The Pilot's Wife (12 page)

And then, horrified, she watches as the computer monitor comes crashing down the stairs.

The monitor gouges the plaster wall at the foot of the steps. Bits of gray plastic and smoked glass from the shattered screen fly into the air and litter the stairs and the kitchen floor. It is a spectacular smash, loud and theatrical.

Kathryn utters a low moan, knowing that it has all gone too far and that she has caused it, has goaded him.

And then she thinks of Mattie.

By the time Kathryn has made her way over the smashed monitor and gotten to the top of the stairs, Mattie is coming down the hallway in her pajamas.

— What happened? Mattie asks, although Kathryn can see that she knows. Has heard everything.

Jack looks stricken with the instant remorse that follows an insanely childish act in front of one’s children.

— Mattie, Kathryn says. — Daddy dropped his computer down the stairs. It’s a mess. But everything is OK.

Mattie gives them both the
look,
the one that, even though she is eleven years old, is always dead on and never misses. But Kathryn can see on her daughter’s face that superior surveil-lance is competing ferociously with sheer horror.

Jack turns to Mattie and enfolds his daughter in his arms. That alone says everything, Kathryn thinks. There is no pretending now that this didn’t happen. It is just perhaps better not to say it aloud.

And then Jack reaches out his arm and draws Kathryn into the fold, so that the three of them stand in the hallway, swaying and crying and saying I’m sorry and kissing each other and hugging again and then standing back and laughing slightly through the tears and runny noses, with Mattie offering, helpfully, to get the Kleenex.

That night, Kathryn and Jack make love as they have not done in months — with a ragged edge, as though playing out the rest of the scene with open mouths and small bites, locked thighs and pinned wrists. And the voracious momentum of that night changes, for a time, the tenor of their marriage, so that they look more often into each other’s eyes as they pass in the hallway, trying mutely to say something meaningful, and kiss each other with more enthusiasm whenever they meet, in the house or outside by the cars or even, several times, in public, which pleases Kathryn. But after a while, that too passes, and she and Jack go back to normal, as they have been before, which is to say that they, like all the other couples Kathryn has ever known, live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less than they were the day before.

Which means, on the whole, she thinks, that it is a good marriage.

S
HE
HAD
NEVER
SEEN
ANYTHING
LIKE
IT
BEFORE
— not even on television or in movies, where a spectacle, she now understood, lost its immediacy, its garish color, its menace. Along the beach road, even before she and Robert had reached the drive, there were parked cars and fat vans with their far wheels stuck into the sandy shoulders. Kathryn saw call letters on the vans,
WBZ
and
WNBC
and
CNN
, a man running with a camera and a complicated brace on his shoulder. People were beginning to look at the car, to peer at the passengers inside. Robert sat hunched over the steering wheel, as though at any minute they might be assaulted. Kathryn resisted the urge to turn her head away or to bring her hands to her face.

“Remind me why we did this?” she asked, her voice tight, her lips barely moving.

The reporters and cameramen were five deep by the wooden gate with its wire fencing. Jack and she had not chosen the gate; it had simply been left over from the convent days. Indeed,

Kathryn thought it surprising the gate even worked: Jack and she had never had any reason to fasten it.

“We’re sending someone over to your grandmother’s,” Robert said.

“Julia won’t like that.”

“I’m afraid Julia doesn’t really have a choice at this point,” Robert said. “And in the end, she may be grateful.”

He gestured toward the crowd outside the car.

“They’ll be all over her lawn before she can blink.”

“I don’t want them anywhere near Mattie,” Kathryn said. “Julia looked pretty formidable to me,” Robert countered. “I’m not sure I’d want to try to get past her.”

A man banged hard against the passenger door window, and Kathryn flinched. Robert moved the car forward, trying to get as close to the gate as he could. He peered through the windshield, looking for a policeman, and almost immediately, the car was engulfed, men and women shouting through the glass.

“Mrs. Lyons, have you heard the tape?”

“Is that her? Wally, is that her?”

“Move, get her face.”

