The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  The water seemed opaque. Overhead, gulls circled. She didn’t want to think about why the gulls were there, either.

  What had been real? she wondered as she studied the water, trying to find a fixed point, which she couldn’t. Had she herself been the pilot’s wife or had Muire Boland? Muire Boland, who had been married in the Catholic Church, who knew of Jack’s mother and his childhood. Muire, who knew of Kathryn, whereas Kathryn had not known of her.

  Or had Kathryn been the real wife? The first wife, the one he had protected from the truth, the wife he wouldn’t leave?

  The more Kathryn learned about Jack — and she had no doubt now that she would learn more, would find, among Jack’s things when they were returned to her, other references to M — the more she would have to rethink the past. As if having to tell a story over and over, each time a little differently because a fact had changed, a detail had altered. And if enough details were altered, or the facts were important enough, perhaps the story veered in a direction very different from its first telling.

  The boat rocked from another’s wake, and she braced herself on the railing. Jack had been, she thought, only another woman’s husband.

  She glanced up briefly at the circling helicopter. Once she had seen a wide-body hovering just off Fortune’s Rocks. The day had wanted to be sunny, and an early fog was just lifting. The plane flew low over the water, and the fat silver slug had seemed too heavy to stay aloft. Kathryn had been afraid for the plane, awed that flight was possible.

  Jack would have known his fate, she thought. In the last several seconds, he would have known.

  He had called out Mattie’s name at the end, Kathryn decided. She would believe that, and it would be true.

  Again, she studied the water. How long had the fisherman been circling? She had lost the ability to perceive the passage of time as it was actually unfolding. When, for example, had the future begun? Or the past ended?

  She tried to find a fixed point in the water, but couldn’t.

  Did change invalidate all that had gone before?

  Soon she would leave this place and fly home and drive to Julia’s. She would say to her daughter, We’re going home now. Kathryn’s life was with Mattie. There could be no other reality.

  She took her wedding ring from her finger and dropped it into the ocean.

  She knew that the divers would not find Jack, that he no longer existed.

  “You all right, then?”

  The young fisherman leaned out of the wheelhouse, one hand still on the wheel. His forehead was creased, and he looked worried.

  She smiled briefly at him and nodded.

  To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

  HE PLACES THE RING ON HER FINGER AND, for a moment, holds it there. The justice of the peace intones the sentences of the simple ceremony. Kathryn looks at Jack’s fingers on the silver, at the gleam of the silver itself. He has bought a suit for the occasion, a gray suit in which he looks handsome but strange to her, in the way of men who do not normally wear suits. She has on a flower-print rayon dress that nips in at the waist and doesn’t show the baby. It has short sleeves and small shoulder pads and falls just below her knees. She can still smell the store in the fabric. She has on a hat as well — peach, like the dress, with a dusty-blue silk flower at the brim, a blue that matches the flowers in the dress. In the corridor, another couple speaks in hushed, impatient tones. Kathryn lifts her head for a kiss that is oddly chaste, prolonged and formal. The wide-brimmed hat slips from her head.

  — I’ll always love you, Jack says.

  They drive to a ranch in the mountains. The temperature drops nearly forty degrees. Over the peach dress, she has on his leather jacket. She can still feel the wedding smile on her face, a smile that hasn’t faded, as if it had been captured in a photograph. Her head jostles some when he shifts. She wonders what it means to have a wedding night if they already live together, and if they will feel different to each other in the bed. She wonders what it means to have a wedding in front of a man neither of them had ever met and who won’t remember them. The dry air of the west makes her hair feel thinner than the humidity of Ely does. It tightens the skin on her face.

  Still they climb higher. Dark now and clear, the night sky draws white lines on scrub and rock and makes shadows of small boulders. In the distance, they can see a light.

  A fire has been lit in the cabin. She wonders if the wattle between the logs is real or for show. The bathroom has a metal shower and a pink sink. Jack seems abashed by the modest furnishings, as though he had planned for something else.

