The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

Birds that were wounded.

  Falling downward.

  Spiraling, like, and spinning.

  She walked to the TV and knelt on the carpet so that her face was even with the old man’s on the screen. The fisherman was waving his hands around to show what he meant. He made a cone shape and moved his fingers up and down and then drew a ragged edge. He told the interviewer that none of the strange bits had actually landed in his boat and that by the time he had motored to the places where it seemed the things had fallen, they had disappeared or sunk into the sea and he could not get at them, not even with his nets.

  Facing the camera, the reporter said that the man’s name was Eamon Gilley. He was eighty-three, she said, and he was the first eyewitness to come forward. No one else appeared to have seen what the fisherman had seen, and nothing had been confirmed yet. Kathryn had the feeling that the reporter wanted very much for Gilley’s story to be true but felt obliged to say that it might not be.

  But Kathryn knew that it was true. She could see the moonlight on the sea, the way it must have twitched and sparkled, the silvery glints falling from the sky, falling, falling, like tiny angels coming down to earth. She could see the small boat in the water and the fisherman standing at its bow — his face turned upward toward the moon, his hands outstretched. She could see him risk his balance to catch the fluttering bits, poking the air like a small child grabbing for fireflies on a summer night. And she thought then how strange it was that disaster — the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face — could be, at times, such a thing of beauty.

  Robert reached over and turned off the television.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “When did you say it happened?”

  He rested his elbows on his knees and folded his hands. “One fifty-seven. Our time. Six fifty-seven theirs.”

  Above his right eyebrow, there was a scar. He must be in his late thirties, she thought, closer to her age than to Jack’s. He had the fair skin of a blond and brown eyes with flecks of rust in the irises. Jack had had blue eyes, two different blues — one a washed-out blue, almost translucent, a watercolor sky; the other brilliant, a sharp royal. The unusual coloring drew others’ eyes to his, made people examine his face as though this asymmetrical characteristic suggested imbalance, perhaps something wrong.

  She thought: Is this the man’s job?

  “That was the time of the last transmission,” the man from the union said in a voice she could hardly hear.

  “What was the last transmission?” she asked.

  “It was routine.”

  She didn’t believe him. What was routine about a last transmission?

  “Do you know,” she asked, “what the most common last words are from a pilot when he knows he’s going down? Well, of course you know.”

  “Mrs. Lyons,” he said, turning to her.

  “Kathryn.”

  “You’re still in shock. You should have some sugar. Is there juice?”

  “In the fridge. It was a bomb, wasn’t it?”

  “I wish I had more to tell you.”

  He stood up and walked into the kitchen. She realized that she didn’t want to be left alone in a room just yet, and so she followed him. She looked at the clock over the sink. 3:38. Was it possible that only fourteen minutes had elapsed since she had peered at the clock on the night table upstairs?

  “You got here fast,” she said, sitting again on the kitchen chair.

  He poured orange juice into a glass.

  “How did you do it?” she asked.

  “We have a plane,” he said quietly.

  “No. I mean, tell me. How is it done? You have a plane waiting? You sit around waiting for a crash?”

  He handed her the glass of juice. He leaned against the sink and ran the middle finger of his right hand vertically along his brow, from the bridge of his nose to his hairline. He seemed to be making decisions then, judgments.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t sit around waiting for a crash. But if one occurs, we have procedures in place. We have a Lear jet at Washington National. It flies me to the nearest major airport. In this case, Portsmouth.”

  “And then?”

  “And then there’s a car waiting.” “And you did it in...”

  She calculated the time it would take him to travel from Washington, which was where the union headquarters was, to Ely, New Hampshire, just over the Massachusetts border.

  “A little over an hour,” he said.

  “But why?” she asked.

  “To get here first,” he said. “To inform you. To help you through it.”

  “That’s not why,” she said quickly.

  He thought a minute.

  “It’s part of it,” he said.

  She smoothed her hand over the cracked surface of the pine table. On nights when Jack had been home, Jack and she and Mattie had seemed to live within a ten-foot radius of that table — reading the paper, listening to the news, cooking, eating, cleaning up, doing homework, and then, after Mattie had gone to bed, talking or not talking, and sometimes, if Jack didn’t have a trip, sharing a bottle of wine. In the beginning, when Mattie was little and early to bed, they had sometimes had candlelight and made love in the kitchen, one or the other of them seized by a sudden lust or fondness.

  She tilted her head back and shut her eyes. The pain seemed to stretch from her abdomen to her throat. She felt panicky, as though she had strayed too close to the edge. She drew in her breath so sharply that Robert looked over at her.

  And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

  The images assaulted her. The feeling of Jack’s breath at the top of her spine, as though he were whispering to her bones. The sliding sensation against her mouth when he gave her a quick kiss as he went off to work. The drape of his arm around Mattie after her last field hockey game, when Mattie was sticky and sweaty and crying because her team had lost eight-zip. The pale skin on the inside of Jack’s arms. The slightly pitted skin between his shoulder blades, a legacy of adolescence. The odd tenderness of his feet, the way he couldn’t walk along a beach without sneakers. The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly. The images pushed and jostled and competed rudely with each other for space. She tried to stop them, but she couldn’t.

