The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  THEY WALK ALONG THE BEACH IN THE FOG. Mattie, in a Red Sox jacket, runs ahead to look for crabs. The beach is flat and shallow, curved like a shell, the sand the color of weathered wood with a calligraphy of seaweed written along its crust. Behind the seawall are the summer houses, empty now. Too late, Kathryn realizes she should have told Mattie, only five, to take off her shoes.

  Jack’s shoulders are hunched against the cold. He wears his leather jacket always, even on the coldest of days, unwilling to invest in a parka, or perhaps too vain, she has never been exactly sure. Her own flannel shirt hangs below her jacket, and she has a woolen scarf doubled around her neck.

  — What’s wrong? she asks.

  — Nothing, he says. — I’m fine.

  — You seem subdued.

  — I’m OK.

  He walks with his hands in his pockets, staring straight ahead. His mouth is set in a hard line. She wonders what has happened to upset him.

  — Did I do something? she asks.

  — No, he says.

  — Mattie has a soccer game tomorrow, she says.

  — Good, he says.

  — Can you be there? she asks.

  — No, I have a trip.

  There is a pause.

  — You know, she says. — Once in a while you could bid a schedule that gave you more free time, more time to be at home.

  He is silent.

  — Mattie misses you.

  — Look, he says. — Don’t make it worse for me than it already is.

  From the corner of her eye, she can see Mattie twirling in circles on the beach. Kathryn feels distracted, pulled toward the man beside her by a gravity that seems unnatural. She wonders if he’s feeling well. Perhaps he is simply tired. She has heard the stories, the statistics: Most airline pilots die before they reach retirement age, which is sixty. It’s the stress, the strain of the unusual schedules. The wear and tear on the body.

  She moves toward him, tucks her hands around his stiffened arm. Still he stares straight ahead.

  — Jack, tell me. What is it?

  — Drop it, will you?

  Stung, she lets his arm go and walks away.

  — It’s the weather, he says, catching up to her. — I don’t know.

  Apologetic now. Mollifying.

  — What about the weather? she asks coldly, unwilling to be so easily mollified.

  — The gray. The fog. I hate it.

  — I don’t think anyone likes it much, she says evenly.

  — Kathryn, you don’t understand.

  He removes his hands from his pockets and hikes his collar against the cold. He seems to slip further into his leather jacket.

  — Today is my mother’s birthday, he says quietly. — Or would have been.

  — Oh, Jack, she says, going to him. — You should have said.

  — You’re lucky, he says. — You’re lucky to have Julia. You say you didn’t have parents, but you did.

  Is this a note of jealousy that she hears?

  — Yes, I am lucky to have Julia, she agrees.

  Jack’s face is pinched and red. His eyes are watering from the cold.

  — Was it very bad when your mother died? she asks.

  — I don’t like to talk about it.

  — I know you don’t, she says gently. — But sometimes talking about it can make it better.

  — I doubt it.

  — Was she sick a long time?

  He hesitates. — Not too long. It was quick.

  — What was it?

  — I told you. Cancer.

  — No, I know, she says. — I mean what kind?

  He sighs slightly. — Breast, he says. — In those days, they didn’t have the kinds of treatments . . .

  She puts her hand on his arm.

  — It’s a terrible age to be left without a mother, she says. Just four years older than Mattie, she thinks suddenly, and the realization makes her go cold all over. It is agonizing to think of Mattie left without a mother.

  — She was Irish, you once said.

  — She was born there. She had a beautiful voice, a beautiful accent.

  — You had your dad.

  Jack makes a short, derisive sound. — Dad isn’t exactly the correct word. My father was an asshole.

  The word, which Jack seldom uses, shocks her.

  She unzips his jacket, snakes her arms inside.

  — Jack, she says.

  He softens slightly and pulls her head toward him. She smells leather mixed with sea air.

  — I don’t know what it is, he says. — Sometimes I’m afraid. Sometimes I think I have no center on gray days. No beliefs.

  — You have me, she says quickly.