  — I love it here, Kathryn says, reassuring him.

  She sits on the bed, which sags and gives a loud metallic creak. Her eyes widen, and he laughs.

  — I’m glad it’s a cabin, he says.

  They undress in the firelight. She watches as he pulls his tie to the side, unbuttons his shirt. The way he tugs his belt buckle slightly to release the tongue. He slides his legs from his suit pants. Men’s socks, she thinks. If they knew how they looked, they wouldn’t wear them.

  Naked, he is cold and dives into the bed. They glide against each other like dry silk. He pulls the comforters, piled high and weighty, the only luxury in the room, over their shoulders.

  The bed squeals at the slightest shift in weight. They lie side by side, their faces not three inches apart, and touch each other as they never have before: slowly, with an economy of movement, as if executing an ancient dance, ritualistic and intent. When he enters her, he moves with exquisite care and patience. She sighs once quickly.

  — The three of us, he says.

  three

  MATTIE’S ARMS TREMBLED, JERKING THE REEL WITH the strain.

  “Hey, did you see that?” Mattie cried.

  “It looks huge,” Kathryn answered.

  “I think I’ve really got him.”

  “Bring the line in away from the rocks or you’ll cut it.” Kathryn could see the black and silver stripes tumbling just below the surface of the water. For forty minutes now, she’d been watching Mattie fight the fish with her father’s oversized rod, letting the line spin out, setting the drag, grunting, and then reeling in the fish, anchoring the pole in her armpit for leverage. Kathryn waded out with the net, scooped and missed, tried again. Finally, she held the striper aloft for Mattie to see.

  Jack should be here, Kathryn thought automatically.

  Mattie put down the rod, took the fish from her mother, and laid it on the sand. The doomed striper flipped its tail. Mattie got out the measuring tape, and Kathryn crouched with her to get a better look.

  “Thirty-six,” Mattie said with pride.

  “Yes!” Kathryn said, scratching the top of Mattie’s head. Her daughter’s hair had gone a lovely coppery color over the summer. She wore it natural, let it wave where it wanted to. She was nearly naked but for the two thin wisps of ice blue that were her bathing suit.

  “Are you going to eat it or release it?” Kathryn asked. “What do you think I should do?”

  “If it weren’t your first, I’d say release it. Did Dad ever teach you how to clean a fish?”

  Mattie stood up, hoisting the fish with muscles that were all but spent.

  “I’ll get the camera,” Kathryn said. “Love you, Mom,” Mattie said, grinning.

  Kathryn walked across the lawn and listened to the halyards on the flagpole sending out an arrhythmic beat of hollow notes. It was a day as fine as any they had had this summer, already a long string of fine days saturated with rich color. Just this morning, she had seen a nearly miraculous sunrise, the low clouds of daybreak giving way to a neon pink all along the horizon, with swirls of rising vapor that looked like lavender smoke. And then the sun had popped, a detonation on the sea, and the water had turned, for a few glorious minutes, a flat, rippling turquoise, reflecting the mackerel pattern of the neon. It was the paradoxical beauty of a nuclear bomb, she had thought, or of a fire aboard a ship. A conflagration of earth and
sea and air together.

  It was her only complaint, the rising early, like a spinster or a widow, which, of course, she was. The early risings suggested a lack of night excitement that might require sleep. In these often ghostly mornings, Kathryn read, pleased that she could read a book through now. She could also read a newspaper in its entirety, as she had read the one on the porch, read particularly the article on the front page about the cease-fire.

