The Pilot's Wife (22 page)

From her vantage point, she could see only the inner third of the cockpit, bits of each pilot in shirtsleeves. It was impossible, gazing at the tableau — the thickish arms, the confident gestures — not to imagine the man in the left-hand seat as Jack. She pictured the shape of his shoulder, the whiteness of his inner wrist. She had never been a passenger on an airliner Jack was flying.

The captain rose and turned toward the cabin. His eyes found Kathryn’s, and she understood that he meant to express his sympathy. He was an older man with a fringe of gray hair and light brown eyes. He seemed almost too kindly to be in charge. He was hopeless with the condolences, and she liked him for his inarticulateness. She thanked him and even managed a slight smile. She said she was doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances, which was all anyone ever wanted to hear. He asked her if she would be traveling on to Malin Head to be with the other family members, and she answered, quickly and perhaps too emphatically, no. He seemed embarrassed for having asked. She turned then and introduced the captain to Robert Hart. The captain studied Robert as if he might be someone he had met before. Then the man excused himself, went back up to the cockpit, and locked the door behind him. For his safety. For their safety.

The flight attendant collected the champagne glasses she’d brought around earlier, and Kathryn saw to her surprise that she had drained hers. She couldn’t remember drinking it, though she could taste it in her mouth. She looked at her watch: 8:14 in the evening. It would be 1:14 A.M. in London.

The plane lumbered to the runway. The pilot — the captain with the washed-out eyes? — revved the engines for the takeoff. Her heart stalled for one prolonged beat, then kicked painfully inside her chest. Her vision narrowed to a dot, the way the picture used to do when one turned off the TV. Kathryn held the armrests and closed her eyes. She bit her lower lip. A veil of protective mist dissipated, and she saw all that was possible: Pieces of bulkhead flooring ripped from the cabin; a person, perhaps a child, harnessed into a seat, spinning through the open air; a fire beginning in a cargo hold and spreading into the cabin.

The plane gathered speed with unnatural momentum. The staggeringly heavy mass of the T-900 would refuse to lift. She shut her eyes and began to pray the only prayer she could remember:
Our Father
…

She had never before known fear on an airliner. Even on the bumpiest transatlantic flights. Jack had always been relaxed on a plane, as both a pilot and a passenger, and his calm had seemed to seep into Kathryn through a kind of marital osmosis. But that protection was gone now. If she had believed herself safe in an airplane because Jack had, didn’t it follow that she could die in a plane if he had? She felt then the shame and revulsion of knowing she was going to be sick. Robert put his hand on her back.

When the plane was airborne, Robert signaled to the flight attendant, who brought ice water and cold towels and a discreet paper bag. Kathryn’s body, unable to perceive relief in having made it aloft, rebelled. To her chagrin, she vomited up the champagne. She was amazed at how intensely visceral the fear of one’s own death was: She hadn’t been this sick even when she’d learned that Jack had died.

As soon as the seat belt sign was turned off, Kathryn rose unsteadily to use the lavatory. A flight attendant handed her a plastic envelope containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, a wash-cloth, a bar of soap, and a comb, and Kathryn realized such kits were kept on hand expressly for physically distraught passengers. Were they for first-class passengers only, or did everyone get one?

In the tiny lavatory, Kathryn washed her face. Her slip and blouse were soaked with sweat, and she tried to dry the skin of her shoulders and neck with paper towels. The plane lurched, and she banged her head against a cabinet. She brushed her teeth as best she could and thought of all the times she’d felt condescending toward people who were afraid to fly.

When she returned, Robert rose from his seat and took her arm.

“I can’t explain,” she said, sitting down and gesturing for him to do the same. “I suppose it was fear. I was certain the plane wouldn’t get off the ground and that we’d be going so fast, we’d crash.”

He gently squeezed her arm.

She pressed her seat back, and Robert aligned his seat with hers. Almost reluctantly, it seemed, he took a magazine from his briefcase.

She fingered her wedding ring.

Over the intercom, the captain spoke with a resonant voice that was meant to be reassuring. Yet flight itself still felt wrong. The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

When she woke, it was dark both inside and outside of the plane. Overhead, a washed-out movie played silently on a screen. They were flying toward morning. When Jack had died, he’d flown into darkness, as if he were outrunning the sun.

Through the windows, she saw clouds. Over where? she wondered. Newfoundland? The Atlantic? Malin Head?

She wondered if the heart stopped from the concussion of the bomb, or if it stopped at the moment of certain knowledge that one would die, or if it stopped in reaction to the horror of falling through the darkness, or if it did not stop until the body hit the water.

What was it like to watch the cockpit split away from the cabin, and then to feel yourself, still harnessed to your seat, falling through the night, knowing that you would hit the water at terminal velocity, as surely Jack would have known if he were conscious? Did he cry out Kathryn’s name? Another woman’s name? Was it Mattie’s name he called in the end? Or had Jack, too, in the last desperate wail of his life, called out for his mother?

She hoped her husband had not had to cry out any name, that he had not had a second to know he would die.

Beside her in the taxi, Robert stretched his legs. The gold buttons on his blazer had set off the airport security alarm. He wore gray trousers, a white shirt, a black-and-gold paisley tie. He looked thinner than he had just yesterday.

She raised a hand to her hair and tried to refasten a wisp. Between them were two overnight bags, both remarkably small. She had packed hastily, without much thought. Her case contained a change of underwear and stockings, a different blouse. They entered London proper and began to pass through pleasant residential areas. The taxi pulled abruptly to a curb.

Through the rain, Kathryn saw a street of white stucco town houses, an immaculate row of almost identical facades. The houses rose four stories tall and were graced with bow-front windows. Delicate wrought-iron fences bordered the sidewalk, and each house bore a lantern hanging from a columned portico. Only the front doors spoke of individuality. Some were thick, wood-paneled doors; some had small glass panes; others were painted dark green. The houses closest to the taxi were identified with discreet numbers on small brass plaques. The house they’d parked in front of read Number 21.

