The Pilot's Wife

This is an entirely fictional story about a woman whose husband goes down with his plane. The characters are not drawn from life and do not resemble anyone I know or have ever heard about.

I would like to thank the following people at Little, Brown and Company: my editor, Michael Pietsch, for his sharp eye, his love of editing, and his quiet wisdom; my publicist, Jen Marshall, for the ease with which she appears to be able to solve any problem that comes her way; and Betsy Uhrig, for the clarity and care she brought to the task of copyediting this book.

I would like to thank as well my daughter, Katherine Clemans, for helping to shape the portrait of Mattie; Alan Samson of Little, Brown and Company, U.K., for reading the manuscript and for his continuing support; and Gary DeLong, for sharing with me details about the harsh reality of the grieving process.

As ever, I am grateful to John Osborn, who always has first look at any manuscript and who consistently manages to steer me ever so gently in the right direction.

And finally, though certainly not least — indeed, she is the linchpin of all my books — I would like to thank my agent and friend, Ginger Barber, for her excellent criticism and unwavering graciousness.

S
HE
HEARD
A
KNOCKING
,
AND
THEN
A
DOG
BARKING
. Her dream left her, skittering behind a closing door. It had been a good dream, warm and close, and she minded. She fought the waking. It was dark in the small bedroom, with no light yet behind the shades. She reached for the lamp, fumbled her way up the brass, and she was thinking,
What? What?

The lit room alarmed her, the wrongness of it, like an emergency room at midnight. She thought, in quick succession: Mattie. Then, Jack. Then, Neighbor. Then, Car accident. But Mattie was in bed, wasn’t she? Kathryn had seen her to bed, had watched her walk down the hall and through a door, the door shutting with a firmness that was just short of a slam, enough to make a statement but not provoke a reprimand. And Jack — where was Jack? She scratched the sides of her head, raking out her sleep-flattened hair. Jack was — where? She tried to remember the schedule: London. Due home around lunchtime. She was certain. Or did she have it wrong and had he forgotten his keys again?

She sat up and put her feet on the freezing floorboards. She had never understood why the wood of an old house lost its warmth so completely in the winter. Her black leggings had ridden up to the middle of her calves, and the cuffs of the shirt she had slept in, a worn white shirt of Jack’s, had unrolled and were hanging past the tips of her fingers. She couldn’t hear the knocking anymore, and she thought for a few seconds that she had imagined it. Had dreamed it, in the way she sometimes had dreams from which she woke into other dreams. She reached for the small clock on her bedside table and looked at it: 3:24. She peered more closely at the black face with the glow-in-the-dark dial and then set the clock down on the marble top of the table so hard that the case popped open and a battery rolled under the bed.

But Jack was in London, she told herself again. And Mattie was in bed.

There was another knock then, three sharp raps on glass. A small stoppage in her chest traveled down into her stomach and lay there. In the distance, the dog started up again with short, brittle yips.

She took careful steps across the floor, as if moving too fast might set something in motion that hadn’t yet begun. She opened the latch of the bedroom door with a soft click and made her way down the back staircase. She was thinking that her daughter was upstairs and that she should be careful.

She walked through the kitchen and tried to see, through the window over the sink, into the driveway that wound around to the back of the house. She could just make out the shape of an ordinary dark car. She turned the corner into the narrow back hallway, where the tiles were worse than the floorboards, ice on the soles of her feet. She flipped on the back-door light and saw, beyond the small panes set into the top of the door, a man.

He tried not to look surprised by the sudden light. He moved his head slowly to the side, not staring into the glass, as if it were not a polite thing to do, as if he had all the time in the world, as if it were not 3:24 in the morning. He looked pale in the glare of the light. He had hooded eyelids and a widow’s peak, hair the color of dust that had been cut short and brushed back at the sides. His topcoat collar was turned up, and his shoulders were hunched. He moved once quickly on the doorstep, stamping his feet. She made a judgment then. The long face, slightly sad; decent clothes; an interesting mouth, the bottom lip slightly curved and fuller than the upper lip: not dangerous. As she reached for the knob, she thought, Not a burglar, not a rapist. Definitely not a rapist. She opened the door.

“Mrs. Lyons?” he asked.

And then she knew.

It was in the way he said her name, the fact that he knew her name at all. It was in his eyes, a wary flicker. The quick breath he took.

She snapped away from him and bent over at the waist. She put a hand to her chest.

He reached his hand through the doorway and touched her at the small of her back.

The touch made her flinch. She tried to straighten up but couldn’t.

“When?” she asked.

He took a step into her house and closed the door. “Earlier this morning,” he said.

“Where?”

“About ten miles off the coast of Ireland.”

“In the water?”

“No. In the air.”

“Oh… .” She brought a hand to her mouth.

“It almost certainly was an explosion,” he said quickly. “You’re sure it was Jack?”

He glanced away and then back again.

“Yes.”

He caught her elbows as she went down. She was momentarily embarrassed, but she couldn’t help it, her legs were gone. She hadn’t known that her body could abandon her so, could just give out like that. He held her elbows, but she wanted her arms back. Gently, he lowered her to the floor.

She bent her face to her knees and wrapped her arms over her head. Inside her there was a white noise, and she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Consciously, she tried to breathe, to fill up her lungs. She raised her head up and took in great gulps of air. As if in the distance, she heard an odd choking sound that wasn’t exactly crying because her face was dry. From behind her, the man was trying to lift her up.

“Let me get you to a chair,” he said.

She swung her head from side to side. She wanted him to let her go. She wanted to sink into the tiles, to ooze onto the floor.

