The Pilot's Wife (8 page)

“Pilot error,” she said aloud, testing herself.

But it couldn’t be pilot error, she thought quickly. Would not, in the end, be pilot error.

She lay down on the bed, fully clothed. This would be her bed now, she was thinking. Her bed alone. All that room for only herself.

She glanced over at the bedside clock: 9:27.

Carefully — monitoring herself for seismic shifts — she reached down and pulled the top sheet over her. She imagined she could smell Jack in the flannel. It was possible — she hadn’t washed the sheets since he left on Tuesday. But she couldn’t trust her senses, didn’t know what was real or imagined. She looked over at Jack’s shirt flung over the chair. Kathryn had gotten into the habit, early in the marriage, of not bothering to tidy the house until just before Jack got home from a trip. Now, she knew, she would not want to remove the shirt from the chair. It might be days before she could touch it, could risk bringing it to her face, risk catching his smell in the weave of the cloth. And when all of the traces of Jack had been cleaned and put away, what would she be left with then?

She rolled onto her side, looking at the room in the moonlight. Through the small opening in the window, she could hear the water rolling.

She had a vivid image of Jack in the water, bumping along the sand at the bottom of the ocean.

She brought the flannel up over her mouth and nose and breathed slowly through it, thinking that might help to stop the panic. She thought of crawling into Mattie’s room and lying down on the floor next to Mattie and Julia. Had she really imagined she could spend this first night alone in the marriage bed?

She got up quickly from the bed and walked into the bathroom, where Robert had left the bottle of Valium. She took one tablet, then another just in case. She thought about taking a third. She sat on the edge of the bathtub until she began to feel swimmy.

She thought perhaps that she would lie down on the daybed in the spare room. But when she passed the door to Jack’s office, she saw that the light had been left on. She opened the door.

The office was over bright and colorless — white, metallic, plastic, gray. It was a room she seldom entered, an unappealing space with no curtains on the windows and metal file cabinets lining the walls. A masculine room.

She supposed it had its own order — an order known only to Jack. On the massive metal desk there were two computers, a keyboard, a fax, two phones, a scanner, coffee cups, dusty models of planes, a mug with red juice in it (Mattie’s, she guessed), and a blue clay pencil holder that Mattie had made for Jack when she was in second grade.

She looked at the fax machine with its blinking light.

She walked to the desk and sat down. Robert had been here earlier, using the phone and the fax. Kathryn opened the left-hand drawer. Inside were Jack’s logbooks, heavy, dark ones with vinyl bindings and smaller ones that fit into a shirt pocket. She saw a small flashlight, an ivory letter opener he had brought back years ago from Africa, handbooks for airplane types he no longer flew, a book on weather radar. A training video on wind shear. Epaulets from Santa Fe. Coasters that looked like flight instruments.

She closed the drawer and opened up the long middle drawer. She fingered a set of keys that she thought might be left over from the apartment in Santa Fe. She picked up a pair of old tortoiseshell reading glasses that Jack had run over with the Caravan. He insisted they still worked. There were boxes of paper clips, pens, pencils, elastic bands, thumbtacks, two batteries, a spark plug. She lifted a packet of Post-it notes and saw a sewing kit underneath from Marriott Hotels. She smiled at the sewing kit and kissed it.

She opened a larger file drawer on the right. It was intended for legal-size files, she saw, but in it was a stack of papers about a foot high. She took the pile out and put it on her lap. It was a random set of papers and had no order that she could see. There was a birthday card from Mattie, memos from the airline, a local phone book, a series of health insurance forms, a rough draft of a paper Mattie had written for school, a catalog of books about flying, a homemade valentine Kathryn had given him a year ago. She looked at the front of the card.
Valentine, I love what you do for my mind …
, the front of the card read. She opened it.

… And the things you do for my body
. She closed her eyes.

After a time, she propped the papers she had already looked through against her chest and continued to riffle through the rest. She discovered several of Jack’s bank statements clipped together. She and Jack had had separate accounts. She paid for the clothes for Mattie and herself, for food and other household items. Jack paid for everything else. Any money Jack saved, he had said, was going toward their retirement.

She was beginning to have trouble keeping her eyes open. She made an attempt to square the remaining papers in her lap and to set them back into the drawer. In the drawer, slightly stuck in the seam, was an unopened envelope, junk mail, yet another invitation to apply for a Visa card. Bay Bank, 9.9 percent. This was old, she thought.

She picked up the envelope and was about to toss it into the wastebasket when she saw writing on the back. Jack’s writing. Another remember list:
Call Ely Falls Pharmacy, Call Alex, Bank deposit, March expenses, Call Larry Johnson re taxes, Call Finn re Caravan.
Finn, she remembered, was the Dodge-Plymouth dealer in Ely Falls. They had bought the Caravan four years ago and hadn’t, to her knowledge, had any dealings with Tommy Finn since.

She turned the envelope around. At the other end of the blank side of the envelope was a note, also in Jack’s writing.
Muire 3:30
, it read.

Who was Muire? Kathryn wondered. Randall Muir from the bank? Had Jack been negotiating a loan?

Kathryn looked again at the front of the envelope. She checked the postmark. Definitely four years ago, she saw.

She put the stack of papers back into the drawer and shoved the drawer closed with her foot.

She was now longing to lie down. She left Jack’s office and walked into the spare room, her retreat. She lay back against the flowered spread, and within seconds she fell asleep.

She was wakened by voices — a shouting voice, nearly hysterical, and another voice, calmer, as though trying to make itself heard over the commotion.

Kathryn got up and opened the door, and the voices increased in volume. Mattie and Julia, she could hear, were downstairs in the front room.

