Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  Some lovers didn’t make it, she knew from her parents’ example. Kathryn could not remember a time when there had not been a feeling of want and need and tension between her parents. Although it was her father who was continuously unfaithful and certainly gave Kathryn’s mother just cause to be hurt, it was her mother herself, Kathryn was certain, who had destroyed early on whatever slim chance her parents had had of happiness. For it was her mother’s fate to be utterly incapable of forgetting that time when she had been twenty-two and had met Bobby Hull, and he had fallen in love with her and had made her feel alive. For one year — a year during which Kathryn’s parents had married and then conceived her — Bobby Hull hadn’t taken his eyes off his new wife, nor left her side, so that Kathryn’s mother felt, for the first time in her life, both deeply loved and extraordinarily beautiful, a drug that turned out to be even more addicting than the bourbon to which Bobby Hull had introduced her when they met. That year, which Kathryn never doubted was the best of her mother’s life — and about which Kathryn knew more than she ought to have, since, as a child, she heard about it in great detail every time her parents fought — took on an importance that became almost sacred as time went on. And Kathryn’s father, even when he relented and actually tried to please his wife, could not begin to recreate it. The tragedy of her mother’s life, Kathryn had always thought, was the gradual withdrawal of Bobby Hull’s attentions to her, which began naturally enough, in the way that even two people who are deeply in love are eventually able to carry on with life and go to work and take care of babies, but became, as soon as her mother felt the withdrawal and named it — labeled it, so to speak — a way of being. Kathryn could hear her mother calling from the upstairs bedroom, in an agonized voice, over and over, the single word Why? Sometimes (and it made Kathryn wince to remember this), her mother begged Bobby Hull to tell her she was beautiful, which automatically caused Kathryn’s father, who could be stubborn, to be stingy with his love, even though he did love his wife very much and might have told her so if she had not asked.

  As for her own marriage, Kathryn thought on balance that it had probably been more difficult for her to make the transition from being lovers to being a couple than it had been for Jack. It had come later for her and Jack than she suspected it came for other couples, and in that they had been lucky. Was it when Mattie was eleven? Twelve? Jack had seemed to withdraw ever so slightly from Kathryn. Nothing she could point to or articulate exactly. In every marriage, she had always thought, a couple created its own sexual drama, played out in the bedroom or silently in public or even over the telephone, a drama that was oft repeated with similar dialogue, similar stage directions, similar body parts as props to the imagination. But if one partner then slightly altered his role or tried to eliminate some of his lines, the play didn’t track quite as well as it once had. The other actor, not yet aware that the play had changed, sometimes lost his lines or swallowed them or became confused by the different choreography.

  And so it had been, she thought, with Jack and her. He had begun to turn to her less often in bed. And then, when he did, it seemed as though an edge was gone. It was just a gradual sliding away, so gradual as to sometimes be almost imperceptible, until one day it occurred to Kathryn that she and Jack hadn’t made love in over two weeks. She’d thought at the time that it was his need for sleep that had overwhelmed him; his schedule was difficult, and he often seemed tired. But sometimes she worried that possibly she was responsible for this new pattern, that she had become too passive. And so she had tried for a time to be more imaginative and playful, an effort that wasn’t entirely successful.

  Kathryn had vowed not to complain. She would not panic. She would not even discuss the matter. But the price for such steadfastness, Kathryn soon realized, was the creation of a subtle gauze all around her, a veil that kept her and Jack just beyond easy reach of each other. And after a while, the gauze began to make her anxious.

  And then there had been the fight. The one truly terrible fight of their marriage.

  But she wouldn’t think about that now.

  “There wasn’t anything,” she said to Robert. “I think I’ll go up to bed.”

  Robert nodded, agreeing with the idea.

  “It was a good marriage,” Kathryn said.

  She ran her palm over the table.

  “It was good,” she repeated.

  But actually she thought that any marriage was like radio reception: It came and went. Occasionally, it — the marriage, Jack — would be clear to her. At other times, there would be interference, a staticky sound between them. At those times, it would be as though she couldn’t quite hear Jack, as though his messages to her were drifting in the wrong direction through the stratosphere.

  “Do we need to notify any other of his family?” Robert asked. Kathryn shook her head.

  “He was an only child. His mother died when he was nine,” she said. “And his father died when he was in college.”

  She wondered if Robert Hart already knew this.

  “Jack never talked about his childhood,” she said. “Actually, I don’t know much about his childhood at all. I always had the impression it wasn’t a very happy one.” Jack’s childhood had been one of those subjects Kathryn had thought there was all the time in the world to talk to him about.

  “Seriously,” Robert said. “I’d be happy to stay here.”

  “No, you should go. I have Julia here if I need someone. What does your ex-wife do?”

  “She works for Senator Hanson. From Virginia.”

  “When you asked me about Jack,” Kathryn said, “about his being depressed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there was one time I would say he was not depressed, exactly, but definitely unhappy.”

  “Tell me about it,” Robert said.

