Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  Julia set a plate of scrambled eggs and toast before Kathryn. “I can’t,” Kathryn said.

  “Eat them. You need it.”

  “My stomach . . .”

  “You’re no good to Mattie, Kathryn, if you don’t keep your strength up. You’re suffering, I can see that, but you’re a parent to that girl, and that’s your job, whether you like it or not.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Excuse me?” Kathryn said.

  Julia sat down. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My nerves are shot.” “There’s something you need to know,” Kathryn said quickly. Julia looked at Kathryn.

  “There’s a rumor. It’s wild. It’s awful.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what a CVR is?”

  Julia’s head swiveled abruptly toward the doorway. Mattie was standing at the threshold, as if not sure what to do next, as if she had forgotten how to be. Her hair had soaked the shoulders of a blue sweatshirt that was cropped just short of her waistline. With it, she had on jeans (size two, slim) that she wore low over her Adidas, the hem frayed just so. Her feet naturally turned inward, which gave her, from the waist down, a childlike stance that contrasted startlingly at times with her cool upper-body posture. She put the tips of her fingers into the top slits of her front pockets and drew her shoulders up. Her eyes were reddened from crying. She tossed her head so that all of her hair fell momentarily to one side. Her upper lip trembled. Nervously, she reached up and folded her hair into a quick knot, and then let it go again.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Mattie asked bravely, looking at the floor. Kathryn had to turn away. She didn’t want Mattie to see the tears that had sprung to her eyes.

  “Mattie,” she said when she could speak. “Come sit here by me and have some eggs and toast. You hardly ate anything yesterday.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Mattie pulled out a chair — the chair, as it happened, farthest from her mother’s — and sat gingerly at its edge, her shoulders slightly hunched, her hands folded in her lap, her feet making a V pattern on the floor.

  “Please, Mattie,” she said.

  “Mom, I’m not hungry, OK? Back off.”

  Julia looked about to speak to Mattie, but Kathryn caught her eye and shook her head.

  “Whatever,” Kathryn said in as offhand a voice as she could muster.

  “Well, maybe toast,” Mattie conceded.

  Julia fixed Mattie a plate of toast and a cup of tea. Mattie tore minute pieces of the toast crust off — pieces only as big as white-bread communion offerings — and chewed each slowly and unenthusiastically until she had made the toast crustless, at which point she set it down.

  “Am I going to go to school?” Mattie asked.

  “Not till after vacation,” Kathryn said.

  Mattie’s face was pale, drawn, the skin gone a grainy white, as though she were operating on only half power. Between her eyes and at the edges of her nostrils were tiny little pimples on bits of reddened skin. She sat hunched over the now unframed toast, pondering the unappetizing cold square on the plate.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Kathryn said.

  Mattie shrugged. The one-shoulder shrug — more dismissive than the two-shoulder shrug.

  On the kitchen door, up behind Mattie, was a quilted Christmas tree that had been bought at a church Christmas fair years ago and was taken out of its box in the attic each year in early December. Julia didn’t put a lot of decorations up, but she was resolutely faithful: Whatever had been out the year before came out again.

  Christmas. A subject Kathryn didn’t want to think about hovered at the edges of her brain, like a dull headache.

  She stood up.

  “Put your jacket on,” she said to Mattie.

  The cold cleared her head, made her body want to move faster. Beyond the stone house, the road became a dirt path and wound up Ely Mountain. It was a modest slope, a graceful landscape of dark pines, abandoned apple orchards, and fields of blueberry bushes. In the late 1980s, a developer had thought to build a set of luxury condos near the summit, and had even cleared a portion of the land and dug a foundation. But the man’s timing had been disastrous, and he’d had to declare bankruptcy six months into a recession that had blanketed and nearly smothered all of New Hampshire. Low scrub now filled the vacant lot, but the abandoned foundation, with its first layer of flooring, gave a stunning view of Ely and Ely Falls to the west, and indeed of the entire valley.