“Can you comment, Mrs. Lyons? Do you think it was suicide?” “Who’s the guy with her? Jerry, is he from the airline?”

“Mrs. Lyons, how do you explain…?”

To Kathryn, the voices sounded like dogs barking. Mouths appeared magnified and watery, the colors around her heightening and then subduing themselves. She wondered briefly if she was fainting. How could she possibly be the focus of so much attention, she who had lived the most ordinary of lives under the most ordinary of circumstances?

“Jesus Christ,” Robert said when a camera lens banged sharply against his window. “That guy just broke his camera.”

Sitting taller to see beyond the crowd, Kathryn spotted Burt Sears, a long, spindly man, stooped with years, pacing behind the gate. He had only the top half of his uniform on, as if he hadn’t been able to find the rest of it in his hurry to get out of the house. Kathryn waved through the windshield, trying to catch his attention, but Burt seemed shocky, his eyes unfocused, as helpless on his side of the gate as they were on theirs. He moved his hands in a slow, unconfident circle, as though he were directing traffic and weren’t particularly good at it.

“It’s Burt,” she said. “He’s on the other side of the gate. He’s retired, but he’s been called back for this.”

“You drive,” Robert said. “Lock the door after me. What’s his last name?”

“Sears.”

With one fluid motion, so swift it was over before it had registered, Robert stepped out of the car and slammed the door. Kathryn slid awkwardly over the gearshift into the driver’s seat and locked the door. She watched Robert put his hands into the pockets of his topcoat and shoulder his way through the reporters and cameramen. He yelled
Burt Sears
so loudly that everyone stopped for a moment to look at the man separating the crowd. Kathryn began to move the car forward into the vacuum Robert created as he walked.

What would happen, she wondered, if the wall of people in front of her simply refused to part?

She watched Robert unfasten the gate. Everywhere she glanced there were cameras, women in suits, men in brightly colored windbreakers, and still she inched forward, urged toward the gate by Robert’s insistent hand. She worried for a moment that the crowd might simply go with her, move with her to the house like a cortege — a grotesque cortege with the widow trapped inside the car, a beetle under glass. But an unwritten law, one she hadn’t known about and didn’t quite understand, halted the crowd behind the gate when it easily might have overwhelmed Burt and Robert. Once inside the gate, she stopped.

“Go,” Robert said, slipping into the passenger seat.

With shaking hands, she put the car in drive and began to inch forward.

“No, I mean
move
,” Robert said brusquely.

She had thought, when she first saw the throng in front of the gate, that her house would be a refuge if only Robert and she could reach it. But she quickly realized that that would not be the case. Four cars she hadn’t seen before were parked in the driveway, one haphazardly, with its door still open, a bell dinging from inside. Four cars meant at least that many strangers.

She turned off the engine.

“You don’t have to do this now,” he said.

“But I’ll have to do it sometime,” she said.

“Possibly.”

“Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?”

“The union’s taking care of it.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Just don’t give these guys any answers you’re not absolutely sure of.”

“I’m not sure of anything,” she said.

They were in her kitchen and in the front room, men in black uniforms and dark suits, Rita from yesterday in pale gray. A large man with oval wire-rimmed glasses and excessively gelled hair came forward to greet Kathryn first. His collar, she noticed, cut into his neck, and his face was flushed. He waddled somewhat, in the way of heavy men, leading with his stomach.

“Mrs. Lyons,” he said, holding out a hand. “Dick Somers.” She let him take her hand. His grip was tentative and damp. The phone rang, and she was glad Robert didn’t leave her to answer it.

“From?” Kathryn asked.

“I’m an investigator with the Safety Board. Let me say how very sorry I am, we all are, for your terrible loss.”

Kathryn could hear a low, steady male voice on a television in another room.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I know this is a difficult time for you and your daughter,” he added.

Her face must have registered wariness at the word
daughter,
for she saw him make a quick scan of her features.

“But I do have to ask you some questions,” he said.