  The man from the union stood at the sink and watched her. He didn’t move.

  “I loved him,” she said when she could speak.

  She got up and ripped a sheet of paper towel from its holder. She blew her nose. She felt a momentary bewilderment of tenses. She wondered if time were opening up an envelope and would swallow her — for a day or a week or a month or possibly forever.

  “I know,” said Robert.

  “Are you married?” she asked, sitting down again.

  He put his hands in the pockets of his trousers and jiggled the change there. He had on gray suit trousers. Jack hardly ever wore a suit. Like many men who wore a uniform to work, he had never been a particularly good dresser.

  “No,” he said. “I’m divorced.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “Two boys. Nine and six.”

  “Do they live with you?”

  “With my wife in Alexandria. Ex-wife.” “Do you see them much?”

  “I try.”

  “Why did you get divorced?”

  “I stopped drinking,” he said.

  He said this matter-of-factly, without explanation. She wasn’t sure she understood. She blew her nose again.

  “I have to call the school,” she said. “I’m a teacher.”

  “That can wait,” he said. “No one will be there anyway. No one is awake yet.” He looked at his watch.

  “Tell me about your job,” she said.

  “There isn’t a lot to tell. It’s mostly public relations.”

  “How many of these things have you had
to do?” she asked. “Things?”

  “Crashes,” she said. “Crashes.”

  He was silent for a minute.

  “Five,” he said finally. “Five major ones.”

  “Five?”

  “And four smaller ones.”

  “Tell me about them,” she said.

  He glanced out the window. Thirty seconds passed. Maybe a minute. Again she sensed that he was making judgments, decisions.

  “Once I got to the widow’s house,” he said, “and I found her in bed with another man.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Westport. Connecticut.”

  “What happened?”

  “The wife came down in a robe, and I told her, and then the man got dressed and came down. He was a neighbor. And then he and I stood in the woman’s kitchen and watched her collapse. It was a mess.”

  “Did you know him?” Kathryn asked. “My husband?” “No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “He was older than you.”

  “I know.”

  “What else did they tell you about him?”

  “Eleven years with Vision. Before that, Santa Fe, five years. Before that, Teterboro, two years. Two years Vietnam, DC-3 gunships. Born in Boston. College, Holy Cross. One child, a daughter, fifteen. A wife.”

  He thought a minute.

  “Tall,” he said. “Six-four? Fit.”

  She nodded.

  “Good record. Excellent record, actually.”

  He scratched the back of one hand with the other.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I know these facts about your husband yet didn’t know him at all.”

  “Did they tell you anything about me?”

  “Only that you’re fifteen years younger than your husband. And that you’d be here with your daughter.”

  She examined her feet, which were small and white, as if the blood had left them. The soles weren’t clean.

  “How many were on board?” she asked.

  “A hundred and four.”

  “Not full,” she said.

  “Not full, no.”

  “Any survivors?”

  “They’re searching. . . .”

  Other images intruded now. A moment of knowledge — what knowledge? — in the cockpit. Jack’s hands at the controls. A body spinning in the air. No. Not even a body. She shook her head roughly.

  “I have to tell her alone,” she said.

  He nodded quickly, as if that were already understood.

  “No,” she said. “I mean you have to leave the house. I don’t want anyone to see this or hear this.”

  “I’ll sit in my car,” he said.

  She slipped off the jacket he had given her. The telephone rang again, but neither of them moved. In the distance, they could hear the answering machine click on.

  She wasn’t prepared for Jack’s voice, deep and amiable, a hint of Boston in the vowels, with its familiar message. She put her face into her hands and waited for the message to be over.

  When she looked up, she saw that Robert had been studying her. He glanced away.

  “It’s to keep me from talking to the press, isn’t it?” she said. “That’s why you’re here.”

  A car rolled into the driveway and crunched on the gravel. The man from the union looked out the window, took the jacket from her, and put it on.

  “It’s so I won’t say anything that might make them think pilot error,” she said. “You don’t want them to think pilot error.”

  He lifted the telephone receiver off its hook and laid it on the counter.

  Lately, Jack and she had hardly ever made love in the kitchen. They had told themselves that Mattie was older now and might come down to the kitchen looking for a snack. Most nights, after Mattie had gone up to her room to listen to her CDs or to talk on the phone, they had just sat at the table reading magazines, too exhausted to put away the dishes or even to talk.

  “I’ll tell her now,” she said.

  He hesitated.

  “You understand we can’t stay out there long,” he said. “They’re from the airline, aren’t they?” she asked, looking through the kitchen window. In the driveway, she could just make out two shadowy shapes emerging from a car. She walked toward the bottom of the stairs.

