Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  There was a question on Robert’s face.

  “Everything all right, Mrs. Lyons?” Somers from the Safety Board asked.

  “Just fine,” Kathryn answered. “Just fine. That’s apart from the fact that my daughter is struggling to absorb the idea that her father may have committed suicide and taken a hundred and three people with him.”

  “Mrs. Lyons . . .”

  “May I be permitted to ask you a question, Mr. Somers?” Kathryn heard the anger in her voice, a good mimic of her daughter’s. Perhaps anger was contagious, Kathryn thought.

  “Yes, of course,” the investigator said warily.

  “What other scenarios besides suicide have you imagined, given the material that is theoretically on the CVR?”

  Somers looked discomfited. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that just now, Mrs. Lyons.”

  Kathryn uncrossed her arms, folded her hands in front of her. “Oh, really?” she asked quietly.

  She looked down at her feet, then up at the faces in her living room. They were backlit, haloed by the light from the windows.

  “Then I guess I’m not at liberty just now to answer your questions,” she said.

  Robert stood up.

  “This interview is over,” she said.

  Walking blindly across the lawn, her head down against the wind, she made wispy footprints in the frost gauze of the grass. Within minutes, she was at the seawall, the granite boulders slick with sea spit. She hopped onto a stone the size of a bathtub, felt herself slipping, then sensed that the only way to stay upright was to keep moving, alighting briefly on each rock and then springing to the next. In this way, she reached the “flat rock,” so dubbed by Mattie when she was five and first able to negotiate the rocky sea border. Thereafter, the flat rock became a favored picnic spot for the two of them on sunny days. Kathryn jumped off the edge of the rock onto a five-foot square of sandy beach nestled among the boulders — an outdoor room, a partial shelter from the wind, a hiding place. She turned her back to the house and sat down on the wet sand. She slid her arms out of their sleeves and hugged her chest inside her zippered parka.

  “Shit,” she said to her feet.

  She let the white noise of the water fill her head, pushing away the voices and faces from the house, faces with thin veils of sympathy over features marked by intense ambition, faces with solemn mouths below keen eyes. Kathryn listened to the soft click of pebbles tumbling in the receding waves. In the pebbles, there was a memory, flirting with her, teasing her. She shut her eyes and tried to concentrate, then gave it up, and in the moment of giving up, found it. A memory of her father and her sitting on pebbles in their bathing suits and letting the sea rush beneath them and wobble the small stones under their thighs and calves. It was summer, a hot day, and she was perhaps nine or ten years old. They were at Fortune’s Rocks, she remembered, and the pebbles tickled her skin. But why were she and her father at the beach without her mother or Julia? Perhaps Kathryn remembered this moment because it was such a rare occurrence, her father and her alone together. He was laughing, she recalled, laughing with genuine, unalloyed pleasure, as a child might do, as he so seldom did. And she thought she would join him in this laughter and just let herself go, but she was so overcome by the sight of her father happy — happy in her presence — that she felt more reverent than uninhibited and, as a result, became confused. And when he turned to ask her what was wrong, she had the distinct sense that she had disappointed him. And so she had laughed then, too loudly, too earnestly, hoping he’d forget the disappointment, but the moment was over, and already he was staring out to sea. She remembered the way her laughter had sounded hollow and contrived, and the way her father had turned away from her, already lost in his own reveries, so much so that Kathryn had had to call to him to get his attention.

  Kathryn drew curlicues in the wet sand. It was one of the things she and Jack had had in common, she thought: They were orphans. Not true orphans, precisely, and not for their entire childhoods, but as good as, both of them abandoned when they were too young to know what was happening to them. In Jack’s case, his being orphaned had happened in a more conventional way. His mother had died when he was nine, and his father, who had never been an emotionally demonstrative man, apparently withdrew so far into himself when his wife died that Jack had always had the distinct feeling that he was on his own. In Kathryn’s case, her parents had been physically present but emotionally absent, and had not even been able to provide the simple rudiments of a child’s care. For nearly all of her childhood, Kathryn and her parents had lived with Julia in her narrow stone house three miles southwest of town. It was Julia who supported her parents, who had both been laid off from work when the Ely Falls mills had begun to close. Julia, whose husband had died when Kathryn was only three, did this with the proceeds from her antiques shop. This unusual arrangement did little to improve the relationship between Kathryn’s mother and Julia, and gave Julia a position of control within the household that even Kathryn’s father sometimes found hard to take. But when Kathryn was a girl, she did not think that her family was unusual in any respect. In her class at school, which numbered thirty-two in first grade and dwindled each year until there were only eighteen at graduation, nearly all of the children seemed to live at the margins. Kathryn had friends who lived in trailers, or who had no central heat in the winter, or whose houses would remain dark and shuttered the entire day so that their fathers or uncles could sleep. Kathryn’s parents fought often and drank every day, and even this was not unusual. What was unusual was that they didn’t behave like adults.

