The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  He looked at her, and she could see that he wanted to say something.

  “Let’s eat,” she said quickly. “I’m starved.”

  The dining room had wood-paneled wainscoting with a subdued blue wallpaper above it. There was a red oriental on the floor. They were shown to a table in a bow window framed with heavy drapes. Robert gestured for her to take the seat in front of the window. The table was laid with heavy white linen, nearly stiff from its pressing, and set with silver and a china she didn’t recognize. She sat and put her napkin in her lap. On the walls were architectural prints, and overhead was a crystal chandelier. She saw now that most of the diners were businessmen.

  She glanced out the window at her side. The sun glistened on the washed streets. The room reminded her of drawing rooms in old British films, and she thought it might once have been that, a formal space that also conveyed warmth. An effort had been made not to sanitize the room, as would have been done in an American hotel, so that you could never believe anyone ever had, or ever would, live there. A fire burned in a grate. They had ordered eggs and sausages, toast in a silver rack. The coffee was hot, and she blew over the edge of the cup.

  She looked up and saw the woman standing at the entrance. Coffee spilled onto the white tablecloth. Robert had his napkin out to blot the mess, but Kathryn stayed his hand. He turned to see what she had seen.

  The woman walked quickly toward their table. She wore a long coat over a short wool skirt and sweater. Kathryn had an impression of muted greens and disarray. The woman had drawn her hair up into a ponytail, and she looked frightened.

  As she approached the table, Robert stood up, startled.

  “I was unforgivably cruel to you yesterday,” the woman said straightaway to Kathryn.

  “This is Robert Hart,” Kathryn said.

  He held out his hand.

  “Muire Boland,” the woman murmured by way of introduction, which he hadn’t needed. “I need to speak with you,” she said to Kathryn and then hesitated. Kathryn understood the hesitation to refer to Robert.

  “It’s all right,” Kathryn said.

  Robert gestured for the woman to sit down.

  “I’ve been angry,” Muire Boland began. She spoke hurriedly, as though she had little time. Sitting closer to the woman than she had yesterday, Kathryn could see that Muire had the same enlarged pupils as her daughter, which accounted for the dark eyes. “Angry since the accident,” Muire continued. “Actually, I’ve been angry for years. I had so little of him.”

  Kathryn was astonished. Was she meant to forgive the woman? Here in this room? Now?

  “It wasn’t suicide,” Muire said.

  Kathryn felt her mouth go dry. Robert asked, still operating in a world the women had abandoned, if Muire would like a cup of coffee. She shook her head tensely.

  “I have to hurry,” Muire said. “I’ve left my house. You won’t be able to get in touch with me.”

  The woman’s face was pinched. Remorse did not produce such features, Kathryn knew. But fear could.

  “I have a brother whose name is Dermot,” Muire said. “I had two other brothers. One of them was shot by paramilitaries in front of his wife and three children as they ate dinner. The other one was killed in an explosion.”

  Kathryn tried to process the information. She thought she understood. She felt buffeted, as though someone had knocked into her.

  “I’d been a courier since I’d started with the airline,” Muire continued. “It’s why I went with Vision, for the Boston-Heathrow route. I carried cash from America to the U.K. Someone else would then see that it made its way to Belfast.”

  Later, it would seem to Kathryn that it was here that time stopped altogether, looped around itself and then slowly began to unwind. The world around her — the diners, the waiters, the vehicles on the street, even the shouts from passersby — existed in a kind of watery pool. Only her immediate surroundings — herself, Muire Boland, Robert, the white linen with its coffee stain — seemed sharply defined.

  A waiter came to the table to blot the coffee, replace the napkin. He asked Muire if she wanted to order breakfast, but she shook her head. The three sat in awkward silence until the waiter had left.

  “I’d be met at each airport, Boston and Heathrow, coming and going. I had an overnight bag. I was to put the bag down in the crew lounge and walk away. A few seconds later, I’d pick it up again. Actually, it was quite easy.” The dark-haired woman reached across for Robert’s water glass, took a sip. “Then I met Jack,” she said, “and I got pregnant.”

  Kathryn felt her feet go cold.