Awkwardly, he placed his arms under hers. She let him help her up.

“I’m going to be —,” she said.

Quickly, she pushed him away with the palms of her hands and leaned against the wall for support. She coughed and gagged, but there was nothing in her stomach.

When she looked up, she could see that he was apprehensive. He took her by the arm and made her round the corner into the kitchen.

“Sit here in this chair,” he said. “Where’s the light?”

“On the wall.”

Her voice was raspy and faint. She realized she was shivering.

He swiped for the switch and found it. She put a hand up in front of her face to ward off the light. Instinctively, she did not want to be seen.

“Where do you keep the glasses?” he asked.

She pointed to a cabinet. He poured her a glass of water and handed it to her, but she couldn’t hold it steady. He braced her fingers while she took a sip.

“You’re in shock,” he said. “Where can I get you a blanket?” “You’re with the airline,” she said.

He took off his topcoat and his jacket and put the jacket around her shoulders. He made her slide her arms into the sleeves, which were surprisingly silky and warm.

“No,” he said. “The union.”

She nodded slowly, trying to make sense of this.

“Robert Hart,” he said, introducing himself.

She nodded again, took another sip of water. Her throat felt dry and sore.

“I’m here to help,” he said. “This is going to be difficult to get through. Is your daughter here?”

“You know I have a daughter?” she asked quickly.

And then she thought, Of course you do.

“Would you like me to tell her?” he asked.

Kathryn shook her head.

“They always said the union would get here first,” she said. “The wives, I mean. Do I have to wake her now?”

He glanced quickly at his watch, then at Kathryn, as if considering how much time was left to them.

“In a few minutes,” he said. “When you’re ready. Take your time.”

The telephone rang, a serrated edge in the silence of the kitchen. Robert Hart answered it immediately.

“No comment,” he said.

“No comment.

“No comment.

“No comment.”

She watched him lay the receiver back on its cradle and massage his forehead with his fingers. He had thick fingers and large hands, hands that seemed too big for his body.

She looked at the man’s shirt, a white oxford with a gray stripe, but all she could see was a fake plane in a fake sky blowing itself to bits in the distance.

She wanted the man from the union to turn around and tell her that he had made a mistake: He’d gotten the plane wrong; she was the wrong wife; it hadn’t happened the way he said it had. She could almost feel the joy of that.

“Is there someone you want me to call?” he asked. “To be with you.”

“No,” she said. “Yes.” She paused. “No.”

She shook her head. She wasn’t ready yet. She lowered her eyes and fixed them on the cabinet under the sink. What was in it? Cascade. Drano. Pine Sol. Jack’s black shoe polish. She bit the inside of her cheek and looked around at the kitchen, at the cracked pine table, the stained hearth behind it, the milk-green Hoosier cabinet. Her husband had shined his shoes in this room not two days ago, his foot braced on a bread drawer he had pulled out for the task. It was often the last thing he did before he left for work. She would sit and watch him from the chair, and lately it had become a kind of ritual, a part of his leaving her.

It had always been hard for her, his leaving the house — no matter how much work she had to do, no matter how much she looked forward to having time to herself. And it wasn’t that she had been afraid. She hadn’t been in the habit of being fearful. Safer than driving a car, he’d always said, and he’d had an offhand confidence, as though his safety were not even worthy of a conversation. No, it wasn’t exactly safety. It was the act of leaving itself, of Jack’s removing himself from the house, that had always been difficult. She often felt, watching him walk out of the door with his thick, boxy flight bag in one hand and his overnight bag in the other, his uniform cap tucked under his arm, that he was, in some profound way, separating from her. And, of course, he was. He was leaving her in order to take a 170-ton airplane into the air and across the ocean to London or to Amsterdam or to Nairobi. It wasn’t a particularly hard feeling to sort out, and within moments it would pass. Sometimes Kathryn would become so accustomed to his absence that she bristled at the change in her routines when he returned. And then, three or four days later, the cycle would begin again.

She didn’t think Jack had ever felt the coming and going in quite the same way she had. To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.

I’m just a glorified bus driver, he used to say.

And not all that glorified, he would add.

Used to say. She tried to take it in. She tried to understand that Jack no longer existed. But all she could see were cartoon puffs of smoke, lines drawn outward in all directions. She let the image go as quickly as it had come.

“Mrs. Lyons? Is there a television in another room that I could keep half an eye on?” Robert Hart asked.

“In the front room,” she said, pointing.

“I just need to hear what they’re reporting now.” “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”

He nodded, but he seemed reluctant. She watched him leave the room. She shut her eyes and thought: I absolutely cannot tell Mattie.

Already, she could imagine how it would be. She would open the door to Mattie’s room, and on the wall there would be posters of Less Than Jake and extreme skiing in Colorado. On the floor would be two or three days’ worth of inside-out clothes. Mattie’s sports equipment would be propped up in a corner — her skis and poles, her snowboard, her field hockey and lacrosse sticks. Her bulletin board would be covered with cartoons and pictures of her friends: Taylor, Alyssa, and Kara, fifteen-year-old girls with ponytails and long hair wisps in the front. Mattie would be huddled under her blue-and-white comforter and would pretend not to hear her until Kathryn said her name for the third time. Then Mattie would bolt upright, at first irritated to be woken, thinking it was time for school and wondering why Kathryn had moved into the room. Mattie’s hair, a sandy red with metallic threads, would be spread along the shoulders of a purple T-shirt that said “Ely Lacrosse” in white letters across her tiny breasts. She would put her hands behind her on the mattress and hold herself up.