There were Styrofoam coffee cups on the kitchen counter, and two bright pink Dunkin’ Donuts boxes on the table. Kathryn had a sudden and powerful craving for a donut, a plain donut dipped in hot coffee, disintegrating from the coffee as she brought it to her mouth. She remembered she hadn’t eaten anything for more than thirty-six hours.

“My colleague, Henry Boyd,” Somers said, introducing a younger man with a blond mustache.

She shook the colleague’s hand.

Four other men came forward to be introduced now, men in Vision uniforms, with their caps tucked under their arms, the uniform, with its gold buttons and braid, its familiarity, causing Kathryn to catch her breath. They were from the airline, from the chief pilot’s office, they said, and Kathryn thought how strange these greetings were, these niceties, these condolences, these cautious condolences, when all about them there was the palpable strain of waiting.

A man with iron-filing hair stepped more forward than the rest.

“Mrs. Lyons, I’m Chief Pilot Bill Tierney,” he said. “We talked on the phone briefly yesterday.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Let me once again express for myself and for the entire airline how deeply sorry we are for the loss of your husband, for your personal loss. He was an excellent pilot, one of our best.”

“Thank you,” she said.

The words
how deeply sorry
seemed to float on the air in the kitchen. She wondered why all the expressions of sympathy sounded so tired, so very much the same. Was there no other language with which to express one’s sorrow? Or was the formality the point? She thought about how many times the chief pilot must have imagined himself saying these very words to the widow of one of his pilots, perhaps even practiced saying the words aloud. The newish airline had never had a fatal crash before.

“What can you tell me about the tape?” she asked the chief pilot.

Tierney pursed his lips and shook his head.

“No information about the tape has been officially released,” said Somers, stepping forward.

“I understand that,” Kathryn said, turning to the investigator. “But you
know
something, don’t you? You
know
what’s on the tape.”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said.

But behind the wire-rimmed glasses, the investigator’s glance was skittish and evasive.

Kathryn stood in the center of her kitchen, in her boots and jeans and jacket, the subject of intense scrutiny. She felt vaguely embarrassed, as if she had committed a grievous social error.

“One of you left your car door open,” she said, gesturing toward the driveway.

“Why don’t we go sit in your living room?” Somers suggested.

Feeling unfamiliar with her own house, Kathryn walked into the front room and squinted at the six oblongs of diffuse light from the windows. There was only one seat left, an oversized wing chair facing the windows, Jack’s chair, not hers, and she felt dwarfed by the chair’s upholstered appendages. The television, she noticed now, had been turned off.

Somers appeared to be in charge. He stood while the others sat.

“I’m just going to ask you one or two questions,” he said, putting his hands into his trouser pockets. “This won’t take a minute. Can you tell us anything about how your husband was behaving just prior to his departure for the airport on Sunday?”

Kathryn saw that no one had a tape recorder out or was writing anything down. Somers seemed almost excessively casual. This couldn’t be official, then, could it?

“There’s not a lot to tell,” she said. “It was routine. Jack took a shower around four in the afternoon, got dressed in his uniform, came downstairs, and shined his shoes.”

“And where were you?”

“I joined him in the kitchen. To say good-bye.”

The word
good-bye
triggered a quick jolt of sadness, and she bit her lip. She tried to remember Sunday, the last day Jack had been home. Occasionally, she had fragments, dream bits, like the fluttering glints of silver in the dark. It seemed to her that it had been an ordinary day, nothing special about it. She could see Jack’s foot on the pulled-out drawer, the old green-checked rag in his hands as she passed through the kitchen on the way to the laundry room. The length of his arms, lengthened even more by the weight of his bags as he walked to the car in the driveway. He’d said something over his shoulder. She’d had the rag in her hand.
Don’t forget to call Alfred
, he’d said.
And tell him Friday
.

He’d shined his shoes. He’d left the house. He would be home, he said, on Tuesday. She was freezing in the doorway, slightly annoyed he hadn’t done it himself. Called Alfred.

“To your knowledge, did Jack call anyone that day?” Somers asked. “Talk to anyone?”