  “When I left the airline, Dermot came to the house,” Muire said. “He asked Jack if he would carry on. He appealed to Jack’s Irish Catholic heritage.” She paused, rubbed her forehead. “My brother is a very passionate man, very persuasive. At first Jack was upset with me because I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t wanted to involve him. But then, gradually, he became intrigued. He was drawn to the risk, certainly, but it was more than that. He began to take on the cause for himself, to become part of it. As time went on, he became almost as passionate as my brother.”

  “A convert,” Robert said.

  Kathryn closed her eyes and swayed.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you by telling you this,” Muire said to Kathryn. “I’m trying to explain.”

  Kathryn opened her eyes. “I doubt you could hurt me any more than you have done,” she said.

  Unlike yesterday, the woman sitting across from her seemed unkempt, as though she’d slept in her clothes. The waiter came with a coffee pot, and Robert quickly waved the man away.

  “I knew that Jack was in over his head,” Muire said, “but he seemed a man who was not afraid to get in over his head.” She paused. “Which is why I loved him.”

  The sentence stung. And then Kathryn thought, surprising herself with the thought: It was why he loved you. Because you offered him this.

  “There were others involved,” Muire said. “People at Heath-row, at Logan, in Belfast.”

  Muire picked up a fork and began to scratch the tablecloth with the tines.

  “The night before Jack’s trip,” she continued, “a woman called and told him he was to carry something the other way. Heath-row to Boston. The same procedures would be in place. It wasn’t absolutely unprecedented. It had happened once or twice before. But I didn’t like it. It was riskier. Security is tighter departing Heathrow than arriving. Much tighter altogether than at Logan. But, in essence, the task itself wasn’t that much different.”

  Muire put down the fork. She looked at her watch and spoke more quickly.

  “When I heard about the crash, I tried to reach my brother. I was frantic. How could they have done that to Jack? Had they lost their minds? And politically, it was insane. To blow up an American plane? For what purpose? It was guaranteed to turn the entire world against them.”

  She put her fingers to her forehead and sighed.

  “Which was, of course, the point.”

  She fell silent.

  Kathryn had the anxious sense of receiving important messages in code, a code that needed immediate deciphering.

  “Because it wasn’t them,” Robert said, slowly understanding. “It wasn’t the IRA who planted the bomb.”

  “No, of course not,” Muire said.

  “It was intended to discredit the IRA,” Robert said, nodding slowly.

  “When I couldn’t reach my brother,” Muire added, “I thought they’d killed him, too. And then I couldn’t reach anyone.”

  Kathryn wondered where Muire’s children were right this very minute. With A?

  “My brother finally called last night. He’s been in hiding. He thought my phone . . .” She gestured with her hands.

  Around her, Kathryn was vaguely aware that other diners were eating toast and drinking coffee, perhaps conducting business.

  “Jack didn’t know what he was carrying,” Robert said almost to himself, putting it together for the first time.
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  Muire shook her head. “Jack never carried explosive material. He was very clear about that. It was understood.”

  In her mind, Kathryn saw the scuffle on the plane.

  “That’s why Jack doesn’t say anything on the tape,” Robert added suddenly. “He’s just as shocked as the engineer.”

  And Kathryn thought then: Jack, too, was betrayed.

  “It’s all coming apart,” Muire said and stood up. “You should go home as soon as you can.”

  She put a hand on the table, leaned down close toward Kathryn, who caught a brief scent of stale breath, unwashed clothing.

  “I came here,” Muire said, “because your daughter and my children are related. They have the same blood.”

  Did Muire Boland mean for an understanding to pass between the two women, a elemental understanding? Kathryn wondered. But then, almost simultaneously, she realized that of course the two women were linked, however much Kathryn might wish it not true. By children, certainly, half-sisters and half-brothers, but also by Jack. Through Jack.

  Muire straightened, clearly about to leave. Panicky, Kathryn realized she might never see the woman again.

  “Tell me about Jack’s mother,” Kathryn blurted in a rush. An admission.

  “He didn’t tell you, then?” Muire asked.

  Kathryn shook her head.

  “I thought he hadn’t,” Muire said thoughtfully. “Yesterday, when you were there . . .”

