The Pilot's Wife (28 page)

Did Muire Boland mean for an understanding to pass between the two women, a elemental understanding? Kathryn wondered. But then, almost simultaneously, she realized that of course the two women were linked, however much Kathryn might wish it not true. By children, certainly, half-sisters and half-brothers, but also by Jack. Through Jack.

Muire straightened, clearly about to leave. Panicky, Kathryn realized she might never see the woman again.

“Tell me about Jack’s mother,” Kathryn blurted in a rush. An admission.

“He didn’t tell you, then?” Muire asked.

Kathryn shook her head.

“I thought he hadn’t,” Muire said thoughtfully. “Yesterday, when you were there …”

Muire paused.

“His mother ran away with another man when he was nine,” she said.

“Jack always maintained she was dead,” Kathryn said.

“He was ashamed he’d been left. But, oddly, he didn’t blame his mother. He blamed his father, his father’s brutality. Actually, it’s only been recently that Jack could acknowledge his mother at all.”

Kathryn looked away, embarrassed for having had to ask.

“I absolutely must go now,” Muire said. “I’m putting you both at risk just by being here.”

The accent might have done it, Kathryn thought. Acted as a trigger. Or was she simply searching for a reason for the inexplicable: why a man fell in love?

Robert glanced quickly from Muire to Kathryn and back again. He had an expression on his face Kathryn had never seen before — anguished.

“What?” Kathryn asked him.

He opened his mouth, then closed it, as if he would say something but then had thought better of it. He picked up a knife and began to flip it back and forth between his fingers, the way she had seen him do with a pen.

“What?” Kathryn repeated.

“Good-bye,” Muire said to Kathryn. “I am sorry.”

Kathryn felt dizzy. How long had it been since Muire Boland had walked through the doorway? Three minutes? Four?

Robert looked at Kathryn, then set the knife carefully beside his plate. “Wait,” he said to Muire as she turned to walk away.

Kathryn watched as the woman halted, slowly pivoted, and studied Robert, tilting her head in a quizzical manner.

“Who were the other pilots?” he asked quickly. “I need the names.”

Kathryn stiffened. She glanced at Robert and then at Muire. She felt herself begin to tremble.

“You know about this?” she asked Robert in a tight whisper. Robert looked down at the table. Kathryn could see the color coming into his face.

“You’ve known all along?” Kathryn asked. “You came to my house knowing that Jack might be involved in this?”

“We knew only that there was a smuggling ring,” Robert said. “We didn’t know who, though we suspected Jack.”

“You knew where this might lead? What I might find out?” Robert raised his eyes to her, and she saw it all, in an instant, pass over his face: Love. Responsibility. Loss.

Particularly loss.

Kathryn stood up, and her napkin fell to the floor. Her movements startled the other diners, who glanced over at her with expressions of faint alarm.

“I trusted you,” she said.

She walked from the dining room straight out the hotel door and stepped into a waiting taxi. She had left her coat and her suitcase in her room. She didn’t care what was in it.

She would change her ticket at the airport.

During the drive, she stared at her hands in her lap, clasped so tightly the knuckles had turned a translucent white. She could not hear or see anything. But she could feel the rage in her blood, actually feel it pumping and churning inside her. She had never known such rage. She wanted only to go home.

At Heathrow, she moved through the revolving door into an international throng, milling in all directions, as if communally lost. She found the British Airways desk and got in line. She would change her flight and the airline itself, and she didn’t care how much it cost.

She felt exposed as she stood in the line, as though she no longer had any insulation at all. Robert might guess her intentions and come looking for her. She would wait for her flight in the bathroom if she had to, she decided.

The line moved too slowly. Her rage began to encompass the inefficiency of the ticket agents.

She wondered if she’d fly over Malin Head, if she’d fly a route similar to the one Jack had flown.

And then she began to feel the gravitational pull. The pure force of it surprised her. She put a hand to her chest.

The pull grew stronger as she moved closer to the beginning of the line.

