The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  “I can’t explain it,” Kathryn said. “I feel as though I’ve temporarily lost Jack and I need to find him.”

  “You’re not going to find him,” Julia said. “He’s gone.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “He didn’t suffer.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Mr. Hart was pretty sure.”

  “No one knows anything yet. It’s all rumor and speculation.” “You should get out of here, Kathryn,” Julia said. “It’s a madhouse at the end of your driveway. I don’t want to frighten you, but they’ve had to bring back Charlie and Burt to help keep everyone away from the gate.”

  Behind Kathryn, a cold slice of air slid through the crack of the opened window, and she breathed it in deeply, smelling the salt. She hadn’t been outside all day except to bring Mattie back inside.

  “I don’t know how long this will take to die down,” Julia said. “Robert says it may take a while.”

  Kathryn inhaled deeply. It was like breathing in ammonia the way the air cleared the head, sharpened the senses.

  “No one can help you with this, Kathryn. It’s something you have to do by yourself. You know that, don’t you?”

  Kathryn briefly closed her eyes.

  “Kathryn?”

  “I loved him,” Kathryn said.

  “I know you did. I know you did. I loved him, too. We all loved him.”

  “Why did this happen?”

  “Forget the why,” Julia said. “There is no why. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help. It’s done, and it can’t be undone.”

  “I’m . . .”

  “You’re exhausted. Go to bed.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You know,” Julia said. “When your mother and father drowned, I literally thought I couldn’t stand it. I literally thought I’d one day just burst apart. The pain was terrible. Terrible. Losing a son is — it’s unimaginable until it happens. And I blamed your mother, Kathryn. I won’t pretend I didn’t. She and your father were lethal together when they were drinking, horribly careless and dangerous. But there you were, bewildered by the loss of these parents you hadn’t even properly had. That’s what saved me, Kathryn. Saving you saved me. Having to take care of you. I had to stop asking why Bobby had died. I just had to stop asking. There was no why. And there isn’t now.”

  Kathryn laid her head on the mattress. Julia began to stroke her hair.

  “You loved him. I know you did,” Julia said.

  Kathryn left Mattie’s room and walked into the bathroom. In the shower, she turned on the water as hot as she could stand it and let it run over her body without moving. Her eyes were swollen and ached from crying. Her head felt heavy. She’d had to blow her nose so many times the skin between her nose and upper lip stung. She’d had a headache since early morning and had been swallowing Advil tablets without counting. She imagined her blood thinning out and draining away with the water from the shower.

  There will be many days like this, Robert had said earlier. Not quite as bad, but bad.

  She could not imagine surviving another day like the one she had just been through.

  She could not remember the sequence of things. What had happened first or second or third. What had happened in the morning or in the afternoon, or later in the morning or earlier in the afternoon. There were bulletins on the TV, newscasters who spoke words that made her stomach kick and contract when she heard them: Downed after taking off . . . Baby clothes and a floating seat ...Tragedy in the... Ninety seconds for the wreckage . . . Shock and grief on both sides of the . . . The fifteen-year-old T-900 . . . Debris spread over . . . The continuing story of Vision Flight 384 . . . Reports indicate that . . . Early morning businessman’s . . . The jointly-owned British and American airline... Gathering at the airport . . . FAA maintenance inspection . . . Speculation that a massive . . .

  And then there were the images Kathryn doubted would ever leave her. A girl’s high school yearbook photo that filled the screen; a vast plain of ocean with a helicopter hovering and flipping white slivers from the tops of the waves; a mother who held her arms out, palms pushing the air, as though she could ward off an unwanted flow of words. Men in complex diving gear, anxiously peering over the edge of a boat; relatives at the airport, scanning a manifest. And then, immediately after the footage of the relatives, three still photographs appeared, one above another, three men in uniform and in formal poses, with their names written underneath. Kathryn hadn’t ever seen that particular picture of Jack, could not imagine for what purpose it had been taken. Not for this eventuality, surely. Not just in case. But whenever else did a pilot’s face appear on the news? she wondered.