  Muire paused.

  “His mother ran away with another man when he was nine,” she said.

  “Jack always maintained she was dead,” Kathryn said.

  “He was ashamed he’d been left. But, oddly, he didn’t blame his mother. He blamed his father, his father’s brutality. Actually, it’s only been recently that Jack could acknowledge his mother at all.”

  Kathryn looked away, embarrassed for having had to ask.

  “I absolutely must go now,” Muire said. “I’m putting you both at risk just by being here.”

  The accent might have done it, Kathryn thought. Acted as a trigger. Or was she simply searching for a reason for the inexplicable: why a man fell in love?

  Robert glanced quickly from Muire to Kathryn and back again. He had an expression on his face Kathryn had never seen before — anguished.

  “What?” Kathryn asked him.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it, as if he would say something but then had thought better of it. He picked up a knife and began to flip it back and forth between his fingers, the way she had seen him do with a pen.

  “What?” Kathryn repeated.

  “Good-bye,” Muire said to Kathryn. “I am sorry.”

  Kathryn felt dizzy. How long had it been since Muire Boland had walked through the doorway? Three minutes? Four?

  Robert looked at Kathryn, then set the knife carefully beside his plate. “Wait,” he said to Muire as she turned to walk away.

  Kathryn watched as the woman halted, slowly pivoted, and studied Robert, tilting her head in a quizzical manner.

  “Who were the other pilots?” he asked quickly. “I need the names.”

  Kathryn stiffened. She glanced at Robert and then at Muire. She felt herself begin to tremble.

  “You know about this?” she asked Robert in a tight whisper. Robert looked down at the table. Kathryn could see the color coming into his face.

  “You’ve known all along?” Kathryn asked. “You came to my house knowing that Jack might be involved in this?”

  “We knew only that there was a smuggling ring,” Robert said. “We didn’t know who, though we suspected Jack.”

  “You knew where this might lead? What I might find out?” Robert raised his eyes to her, and she saw it all, in an instant, pass over his face: Love. Responsibility. Loss.

  Particularly loss.

  Kathryn stood up, and her napkin fell to the floor. Her movements startled the other diners, who glanced over at her with expressions of faint alarm.

  “I trusted you,” she said.

  She walked from the dining room straight out the hotel door and stepped into a waiting taxi. She had left her coat and her suitcase in her room. She didn’t care what was in it.

  She would change her ticket at the airport.

  During the drive, she stared at her hands in her lap, clasped so tightly the knuckles had turned a translucent white. She could not hear or see anything. But she could feel the rage in her blood, actually feel it pumping and churning inside her. She had never known such rage. She wanted only to go home.

  At Heathrow, she moved through the revolving door into an international throng, milling in all directions, as if communally lost. She found the British Airways desk and got in line. She would change her flight and the airline itself, and she didn’t care how much it cost.

  She felt exposed as she stood in the line, as though she no longer had any insulation at all. Robert might guess her intentions and come looking for her. She would wait for her flight in the bathroom if she had to, she decided.

  The line moved too slowly. Her rage began to encompass the inefficiency of the ticket agents.

  She wondered if she’d fly over Malin Head, if she’d fly a route similar to the one Jack had flown.

  And then she began to feel the gravitational pull. The pure force of it surprised her. She put a hand to her chest.

  The pull grew stronger as she moved closer to the beginning of the line.

  When it was Kathryn’s turn, she laid her ticket on the counter. The agent looked at her, waiting for her to speak.

  “What’s the closest airport to Malin Head?” Kathryn asked.

  HER ARMS ARE FULL OF DIRTY LAUNDRY — WET towels, crumpled sheets, and sprung socks that keep slipping from her arms and falling to the floor. She bends to retrieve an errant washcloth, thinking that if she’d brought the basket upstairs first the laundry wouldn’t be so frisky. She hugs the damp bundle even more tightly and walks toward the stairs. As she passes the entrance to their bedroom, she glances in.

  It is a fleeting tableau, so brief it barely registers. A subliminal picture, no different from the thousands of subliminal pictures that enter the brain but fail to interest the consciousness. Like seeing a woman in a camel jacket selecting oranges at the supermarket, or seeing but not noticing a locket around a student’s neck.