  For years, it had been only Julia who had fed and dressed Kathryn, taught her to read and to play the piano, and saw her off each day to school. In the afternoons, Kathryn would help Julia at the shop or would be sent outside to play. Together, they watched the soap opera of her parents’ lives unfold — perhaps not always from a distance, but from a safe place inside Julia’s tall and oddly shaped house. For nearly all of Kathryn’s childhood, Julia and she had been cast into the curious role of parents to the parents.

  When Kathryn went away to college and was sitting in her dormitory in Boston, she was sometimes certain she would not ever be able to go back to Ely, that she did not ever again want to witness the endlessly repeatable drunken scenes between her parents. But on an unseasonably warm January afternoon during Kathryn’s freshman year, her parents fell into the runoff from Ely Falls, which inexplicably they seemed to have been trying to cross, and drowned. Kathryn discovered, to her surprise, that grief overwhelmed her — as if children had died — and that when the time came to return to Boston after the double funeral, she could not leave Ely or Julia.

  Julia had been at least as good as two parents, Kathryn thought now, and in that she had been lucky.

  She was startled by a footfall on a rock above and behind her. Robert’s hair was standing out from his head, and he was squinting.

  “I was hoping you would bolt,” he said, hopping down into the protected space.

  She put her arms back into the sleeves of her jacket and tried to hold her hair in the wind so that she could see his face.

  He leaned against a rock and brushed his hair back in place. He took a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket. He turned away from the wind, but even in the shelter of the rocks, he was having trouble with his lighter. Finally, the cigarette caught, and he inhaled deeply, snapping the lighter shut. He slipped it back into his pocket, and immediately the wind blew embers off the end of the cigarette and threatened to put it out.

  Was Robert Hart telling the truth? she wondered. Was he glad she’d bolted? “Have they gone?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “And?”

  “They’ll be all right. They have to do this. I don’t think they really expected you to say anything.”

  She rested her elbows on her upraised knees, clutched her hair into a ponytail.

  “We do need to have a funeral,” she said.

 
He nodded.

  “Mattie and I need to honor Jack,” she said. “Mattie needs to honor her father.”

  And she thought suddenly that this was true. Jack should be honored.

  “It wasn’t suicide,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”

  A gull screeched down at them, and together they looked up at the bird that was circling overhead.

  “When I was small,” she said, “I used to think I wanted to come back in my next life as a gull. Until Julia told me how filthy they are.”

  “The rats of the sea,” Robert said, stubbing out the cigarette on the sand with his foot. He slipped his hands into his pockets and seemed to hunch even more deeply into his coat. He was cold, she could see that. The skin around the eyes had gone papery and white.

  She removed a strand of hair from her mouth.

  “People in Ely,” she said, “they say never live on the water. It’s too depressing in the winter. But I’ve never been depressed.”

  “I envy you,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve been depressed, but not because of the ocean.” She saw now in the strong light that his eyes were hazel, not brown.

  “But it’s hell on windows,” she added, looking in the direction of the house. “The salt spray.”

  He crouched down near the sand, where it was warmer. “When Mattie was little, I worried about being so close to the ocean. I had to watch her all the time.”

  Kathryn gazed at the water, contemplating the danger there.

  “Two summers ago,” she said, “a girl drowned not far from here. A five-year-old girl. She was on a boat with her parents and got washed overboard. Her name was Wilhelmina. I remember thinking that was such an old-fashioned name to give a girl.”

  He nodded.

  “When it happened, all I could think was how treacherous the ocean is, how quickly it can snatch a person. It happens so fast, doesn’t it? One minute your life is normal, the next it isn’t.”

  “You of all people should know that.”

  She dug the heels of her boots into the sand.

  “You’re thinking it could have been worse,” Kathryn said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It might have been Mattie on the plane.”

  “Yes.”

  “That would have been unbearable. Literally unbearable.” He brushed his hands together to get rid of the wet sand. “You could go away, you know,” he said. “You and Mattie.” “Go away?”

  “To the Bahamas. To Bermuda. For a couple of weeks, until this dies down.”

  Kathryn tried to imagine being in Bermuda right now with Mattie, then shook her head.

  “I couldn’t do that,” Kathryn said. “They’d take it as true about Jack. They’d see us as running away. And besides, Mattie wouldn’t go. I don’t think she would.”

  “Some of the relatives have gone to Ireland,” he said.

  “And what? Stay in a motel with a hundred other families who are out of their minds? Or go to the crash site and wait for the divers to bring up body parts? No, I don’t think so.”

  She felt around in the pockets of her parka. A used Kleenex. Coins. An outdated credit card. A couple of dollar bills. A tube of Lifesavers.

  “You want one?” she asked, holding the Lifesavers forward. “Thanks,” he said.

  Tired of crouching, he sat on the sand and leaned back against a rock.