  “It was about his job,” she said. “This was about five years ago. He became bored with the airline. Nearly, for a short time, terribly bored. He began to fantasize about quitting, giving it up for another job — aerobatics, he said. In a Russian-built YAK 27, I remember. Or opening his own operation. You know, a flying school, charter business, sell a few airplanes.”

  “I used to think about that, too,” Robert said. “I think every pilot probably does at one time or another.”

  “The company had grown too fast, Jack said. It had become too impersonal, and he hardly knew any of the crew he flew with. A lot of the pilots were British and lived in London. Also, he missed the hands-on flying he’d known earlier. He wanted to be able to feel the plane again. For a while, we got brochures for strange-looking stunt planes in the mail, and he even went so far as to ask me one morning if I’d be willing to go with him to Boulder, where there was a woman who was selling her school. And of course I had to say yes, because he’d once done it for me, and I remember being worried about how unhappy he was and thinking perhaps he really did need a change. Although I was relieved when the subject finally drifted off the screen. After that, there wasn’t any more talk of leaving the airline.”

  “This was five years ago?”

  “About. I’m no good with time. I know that getting the Boston-Heathrow route helped,” she said. “I guess I was just so glad the crisis was over, I didn’t dare raise the subject again by asking about it. I wish I had now.”

  “After that, he didn’t seem depressed anymore?” Robert asked. “No. Not really.”

  She thought that it would be impossible to say with any certainty what accommodations Jack had made inside himself. He had seemed to put his discontent into the same place he had put his childhood — a sealed vault.

  “You look tired,” she said to Robert.

  “I am.”

  “You probably should go now,” she said.

  He was silent. He didn’t move.

  “What does she look like?” she asked. “Your wife, I mean. Ex-wife.”

  “She’s your age. Tall. Short dark hair. Very pretty.”

  “I trusted him not to die,” Kathryn sa
id. “I feel like I’ve been cheated. Does that sound terrible? After all, he died, and I didn’t. He may have suffered. I know he suffered, if only for seconds.”

  “You’re suffering now.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “You have been cheated,” he said. “Both you and your daughter.”

  At the mention of her daughter, Kathryn’s throat tightened. She put her hands in front of her face, as if to tell him not to say anything else.

  “You have to let this happen to you,” he said quietly. “It has its own momentum.”

  “It’s like a train rolling over me,” she said. “A train that doesn’t stop.”

  “I want to help you, but there isn’t a lot I can do except watch,” Robert said. “Grief is messy. There’s nothing good about it.”

  She put her head down on the table and shut her eyes.

  “We have to have a funeral, don’t we?” she asked.

  “We can talk about that tomorrow.”

  “But what if there’s no body?”

  “What religion are you?” he asked.

  “I’m nothing. I used to be Methodist. Julia is a Methodist.” “What was Jack?”

  “Catholic. But he was nothing, too. We didn’t belong to a church. We weren’t married in a church.”

  She felt Robert’s fingers touch the top of her hair. Lightly. Quickly.

  “I’m going now,” he said.

  When Robert was gone, Kathryn sat for a minute by herself and then got up and walked through the downstairs rooms of the house, turning out lights. She wondered what precisely was meant by pilot error. A left turn when a right was called for? A miscalculation of fuel? Directions not followed? A switch accidentally flipped? In what other job could a man make a mistake and kill 103 other people? A train engineer? A bus driver? Someone who worked with chemicals, with nuclear waste?

  It couldn’t be pilot error, she said to herself. For Mattie’s sake, it couldn’t.

  She stood for a long time at the top of the stairs, then turned down the hallway.

  It was cold in the bedroom. The door had been shut all day. She let her eyes adjust to the dark. The bed was unmade, just as she had left it at 3:24 in the morning.

  She circled the bed and looked at it, the way an animal might do — wary and considering. She pulled back the comforter and top sheet and studied the fitted sheet in the moonlight. It was cream-colored, flannel for the winter. How many times had Jack and she made love on that bed? she wondered. In sixteen years of marriage? She touched the sheet with her fingers. It felt worn and smooth. Soft. Tentatively, she sat on the edge of the bed, seeing if she could stand that. She no longer trusted herself, could no longer say with any certainty how her body would react to any piece of news. But as she sat there, she felt nothing. Perhaps, during the long day, she had finally become numb, she thought. The senses could only bear so much.

  “Pilot error,” she said aloud, testing herself.

  But it couldn’t be pilot error, she thought quickly. Would not, in the end, be pilot error.

  She lay down on the bed, fully clothed. This would be her bed now, she was thinking. Her bed alone. All that room for only herself.

  She glanced over at the bedside clock: 9:27.

  Carefully — monitoring herself for seismic shifts — she reached down and pulled the top sheet over her. She imagined she could smell Jack in the flannel. It was possible — she hadn’t washed the sheets since he left on Tuesday. But she couldn’t trust her senses, didn’t know what was real or imagined. She looked over at Jack’s shirt flung over the chair. Kathryn had gotten into the habit, early in the marriage, of not bothering to tidy the house until just before Jack got home from a trip. Now, she knew, she would not want to remove the shirt from the chair. It might be days before she could touch it, could risk bringing it to her face, risk catching his smell in the weave of the cloth. And when all of the traces of Jack had been cleaned and put away, what would she be left with then?