  — This is true.

  — You have Mattie, she says.

  — I know, I know. Of course.

  — Aren’t we enough? she asks.

  — Where is Mattie? he asks, suddenly pulling away. Kathryn whips around and scans the beach. Jack spots her first, a brief flash of red among the gray. Kathryn, inexplicably paralyzed, watches Jack race across the sand and wade with high steps into the waves. She waits an endless minute and then sees Jack snatch Mattie like a small dog from the surf. He holds his daughter facedown by the waist, and she thinks for a moment that he will shake Mattie dry like a dog as well. But then she hears a familiar cry. Jack kneels on the beach, whips off his leather jacket, and enfolds the small body. When Kathryn reaches the two of them, he is wiping seawater from his daughter’s face with the tail of his shirt.

  Mattie looks stunned.

  — The wave knocked her down, Jack says breathlessly.

  — And the undertow was taking her out.

  Kathryn picks Mattie up, cradles her in her arms.

  — Let’s go, Jack says quickly. — In a minute, she’ll be freezing. They begin to walk fast back to the house. Mattie coughs and wheezes from the seawater. Kathryn murmurs soothing words. Mattie’s face is bright pink from the cold.

  Jack holds Mattie’s hand as if attached to his daughter by an umbilical cord. His pants are soaked, his shirt untucked. Kathryn thinks that he, too, must be freezing. The thought of what might have happened to Mattie had he not seen her in time weakens her arms, her knees.

  She stops abruptly on the beach, and, in a natural movement, Jack encircles her and Mattie with his arms.

  — Aren’t we enough? she asks again.

  Jack bends his head and kisses Kathryn on her forehead.

  — Enough of what? Mattie asks.

  two

  SOMETIMES IT WAS AS THOUGH SHE HAD LIVED THREE, four years in eleven days. At other times it seemed just minutes ago that Robert Hart stood at her door and uttered the two words — Mrs. Lyons? — that had changed her life. She could not remember time looping in on itself in such a manner before, except perhaps for those two or three sublime days when she had first met Jack Lyons and fallen in love, and life had been measured out in minutes rather than in hours.

  She lay on the daybed in the spare room, her arms outstretched, her head slightly raised on a pillow so that she could see past the red lacquered chair and out to sea. It was sunny when she’d driven to the house, but now the sky was beginning to cloud over, just swirls of cloud, milk drops in a water glass. She pulled a butterfly clip from the back of her head and tossed it to the floor, where it skidded along the polished wooden boards and came to rest against the baseboard. She had meant that morning to reenter the house and begin the long process of cleaning up and clearing away all traces of the past eleven days so that Mattie and she might move back from Julia’s and begin their lives again. The gesture had been an admirable one, Kathryn thought, but her courage had thinned and dissipated when she’d walked into the kitchen and seen the pile of newspapers with their front-page photographs of Jack and her and Mattie, one edition of which had fallen onto the floor, making small tents on the tiles. There were rock-hard bagels in a waxed-paper bag on the table and a half dozen opened cans of Diet Coke on the counter, although someone had thoug
htfully taken the trash out of its bin, so the house didn’t smell as awful as Kathryn had feared it might. Climbing the stairs, she had opened the door to Jack’s office and gazed at the pulled drawers and scattered papers on the floor, the strange nakedness of the desk without its computer equipment. She had known that the FBI would come with search warrants and documents, but she hadn’t known precisely when. She had not been back to the house since the memorial service, two days before Christmas. Nor had Robert, who had returned to Washington immediately after the service. Shutting the door to Jack’s office, Kathryn had walked the length of the hallway, entered the spare room, and lay down on the bed.