Kathryn sat back on the upholstered seat.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Do you want me to go instead?” he asked.

She thought about the offer and smoothed her skirt. Like the steady hum of the engine, the driver seemed unperturbed by the wait.

“What would you do when you got there?” she asked.

He shook his head, as if to say he hadn’t given it any thought. Or that he would do what she asked him to.

“What will you do?” he asked.

Kathryn felt light-headed and thought she could no longer predict with any accuracy the actions and reactions of her body. The difficulty with not thinking about the immediate future, she decided, was that it left one unprepared for its reality.

The drive to the hotel was brief, the block on which it stood eerily like the one they had just left. The hotel had taken over seven or eight town houses and had a discreet entrance. The upper floors were ringed with pristine white balustrades.

Robert had booked two adjacent, but not adjoining, rooms. He carried her bag to the door.

“We’ll have lunch downstairs in the pub,” he said. He checked his watch. “At noon?”

“Sure,” she answered.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

Her room was small but perfectly adequate. The walls bore an innocuous wallpaper, brass wall sconces. There was a desk and a bed, a trouser press, an alcove where one could make a cup of coffee or tea.

She showered, changed her underwear and blouse, and brushed her hair. Looking into the mirror, she put her hands to her face. She could no longer deny that something was waiting for her here in this city.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

The pub was dark, with wood-paneled alcoves. Irish music played from overhead. Prints of horses, matted in dark green and framed in gold, were hung upon the walls. A half-dozen men sat at the bar drinking large glasses of beer, and pairs of businessmen were seated in the alcoves. She spotted Robert across the room, comfortably slouched against a banquette cushion. He looked contented, perhaps more than contented. He waved to her.

She crossed the room and lay her purse on the banquette.

“I took the liberty of ordering you a drink,” he said.

She glanced at the ale. In front of Robert was a glass of mineral water. She slipped in next to him. Her feet brushed his, but it seemed rude to pull away.

“What happened to you?” she asked suddenly, gesturing toward the water. “I mean with the drinking? I’m sorry. Do you mind my asking?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “My parents were both professors at a college in Toronto. Every evening, they held court for the students — a kind of salon. The tray with the bottles on it was always the focal point of the gathering. The students loved it, of course. I started joining them when I was fifteen. Actually, now that I think of it, my parents probably created a lot of alcoholics.”

“You’re Canadian?”

“Originally. Not now.”

Kathryn studied the man beside her. What did she know about him, except that he had been kind to her? He seemed good at his job, and he was undeniably attractive. She wondered if accompanying her to London was somehow part of his job description.

“We might have come here for no good reason,” she said, and could hear the note of hope in her voice. Like finding a suspicious lump in your breast, she thought, and then having the doctor tell you it was nothing, nothing at all. “Robert, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is nuts. I know you must think I’m out of my mind. I’m really sorry to have dragged you into it.”

“I love London,” he said quickly, seemingly unwilling to dismiss their joint venture so quickly. “You need to eat something,” he said. “I hate Irish music. Why is it always so lugubrious?”

She smiled. “Have you been here before?” she asked, acquiescing to the change in subject. “To this hotel?”

“I come here fairly often,” he said. “We
liaise,
I believe the word is, with our British counterparts.”

She studied the menu, laid it down on the polished but slightly sticky veneer of the table.

“You have a beautiful face,” he said suddenly.

She blushed. No one had said that to her in a long time. She was embarrassed that she had colored, that he could see it mattered. She picked up the menu again and began to reexamine it. “I can’t eat, Robert. I just can’t.”

“There’s something I want to tell you,” he began.

She held her hand up. She didn’t want him to say anything that would require her to respond.

“I’m sorry,” he said, glancing away. “You don’t need this.”

“I was just thinking about how enjoyable this is,” she said quietly.

And she saw, with surprise, that he couldn’t hide his disappointment at the tepid offering.

“I’m going to go now,” she said.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No,” she said. “I have to do this alone.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Be careful,” he said.

She went out onto the street blindly, moving now with a momentum she didn’t dare to question. The taxi dropped her in front of the narrow town house she had seen little more than an hour before. She surveyed the street, studied a small pink lamp in a ground-floor window. She paid the driver and was certain, as she stepped out onto the curb, that she had given the man too many coins.

The rain poured over the edges of her umbrella and soaked the back of her legs, spotting and then running down her stockings. There was a moment, as she stood on the steps in front of the imposing wooden door, when she thought: I don’t have to do this. Though she understood in the same moment that it was knowing that she would positively do this that had allowed her the luxury of indecision.

She raised the heavy brass knocker and rapped on the door. She heard footsteps on an inner staircase, the short impatient cry of a child. The door opened abruptly, as though the person behind it were expecting a delivery.

It was a woman — a tall, angular woman with dark hair that fell along her jawline. The woman was thirty, perhaps thirty-five. She held a child on her hip, a child so astonishing that it was all Kathryn could do not to cry out.

Kathryn began to tremble inside her coat. She held the umbrella at an unnatural angle.

The woman with the child looked surprised, and for a moment quizzical. And then she did not seem surprised at all.

“I’ve been imagining this moment for years,” the woman said.

T
HE
FEATURES
OF
THE
WOMAN
IMPRESSED
THEM-selves upon Kathryn’s consciousness, like acid eating away at a photographic plate. The brown eyes, the thick, dark lashes. The narrow jeans, long-legged. The ivory flats, well worn, like slippers. The pink shirt, sleeves rolled. A thousand questions competed for Kathryn’s attention. When? For how long? How was it done? Why?