When it was Kathryn’s turn, she laid her ticket on the counter. The agent looked at her, waiting for her to speak.

“What’s the closest airport to Malin Head?” Kathryn asked.

H
ER
ARMS
ARE
FULL
OF
DIRTY
LAUNDRY
— WET
towels, crumpled sheets, and sprung socks that keep slipping from her arms and falling to the floor. She bends to retrieve an errant washcloth, thinking that if she’d brought the basket upstairs first the laundry wouldn’t be so frisky. She hugs the damp bundle even more tightly and walks toward the stairs. As she passes the entrance to their bedroom, she glances in.

It is a fleeting tableau, so brief it barely registers. A subliminal picture, no different from the thousands of subliminal pictures that enter the brain but fail to interest the consciousness. Like seeing a woman in a camel jacket selecting oranges at the supermarket, or seeing but not noticing a locket around a student’s neck.

Jack is bent over his carry-on, packing for a trip. His hand moves quickly, tucks an item out of sight. A shirt, she thinks, blue with yellow stripes. A shirt she has never seen before. Perhaps a shirt he bought in a pinch at an airport kiosk.

She smiles to show that she hasn’t meant to startle him. He straightens and lets the lid of his small suitcase fall closed.

— You need a hand with that? he asks.

She stands for a minute, admiring the way the afternoon sun falls on the old floorboards of the house, setting the pumpkin stain aglow.

— When are you leaving? she asks.

— Ten minutes.

— And you’ll be back when?

— Tuesday. Around noon. Maybe we’d better call Alfred Zacharian, get him in to take a look at the leak. It’s worse today.

She notices that his hair is still wet from the shower. He’s slimmed down some, she observes; there’s hardly any sign of a stomach now. She watches as he crosses to the closet, takes his uniform jacket from a hanger, and slips it on. She has never failed to be moved by the sight of Jack in his uniform, at the immediate authority that drapes itself over his shoulders, that clarifies itself as he fastens the three gold buttons.

— I’ll miss you, she says impulsively.

He turns and steps into a block of sunlight. Around the eyes, he looks tired.

— What is it? she asks.

— What’s what?

— You look worried about something.

— It’s just a headache, he says, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes.

She watches him relax his features, smooth his brow muscles.

— You want some Advil? she asks.

— No, I’m fine, he says.

He zips the suitcase shut, grasps the handle, and pauses. He seems about to say something to her, then appears to change his mind. He swings the bag off the bed.

— Just leave the dry cleaning until I get home, he says, walking to her. He holds her eyes for a second longer than he might have. Across the bundle of dirty laundry, he kisses her. The kiss slides off the side of her mouth.

— I’ll take care of it on Tuesday, he says.

S
HE
WAS
TRYING
TO
READ
THE
MAP
WHILE
REMEM-bering to drive on the left, a challenge that taxed all of her concentration, so that it was some time before she realized the irony of being on the Antrim Road as it led west, away from the Belfast airport. The flight had been uneventful, the car rental straightforward. She felt an almost physical urgency to get to her destination.

By landing west of Belfast, she’d missed the city altogether, had seen none of the bombed-out buildings and bullet-scarred facades she’d heard about. Indeed, it was difficult to reconcile the pastoral landscape spreading out before her with the unsolvable conflict that had claimed so many lives — most recently one hundred and four persons in an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean. The unadorned white cottages and pastureland were marred only by wire fences, telephone lines, occasionally a satellite dish. In the distance, the hills seemed to change their color and even their shape, depending on how the sun shifted through the fair-weather clouds. The land looked ancient, trespassed upon, and the hills had a worn and mossy look, as though they had been trampled by many feet. On the ridge of hills closest to the road, she could see the scattered white dots of hundreds of sheep, the plowed and furrowed bits of patchwork, the low green hedgerows that bordered the crops like lines drawn by a child.

