Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  Her fingers under Robert’s went slack, and she felt the tension drain from her body. It was erotic, but not, that loosening, that giving up. Her eyes seemed to have unfocused themselves, and she couldn’t see Robert or anything else properly, only a sense of light from the windows. That light, diffuse and dimmed, created an aura of languid ease. And she thought that she ought to feel disturbed for thinking of Robert and herself in that way, but a kind of leniency seemed to have descended upon them with the haze, and she felt merely vague and drifting. So much so that when Robert, perhaps in an effort to bring her back, tightened the pressure on her hand, she felt jolted into the present moment.

  “You’re like a kind of priest,” she said.

  He laughed. “No, I’m not.”

  “I think that’s how I’ve come to see you.”

  “Father Robert,” he said, smiling.

  And then she thought: Who was to know if this man’s hand traveled up the inside of her arm? Who was to care? Weren’t all of the rules now broken? Hadn’t Mattie said so?

  The silence of the steady snowfall enclosed them. She could see that he was struggling to understand precisely where she was and why, but she couldn’t help him, because she herself didn’t know. The front room was always slightly too cold in winter, she thought, and she shivered once in spite of the steam she could hear rushing into the radiators. Outside, the sky was becoming so dark it might have been mistaken for dusk.

  He withdrew his hand, leaving hers uncovered. She felt exposed.

  She drank another bottle of beer. Between them, they ate all of the bread and the lobsters. In the middle of the meal, Robert got up and changed the CD. From B.B. King to Brahms.

  “You have wonderful music,” he said when he returned. “You’re interested in music?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind?”

  “Piano, especially. Was the music Jack’s or yours?” he asked, sitting down.

  She cocked her head, not certain she understood what he meant.

  “Usually the CDs and the sound system are the passion of either the husband or the wife, but not both,” he explained. “At least in my experience.”

  She thought about this.

  “Mine,” she said. “Jack was tone-deaf. But he liked rock and roll. And some of Mattie’s music — for the beat, I think. What about you?”

  “Mine, too,” he said. “Although my ex-wife kept the sound system and most of the CDs. One of my sons has inherited an ear. He plays the saxophone at school. The other one seems to have no interest.”

  “Mattie plays the clarinet. I tried to get her to play the piano,” Kathryn said, “but it was torture.”

  Kathryn thought about all of the hours she had spent with Mattie at the piano, Mattie clearly not wanting to be there, exaggerating her nearly pathological reluctance by having obsessively to scratch her back where she couldn’t quite reach, or adjust the bench, or take an inordinately long time finding her fingering. It was an effort just to get Mattie to play a song once, never mind actually practice the piece several times. Often, Kathryn had ended up having to leave the room in a barely restrained rage, at which point Mattie would begin to cry. Before the first year was out, Kathryn could see that if she insisted Mattie keep on with the lessons, their relationship would be in tatters.

  Now, of course, Mattie was almost never without her music — in her room, in the car, and plugged into headphones as if they delivered oxygen through the ears.

  “You play?” Kathryn asked.

  “Used to.”

  She studied him and added a small detail to a portrait that had been forming since the day he’d entered her house. It was what one did with people, Kathryn thought, form portraits, fill in missing brush strokes, wait for form and color to materialize.

  He dipped a piece of tail in butter and brought it dripping to his mouth.

  “The night before Jack left for his trip,” Kathryn said, “he went into Mattie’s room and asked her if she wanted to go to a Celtics game with him on Friday night. A friend had given him really good seats. What I want to know is this: Would a man ask his daughter to go with him to a Celtics game if he planned to kill himself before he got back?”

  Robert wiped his chin and thought a minute.

  “Would a man who had really good seats to a Celtics game kill himself before he got to see the game?”

  Her eyes widened.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “No. It doesn’t make any sense, not in any realm of human nature I’ve ever heard of.”

  “And Jack told me to call Alfred,” Kathryn said. “He told me to have Alfred come on Friday to fix the leaky shower. If Jack wasn’t planning on coming back, he wouldn’t have done that. Not in the way he did it, almost as an afterthought as he walked to the car. And he’d have been different with me. He’d have said good-bye differently. I know he would. There’d be one small thing that maybe wouldn’t register at the time, but would after the fact. Something.”

  Robert reached for his water glass and pushed himself slightly away from the table.

  “Do you remember,” she asked, “when the Safety Board questioned me, they asked me if Jack had any close friends in England?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at the bowl of discarded shells.

  “I’ve just had a thought,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  As she climbed the stairs, she tried to recall if she had done that particular wash. She’d worn the jeans for two days and then thrown them in the hamper. But not her own hamper, she remembered, Mattie’s hamper. And Kathryn hadn’t done any wash at all of Mattie’s because Mattie hadn’t been there. Any laundry Mattie had needed had been done at Julia’s.

  She found the jeans at the bottom of the pile of soiled laundry, buried beneath clothes Robert and she had tossed into the hamper just hours ago. She removed the handful of papers and receipts, which were slightly damp from a long-buried towel.

  When she returned to the front room, Robert was contemplating the snowfall. He watched her as she pushed her plate away and unfolded the papers.