  Mattie wasn’t wearing a hat. She walked with her fists pushed hard into the pockets of her shiny black quilted jacket, which was unzipped. Kathryn had long ago given up telling Mattie to zip up her jacket or put on a hat. Sometimes, when Kathryn walked out of the high school after work, she would be amazed to see the girls standing at the curb in forty-degree weather with only unbuttoned flannel shirts over their T-shirts.

  “Mom, there’s Christmas,” Mattie said.

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Not do it. I don’t know. Do it, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t we just wait a few days and see.”

  “Oh, Mom!”

  Mattie stopped short, dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and began to shake uncontrollably. Kathryn put her arms around Mattie, but she wrenched herself away from her mother.

  “Oh, God. Mom. Last night when I got out his present...” Mattie was crying hard now. Kathryn sensed that her daughter was too raw, too flayed to be touched again, a hair’s breadth from spiraling herself into a frenzy.

  Kathryn shut her eyes and waited. She counted slowly to herself, the way she did when she barked her shin on the open dishwasher or shut a window on a finger. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. When Kathryn heard the crying subside a bit, she opened her eyes. She nudged her daughter forward, like a sheepdog might a sheep or a cow. Mattie was too dazed to resist.

  Kathryn handed Mattie a Kleenex and waited for the girl to blow her nose.

  “I got him a CD,” Mattie said. “Stone Temple Pilots. He said he wanted it.”

  The leaves and frozen snow made a complicated matting at the sides of the dirt path. The ground was hard with ruts.

  “Mom, let’s not do it at home, OK? I don’t think I could stand it if we did it at home.”

  “We’ll do Christmas at Julia’s,” Kathryn said.

  “Are we going to have a funeral?”

  Kathryn tried to keep pace with Mattie, who was walking fast, her questions like puffs of steam escaping from her mouth. Kathryn thought that Mattie had probably been asking herself these questions all night and now finally had the courage to voice them.

  But Kathryn didn’t know how to answer the last question. If you didn’t have a body, could you have a funeral, or was it called a memorial service? And if you had a memorial service, was it best to have it right away, or wait a bit? And what happened if you had a memorial service and then, a week later, the body was found?

  “I don’t know,” Kathryn said truthfully. “I need to talk to . . .” She almost said Robert, but caught herself in time.

  “Julia,” Kathryn said.

  Although, surprisingly, it was Robert Kathryn wanted to ask. “Do I have to go?” Mattie asked.

  Kathryn thought a minute.

  “Yes, you should,” she said. “It’s hard, I know; it’s awful, Mattie, but they say it’s better to experience the funeral of a loved one than not. It’s a kind of closure. You’re old enough to do that now. If you were younger, I’d say no.”

  “I don’t want to close anything, Mom. I can’t do that. I have to keep it open as long as I can.”

  Kathryn knew precisely what her daughter meant. Yet Kathryn also felt she should do for Mattie what Julia had done for her. When were you supposed to stop being a rational parent, Kathryn wondered, and admit to being just as bewildered as your child?

  “He’s not coming back, Mattie.”

  Mattie t
ook her hands out of her pockets, folded her arms across her chest, and made her hands into fists.

  “How do you know that, Mom? How can you be so absolutely sure?”

  “Robert Hart said there were no survivors. That no one could have survived the explosion.”

  “What’s he know?”

  It wasn’t a question.

  They walked in silence for a distance. Mattie began swinging her arms hard, increasing her speed. Kathryn tried for a minute to keep up with her and then realized she wasn’t supposed to. That was the point.

  Kathryn watched Mattie walk faster and faster until the girl broke into a run and turned a corner so that she could no longer be seen.

  Kathryn had no idea how they would all survive Christmas, only seven days away. An accident had occurred that had thrown their universe off kilter, so that they were spinning in a foreign orbit now — one adjacent to, but different from, that of others around them.

