. She asked if Muire was there.

  The man coughed into the phone like a heavy smoker. “Who’s it you’re wanting?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard the question correctly.

  “Muire Boland,” she said.

  “No Muire Bolands here,” the man said confidently. “Sorry,” Kathryn said and hung up the phone.

  She crossed out the first number and tried the second. No response. She tried the third number. A man answered in a crisp, businesslike voice.

  “Michael Boland here,” he said, as if expecting a particular call. “Sorry,” Kathryn said. “Wrong number.”

  She crossed out the third number. She tried the fourth number. A woman answered the phone. “Hello?” the woman said.

 
; “Hello,” Kathryn said. “I’m looking for a Muire Boland.” The silence at the other end of the line was so complete Kathryn could hear the faint echo of someone else’s transatlantic conversation.

  “Hello?” Kathryn tried again.

  The woman hung up. Kathryn sat with the dead receiver to her ear. She picked up the pencil to cross out the fourth number, but then she hesitated.

  She called the fifth number instead. Then the sixth. Then the seventh. When she had finished, she looked at her list. On it, she had a man who didn’t know a Muire; an unanswered number; a Michael Boland, businessman; a woman who didn’t speak; another unanswered number; a message on an answering machine in an almost unintelligible accent saying that Kate and Murray hoped she would leave a number; a teenage girl who didn’t know a Muire but said her mother’s name was Mary.

  She tried the fourth number again.

  “Hello?” the same woman said.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Kathryn said quickly, before the other woman could hang up. “But I’m trying to locate a Muire Boland.”

  Eerily, there was a similar silence to the first. Something was in the background. Music? A dishwasher? And then Kathryn heard a small sound from the back of the woman’s throat, like the beginning of a word that might be spoken. Followed by another silence, shorter this time.

  “There’s no Muire here,” the voice said finally.

  Kathryn thought there might have been a delay between her thoughts and her voice, because by the time she opened her mouth to speak, the line had gone dead.

  When Robert found her in the morning, she was sitting at the table in the front room. The sun had come up, and the snow outside the windows was so blisteringly bright Robert had to squint to look at her. In the glare, she could see every line and pore on his face.

  “It’s bright in here,” he said, turning his head away. “Sometimes you need sunglasses in this room,” she said. “Jack used to wear them.”