  She was thinking that she’d been foolish to come back so soon, but she could not ignore her house forever. The clearing up had to be done. Julia, Kathryn knew, would have come in her place, but Kathryn could not allow that. Julia was exhausted, near to collapse herself, not only from the memorial service and the caring for Kathryn and Mattie, but also from her own finely honed sense of obligation: Julia had been determined to fill the Christmas rush orders from the shop. Privately, Kathryn had thought this misguided effort might kill her grandmother, but Kathryn could not dissuade Julia from her sense of duty. And so the two of them, with Mattie helping sporadically, had spent several long nights boxing and packing and wrapping and ticking off names and addresses from a list. And in its own way, Kathryn thought, the work had been mildly therapeutic. Julia and she had slept when they literally could no longer see, and thus they had avoided the insomnia that might have been their fate.

  This morning, however, Kathryn had insisted that Julia stay in bed, and, not too surprisingly, Julia had finally acquiesced. Mattie, too, was sleeping late and might remain in bed until the early afternoon, as she had been doing for days. Actually, Kathryn wished her daughter would sleep for months in a peaceful coma and then awaken to a consciousness dulled by time, so that she would not be hit again and again with the pain that was always absurdly and cuttingly fresh. It was why Mattie slept so long, Kathryn thought, to postpone that awful moment of knowing.

  Kathryn wished she herself could manage a coma. Instead, she felt herself to be inside a private weather system, one in which she was continuously tossed and buffeted by bits of news and information, sometimes chilled by thoughts of what lay immediately ahead, thawed by the kindness of others (Julia and Robert and strangers), frequently drenched by memories that seemed to have no regard for circumstance or place, and then subjected to the nearly intolerable heat of reporters, photographers, and curious onlookers. It was a weather system with no logic, she had decided, no pattern, no progression, no form. Sometimes she was unable to sleep or eat or, most oddly, to read even a single article through to the end. And not because the subject matter was Jack or the explosion, but because she couldn’t summon the necessary concentration. At other times, when speaking to Julia or Mattie, she couldn’t get to the end of a sentence without forgetting what the beginning had been, nor could she remember, from moment to moment, what task it was that she had been engaged in. Occasionally she found herself with the telephone to her ear, a number ringing, and no idea who it was she had called or why. Her mind felt crowded, as though there were a critical fact teasing her at the periphery of her brain, a detail she ought to be thinking about, a memory she ought to be seizing, a solution to a problem that seemed just beyond her grasp.

  Worse, however, were the moments of relative calm that suddenly gave way to anger, all the more confusing because she could not always attach the anger to the appropriate person or event. It seemed composed of bits, tiny stone chips of an ugly mosaic: irritation at Jack, as though he were standing next to her, for something as trivial as the fact that he had neglected to tell her the name of their insurance agent (which she realized she could easily get, and did get, for herself by calling the company), or for the infinitely more innocent yet utterly infuriating fact that he had left her for good. Or anger at Arthur Kahler, with whom Jack had played tennis for years, for treating Kathryn as though she were vaguely toxic when he’d met her one day at Ingerbretson’s. Even the sight of a tourist couple touching in front of Julia’s shop (this other couple intact when Jack and she were not) caused such a rage inside Kathryn that she could not speak to them when they entered the store.

  Kathryn knew that there were more appropriate and more obvious targets for her anger, but, inexplicably, she most often found herself mute or helpless in the face of them: the media, the airline, the agencies with their acronyms, and the hecklers — disturbed and frightening hecklers on the telephone, in the streets, at the memorial service, and even once, mind-numbingly, on the television, when a woman, asked for a man-on-the-street comment about the crash investigation, turned to the camera and accused Kathryn of hiding critical information about the explosion.

  Shortly after her interview with the Safety Board investigator, Robert had suggested they go for a drive. They left the house and walked toward the car. He held the door for her, and only after it had closed did it occur to her to ask where they were going.

  “Saint Joseph’s Church,” he said quickly.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I think it’s time for you to talk to a priest.”