  He’ll ruin his coat, she thought.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said. “Beautiful part of the world.” “It is.”

  She stretched her legs out in front of her. The sand, though wet, was oddly warm.

  “Until this goes away, the media is going to be relentless,” he said. “I’m sorry for that.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Even I’ve never seen anything like that scene at the gate.” “It was frightening.”

  “You must be pretty used to a quiet life here.”

  “A quiet, ordinary life,” she said.

  He had his elbows hooked around his knees, his hands clasped in front of him.

  “What was your life like before this?” he asked. “What was your routine?”

  “It was different each day. Which one do you want?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Thursdays.”

  “Thursdays.” She thought a minute. “On Thursdays, Mattie had field hockey or lacrosse games. I did Band at noon. It was pizza day in the cafeteria. We had roast chicken for supper. We watched Seinfeld and ER.”

  “And Jack?”

  “When Jack was there, he was there. He did it all. The games.

  The roast chickens. Seinfeld. What about you? What do you do when you’re not working for the union?”

  “I’m an instructor,” he said. “I give flying lessons in my spare time at an airport in Virginia. It’s just a pasture, really, with a couple of old Cessnas. It’s a lot of fun, except when they won’t come down.”

  “What won’t come down?”

  “The students on their first solo flights.”

  She laughed.

  They sat in an easy silence, leaning against the rocks. The lulling noise of the sea was momentarily peaceful.

  “Maybe I should start to think about the details of the funeral,” she said after a time.

  “Have you had any thoughts about where you want to do it?” “I suppose it’ll have to be Saint Joseph’s in Ely Falls,” she said. “That’s the closest Catholic church.”

  She paused.

  “They’ll certainly be surprised to see me,” she said.

  “Christ,” Robert said.

  Confused by this response, she felt Robert tugging at her sleeve, making her stand up. She turned to see what Robert had seen. A young man with a ponytail was aiming a camera as big as a television at them. Kathryn could see herself and Robert reflected in the enormous lens.

  She heard the soft, professional click, click, click of a man at work.

  They were in the kitchen when she returned, Somers rolling a fax in his hand, Rita with the telephone cradled under her chin. Without taking off her jacket, Kathryn announced that she had a short statement to make. Somers looked up from the fax.

  “My husband, Jack, never gave me or anyone else any indication of instability, drug use, abuse of alcohol, depression, or physical illness,” she said.

  She watched Somers fold the fax into squares.

  “As far as I know,” she continued, “he was healthy, both physically and mentally. We were happily married. We were a happy, normal family living within a small community. I will not answer any other questions without a lawyer present, and nothing is to be removed from this house without proper legal documents. As you all know, my daughter is staying with my grandmother here in town. Neither of them is to be interviewed or contacted in any way. That’s all.”

  “Mrs. Lyons,” said Somers. “Have you been in touch with Jack’s mother?”

  “His mother is dead,” Kathryn said quickly.

  And, then, in the silence that ensued, she knew that something was wrong. Perhaps there was the most minute lifting of an eyebrow, the barest suggestion of a smile on Somers’s face. Or possibly it was only later that she imagined these signals. The silence was so complete that even with nine people in the room, all she could hear was the hum of the refrigerator.

  “I don’t think that’s the case,” said Somers softly, placing the shiny, folded square into a breast pocket.

  The floor seemed to dip and waver like a ride at an amusement park.

  Somers pulled a torn piece of notebook paper from another pocket.

  “Matigan Rice,” he read. “Forest Park Nursing Home, 47 Adams Street, Wesley, Minnesota.”

  The ride picked up speed and dropped fifty feet. Kathryn felt light-headed, dizzy.

  “Seventy-two years old, born October 22, 1924,” he read. “Married three times. Divorced three times. First marriage to John Francis Lyons. One child, a son, John Fitzwilliam Lyons, born April 18, 1947, Faulkner Hospital, Boston.”


  Kathryn’s mouth went dry, and she licked her top lip. Perhaps there was something she hadn’t understood correctly.

  “Jack’s mother is alive?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Jack always said...”

  She stopped herself. She thought about what Jack had always said. His mother had died when he was nine. Of cancer. Kathryn glanced quickly at Robert, and she could see from the expression on his face that he, too, was taken aback. She thought about the arrogance, the smug certainty, with which she had made her statement just seconds earlier.

  “Apparently,” Somers said.

  The investigator was enjoying this, Kathryn thought.

  “How did you discover her?” she asked.

  “She’s listed in his military records.”

  “And Jack’s father?”

  “Deceased.”

  She sat on the nearest chair and shut her eyes. She felt vaguely drunk, the room swirling unpleasantly behind her eyelids.

  All this time, she thought, and she had never known. All this time, Mattie had had a grandmother. A grandmother for whom she had been named.

  But why? she asked herself.

  Jack, why? she silently asked her husband.

  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.