  Jack is bent over his carry-on, packing for a trip. His hand moves quickly, tucks an item out of sight. A shirt, she thinks, blue with yellow stripes. A shirt she has never seen before. Perhaps a shirt he bought in a pinch at an airport kiosk.

  She smiles to show that she hasn’t meant to startle him. He straightens and lets the lid of his small suitcase fall closed.

  — You need a hand with that? he asks.

  She stands for a minute, admiring the way the afternoon sun falls on the old floorboards of the house, setting the pumpkin stain aglow.

  — When are you leaving? she asks.

  — Ten minutes.

  — And you’ll be back when?

  — Tuesday. Around noon. Maybe we’d better call Alfred Zacharian, get him in to take a look at the leak. It’s worse today.

  She notices that his hair is still wet from the shower. He’s slimmed down some, she observes; there’s hardly any sign of a stomach now. She watches as he crosses to the closet, takes his uniform jacket from a hanger, and slips it on. She has never failed to be moved by the sight of Jack in his uniform, at the immediate authority that drapes itself over his shoulders, that clarifies itself as he fastens the three gold buttons.

  — I’ll miss you, she says impulsively.

  He turns and steps into a block of sunlight. Around the eyes, he looks tired.

  — What is it? she asks.

  — What’s what?

  — You look worried about something.

  — It’s just a headache, he says, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes.

  She watches him relax his features, smooth his brow muscles.

  — You want some Advil? she asks.

/>   — No, I’m fine, he says.

  He zips the suitcase shut, grasps the handle, and pauses. He seems about to say something to her, then appears to change his mind. He swings the bag off the bed.

  — Just leave the dry cleaning until I get home, he says, walking to her. He holds her eyes for a second longer than he might have. Across the bundle of dirty laundry, he kisses her. The kiss slides off the side of her mouth.

  — I’ll take care of it on Tuesday, he says.

  SHE WAS TRYING TO READ THE MAP WHILE REMEM-bering to drive on the left, a challenge that taxed all of her concentration, so that it was some time before she realized the irony of being on the Antrim Road as it led west, away from the Belfast airport. The flight had been uneventful, the car rental straightforward. She felt an almost physical urgency to get to her destination.

  By landing west of Belfast, she’d missed the city altogether, had seen none of the bombed-out buildings and bullet-scarred facades she’d heard about. Indeed, it was difficult to reconcile the pastoral landscape spreading out before her with the unsolvable conflict that had claimed so many lives — most recently one hundred and four persons in an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean. The unadorned white cottages and pastureland were marred only by wire fences, telephone lines, occasionally a satellite dish. In the distance, the hills seemed to change their color and even their shape, depending on how the sun shifted through the fair-weather clouds. The land looked ancient, trespassed upon, and the hills had a worn and mossy look, as though they had been trampled by many feet. On the ridge of hills closest to the road, she could see the scattered white dots of hundreds of sheep, the plowed and furrowed bits of patchwork, the low green hedgerows that bordered the crops like lines drawn by a child.

  This would not be what the bloody struggle had been about, she thought as she drove. It was something else she’d never fathom, never understand. Though Jack, in arrogance or love, had presumed to do so, had involved himself in Northern Ireland’s complex conflict, thus causing even Kathryn and Mattie to be peripheral, if unwitting, participants.

  She knew few facts about the Troubles, only what she’d absorbed, like everyone else, from headlines and from television when events occurred that were catastrophic enough to make news in the United States. She’d read or heard about the sectarian violence of the early 1970s, the hunger strikes, the cease-fire of 1994, and the breakdown of the cease-fire, but she knew little about the why of it all. She’d heard of kneecapping, of car bombings, and of men in ski masks entering civilian homes, but she had no sense of the patriotism driving these terrorist activities. At times, she was tempted to think of the participants in this struggle as misguided thugs cloaking themselves in idealism like murderous religious zealots of any age. At other times, the cruelty and the sheer stupidity of the British had seemed positively to invite a frustration and a bitterness that might lead any group of people to violent action.