  All day, Robert had told her not to watch. The pictures would stay with her, he had warned, the images would not leave. It was better not to see, not to have them, for they would come back, in the daytime and in her dreams.

  It was unimaginable, he said to her.

  Meaning, Don’t imagine it.

  But how could she not? How could she stop the flow of detail, the flow of words and photographs in her mind?

  Throughout the day, the phone had rung continuously. Most often Robert had answered it or given it to one of the people from the airline, but sometimes, when they were watching the bulletins, he let it ring, and she heard the voices on the answering machine. Tentative, inquiring voices from news organizations. The voices of friends and neighbors in town, calling to say how terrible it was (I can’t believe it was Jack. . . .), (If there is anything we can do . . .). The voice of an older woman from the union — businesslike, hard edged, demanding that Robert return her call. The union, Kathryn knew, didn’t want it to be pilot error, and the airline didn’t want it to be pilot error or mechanical failure. Already she had heard that there were lawyers scavenging. She wondered if a lawyer had tried to contact her, if Robert Hart had cut him off.

  The divers, she knew, were searching for the flight data recorder and the CVR, the box with the last words. She was afraid of the divers’ finding the latter. It was the one news bulletin she knew she would not be able to bear — hearing Jack’s voice, the authority in it, the control, and then what? It seemed ghoulishly intrusive to record the last seconds of a man. Where else but on death row did they do that?

  She stepped out of the shower, toweled herself off, and then realized, in the way a woman might absentmindedly get into a car and remember that she had forgotten her keys, that she had not used any soap or shampoo. She turned the water on again and stepped back in. There were spaces between her thoughts now — dead air, cotton fluff.

  She stepped out of the shower for a second time, dried herself off, and looked quickly around her for her robe. The shirt and socks and leggings she had had on all day were strewn over the tile floor, but she had forgotten her robe. She looked at the back of the door.

  Jack’s jeans were on a hook. Old jeans, faded in the knees. He would have worn these his last day home, she was thinking.

  She pressed the jeans to her face. She breathed through the denim.

  She took the jeans off the hook and laid them on the bathroom counter. She heard change in the pockets, the crinkle of papers. She reached into a back pocket and found a wad of papers, slightly curved, compacted from having been sat on. She extracted a fold of money from the papers, several ones and a twenty. There was a receipt from Ames, for an extension cord, a package of lightbulbs, a can of Right Guard. There was a pink dry-cleaning slip: six shirts, light starch, hangers. A receipt from Staples: printer cable and twelve pens. A receipt from the post office for a twenty-two-dollar purchase; stamps, she guessed, looking at it quickly. There was a business card: Barron Todd, Investments. Two lottery tickets. Lottery tickets? She hadn’t known that Jack had played the lottery. She looked at one of the tickets more closely. There was a faint note scribbled in pencil. M at A’s, it read. Followed by a series of numbers. Mattie at someone’s? But what did the numbers mean? There were a lot of them. Another lottery pick? And then, un
folding the dense wad more thoroughly, she saw that there were two pieces of white lined paper. On the first was written several lines from what looked like a poem, written in ink, real fountain-pen ink. It was Jack’s handwriting.

  Here in the narrow passage and the pitiless north, perpetual

  Betrayals, relentless resultless fighting.

  A random fury of dirks in the dark: a struggle for survival

  Of hungry blind cells of life in the womb.

  Puzzled, she leaned against the wall. What poem was this, and what did it mean? she wondered. Why had Jack written it down?

  She unfolded the second piece of lined paper. It was a remember list. Jack had made one every morning he’d been home. She read the items on the list: Extension cord, Call gutter, Mattie HP color printer, Bergdorf FedEx robe to arrive 20th.

  Bergdorf. FedEx robe. To arrive 20th.