  Kathryn found Mattie sitting on the cement wall of the low foundation, breathing hard, the way she did after a field hockey game. She looked up at her mother.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  Kathryn gazed out at the view. That, at least, was still the same. Behind them, to the east, was the Atlantic. If they were to walk farther up the hill to its actual summit, they would be able to see the ocean. Almost certainly smell it.

  “Let’s declare a moratorium on apologies for a while, OK?” Kathryn said.

  “We’ll be all right, won’t we, Mom?”

  Kathryn sat down beside her daughter, put her arm around her. Mattie laid her head on Kathryn’s shoulder.

  “Eventually,” Kathryn said.

  Mattie toed the snow. “I know this is hard for you, too, Mom. You really loved him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Once I saw this documentary? On penguins? Do you know about them?”

  “Not much,” Kathryn said.

  Mattie sat up. Her face was suddenly animated and flushed. Kathryn slid her arm from her daughter’s shoulder.

  “Well, what they do is, the male picks out one female from all the others, and sometimes there are hundreds; I don’t know how he can tell the difference, they all look just alike. And then when he’s picked her out, he goes and finds five smooth stones and, one by one, lays them at her feet. And if she likes him, she’ll accept the stones, and they’ll be mates for life.”

  “That’s sweet,” Kathryn said.

  “And later, after the documentary, we went to the aquarium, when we went to Boston with our class. And the penguins — oh, Mom, it was so great — these penguins were, like, mating? And the male, he just covered the female, like he was a blanket lying on her, and then he quivered a bit and flopped down beside her, and they both looked exhausted, but kind of like happy? They nuzzled each other’s face and neck, like they were in love. And this guy beside me, Dennis Rollins, what a jerk, you don’t know him, kept making all these weird jokes. That part sucked.”

  Kathryn stroked her daughter’s hair. This seemed a giddiness very close to tears.

  “You know, Mom, I’ve done it.”

  Kathryn’s hand stopped in its path down the graceful curve of Mattie’s head.

  “Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?” Kathryn asked quietly.

  “Are you mad?”

  “Mad?”

  Kathryn shook her head, dazed. She slowly closed her mouth.

  She didn’t know which she was more surprised by — Mattie’s admission or the ease with which she had made it.

  “When?” Kathryn asked.

  “Last year.”

  “Last year?”

  Kathryn was stunned. This had happened a year ago, and she hadn’t known?

  “Remember Tommy?” Mattie asked.

  Kathryn blinked. Tommy Arsenault, as she recalled, was a cute, brown-haired boy with a sullen attitude.

  “You were only fourteen,” Kathryn said incredulously. “Barely fourteen,” Mattie said, as if it were a badge of honor to have had sex so young, nearly thirteen.

  “But why?” Kathryn asked, already knowing the question was ridiculous.

  “You’re upset, I can tell.”

  “No. No. I’m not upset. I’m just . . . I’m just surprised, I guess.”

  “I just wanted to try it,” Mattie said.

  Kathryn felt light-headed. The view was bothering her. She shut her eyes. Mattie had gotten her period late, just last December, and to Kathryn’s knowledge, she had had only three of them since. She may not even have been sexually mature when it happened.

  “Once?” Kathryn asked, unable to suppress a note of hope. Mattie hesitated, as though frequency were a subject too intimate to discuss with one’s mother.

  “No, a few times.”

  Kathryn was silent.

  “It’s fine, Mom. I’m fine about it. I didn’t love him or anything. But I wanted to find out what it was like, and I did.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “At first. But then I liked it.”

  “And you were careful?”

  “Of course, Mom. What do you think, I’m going to take chances?”

  As if the sex itself weren’t chance enough.

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  Mattie tied her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. “What about Jason?” Kathryn asked, referring to her current boyfriend. Of all of Mattie’s friends, Jason, a tall blond boy who was addicted to basketball, was the only one who had been brave enough to call yesterday to see if Mattie was all right.

  “No, we don’t. He’s kind of religious? He says he can’t. Which is fine with me. I’m not putting any pressure on him or anything.”

