The Pilot's Wife Read online

  Kathryn got up and opened the door, and the voices increased in volume. Mattie and Julia, she could hear, were downstairs in the front room.

  They were kneeling on the floor when Kathryn got there, Julia in a flannel nightgown, Mattie in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. Around them was a grotesque garden of wrapping paper — balls and crumpled clusters of red, gold, plaid, blue, and silver interspersed with what seemed to be thousands of yards of colored ribbon.

  Julia looked up from the doorway.

  “She woke up and came downstairs,” Julia explained. “She was trying to wrap her presents.”

  Mattie lowered herself to the floor and lay on the carpet in a fetal curl.

  Kathryn lay down next to her daughter.

  “I can’t stand it, Mom,” Mattie said. “Everywhere I look, he’s there. He’s in every room, in every chair, in the windows, in the wallpaper. I literally can’t stand it, Mom.”

  “You were trying to wrap his present?” Kathryn asked, smoothing her daughter’s hair out of her face.

  Mattie nodded and began to cry.

  “I’m going to take her to my place,” Julia said. “What time is it?”

  “Just after midnight. I’ll take her home and put her to bed,” Julia said.

  “I’ll come, too,” Kathryn said.

  “No,” Julia said. “You’re exhausted. You stay here and go back to bed. Mattie will be fine with me. She needs a change of scene, a neutral zone, a neutral bedroom.”

  And Kathryn thought how appropriate that image was, for she had the distinct sense they were involved in a war, that they were all in danger of becoming battle casualties.

  While Julia packed an overnight bag for Mattie, Kathryn lay down beside her daughter and rubbed her back. From time to time, Mattie shuddered convulsively. Kathryn sang a song she had made up when Mattie was a baby: M is for Matigan . . . , the song began.

  After Julia and Mattie had left, Kathryn climbed back up to her bedroom. This time, feeling braver, she crawled between the flannel sheets.

  She did not dream.

  In the morning, she heard a dog barking.

  There was something discordantly familiar about the dog barking.

  And then she braced herself, the way she might do if she were stopped at a light and happened to look up in the rear-view mirror to see that the driver behind her was going too fast.

  Robert’s hair was wet and freshly combed. She could see the comb lines near the widow’s peak. He had on a different shirt, a blue that was almost a denim, with a dark red tie. Second-day shirt, she thought idly.

  A coffee cup was on the counter. He had his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and he was pacing.

  She looked up at the clock: 6:40. Why was he there so early? she wondered.

  When he saw her at the bottom of the stairs, he took his hands out of his pockets and walked toward her.

  He put his hands on her shoulders.

  “What?” she asked, alarmed.

  “Do you know what the CVR is?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “The cockpit voice recorder.” “Well, they’ve found it.”

  “And?”

  He hesitated. Just a beat.

  “They’re saying suicide,” he said.

  HE WALKS WITH HIS ARM AROUND HER TOWARD the planes, which seem too small, only toys that children might climb in and over and about. The heat, deep and roasting, radiates from the pavement. This is a masculine world, she thinks, with its odd bits of machinery, its briefing room, its tower. All around her there is metal, brilliant or dull in the sun’s glare.

  He seems solicitous, but he walks briskly. The plane is pretty, with red and white markings. She takes his hand as she steps onto the wing, then crawls through the tiny opening into the cockpit, the size of which is immediately alarming. How could something as monumental as flight take place in such an unpre-possessing space? Flight, which has always seemed to Kathryn to be improbable, now seems clearly impossible, and she tells herself, as she has sometimes done when in a car with a bad driver or on a ride at a carnival, that this will be over soon and all she has to do is survive.

  Jack hoists himself up on his side. He has on sunglasses with iridescent blue lenses. He tells her to buckle up and hands her headphones, which he explains will make it easier for them to talk to each other over the noise of the engine.

  They bump along the pitted tarmac. The plane feels loose and wobbly. She wants to tell him to stop, that she has changed her mind. The plane gathers speed, the bouncing stops, and they are up.