  Bergdorf Goodman? The New York department store?

  She tried to think, to remember the December calendar on the fridge. Today, despite its agonizing length, was still December 17. On the 20th, she was to have been in school, the last day before vacation. And Jack would have been home that day. Between trips.

  Was this a reference to her Christmas present?

  She gathered the papers in her hand, clutched them tightly. She leaned her back against the door and slid down its length.

  Her exhaustion was bone deep. She could barely hold up her head.

  THE CAR FILLS WITH OVERLY WARM AIR. HER stomach is so full from Julia’s Christmas dinner that she has to flip the seat back to make herself more comfortable. Jack has on the cream-colored sweater that she knit for him their first winter together, the one with the mistakes in the back only she can see. He wears the sweater loyally each Thanksgiving and Christmas when they make the trip from Santa Fe. He has let his hair grow out some, and it curls slightly just behind his ears. He has on sunglasses, which he almost always wears, except on the grayest of days.

  — You’re good at this, she says.

  — Good at what?

  — Surprises.

  Once there was a sudden trip to Mexico. Another time, during a Christmas visit, he took her to the Ritz for the weekend when she thought they were driving into Boston to see an orthopedist for his back. Today, after the meal at Julia’s, he said only that he wanted to take a drive to pick up her Christmas present. Just the two of them. Julia would stay with Mattie, who, at four, would not be separated from her new toys.

  They leave the town of Ely and drive toward Fortune’s Rocks, where the summer houses are. As a girl, on her walks from the village to the beach, she used to imagine that these houses, which sit empty ten months of the year, had character and personality. This one proud and a little showy, and then, after a particularly brutal storm, a bit chastened. This one tall and elegant, an aging beauty. This one challenging the elements, pushing its face forward, foolhardy. Another too quiet, sullen, unadorned, as if unloved. Yet another separated from the others, self-contained, unruffled by the crush of summer people or the long, lonely nights of winter.

  — I can’t imagine what this present is, Kathryn says.

  — You’ll see.

  In the car, she allows herself to close her eyes. It seems she dozes only a minute, but when she wakes, it is with a start. The car is in a driveway. A familiar driveway.

  — You’re feeling nostalgic? she asks.

  — Something like that, he says.

  She peers through the windshield at the house. It is, she thinks, as she has so often thought before, the most beautiful house she has ever seen. Sided with white clapboards, the house is two stories high, with a generous wraparound porch. The shutters are a dusty blue, the muted opaque of the ocean on a hazy day. The upper story is cedar shingled and long weathered, and it curves shallowly, as though someone had shaved a slice out. Perhaps it is a mansard roof — she has never been exactly sure. There are dormers in that upper story, evenly spaced, that seem to suggest comfortably sleeping bodies behind them. She thinks of old hotels, old oceanfront hotels.

  Wordlessly, Jack gets out of the car and climbs the steps to the porch, and she follows him. The woven rockers and the wide floorboards have weathered to an ageless gray patina. She stands at the railing, looking across the lawn and down to the shoreline, where the water ebbs and flows over the rocks so that it seems it is the light itself that gathers and spills, gathers and spills, and then falls back into the sea.

  In the distance, there is a haze on the ocean, a fresh, clean haze that comes only on fine days. She cannot precisely see the islands; they are there, then not, and then they seem to hover above the water. To one side of the lawn lies a meadow; to the other, orchards of dwarf pear and peach. By the porch is an overgrown flower garden oddly planted in the shape of an arched window, an oblong with a fan attached. In the arch is a white marble bench, now covered with vines.

  A sudden east wind rises and blows across the porch, bringing with it a faintly damp chill, as it almost always does. In a minute, she knows, there will be whitecaps on the water. She hunches her shoulders inside her coat.

  Behind her, Jack unlocks the kitchen door and enters the house.

  — Jack, what are you doing? she asks.