  “Good,” Kathryn managed to say.

  For all of Mattie’s girlhood, Kathryn had imagined this moment, had hoped, as mothers do, that her daughter would discover sex in combination with love. What dialogue had she written in her mind for the event? Certainly not this.

  Mattie gave her a hug.

  “Poor Mom,” she said.

  Her tone was mocking but affectionate.

  “Did you know,” Kathryn asked, “that in the 1700s in Norway, any woman who was discovered to have had premarital sex was beheaded, her head put on a pike, and her body buried at the site of the beheading?”

  Mattie looked at her mother the way Kathryn imagined she might do if Kathryn had just had a stroke.

  “Mom?”

  “Just a bit of historical detail,” Kathryn said. “I’m glad you told me.”

  “I wanted to before, but I thought . . .”

  Mattie bit her lip hard.

  “Well, I thought you’d be upset, and I know you’d probably have to tell Daddy.”

  Her voice quavered at the mention of her father.

  “You’re sure you’re not mad?” Mattie asked again.

  “Mad? No. Mad has nothing to do with it. It’s just that . . . it’s an important part of life, Mattie. It does mean something. It is special. I do believe this.”

  Kathryn could hear the platitudes. Was sex special? Did it mean something? Or was it just a natural act, performed billions of times a day all over the world in a dizzying number of ways, some of them monstrous? She didn’t know what she thought on the subject, and she wondered how often it was that parents were trapped into pronouncing sentiments they did not actually believe.

  “I know that now,” Mattie said. “I just had to get it out of the way.”

  She took Kathryn’s hand. Mattie’s fingers were freezing. “Just think about the penguins,” Kathryn said lamely.

  Mattie laughed.

  “Mom, you’re weird.”

  “We knew that.”

  They stood up.

  “Mattie, listen.”

  Kathryn turned to her daughter. She wanted to tell Mattie about the rumors now, about the terrible stories Mattie would almost certainly hear. But when Kathryn pulled Mattie’s face up to her own and saw the hurt that lingered there, she couldn’t do
it. Robert had said that Kathryn must absolutely refuse to credit the rumors. So why bother Mattie with them? she rationalized. Even so, she felt a small twinge of parental guilt, the same sort of twinge she felt whenever she backed away from a difficult task.

  “I love you, Mattie,” Kathryn said. “You have no idea how much I love you.”

  “Oh, Mom, the worst part . . .”

  “What?” Kathryn asked, pulling away from her daughter and bracing for another revelation.

  “That morning, before Daddy left? He came into my room and asked me if I wanted to go to a Celtics game with him on Friday when he got back. And I was in a bad mood, and I wanted to see what Jason was doing on Friday first, and so I said couldn’t we just wait and see? And I think . . . Oh, I know he was. He was hurt, Mom. You could see it on his face.”

  Mattie’s mouth began to contort. She looked considerably younger when she cried, Kathryn thought. Still a child.

  How could Kathryn explain to her that such rebuffs happened all the time? Parents got hurt and swallowed it and watched their children leave them, incrementally at first, and then with head-spinning rapidity.

  “He understood,” Kathryn said, lying. “He did. Really. He told me before he left.”

  “He did?”

  “He made a joke about how he was second-string now, but really, he was fine about it. When he jokes about something, it means he’s OK.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  Kathryn nodded her head vigorously, willing her daughter to believe her.

  Mattie sniffed. Wiped her upper lip with the back of her hand.

  “You have another Kleenex?” she asked.

  Kathryn gave her one.

  “I’ve cried so much,” Mattie said. “I think my head is going to blow up.”

  “I know the feeling,” Kathryn said.

  Julia was sitting at the table when they returned. She had made hot chocolate for them both, which seemed to please Mattie. As Kathryn gingerly sipped the hot liquid, she noticed that the bottom lids of Julia’s eyes were reddened, and she was suddenly frightened at the thought of her grandmother crying all alone in her kitchen.