This would not be what the bloody struggle had been about, she thought as she drove. It was something else she’d never fathom, never understand. Though Jack, in arrogance or love, had presumed to do so, had involved himself in Northern Ireland’s complex conflict, thus causing even Kathryn and Mattie to be peripheral, if unwitting, participants.

She knew few facts about the Troubles, only what she’d absorbed, like everyone else, from headlines and from television when events occurred that were catastrophic enough to make news in the United States. She’d read or heard about the sectarian violence of the early 1970s, the hunger strikes, the cease-fire of 1994, and the breakdown of the cease-fire, but she knew little about the
why
of it all. She’d heard of kneecapping, of car bombings, and of men in ski masks entering civilian homes, but she had no sense of the patriotism driving these terrorist activities. At times, she was tempted to think of the participants in this struggle as misguided thugs cloaking themselves in idealism like murderous religious zealots of any age. At other times, the cruelty and the sheer stupidity of the British had seemed positively to invite a frustration and a bitterness that might lead any group of people to violent action.

What baffled her now, though, was not the reason for such a conflict, but Jack’s participation in it, a reality she could barely absorb. Had he believed in the cause, or had he been drawn by its seeming authenticity? She could see the appeal of that, the instant meaning given to a life. The falling in love itself, the romantic idealism, the belonging to a righteous organization, and even the religion would have been part of the whole. It would have meant a total giving over of oneself to a person or an ideal, and in this case the two would have been inextricably linked. Just as the cause would have been part of the love affair, the love affair would have been part of the cause, so that you couldn’t, later, have one without the other. Nor could you leave one without the other. Seen in this light, she thought, the question wasn’t so much why Jack had taken up with Muire Boland and married her in a Catholic church, but rather why he hadn’t left Mattie and Kathryn.

Because he loved Mattie too much, she answered herself at once.

She wondered then if Jack and Muire had actually been legally married. Did a wedding in a church automatically confer legal status? She didn’t know how it worked, or how Muire and Jack had specifically worked it. And she would never know. There was so much now that she would never know.

Just outside of Londonderry, she showed her passport at the checkpoint and passed into the Republic of Ireland, simultaneously entering Donegal. She drove north and west through countryside that became noticeably more rural as she went, the number of sheep beginning vastly to outnumber people, the cottages becoming even more rare. She followed signs for Malin Head, Cionn Mhalanna in Irish, through the heavy aroma of peat. The land grew rugged, wilder, with long vistas of cliff and jagged rock, tall sand dunes capped in green and heather. The road narrowed to barely a single lane, and she realized she was driving too fast when she came upon a sharp curve and nearly put the car into a ditch.

Of course, it could have been the mother, Kathryn thought. A desire to recapture the mother, have the mother he’d been denied. Certainly this might have been the case with his having fallen in love with Muire Boland, and even Muire had seemed to understand that. But beyond this speculation, Kathryn thought, the territory grew murky: Who could say what a man’s motivations were? Even had Jack been alive and with her in the car, could he have articulated his own
Why?
Could anyone? Again, she’d never know. She could only know what she imagined to be true. What she herself decided would be true.

As she drove, certain memories pricked at her, nagged at her, and she knew it might be months or years before they stopped: The thought, for example, that Jack might have taken money from her and Mattie to give to another family was insupportable, and she could feel her blood pressure rising in the car. Or the fight, she remembered suddenly, that horrible fight for which she’d blamed herself. The gall of him, she thought now, letting her believe her own inadequacies had been the cause, when all along he was having an affair with another woman. Was that what Jack had been doing on the computer all that time? Writing to a lover? Is that why he’d been willing to escalate the hostilities so quickly when he’d asked her if she wanted him to go? Had he been flirting with the idea?

Or the lines of poetry, she thought. Had Jack relaxed his vigilance and allowed bits of his relationship with Muire Boland to seep into his marriage with Kathryn? Had Kathryn’s life been invaded in ways she’d never noticed? How many books had she read or films had she seen that Muire might have suggested? How much of the Irish woman’s life had leached into her own?

Again, Kathryn would never know.