The Pilot's Wife (4 page)

Julia made Mattie lie down on her bed and then returned to the front room. Sitting beside Kathryn on the couch, she peered into Kathryn’s cup to see how much tea she had swallowed, then told her to drink some more. She asked straight out if Kathryn had any tranquilizers. Robert volunteered the Valium.

Julia said, “Who are you?” and Robert told her, and then she asked him for a pill.

“Take this,” Julia said to Kathryn.

“I can’t,” Kathryn said. “I’ve had the brandy.”

“So what. Take it.”

Julia didn’t ask Kathryn how she felt or if she was all right. In Julia’s way of thinking, Kathryn knew, there wasn’t an alternative to being a certain level of all right. Nothing else would work now. The tears, the shock, the sympathy — all of that could come later.

“It’s awful,” Julia said. “Kathryn, I know it’s awful. Look at me. But the only way to the other side is through it. You know that, don’t you? Nod your head.”

“Mrs. Lyons?”

Kathryn turned from the window. Rita, a small blond woman from the chief pilot’s office, was sliding her arms into her coat.

“I’m going to go now, to the inn.”

Rita, who wore oak-colored lipstick, had been in the house all day, since four in the morning, yet her face was oddly dewy, her navy blue suit barely wrinkled. The woman’s partner, Jim something, also from the airline, had left the house hours ago; Kathryn couldn’t remember exactly when.

“Robert Hart is still here,” Rita said. “In the office.” Kathryn was studying the perfect part in Rita’s straight hair with a kind of fascination. Rita, she was thinking, bore a striking resemblance to a certain newscaster on a station out of Portland. Earlier in the day, Kathryn had minded the strangers in her house, but she’d quickly seen she couldn’t cope alone.

“You have rooms at the Tides?” Kathryn asked.

“Yes. We’ve taken several.”

Kathryn nodded. She understood that the Tides Inn, which in the off-season was lucky to have two couples for a weekend stay, would be full now, full of the press and people from the airline.

“You’re all right?” Rita asked.

“Yes.”

“Can I get you anything before I go?”

“No,” Kathryn said. “I’m fine.”

It was an absurd statement, Kathryn was thinking, watching Rita leave the kitchen. Laughably meaningless. She would probably never be fine again.

It was not yet four-fifteen, but it was nearly dark already. In late December, the shadows started as soon as lunch was over, and all afternoon the light was long and stretched thin. It made soft, feathery colors she hadn’t seen in months, so that nothing seemed exactly familiar anymore. Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.

She crossed her arms and leaned forward against the lip of the sink, looking out through the kitchen window. It had been a long day, a long, terrible day — a day so long and so terrible it had hours ago passed out of any reality Kathryn had ever known. She had the distinct feeling she would never sleep again, that when she’d woken early that morning she had emerged from a state of being that could never be reentered. She watched Rita walk to her car, start it up, and head out the driveway. There were four of them in the house now — Mattie asleep in her room, with Julia and Kathryn taking turns watching over her, and Robert, Rita had said, was in Jack’s office. Doing what? Kathryn wondered.

All day, down the long gravel drive and behind the wooden gate, there had been people looking in and other people keeping them away. But now, Kathryn imagined, the reporters and cameramen and producers and makeup artists were probably all headed over to the Tides Inn to have a drink, tell stories, discuss the rumors, have dinner, and sleep. Wasn’t this just the end of a normal workday for them?

Kathryn heard on the stairs a heavy tread, a man’s tread, and for a moment she thought it was Jack coming down to the kitchen. But then she remembered almost immediately that it couldn’t be Jack, it wasn’t Jack at all.

“Kathryn.”

The tie was gone, the cuffs of his shirt rolled, the top button of his shirt open. Already she had noticed that Robert Hart had a nervous habit of holding his pen between the knuckles of his fingers and flipping it back and forth like a baton.

“I thought you should know,” Robert said. “They’re saying mechanical failure.”

“Who’s saying mechanical failure?”

“London.”

“They know?”

“No. It’s just bullshit at this point. They’re guessing. They’ve found a piece of the fuselage and an engine.”

“Oh,” she said. She combed her hair with her fingers. It was her own nervous habit. A piece of the fuselage, she thought. She repeated the phrase in her mind. She tried to see the piece of the fuselage, to imagine what it might be.