  Bewildered, she follows him through the kitchen and into the front room, a long space that runs the width of the ocean side of the house, a lovely room with six pairs of tall floor-to-ceiling windows. On the walls is a faded yellow paper, peeling at the seams. There are shades at the windows, rolled a quarter of the way down, that remind her of shades in old schoolrooms.

  It has been four and a half years since the first time they trespassed in this house, since they first made love in an upstairs bedroom. It was after they’d gone swimming in their clothes. She told him she knew about a house that was abandoned. She remembers the way he unbuttoned his shirt and let it drop to the floor. How different he looked without his shirt — years younger, looser, like someone from the mills she might once have gone out with. He crouched over her and began to lick the salt from her skin. She felt dizzy with the heat. Beneath her own lips, the skin of his chest was tangy, silky with fine hairs.

  Jack passes through the front room and waits for her at the bottom of the stairs. The house is still unoccupied, has been for decades. It was once a convent, and then it belonged to a family from Boston who used it as a summer house. It has been for sale for years, and she wonders why the house never sells. Perhaps it is the dormitory effect of the many bedrooms, the single bathroom at the end of the hall.

  He holds out his hand. She decides, as she climbs the steps with him, that he means to give her the present in the room where they once made love. So she is not surprised when they enter a room with walls of bright lime green. In the corner, a daybed is covered with a flower-print spread. But the most striking item in the room is a red chair, a simple kitchen chair that has been painted with a fire-engine red lacquer. The chair shines in the sunlight — the red chair against the lime green against the blue of the ocean through the window — and she wonders, as she has wondered before, in what flight of whimsy the painter chose such startling colors.

  — I got a call from Vision, he says at once.

  — Vision?

  — A start-up airline, British and American, jointly owned. Fast growing, out of Logan. In a few years, I could get an international route.

  He smiles, the triumphant and complex smile of a man who has planned a surprise and pulled it off.

  She puts a foot forward, about to go to him.

  — And if you like this house, we’re going to buy it.

  The sentence stops her. She puts her hand to her chest.

  — You’ve been here? she asks.

  He nods. — With Julia.

  — Julia knows about this? Kathryn asks incredulously.

  — We wanted to surprise you. The house is a wreck. It needs work. Well, obviously.

  — When did you come here with her?

  — Two weeks ago. I had a layover in Port
smouth.

  Kathryn tries to remember. She sees the days of December as blocks on the pages of a calendar. Each trip seems to blend into the next. She cannot precisely remember any of them.

  — Julia knew about this? she asks again.

  — They’ve accepted our offer, Jack says.

  — Our offer?

  She feels slow and doltish. The surprises are piling up before she can sort them out.

  — Wait here, he says.

  Shaken, she crosses the room and sits on the red chair. The sun from a side window makes an oblong of bright hot light on the bedspread. She wants to crawl into the light to warm her hands and feet.

  How could he? she wonders. About such an important matter? This isn’t simply hiding a box in a bureau. There were other people involved. Real estate agents. And Julia. Is Julia capable of keeping such a secret? Perhaps for a surprise, Kathryn answers herself. And Jack is good at secrets.

  She shakes her head. She cannot conceive of making an offer on a house without Jack.

  When he returns, he has a bottle of champagne and two glasses in his hands. She recognizes the glasses from Julia’s cupboard.

  — I love it that you’re here, he says. — I love seeing you here. She watches as he pops the cork. She thinks: But this is what Jack does best, isn’t it? He makes things happen.

  She wants to feel happy. In a minute, when she has digested the news, she thinks she will feel happy.

  — You’ll commute to Boston? she asks.

  — I’ve timed it. Fifty minutes.

  My God, she thinks, he’s been here and he’s timed it already. He pours the champagne into the two glasses and hands her one of them. Together, they drink. Her hand is trembling, which she knows he sees. He puts his glass down then and comes toward her. He makes her stand up and turns her so that they are both looking out the window. He speaks quietly into her ear.