The Pilot's Wife (31 page)

She had these moments often. She had them about Jack Lyons, about Muire Boland and about Robert Hart. She had them about airplanes, about anything Irish, about London. She had them about white shirts, and she had them about umbrellas. Even a glass of beer could trigger a splintery recollection. She had learned to live with them, like learning to live with a tic or a stutter or a bad knee that occasionally sent a jolt of pain through the body.

“Hello, Mattie,” Robert said when the girl had reached the porch. He said it in a friendly manner, but not overly so, which would have put Mattie on alert, made her even more uneasy than Kathryn could see she already was.

And Mattie, well brought up, said hello in return, but turned her head away.

“It’s a beauty,” Robert said.

Kathryn, considering Robert and her daughter in the same frame of her vision, said: “Mattie’s been teaching herself to fish.”

“It’s thirty-four, thirty-five?” Robert asked.

“Thirty-six,” Mattie said, and not without a note of pride. Mattie took the tackle box from her mother. “I’ll do it over here,” she said, pointing to a corner of the porch floor.

“As long as you hose it down afterward,” Kathryn answered. She watched as Mattie laid the fish at the porch’s edge. The girl studied the gills from different angles, then took a knife from the tackle box. She made an experimental cut. Kathryn hoped the fish was dead.

Robert walked to the other end of the porch. He would want to talk, she thought.

“This is beautiful,” Robert said when she had drifted in his direction. He turned and leaned against the railing. He meant the view. She could see his face now, and she thought it looked sharper than she remembered it, more defined. Which would be the color, the tan. “I’ve imagined this,” he added.

Both simultaneously hearing the painful reminder of things imagined.

Robert’s legs were also tanned and had tiny golden hairs. Kathryn thought she had probably never seen his legs before. Hers were bare, too, which he took in.

“How is she?” he asked, his gaze as she remembered it: intent and acute. Observant.

“Better,” Kathryn said quietly so that Mattie couldn’t hear. “Better. It was a rough spring.”

For weeks, she and Mattie had borne the brunt of a collective anger.
If Jack hadn’t been involved
… , some said.
It was your father who carried the bomb
… , others said. There had been threatening calls from strangers, anguished letters from relatives, a platoon of reporters at her gate. Simply driving to work had occasionally been harrowing, but Kathryn had refused to leave her home. She’d had to ask the Town of Ely to post a security detail on her property. The selectmen had called a town meeting, put it to a vote, and the unusual appropriation, after much debate, was inserted into the budget. It was listed under a section called Acts of God.

The need for security had abated with the passing months, but Kathryn knew that neither she nor Mattie would ever recover a normal life. This was now a fact, a given, of their existence with which they struggled daily to come to terms. She thought of Robert’s comment about the children of crash victims:
They mutate with disaster and make accommodations
.

“And how are you?” he asked.

“I’m all right,” she said.

He turned, put a hand on a post, and surveyed the lawn and the garden.

“You grow roses,” he said.

“I try.”

“They look good.”

“It’s a fool’s enterprise near the ocean,” she said.

In the arch of the garden, she had buff Friars and thorny Wenlocks; in the oblong were the Cressidas and Prosperos. She thought she liked the St. Cecilias best, however, for their shameless blush centers. They were easy to grow despite the sea air. Kathryn liked extravagance in flowers, wasteful luxury.

“I should have told you the very first day,” he said, and she was unprepared for this so soon. “And then later, I knew that if I told you, I would lose you.”

She was silent.

“I made the wrong decision,” he said.

“You tried to tell me.”

“I didn’t try hard enough.”

And there, it was said. It was done.

“Sometimes I can’t believe any of it happened,” Kathryn said. “If we’d found them sooner, it might not have happened.” Found Jack and Muire sooner, was what he meant.

“The bomb was supposed to go off in the middle of the Atlantic, wasn’t it?” she asked. “Meant to go off where there would be little evidence.”

“We think so.”

“Why didn’t they just call in right away and say the
IRA
had done it?”

“They couldn’t. There are codes between the
IRA
and the police.”

“So they simply waited for the investigation to find its way to Muire and Jack.”

“Like a long fuse.”

Kathryn took a deep and audible breath.

“Where is she?”

“The Maze,” he said. “In Belfast. Ironically, the Loyalist terrorists are there as well.”

“You suspected Jack?”

“We knew it might be someone with that route.”

She wondered, and not for the first time, if a woman could forgive a man who’d betrayed her. And if she did, was that an affirmation? Or was it merely foolishness?

“Are you over the worst of it?” Robert asked.

She fingered a mosquito bite on her arm. The light was clarifying itself, sharpening in the sunset.

“The worst is that I can’t grieve,” Kathryn said. “How can I grieve for someone I may not even have known? Who wasn’t the person I thought he was? He’s gutted my memories.”

“Grieve for Mattie’s father,” Robert said, and she saw that he had thought about this.

Kathryn watched Mattie make a serious cut from behind a gill to the backbone.

“I couldn’t stay away,” Robert said. “I had to come.”

She realized that Robert, too, had gambled. As she was doing now with Mattie. Not revealing something when she might.

And then, turning slightly, so that she saw her garden from the porch’s edge, so that she was looking down upon it as she seldom did — or perhaps it was only this year’s particular configuration of roses — she saw it.

“There it is,” she said quietly.

Mattie, hearing the hushed surprise in her mother’s voice, glanced up from her surgery, scalpel in her hand.

“The chapel,” Kathryn said, explaining.

“What?” Mattie asked, mildly bewildered.

“The garden. The arch there. The shape. That marble thing I thought all this time was a bench? It’s not a bench at all.”

Mattie studied the garden for a moment, seeing, Kathryn knew, only a garden.

Whereas Kathryn could see the Sisters of the Order of Saint Jean de Baptiste de Bienfaisance kneeling in their summer-white habits. In a chapel made of wood in the shape of an arched window. A chapel that had perhaps burned down, leaving only the marble altar.

She walked closer to the garden.

Seeing things for what they were, she thought. And had been.

“I’ll get us something to drink,” she said to Robert, privately pleased with her discovery.

She walked into the front room, meaning to continue into the kitchen, to put iced tea into glasses, to cut a lemon into slices, but she instead paused to look out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. In the frame of the window, Mattie struggled with the fish, and Robert watched her from the railing. He might have shown her how to angle the knife, but these were Jack’s tools, and Kathryn knew that Robert would bide his time.

She thought about Muire Boland in a prison in Northern Ireland. About Jack, whose body had never been found. She thought it might be easier to bear if she could say that it had been his mother’s leaving him when he was a boy, or his father’s brutality. Or that it had been the influence of a priest at Holy Name, or the Vietnam War, or middle age, or boredom with the airline. Or a search for meaning in his life. Or a desire to share risk with a woman he loved. But she knew it might be all of those reasons or none of them. Jack’s motivation, which would always remain unknown to Kathryn, was made up of bits of all his motivations, a baffling mosaic.

She found the piece of paper where she had recently left it, tucked under the clock on the mantelpiece. She had thought, some weeks ago, that she might do this.

She unfolded the lottery ticket.

On the porch, Mattie lifted up a fillet and slid it into a plastic bag that Robert held open for her. In London, there was a silence, as Kathryn had known there would be.

“I just wanted to know if the children are all right,” she said across the sea.

A
nita Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction in 1998. She is the author of five previous novels:
The Weight of Water, Resistance, Where or When, Strange Fits of Passion,
and
Eden Close