  The story of the bomb planted on Vision Flight 384, with the unwitting though not blameless assistance of Captain Jack Lyons, had broken on New Year’s Day in the Belfast Telegraph. Also reported was the long-term history of crew-assisted smuggling on airliners, the names of the other pilots involved, and the effects of the attempt on the part of the Loyalist splinter group to discredit the IRA and sabotage the peace process. Among others, Muire Boland and her brother had been arrested, and a connection with Jack Lyons established. There had been no mention yet of a marriage or of another family, and for months now Kathryn had dreaded this final word. She had gambled with Mattie, deciding to say nothing to her daughter unless this knowledge was made public. It was a large gamble, and who could say how it would end? Mattie knew only what the rest of the world knew, which was enough.

  Kathryn didn’t know what had happened to Muire Boland’s children. Sometimes she imagined them at A’s.

  In the spring, Kathryn had read books about the Troubles in an effort to better understand them. She could say that she knew more facts than she had in December, but she thought this knowledge only made the saga more complex. Over the last several months, she’d also read, in the newspapers, of prison riots, paramilitary executions, and car bombings. Now there was again a cease-fire. It was possible that one day there would be a resolution, although Kathryn didn’t think it would happen soon.

  But it was not for her to say. It was not her war.

  Most days, it was all that Kathryn could do to manage the day in front of her, and, as a consequence, she required little of herself. She lived in her bathing suit, worn under a faded navy sweatshirt. She was knitting a tank top for Mattie in confetti cotton, and she wanted to try one for herself. This seemed to be the limit of her ambitions. Most days, Julia came by, or Kathryn stopped in town. They ate meals together, trying to re-create a family threesome. Julia had taken the news of Jack’s infidelity particularly hard. It was the first time Kathryn could remember her grandmother at a loss for words, unable to give advice.

  Kathryn jogged up the porch steps, passed through the front room and the kitchen. She thought the camera was in a wind-breaker in the back hall. She turned the corner into the hallway and stopped short.

  He was standing at the back door, having already knocked. She could see his face through the glass panes. She put a hand out to the wall to steady herself. Between herself and the door was a pungent memory, a reprise of another time she’d walked the length of the hall and opened the door to him, a moment when all her life had changed, had altered its course for good.

  She moved the six or seven steps to the door as if in a trance, and opened it.

  He leaned against the door frame with his hands in his pockets. He had on a white T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He’d cut his hair, she saw, and had some color. Beyond that, she couldn’t make out much because the sun was behind him. She could feel him there, however, in the curious mix of determination and resignation that seemed to emanate from his body. She thought he must be waiting for her to shut the door or to ask him to leave or to demand of him, curtly, what it was that he expected from her now.

  The air seemed crowded between them.

  “Has enough time passed?” he asked.

  And she wondered, as she stood there, exactly how much time would be enough.

  “Mattie has a fish,” she said, coming to, remembering. “I’ve got to get the camera.”

  She found the camera where she thought it was. She put a hand to her forehead as she passed through the house. Her skin was hot to the touch and abrasive with layers of beach sand and sea salt. Earlier, she and Mattie had gone bodysurfing, crawling from the undertow on their hands and knees like two shipwrecked sailors.

  She crossed the lawn again, preoccupied now with the man she’d left in the doorway. She wondered, briefly, if she had dreamt him there, only imagined that he stood backlit by the sun. She took a dozen pictures of her daughter and the fish, wanting to prolong the moment, to give herself some time. Only when Mattie grew impatient did Kathryn put the camera around her neck and help Mattie haul the equipment and the fish to the porch.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked Mattie, referring to the filleting of the fish. But Kathryn thought it was a question she might well have asked herself.

  “I want to try,” Mattie said.

  Mattie had the keener sight and saw the man on the porch just before her mother did. The girl stopped and lowered her fish slightly. Her eyes flickered with a warning, the memory of a bad dream.

  The messenger, Kathryn thought.

  “It’s OK,” she said quietly to her daughter. “He’s just come.” The woman and the girl crossed the lawn together, walking in from fishing as countless others had done before them, the parent carrying the rod, the child carrying the trophy, the first of many fish caught in a lifetime. Last week, Mattie had found Jack’s fishing pole and tackle in the garage and had methodically set out to recall what Jack had taught her the previous summer. Kathryn had not been able to help her much, never having liked fishing herself. But Mattie was determined and had learned to manage the oversized equipment, developing some skill along the way.