  Her heart fills her chest. Jack turns to her, his smile full of confidence and amusement, a smile that says, This will be fun, so just relax.

  Before her is a vast expanse of blue. What happened to the ground? She has an image of a plane reaching a terrible height, tipping slightly, and then falling, as nature would demand it do. Beside her, Jack gestures toward the window.

  — Take a look, he says.

  They are over the coast, so high up the surf looks stationary. The ocean ripples back to a darker blue. Just inland from the coast, she can see dark fir trees, what seems like an entire country of fir trees. She spots a boat and its wake, a power plant up the coast. The dark stain of Portsmouth. The glistening bits of rock that are the Isles of Shoals. She looks for Ely, thinks she sees it, follows a road from town to Julia’s house.

  He banks for a turn, and her hands jerk out to save herself. She wants to tell him to be careful, which immediately strikes her as inane. Of course he will be careful. Won’t he?

  As if in answer, he angles the plane steeply up, an angle so sharp she thinks he must be testing the very laws of physics. She is certain they will fall from the sky. She calls out his name, but he is intent upon his instruments and doesn’t answer.

  Gravity pins her against the back of her seat. They climb into a long, high loop, and for a second, at its apex, they are motionless, upside down, a speck suspended over the Atlantic. The plane dives then into a run out the other side of the loop. She screams and grabs for whatever she can reach. Jack glances over at her once quickly and puts the plane nearly vertical to the ground. She watches Jack at the controls, his calm movements, the concentration on his face. It amazes her that a man can make a plane do tricks — tricks with gravity, with physics, with fate.

  And then the world is silent. As if surprised itself, the plane begins to fall. Not like a stone, but rather like a leaf, fluttering a bit and then dipping to the right. Heartsick, she glances at Jack. The plane begins then to spin crazily, its nose pointed toward the ground. She arches her back, unable even to scream.

  When he pulls out of the spin, they are not a hundred feet from the water. She can see whitecaps, the twitching of a slightly agitated sea. Astonishing herself, she begins to cry.

  — Are you OK? he asks quickly, seeing the tears. He puts his hand on her thigh. He shakes his head. — I never should have done that, he says. — I’m so sorry. I thought you would enjoy it.

  She turns to look at him. She covers his hand with her own and takes a deep shuddering breath.

  — That was thrilling, she says. And she means it.

  IT WAS FRIGID IN THE CAR. KATHRYN WAS BARELY ABLE to hold onto the steering wheel, having left the house in a rush and forgotten her gloves. How cold was it out? she wondered. Fifteen? Twenty? Below a certain point, she thought, it didn’t seem to matter much. She felt the strain in her shoulders as she hunched forward, trying not to touch anything — not even the seat back — until the heat kicked in.

  In the wake of Robert’s news — which he insisted Kathryn must absolutely refuse to credit — she had wanted only to be with Mattie. As Kathryn stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking at Robert’s face, the desire for her daughter had overwhelmed her, filling her up as quickly as water rushing into a jar. Still in the clothes she had slept in, she had brushed past Robert and nearly simultaneously slipped her arms into her parka, stepped into her boots, and unhooked the keys by the back door. In the Caravan, she had rattled down the
long drive, sped past several men who were running toward the gate, and for almost a mile had had the speedometer at nearly sixty. And then she’d skidded badly in a turn and come to rest on a sandy shoulder on the road from Fortune’s Rocks into Ely. She put her forehead silently against the steering wheel.

  It couldn’t be suicide, Kathryn thought. Suicide was absolutely impossible. It was unimaginable. Unthinkable. Out of the question.

  How long she sat there, she didn’t know, perhaps ten minutes. And then she started out again, this time at a slower pace and with an odd sort of calm — a calm born of exhaustion, possibly, or simply a disguised numbness — descending upon her. She would get to Mattie, she told herself, and it wouldn’t be true what was being said about Jack.