  She looked up the steep incline. There were five hundred steps, at least five hundred. They stretched on and on. She understood that something had been set in motion and was beginning now. She was not sure she had the stamina to make it to the top.

  She looked at the man from the union, who was moving through the kitchen to answer the door.

  “Mom,” she said, and he turned. “What they usually say is Mom.”

  THE GLARE OF THE SUN, REFLECTED FROM THE occasional passing car, moves along the back wall of the shop like a slow strobe. The shop seems airless today, suffocating in the heat, the air thick with dust motes floating in the shafts of light. She stands with a rag in her hand inside a maze of mahogany and walnut tables, of lamps and old linens, of books that smell of mildew. She glances up at him as he walks in. She has a brief impression of someone official on an errand, of someone lost and looking for directions. He has on a white shirt with short sleeves that stick out from his shoulders like thin white flags. Heavy navy blue trousers. He wears old man’s shoes, black shoes that are weighty and enormous.

  — We’re closed, she says.

  He looks quickly behind him and sees the OPEN sign on the inside of the door. He scratches the back of his neck.

  — Sorry, he says, and turns to leave.

  She has always marveled at the speed with which the mind makes judgments — a second, two seconds at the most, even before anyone has moved or said a word. Early thirties, she guesses. Not stocky, exactly, but large. He has broad shoulders, and she thinks at once that there is nothing anemic about him. She is struck initially by his jawline, which is rectangular and smooth, and by his somewhat comical ears, which stick out at their tops. She thinks there might be something wrong with his eyes.

  — I’m taking inventory, but if there’s something that you’re looking for, that’s fine, she says.

  He moves into a tube of sunlight that comes from a round window over the door. She can see his face clearly.

  There are tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and he doesn’t have perfect teeth. His hair is cut short, a military cut, dark, almost black, and would be curly if it had any length. There is a dent in his hair, as if he had a cap on earlier.

  He puts his hands into his trouser pockets. He asks her if she has any old checkerboards.

  — Yes, she says.

  She begins to walk through the maze to a far wall, apologizing for the mess as she goes. She is aware of him behind her, aware of her gait and posture, which suddenly seem unnatural, too stiff. She has on jeans, a red tank top, and a pair of old leather sandals. Her hair is loose and sticky on the back of her neck. She feels as though the heat and the humidity, combined with the dust she has been kicking up, have created a kind of dirty film all over her. In the mosaic of her reflection in an antique mirror on the wall, she catches a glimpse of soggy tendrils of hair on either side of her face, which is shiny with perspiration. Her bra strap is showing, a white flash under the red, and there is a blue stain on the tank top from something that bled in the wash.

  The board is lying against the wall with several old paintings. The man moves in front of her and crouches to get a better look. She can see the strength of him in his thighs, the length of his back in the crouch, the place where the belt dips in the back with the strain. She notices the white epaulets on his shoulders.

  —What’s this? he asks, his eye caught by a painting beside the checkerboard. It is a landscape, an impressionistic rendering of a hotel out at the Isles of Shoals. The hotel is old, nineteenth century, with deep porches and a long smooth lawn in the middle of a rocky seascape.

  He stands and shows her the painting, which she has never paid much attention to before.

  —This
is pretty good, he says. —Who’s the artist?

  She tilts her head and reads from the back of the painting:

  — Claude Legny, she says. — Eighteen ninety. It says here that it came from an estate sale in Portsmouth.

  — It’s like a Childe Hassam, he says.

  She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t know who Childe Hassam is. He traces the wooden frame with his fingers, and it seems to her as though someone were trailing his fingers up and down her spine.

  — How much is it? he asks.

  — I’ll look it up, she says.

  They walk together to the register. The price, when she finds it, seems staggeringly high. She feels embarrassed to name such a sum, but it is not her shop, and she should try to make the sale for her grandmother.

  When she tells him the price, he doesn’t even blink.

  — I’ll take it, he says.

  He gives her cash, and she hands him a receipt, which he sticks absentmindedly in his shirt pocket. She wonders what he does in the military, why he isn’t at his base on a Wednesday afternoon.

  — What do you do? she asks, looking again at the epaulets on his shoulders.

  — Cargo transport, he says. — I have a layover. I borrow a car from a ticket agent at the airport and go for drives.

  — You fly, she says, stating the obvious.

  — I’m like a truck driver, only it’s a plane, he says, looking at her intently.

  — What’s in the plane? she asks.

  — Canceled checks.

  — Canceled checks?

  She laughs. She tries to imagine an entire plane filled with canceled checks.

  — Nice shop, he says, looking around.

  — It’s my grandmother’s.

  She crosses her arms over her chest.

  — Your eyes are two different colors, she says.

  — It’s genetic. It’s from my father’s side of the family. He pauses.

  — The eyes are both real, in case you wanted to know.

  — I did, as a matter of fact.

  — Your hair is beautiful, he says.

  — It’s genetic, she says.

  He nods his head and smiles, as if to say touché.

  —It’s . . . what color? he asks.

  — Red.

  —No, I mean...