  The wind shifted to the east, and immediately Kathryn felt the faint chill in the air that came with an east wind. In a few minutes, there would be whitecaps on the ocean. She thought of Jack then, as she always did, and she knew that she would never again experience an east wind without remembering the day she had stood on the porch, the day Jack had told her of the offer on the house. It was one of hundreds of triggers, small moments: There it is again, the east wind.

  She had these moments often. She had them about Jack Lyons, about Muire Boland and about Robert Hart. She had them about airplanes, about anything Irish, about London. She had them about white shirts, and she had them about umbrellas. Even a glass of beer could trigger a splintery recollection. She had learned to live with them, like learning to live with a tic or a stutter or a bad knee that occasionally sent a jolt of pain through the body.

  “Hello, Mattie,” Robert said when the girl had reached the porch. He said it in a friendly manner, but not overly so, which would have put Mattie on alert, made her even more uneasy than Kathryn could see she already was.

  And Mattie, well brought up, said hello in return, but turned her head away.

  “It’s a beauty,” Robert said.

  Kathryn, considering Robert and her daughter in the same frame of her vision, said: “Mattie’s been teaching herself to fish.”

  “It’s thirty-four, thirty-five?” Robert asked.

  “Thirty-six,” Mattie said, and not without a note of pride. Mattie took the tackle box from her mother. “I’ll do it over here,” she said, pointing to a corner of the porch floor.

  “As long as you hose it down afterward,” Kathryn answered. She watched as Mattie laid the fish at the porch’s edge. The girl studied the gills from different angles, then took a knife from the tackle box. She made an experimental cut. Kathryn hoped the fish was dead.

  Robert walked to the other end of the porch. He would want to talk, she thought.

  “This is beautiful,” Robert said when she had drifted in his direction. He turned and leaned against the railing. He meant the view. She could see his face now, and she thought it looked sharper than she remembered it, more defined. Which would be the color, the tan. “I’ve imagined this,” he added.

  Both simultaneously hearing the painful reminder of things imagined.

  Robert’s legs were also tanned and had tiny golden hairs. Kathryn thought
she had probably never seen his legs before. Hers were bare, too, which he took in.

  “How is she?” he asked, his gaze as she remembered it: intent and acute. Observant.

  “Better,” Kathryn said quietly so that Mattie couldn’t hear. “Better. It was a rough spring.”

  For weeks, she and Mattie had borne the brunt of a collective anger. If Jack hadn’t been involved . . . , some said. It was your father who carried the bomb . . . , others said. There had been threatening calls from strangers, anguished letters from relatives, a platoon of reporters at her gate. Simply driving to work had occasionally been harrowing, but Kathryn had refused to leave her home. She’d had to ask the Town of Ely to post a security detail on her property. The selectmen had called a town meeting, put it to a vote, and the unusual appropriation, after much debate, was inserted into the budget. It was listed under a section called Acts of God.

  The need for security had abated with the passing months, but Kathryn knew that neither she nor Mattie would ever recover a normal life. This was now a fact, a given, of their existence with which they struggled daily to come to terms. She thought of Robert’s comment about the children of crash victims: They mutate with disaster and make accommodations.

  “And how are you?” he asked.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  He turned, put a hand on a post, and surveyed the lawn and the garden.

  “You grow roses,” he said.

  “I try.”

  “They look good.”

  “It’s a fool’s enterprise near the ocean,” she said.

  In the arch of the garden, she had buff Friars and thorny Wenlocks; in the oblong were the Cressidas and Prosperos. She thought she liked the St. Cecilias best, however, for their shameless blush centers. They were easy to grow despite the sea air. Kathryn liked extravagance in flowers, wasteful luxury.