  “Look at this,” she said, handing the lottery ticket to Robert. “I found these papers wadded up in the pocket of Jack’s jeans on the back of the bathroom door on the day he died. I didn’t think much of them at the time and just stuck them in the pocket of my own jeans. But do you see that notation, M at A’s, and the numbers following it? What does it look like to you?”

  Robert studied the number, and she could see from the flicker of his eyes that he understood what she was thinking.

  “A U.K. phone number, you think,” he said.

  “It’s a London exchange, isn’t it? The one eight one?”

  “I think so.”

  “Isn’t that the right number of digits?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Let me see,” she said. She put out her hand, and Robert gave her back the ticket, though not without a certain reluctance.

  “I’m curious,” she said, defending herself. “If it’s a phone number, why is it written on this ticket? And this is recent. He must have bought this ticket the day before he left.” She looked at the ticket’s date. “Yes, he did,” she said. “December fourteenth.”

  This was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, she thought as she walked to the telephone by the sofa. She picked up the receiver and tapped in the numbers. Almost immediately, she could hear a distinctly foreign ring, a sound that always put her in mind of old-fashioned Parisian telephones with spindly black cradles.

  A voice answered at the other end, and Kathryn, startled by the voice, unprepared for it, glanced quickly up at Robert. She’d given no thought at all to what she wanted to say. A woman said hello again, this time in a slightly irritated voice. Not an old woman, not a girl.

  Kathryn searched for a name. She wanted to ask: Did you ever know a man named Jack Lyons? but the question suddenly seemed absurd.

  “I must have the wrong number,” Kathryn said quickly. “Sorry to h
ave bothered you.”

  “Who is this?” the woman asked, wary now.

  Kathryn couldn’t bring herself to say her name.

  There was the click of a phone hung up in annoyance. Followed by silence.

  Her hands shaking badly, Kathryn replaced the receiver and sat down. She felt rattled much in the same way she once had as a girl, in junior high school, when she had called a boy she liked but hadn’t been able to say her name.

  “Let this go,” Robert said quietly from the table.

  Kathryn rubbed her hands along the thighs of her jeans to stop their trembling.

  “Listen,” she said. “Can you find out something for me?” “What?”

  “Could you find out the names of all of the crew Jack has ever flown with?”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I might be able to recognize a name if I saw it. Or put a name to a face I’ve once seen.”

  “If that’s what you want,” he said slowly. “It’s hard to know what I want,” she said.

  While Robert went up to Jack’s office to get the crew list, Kathryn spread out all of the other papers from the crumpled wad and scanned them. She noticed particularly the receipt from the post office for a twenty-two-dollar purchase. Perhaps it was not for stamps, she thought, peering at the receipt more closely. She opened up the piece of white-lined paper and looked at the lines of poetry Jack had copied.

  Here in the narrow passage and the pitiless north, perpetual Betrayals, relentless resultless fighting.

  A random fury of dirks in the dark: a struggle for survival Of hungry blind cells of life in the womb.

  What did the poem mean? She glanced up at the white-out beyond the windows. Already there was a significant accumulation on the lawn, and she thought she should probably call Julia to make sure she and Mattie were OK. She wondered if Mattie was up yet.

  She unfolded the second piece of lined paper — the remember list. Bergdorf FedEx robe to arrive 20th.

  Odd, she thought, but a FedEx package had not come on the twentieth. She was certain of that.

  Rising from the table, she once again pondered the significance of the lines of poetry. They meant little to her now, but perhaps she could find the whole poem and that would suggest an idea to her. She walked over to the bookshelf. It was little more than a tall tier of wooden planks, stretching nearly to the ceiling. Jack had read books about airplanes and biographies about men, sometimes a novel with a clever plot. For her part, Kathryn mostly read fiction written by women, usually contemporary novels, although she had a special fondness for Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. She searched for an old anthology of poetry and found it on the bottom shelf.

  She sat on the edge of the sofa. She propped the book on her lap and began to turn the pages. When nothing immediately revealed itself, she decided to start at the beginning with the intention of turning each page until she had found the lines she was looking for. But it quickly became clear to her that she wouldn’t have to do that: The early poems were ancient. Using the language in the lines of the poem as a guide, she opened the book about halfway through. There, the verse was by poets who wrote in a syntax similar to the lines she had in her hand. She began methodically to make her way through the pages when Robert called to her from Jack’s office.

  Outside, the snow was thickening steadily, falling against the windows in swift cascades. The forecasters were predicting six to eight inches, Robert had said. At least Kathryn knew where Mattie was and that she wouldn’t be going out in a car.

  She put the book down and went up to Jack’s office, where Robert was seated at the desk. In his hands, he held the shiny paper of a fax. And she realized suddenly, as she saw him sitting in Jack’s chair, that Robert knew what was on the tape — of course he did.

  “Tell me about the tape,” she said.

  “This is a list of all of the people Jack ever flew with at Vision,” he said, handing her the fax.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking the list from him but not looking at it. She could see that he hadn’t thought she would ask. “Please,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”

  He crossed his arms and rolled the chair away from the desk, putting a little distance between them. “I haven’t heard the tape itself,” he said. “None of us has.”