“What piece of the fuselage?” she asked. “The cabin. About twenty feet.”

“Any…?”

“No. You haven’t eaten all day, have you?” he asked.

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not all right.”

She looked over at the table, which was covered with dishes of food — casseroles, pies, entire dinners in separately marked plastic containers, brownies, cakes, cookies, salads. It would take a large family days to eat all of that.

“It’s what people do,” she said. “They don’t know what else to do, so they bring food.”

Throughout the day, individual policemen had periodically walked the length of the driveway carrying yet another offering. Kathryn understood this custom, had seen it happen over and over again when there was a death in a family. But it amazed her the way the body kept moving forward, past the shock and the grief, past the retching and the hollowness inside, and kept wanting sustenance, kept wanting to be fed. It seemed unsuitable, like wanting sex.

“We should have sent it back out to the end of the drive,” Kathryn said. “To the police and the press. It’ll just go to waste in here.”

“Never feed the press,” Robert said quickly. “They’re like dogs looking for affection. They’re hungry to be let inside the house.”

Kathryn smiled, and it shocked her, that she could smile. Her face hurt, the dryness and the salt of the crying.

“Well, I’ll be heading out now,” he said, unrolling his shirt-sleeves and buttoning his cuffs. “You probably want to be alone with your family.”

Kathryn wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be alone. “You’re going back to Washington?”

“No, I’m staying at the inn. I’ll stop by tomorrow before I go.” He reached for his jacket on the back of a chair and put it on. He took his tie out of the pocket.

“Oh,” she said vaguely. “Good.”

He slid his tie through his collar. “So,” he said, when he had knotted the tie. He gave it a small tug.

The phone rang. It seemed too loud in the kitchen, too abrasive, too intrusive. She looked at it helplessly.

“Robert, I can’t,” she said.

He walked over to the telephone and answered it. “Robert Hart,” he said.

“No comment,” he said.

“Not as yet,” he said.

“No comment.”

When he hung up, Kathryn started to speak.

“You go up and take a shower,” he said, cutting her off. He began to remove his jacket. “I’ll heat something up.”

“Fine,” she said. And felt relieved.

Upstairs in the hallway, she was momentarily confused. It was too long a hallway, with too many doors and too many rooms. Already the memories of the day had begun to taint the rooms, to overlay previous memories. She walked the length of the hallway and entered Mattie’s bedroom. Both Mattie and Julia were in Mattie’s bed, sound asleep. Julia was snoring lightly. Each had her back to the other, sharing the double bed’s sheets and comforter. Kathryn watched the covers rise and fall over the humpy mound, caught the sparkle of Mattie’s newest earring in the cartilage of her left ear.

Julia stirred.

“Hi,” Kathryn whispered, so as not to wake Mattie. “How is she?”

“I hope she sleeps all night,” Julia said, rubbing an eye. “Robert’s still here?”

“Yes.”

“He’s going to stay?”

“I don’t know. No. I imagine he’ll go to the inn with the others.”

Kathryn wanted to lie down with her grandmother and her daughter. Periodically throughout the day, she’d felt the strength in her thighs giving out and had been overwhelmed with the need to sit down. There was a hierarchy at work here, she thought. In Kathryn’s presence, Mattie could be a child. In Julia’s presence, Kathryn found herself wanting Julia’s solace and embrace.

Downstairs, on a table in the hallway, there was a photograph of Julia, an evocative photograph from another era. In the picture, Julia had on a narrow, dark skirt that fell just below the knees, a white blouse, and a short cardigan sweater. There were pearls at her throat. She was long waisted and thin, and her glossy black hair was parted to one side. Her features were strong, what people meant when they said a handsome woman. In the photograph, Julia was sitting on a sofa, leaning forward to reach for something out of the frame. In her other hand she was holding a cigarette in the sort of pose that had once made cigarette smoking seductive: the cigarette held casually in slender fingers, the smoke curling around the throat and chin. The woman in the photograph was perhaps twenty years old.