  The sun broke the horizon line, turning snowy lawns pink and criss-crossing them with the long blue shadows of trees and cars. The town was still, though occasionally Kathryn could see exhaust rising in billows from cars left running in driveways so that the owners could defrost the windshields and bear to sit on the upholstery. Along the eaves of some of the houses were strings of colored lights, and she saw numerous Christmas trees in front windows. She passed a blue-shingled cape with an outline of gaudy colored bulbs at the picture window. The auto-parts-store-look, Jack had once commented as they’d driven by.

  Once commented. Had commented. Won’t ever comment again. The envelope of time, she thought, was starting in earnest to swallow her. But she wondered if she hadn’t already adjusted, however slightly, to the concept of Jack’s absence. The thought of his death, coming randomly on the tail of another thought — a memory of him, an image — didn’t rock her quite as violently as it had done the day before. How quickly the mind accommodated itself, she thought, even in such tiny increments. Perhaps it was that after a series of shocks, the body acclimated itself, like being inoculated — each subsequent shock delivering less impact. Or possibly this momentarily benumbed state was only a lull — a cease-fire. How would she know? There had never been a rehearsal for any of this.

  She drove through the center of Ely, the light just beginning to flood the storefronts now, the earth having made its incremental journey eastward, just enough to show the town of Ely to the sun. She passed the hardware store and Beekman’s, a fiveand-ten-cent store that had survived the mall on Route 24, although its shelves were often dusty and thinly stocked. She passed an empty building that had once been a yarn and fabric shop that sold mill ends when the Ely Falls mill had been in business. She passed the Bobbin, the only place in town where one could get a drink or a sandwich. The Bobbin was open, three cars parked outside. She glanced at the dashboard clock: 7:05. In ten minutes, Janet Riley, a reading specialist for the middle school, and Jimmy Hirsch, an agent for MetLife, would be there having a bagel with cream cheese and an egg sandwich respectively. It was true, Kathryn thought, that you could set your watch by the habits of certain townspeople, and then you could check your watch regularly throughout the day by other villagers and their absolute insistence on routine.

  Kathryn, for one, understood routine, which in Julia’s house had been a necessary hedge against chaos. And, of course, Jack had understood routine — particularly in a job that required a man to become a machine that would behave in precisely a certain way each time a particular set of circumstances came into play. Oddly, though, he was impatient with routine once out of the plane. He preferred to think of possibilities and be ready for them. Of the two of them, he was always the more likely to say, Let’s go into Portsmouth for lunch. Or, Let’s take Mattie out of school and go skiing.

  Kathryn passed the high school, which lay just at the edge of the town center. She’d been working there now for seven years, having finished her degree when she moved back to Ely. It was an ancient brick building with large windows, a building that had already been old when Julia had gone to school there. There were fewer students in the school now than there had been in Julia’s day, when the mills were thriving.

  For a few blocks, there were white houses with black shutters in small lots, many of them bordered with white fences — mostly Capes and Victorians, but some early colonials — that lent Ely what charm it had. But once beyond this inner ring, the neighborhood began to thin out, brief patches of woods or salt marsh separating one house from another, and continued to elongate, like a pull of taffy, until the end of that particular road, three miles farther along, where the stone house was.

  She made the familiar turn and followed the street up the hill. No lights were on yet, and she guessed that Mattie and Julia were still in bed. She got out of the car and stood a minute in the stillness. There was always a moment in a morning, between the silence of the night before and the noise of the day to come, when it seemed to Kathryn that time stopped for a beat, when all the world was motionless, expectant. The ground around the car was dusted with a powdery snow that had fallen three days earlier and had not yet melted. On the rocks, the snow had frozen into a thin lace.

  Julia’s house stood on a hill, which sometimes made chores such as bringing in groceries difficult, but the house gave a magnificent view westward if one was in the mood for it. The house was old, mid-nineteenth century. It had once been an outbuilding for a farm a mile away. On one side, the house was bordered by the narrow road; on the other, by a stone wall. Beyond the stone wall was an orderly field of crooked apple trees that by the end of summer would already be bearing dusty, rose-colored fruit.