  She rolled onto her side, looking at the room in the moonlight. Through the small opening in the window, she could hear the water rolling.

  She had a vivid image of Jack in the water, bumping along the sand at the bottom of the ocean.

  She brought the flannel up over her mouth and nose and breathed slowly through it, thinking that might help to stop the panic. She thought of crawling into Mattie’s room and lying down on the floor next to Mattie and Julia. Had she really imagined she could spend this first night alone in the marriage bed?

  She got up quickly from the bed and walked into the bathroom, where Robert had left the bottle of Valium. She took one tablet, then another just in case. She thought about taking a third. She sat on the edge of the bathtub until she began to feel swimmy.

  She thought perhaps that she would lie down on the daybed in the spare room. But when she passed the door to Jack’s office, she saw that the light had been left on. She opened the door.

  The office was over bright and colorless — white, metallic, plastic, gray. It was a room she seldom entered, an unappealing space with no curtains on the windows and metal file cabinets lining the walls. A masculine room.

  She supposed it had its own order — an order known only to Jack. On the massive metal desk there were two computers, a keyboard, a fax, two phones, a scanner, coffee cups, dusty models of planes, a mug with red juice in it (Mattie’s, she guessed), and a blue clay pencil holder that Mattie had made for Jack when she was in second grade.

  She looked at the fax machine with its blinking light.

  She walked to the desk and sat down. Robert had been here earlier, using the phone and the fax. Kathryn opened the left-hand drawer. Inside were Jack’s logbooks, heavy, dark ones with vinyl bindings and smaller ones that fit into a shirt pocket. She saw a small flashlight, an ivory letter opener he had brought back years ago from Africa, handbooks for airplane types he no longer flew, a book on weather radar. A training video on wind shear. Epaulets from Santa Fe. Coasters that looked like flight instruments.

  She closed the drawer and opened up the long middle drawer. She fingered a set of keys that she thought might be left over from the apartment in Santa Fe. She picked up a pair of old tortoiseshell reading glasses that Jack had run over with the Caravan. He insisted they still worked. There were boxes of paper clips, pens, pencils, elastic bands, thumbtacks, two batteries, a spark plug. She lifted a packet of Post-it notes and saw a sewing kit underneath from Marriott Hotels. She smiled at the sewing kit and kissed it.

  She opened a larger file drawer on the right. It was intended for legal-size files, she saw, but in it was a stack of papers about a foot high. She took the pile out and put it on her lap. It was a random set of papers and had no order that she could see. There was a birthday card from Mattie, memos from the airline, a local phone book, a series of health insurance forms, a rough draft of a paper Mattie had written for school, a catalog of books about flying, a homemade valentine Kathryn had given him a year ago. She looked at the front of the card. Valentine, I love what you do for my mind . . . , the front of the card read. She opened it.

  . . . And the things you do for my body. She closed her eyes.

  After a time, she propped the papers she had already looked through against her chest and continued to riffle through the rest. She discovered several of Jack’s bank statements clipped together. She and Jack had had separate accounts. She paid for the clothes for Mattie and herself, for food and other household items. Jack paid for everything else. Any money Jack saved, he had said, was going toward their retirement.

  She was beginning to have trouble keeping her eyes open. She made an attempt to square the remaining papers in her lap and to set them back into the drawer. In the drawer, slightly stuck in the seam, was an unopened envelope, junk mail, yet another invitation to apply for a Visa card. Bay Bank, 9.9 percent. This was old, she thought.

  She picked up the envelope and was about to toss it into the wastebasket when she saw writing on the back. Jack’s writing. A
nother remember list: Call Ely Falls Pharmacy, Call Alex, Bank deposit, March expenses, Call Larry Johnson re taxes, Call Finn re Caravan. Finn, she remembered, was the Dodge-Plymouth dealer in Ely Falls. They had bought the Caravan four years ago and hadn’t, to her knowledge, had any dealings with Tommy Finn since.

  She turned the envelope around. At the other end of the blank side of the envelope was a note, also in Jack’s writing. Muire 3:30, it read.

  Who was Muire? Kathryn wondered. Randall Muir from the bank? Had Jack been negotiating a loan?

  Kathryn looked again at the front of the envelope. She checked the postmark. Definitely four years ago, she saw.

  She put the stack of papers back into the drawer and shoved the drawer closed with her foot.

  She was now longing to lie down. She left Jack’s office and walked into the spare room, her retreat. She lay back against the flowered spread, and within seconds she fell asleep.

  She was wakened by voices — a shouting voice, nearly hysterical, and another voice, calmer, as though trying to make itself heard over the commotion.

  Kathryn got up and opened the door, and the voices increased in volume. Mattie and Julia, she could hear, were downstairs in the front room.

  They were kneeling on the floor when Kathryn got there, Julia in a flannel nightgown, Mattie in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. Around them was a grotesque garden of wrapping paper — balls and crumpled clusters of red, gold, plaid, blue, and silver interspersed with what seemed to be thousands of yards of colored ribbon.