The Pilot's Wife (7 page)

Kathryn watched Robert at the phone. He turned once quickly and glanced at her, then turned back again.

“No comment,” he said.

“I don’t think so.

“No comment.

“No comment.”

He hung up the phone and stood looking at the cabinet above it. He picked up a pen from the counter and began to flip it back and forth.

“What?” she asked.

He turned.

“Well, we knew this was going to happen,” he said.

“What?”

“This will have a shelf life of twenty-four hours max. Then it will be history.”

“What?”

He looked at her hard and took a deep breath.

“They’re saying pilot error,” he said.

She shut her eyes.

“It’s just speculation,” he said quickly. “They think they’ve found some flight data that doesn’t make sense. But, trust me, they couldn’t know for sure.”

“Oh.”

“Also,” he said quietly, “they’ve found some bodies.”

She thought that if she just kept breathing in and out slowly, she would be all right.

“No identification yet,” he said.

“How many?”

“Eight.”

She tried to imagine. Eight bodies. Whole? In pieces? She wanted to ask but didn’t.

“There’ll be more,” he said. “They’re bringing up more.” British? she wondered. Or American? Women or men? “Who was it? On the phone?”

“Reuters.”

She got up from the table and walked through the hallway to the bathroom. For a moment, she was afraid she might be sick. It was a reflexive reaction, she thought, the inability to take it in, the desire to cough it out. She splashed water on her face and dried it. In the mirror, her face was almost unrecognizable.

When she returned to the kitchen, Robert was on the telephone again. He had one arm across his chest, his hand tucked under the other arm. He was speaking quietly, answering Yes and OK, watching her as she walked into the room. “Later,” he said and hung up.

There was a long silence.

“How many of them are pilot error?” she asked.

“Seventy percent.”

“What error? What happens?”

“It’s a series of events leading to the last one, and the last one is usually called pilot error because by that time the pilots are deeply involved.”

“I see.”

“May I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Was Jack…?”

He hesitated.

“Was Jack what?” she asked.

“Was Jack agitated or depressed?”

Robert paused.

“You mean recently?” she asked.

“I know it’s an awful question,” he said. “But you’re going to have to answer it sooner or later. If there was something, if there’s anything you know or you can remember, it would be better if you and I talked about it first.”

She considered the question. Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love — soaked, drenched in love — only to discover later that perhaps you didn’t know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren’t quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitably, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane. It was the way people worked, Kathryn thought, with a need to evolve from being sick with love to making a life with someone who was also changing, altering himself, so that the couple could one day raise a child.

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 said. “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.