Now Julia was seventy-eight and wore baggy jeans that were always slightly too short, loose sweaters that attempted to camouflage a prominent stomach. There was no longer any trace of the young woman with the glossy hair and slender waist in the woman with the thinning silver hair who was now with Mattie. Perhaps in the eyes there was a resemblance, but even there time had destroyed beauty. Julia’s eyes were sometimes watery now and had lost nearly all their lashes. No matter how often Kathryn observed the phenomenon, she found it hard to comprehend: the way nothing could remain as it had been, not a house that was falling down, not a woman’s face that had once been beautiful, not childhood, not a marriage, not love.

“I can’t explain it,” Kathryn said. “I feel as though I’ve temporarily lost Jack and I need to find him.”

“You’re not going to find him,” Julia said. “He’s gone.”

“I know, I know.”

“He didn’t suffer.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Mr. Hart was pretty sure.”

“No one knows anything yet. It’s all rumor and speculation.” “You should get out of here, Kathryn,” Julia said. “It’s a madhouse at the end of your driveway. I don’t want to frighten you, but they’ve had to bring back Charlie and Burt to help keep everyone away from the gate.”

Behind Kathryn, a cold slice of air slid through the crack of the opened window, and she breathed it in deeply, smelling the salt. She hadn’t been outside all day except to bring Mattie back inside.

“I don’t know how long this will take to die down,” Julia said. “Robert says it may take a while.”

Kathryn inhaled deeply. It was like breathing in ammonia the way the air cleared the head, sharpened the senses.

“No one can help you with this, Kathryn. It’s something you have to do by yourself. You know that, don’t you?”

Kathryn briefly closed her eyes.

“Kathryn?”

“I loved him,” Kathryn said.

“I know you did. I know you did. I loved him, too. We all loved him.”

“Why did this happen?”

“Forget the why,” Julia said. “There is no why. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help. It’s done, and it can’t be undone.”

“I’m …”

“You’re exhausted. Go to bed.”

“I’m all right.”

“You know,” Julia said. “When your mother and father drowned, I literally thought I couldn’t stand it. I literally thought I’d one day just burst apart. The pain was terrible. Terrible. Losing a son is — it’s unimaginable until it happens. And I blamed your mother, Kathryn. I won’t pretend I didn’t. She and your father were lethal together when they were drinking, horribly careless and dangerous. But there you were, bewildered by the loss of these parents you hadn’t even properly had. That’s what saved me, Kathryn. Saving you saved me. Having to take care of you. I had to stop asking why Bobby had died. I just had to stop asking. There was no why. And there isn’t now.”

Kathryn laid her head on the mattress. Julia began to stroke her hair.

“You loved him. I know you did,” Julia said.

Kathryn left Mattie’s room and walked into the bathroom. In the shower, she turned on the water as hot as she could stand it and let it run over her body without moving. Her eyes were swollen and ached from crying. Her head felt heavy. She’d had to blow her nose so many times the skin between her nose and upper lip stung. She’d had a headache since early morning and had been swallowing Advil tablets without counting. She imagined her blood thinning out and draining away with the water from the shower.

There will be many days like this, Robert had said earlier. Not quite as bad, but bad.

She could not imagine surviving another day like the one she had just been through.

She could not remember the sequence of things. What had happened first or second or third. What had happened in the morning or in the afternoon, or later in the morning or earlier in the afternoon. There were bulletins on the TV, newscasters who spoke words that made her stomach kick and contract when she heard them:
Downed after taking off … Baby clothes and a floating seat …Tragedy in the… Ninety seconds for the wreckage … Shock and grief on both sides of the … The fifteen-year-old T-900 … Debris spread over … The continuing story of Vision Flight 384 … Reports indicate that … Early morning businessman’s … The jointly-owned British and American airline… Gathering at the airport …
FAA
maintenance inspection … Speculation that a massive …

And then there were the images Kathryn doubted would ever leave her. A girl’s high school yearbook photo that filled the screen; a vast plain of ocean with a helicopter hovering and flipping white slivers from the tops of the waves; a mother who held her arms out, palms pushing the air, as though she could ward off an unwanted flow of words. Men in complex diving gear, anxiously peering over the edge of a boat; relatives at the airport, scanning a manifest. And then, immediately after the footage of the relatives, three still photographs appeared, one above another, three men in uniform and in formal poses, with their names written underneath. Kathryn hadn’t ever seen that particular picture of Jack, could not imagine for what purpose it had been taken. Not for this eventuality, surely. Not just in case. But whenever else did a pilot’s face appear on the news? she wondered.