  They drove through Ely and then across the road that traversed the salt marsh and led into Ely Falls, past abandoned mills and storefronts with signs that hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. Robert parked in front of the rectory, a dark brick edifice that needed scouring, a building Kathryn had never entered. As a girl, she had often taken the bus into Ely Falls with her friends on Saturday afternoons and gone with them to confession at Saint Joseph’s. Sitting alone on a darkened pew, she had been entranced by the seemingly moist stone walls, the intricately carved wooden cubicles with their maroon drapes behind which her friends confessed their sins (what they’d been, Kathryn could not now imagine), the captivatingly lurid paintings of the Stations of the Cross (which her best friend, Patty Regan, had once tried without success to explain to Kathryn), and the tawdry red glass globes that held the flickering candles that Patty would pay for and then light on her way out. Kathryn’s own childhood church, Saint Matthew’s Methodist on High Street in Ely, had been almost aggressively sterile by comparison, a brown-shingled church, trimmed in yellow wood, with long multipaned windows through which the sun bountifully shone on Sunday mornings, as though the architect had been specifically commissioned to include the light and air of Protestantism in his design. Julia had taken Kathryn to Sunday school, though not much past the fifth grade, the age at which stories from the Bible no longer mesmerized her as they once had. And after that time, Kathryn had not been to church much at all, except at Christmas and Easter with Julia. Sometimes, Kathryn had felt a small twinge of parental guilt at not sending Mattie to Sunday school, not allowing her daughter the opportunity to learn about Christianity and then decide its validity for herself, as Kathryn had been allowed to do. Kathryn guessed that Mattie hardly ever thought about God, although in this she knew she could be wrong.

  In the early years of their marriage, Jack had been aggressively scornful of the Catholic Church. He had attended the School of the Holy Name in Chelsea, with the worst that such parochial schools had to offer, including corporal punishment. It was hard for Kathryn to imagine schooling much worse than her own, which had been so spectacularly dull that when Kathryn thought about her years at Ely Elementary, the first image that came to mind was that of dust in the corridors. Lately, however, Jack’s vehemence against the church had seemed to subside, and she wondered if he’d changed his mind. As he never talked about it, she couldn’t say.

  They got out of the car and knocked on a large wooden door. A tall man with dark, wiry hair answered the bell.

  “There’s been a terrible death,” Robert said at once.

  The priest nodded calmly and gazed from Robert to Kathryn.

  “This is Kathryn Lyons,” Robert said. “Her husband died yesterday in a plane crash.”

  It seemed to Kathryn that
the color left the priest’s face for just a moment and then returned.

  “I’m Father Paul LeFevre,” he said to both of them, extending his hand. “Please come in.”

  They followed the priest into a large room with leaded glass casement windows and seemingly thousands of books. Father Paul gestured for them to take seats around a small black fire-place grate. He looked to be in his late forties, and he seemed unusually muscular and fit under his dark shirt. She wondered idly as she sat there what priests did to keep in shape, if they were allowed to go to the gym and lift weights.

  “I want to honor my husband,” Kathryn said when Father Paul had seated himself. He held a pad of paper and a pen in his lap.

  Kathryn searched for more explicit words but couldn’t find them. Father Paul nodded slowly and appeared to understand. Indeed, Kathryn had the distinct impression, throughout the interview, that the Catholic priest knew a great deal more about her needs and her immediate future than she herself did.

  “I’m not a Catholic,” she explained. “But my husband was. He was raised a Catholic and educated in Catholic schools. I’m sorry to say that he hadn’t gone to church in quite a long time.”

  There was a pause as the priest took this in. Kathryn wondered why she had felt it necessary to apologize for Jack.

  “And what about yourself ?” Father Paul asked.

  “I was raised a Methodist, but I haven’t been to church much either.”

  No, she thought, she and Jack hadn’t gone to church on Sunday mornings. Sunday mornings, when Jack had been home, had been for waking in the bed with the burr of sleep upon them both, for the languid ease with which they’d reached for each other — without a word between them, without the day between them, trailing dreams instead of responsibilities — and then afterward, for lying in the crook of Jack’s arm while he slept.

  “Are there other family members to inform?” the priest asked. Kathryn hesitated and glanced at Robert.

  “No,” she said, uncomfortably aware that she was lying to a priest in a Catholic rectory.