  She shut the car door, walked up the front path, and let herself in. Julia had never locked her door, not when Kathryn was growing up and not even now, when others did. In the kitchen, Kathryn once again smelled the unique scent of Julia’s house — a mix of orange sponge cake and onions. Kathryn took off her parka and laid it over a chair in the living room.

  The house was cramped, but stood three stories tall. When Kathryn’s parents died, Julia had encouraged Kathryn to take over their bedroom on the top floor. After some hesitation, Kathryn had put her books there and a desk that looked out through the single window. On the middle floor were two tiny bedrooms, one of which was Julia’s, and on the ground floor of the house were the living room and kitchen. In the living room was Julia’s furniture from her marriage — a faded brown velvet sofa, two soft chairs that needed reupholstering, a rug, a side table, and the grand piano that took up nearly all the remaining space.

  Holding onto the banister, Kathryn climbed the narrow stairway to her old room, now her daughter’s when Mattie slept over, which was often. Kathryn walked to the window and drew the drapes a crack so that she could see her in the bed. Mattie slept, as she nearly always did, huddled into herself, her stuffed tiger having fallen onto the floor. Kathryn could hardly see her daughter’s face — it was bent into the covers — but it was enough to see her hair spread out behind her, to see the shape of her delicate body beneath the blankets.

  Quietly, Kathryn moved to a chair opposite the bed so that she could keep watch over Mattie. Kathryn didn’t want to wake her just yet, was not ready for the way the knowledge of the day before would hit Mattie afresh, just as it had hit her earlier in the morning. But when it did happen, Kathryn wanted to be there.

  Mattie lifted her head off the pillow, turned, and rolled over. The sun was fully up now, the light threading itself around the curtains and making a slit of bright color along the left side of the double bed. It was the same mahogany bed Kathryn’s parents had slept in, and she sometimes wondered if couples had made love more often in the old days than they did now, simply because the beds had been narrower. Mattie stirred dreamily, as though snuggling in for another hour or so. Kathryn got up from her chair, picked up the stuffed tiger, and placed it near Mattie’s head. For a moment, Kathryn could feel her daughter’s warm breath on her fingers. Then, perhaps sensing her mother’s presence, Mattie stiffened. Impulsively, Kathryn lay down beside her, folding her arms around her. She held her daughter tightly, heard a quick snort of breath.

  “I’m right here,” Kathryn said.


  Mattie was silent. Kathryn relaxed her grip and began to smooth the top of her daughter’s hair. It was thick with an unbrushed curl, the way it always was first thing in the morning. Mattie had inherited the curl from Jack, the color of her hair from Kathryn. From her father, Mattie had also inherited the two-color blue eyes, which until recently had pleased her no end. She thought that bearing a mark different from others made her special in some way. But with the onset of serious middle adolescence, when any characteristic that deviated even slightly from her friends’ was cause for severe anguish, she had begun wearing a single contact lens to even out the hues. Of course, she didn’t wear it to bed.

  There was a movement of the sheet, as though someone were tugging at it. Gently, Kathryn lowered the covers from

  Mattie’s face. Her daughter’s mouth was stuffed with cloth, the white sheet bunched between her teeth.

  “Mattie, please. You’ll choke.”

  Mattie’s jaws clamped down more tightly on the cloth. Kathryn pulled gently at the material, but Mattie would not ease up. Kathryn could hear her daughter breathing hard through her nose. There were tiny tears at Mattie’s lids, ready to pop and spill if she blinked. She looked at Kathryn with a mixture of pleading and anger. Kathryn could see the muscles of her daughter’s face tighten and loosen.

  Slowly, Kathryn began once more to pull at the sheet. Mattie suddenly opened her mouth and yanked the sheet out herself.

  “This sucks,” she said when she could breathe.

  Mattie was in the shower. Julia, who was wearing a short red-plaid bathrobe over a nightgown that predated the Carter administration, was at the stove. It was Julia’s belief that being tired of an article of clothing wasn’t a good enough reason to buy a new one. Another unwritten rule was that if you hadn’t worn a certain dress within a year, you should give it away.