  “No, I know that.”

  “I can only tell you what I’ve been told by a friend of mine who works with me at the union.”

  “I know.”

  “You really want to hear this?”

  “Yes,” she said, although she didn’t know, she couldn’t be sure. How could she be sure she wanted to hear it until she’d heard it?

  He stood abruptly and walked to the window, his back to Kathryn. He spoke briskly, in a businesslike manner, as though to strip the words of any emotional content.

  “The flight is normal until fifty-six minutes into it,” he said. “Jack is apparently taken short.”

  “Taken short?”

  “He leaves the cockpit at fifty-six minutes and fourteen seconds into the flight. He doesn’t say what’s wrong, only that he will be right back. They — the people who have heard the tape — assume he went into the bathroom.” He turned to look in her direction, though not quite at her.

  She nodded.

  “Two minutes later, First Officer Roger Martin announces he’s having trouble with his headset. He asks to borrow those of Trevor Sullivan, the engineer. Sullivan hands Martin his own headset and says, Try these. Martin tries the engineer’s headset, finds Sullivan’s works just fine, and says to him, Well, it’s not the plug. My headset must be bad.”

  “Roger Martin’s headphones are bad,” Kathryn said.

  “Yes. So Martin gives Sullivan his headset back, and then Sullivan says, Here, wait a minute. Maybe Lyons has a spare. Apparently, Sullivan then unfastens his seat belt and reaches over into Jack’s flight bag. You know where the flight bags are stowed?”

  “Beside the pilots?”

  “On the outside bulkhead beside each pilot. Yes. And Sullivan must then pull out something from Jack’s flight bag that he doesn’t recognize. Because he says, What the hell?”

  “It’s something he didn’t expect.” “It seems that way.”

  “Not headphones.”

  “We don’t know.”

  “And then?”

  “And then Jack enters the cockpit. Sullivan says, Lyons, is this a joke?”

  Robert paused. He leaned against the windowsill, half sitting. “There may have been a scuffle here,” Robert said. “I’ve heard conflicting reports. But if there was, it was quick. Because Sullivan says almost immediately, What the fuck?”

  “And?”

  “And then he says, Jesus Christ.”

  “Who says Jesus Christ?”

  “Sullivan.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s all.”

  “No one says anything else?”

  “The tape ends.”

  She tilted her head toward the ceiling, contemplating what the end of the tape meant.

  “He had a bomb in his flight bag,” she said quietly. “An armed bomb. That’s why they think suicide.”

  Robert stood. He put his hands in his pockets.

  “Even one phrase different,” Robert said, “and the whole tape could mean something else. Even with the words exactly as I’ve just said them, the tape doesn’t necessarily mean anything. You know that. We’ve talked about that.”

  “Do they know for sure Jack was in the cockpit at the time?” “They can hear the latch of the cockpit door opening and closing. After which Sullivan addresses him specifically.”

  “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is how Jack could possibly have something that dangerous in his flight bag.”

  “Actually,” Robert said, “that’s the easy part.” He turned to look out at the snow. “It’s harmless. Absolutely harmless. Everyone does it.”

  “Does what?”

  “A lot of international pilots do it, almost every flight at
tendant I’ve ever known,” Robert said. “Usually, it’s jewelry. Gold and silver, sometimes gems.”

  She wasn’t sure she understood. She thought of the jewelry she had received from Jack over the years: a thin gold bracelet on an anniversary, a gold S-chain for a birthday, diamond-studded earrings once for Christmas.

  “A hundred times in and out of an airport, you get to know the security people pretty well,” Robert said. “They chat about their families and they wave you through. It’s a courtesy. When I was flying, I probably had to show my passport one time in fifty. And customs almost never looked in my flight bag.”

  Kathryn shook her head. “I had no idea,” she said. “Jack never said.”

  “Some of the pilots, they keep it to themselves. I guess if what you’re bringing in is a present, it spoils the gift if the wife knows you smuggled it past customs. I don’t know.”

  “Did you do it?” she asked.

  “Always at Christmas,” he said. “That would be the question when you met in the lobby to take the van to the airport: What’d you get the wife?”

  She put her hands into the pockets of her jeans; she stood with her shoulders hunched.

  “Why doesn’t Jack say anything on the tape?” Kathryn asked. “If he didn’t know it was a bomb, he’d have been just as surprised as Trevor Sullivan. He’d have said something. He’d have said, What are you talking about? He’d have exclaimed or shouted.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Jack lied about his mother,” Kathryn said.

  “So?”

  “He didn’t sleep in the crew apartment,” she said.

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Someone put a bomb on the plane,” she said.

  “If it was a bomb, someone put it there. I’ll grant you that.” “And Jack must have known about it,” she said. “It was his flight bag.”

  “I won’t grant you that.”

  “The Moroccan pilot committed suicide,” she said.

  “That was entirely different.”

  “How do we know it was different?”

  “You’re just playing devil’s advocate,” Robert said to her with some heat. “You don’t really believe Jack did this.” Robert sighed with frustration and turned his back to her.