They were kneeling on the floor when Kathryn got there, Julia in a flannel nightgown, Mattie in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. Around them was a grotesque garden of wrapping paper — balls and crumpled clusters of red, gold, plaid, blue, and silver interspersed with what seemed to be thousands of yards of colored ribbon.

Julia looked up from the doorway.

“She woke up and came downstairs,” Julia explained. “She was trying to wrap her presents.”

Mattie lowered herself to the floor and lay on the carpet in a fetal curl.

Kathryn lay down next to her daughter.

“I can’t stand it, Mom,” Mattie said. “Everywhere I look, he’s there. He’s in every room, in every chair, in the windows, in the wallpaper. I literally can’t stand it, Mom.”

“You were trying to wrap his present?” Kathryn asked, smoothing her daughter’s hair out of her face.

Mattie nodded and began to cry.

“I’m going to take her to my place,” Julia said. “What time is it?”

“Just after midnight. I’ll take her home and put her to bed,” Julia said.

“I’ll come, too,” Kathryn said.

“No,” Julia said. “You’re exhausted. You stay here and go back to bed. Mattie will be fine with me. She needs a change of scene, a neutral zone, a neutral bedroom.”

And Kathryn thought how appropriate that image was, for she had the distinct sense they were involved in a war, that they were all in danger of becoming battle casualties.

While Julia packed an overnight bag for Mattie, Kathryn lay down beside her daughter and rubbed her back. From time to time, Mattie shuddered convulsively. Kathryn sang a song she had made up when Mattie was a baby:
M is for Matigan
… , the song began.

After Julia and Mattie had left, Kathryn climbed back up to her bedroom. This time, feeling braver, she crawled between the flannel sheets.

She did not dream.

In the morning, she heard a dog barking.

There was something discordantly familiar about the dog barking.

And then she braced herself, the way she might do if she were stopped at a light and happened to look up in the rear-view mirror to see that the driver behind her was going too fast.

Robert’s hair was wet and freshly combed. She could see the comb lines near the widow’s peak. He had on a different shirt, a blue that was almost a denim, with a dark red tie. Second-day shirt, she thought idly.

A coffee cup was on the counter. He had his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and he was pacing.

She looked up at the clock: 6:40. Why was he there so early? she wondered.

When he saw her at the bottom of the stairs, he took his hands out of his pockets and walked toward her.

He put his hands on her shoulders.

“What?” she asked, alarmed.

“Do you know what the
CVR
is?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “The cockpit voice recorder.” “Well, they’ve found it.”

“And?”

He hesitated. Just a beat.

“They’re saying suicide,” he said.

H
E
WALKS
WITH
HIS
ARM
AROUND
HER
TOWARD
the planes, which seem too small, only toys that children might climb in and over and about. The heat, deep and roasting, radiates from the pavement. This is a masculine world, she thinks, with its odd bits of machinery, its briefing room, its tower. All around her there is metal, brilliant or dull in the sun’s glare.

He seems solicitous, but he walks briskly. The plane is pretty, with red and white markings. She takes his hand as she steps onto the wing, then crawls through the tiny opening into the cockpit, the size of which is immediately alarming. How could something as monumental as flight take place in such an unpre-possessing space? Flight, which has always seemed to Kathryn to be improbable, now seems clearly impossible, and she tells herself, as she has sometimes done when in a car with a bad driver or on a ride at a carnival, that this will be over soon and all she has to do is survive.

Jack hoists himself up on his side. He has on sunglasses with iridescent blue lenses. He tells her to buckle up and hands her headphones, which he explains will make it easier for them to talk to each other over the noise of the engine.

They bump along the pitted tarmac. The plane feels loose and wobbly. She wants to tell him to stop, that she has changed her mind. The plane gathers speed, the bouncing stops, and they are up.

Her heart fills her chest. Jack turns to her, his smile full of confidence and amusement, a smile that says, This will be fun, so just relax.

Before her is a vast expanse of blue. What happened to the ground? She has an image of a plane reaching a terrible height, tipping slightly, and then falling, as nature would demand it do. Beside her, Jack gestures toward the window.

— Take a look, he says.

They are over the coast, so high up the surf looks stationary. The ocean ripples back to a darker blue. Just inland from the coast, she can see dark fir trees, what seems like an entire country of fir trees. She spots a boat and its wake, a power plant up the coast. The dark stain of Portsmouth. The glistening bits of rock that are the Isles of Shoals. She looks for Ely, thinks she sees it, follows a road from town to Julia’s house.

He banks for a turn, and her hands jerk out to save herself. She wants to tell him to be careful, which immediately strikes her as inane. Of course he will be careful. Won’t he?

As if in answer, he angles the plane steeply up, an angle so sharp she thinks he must be testing the very laws of physics. She is certain they will fall from the sky. She calls out his name, but he is intent upon his instruments and doesn’t answer.

Gravity pins her against the back of her seat. They climb into a long, high loop, and for a second, at its apex, they are motionless, upside down, a speck suspended over the Atlantic. The plane dives then into a run out the other side of the loop. She screams and grabs for whatever she can reach. Jack glances over at her once quickly and puts the plane nearly vertical to the ground. She watches Jack at the controls, his calm movements, the concentration on his face. It amazes her that a man can make a plane do tricks — tricks with gravity, with physics, with fate.

And then the world is silent. As if surprised itself, the plane begins to fall. Not like a stone, but rather like a leaf, fluttering a bit and then dipping to the right. Heartsick, she glances at Jack. The plane begins then to spin crazily, its nose pointed toward the ground. She arches her back, unable even to scream.

When he pulls out of the spin, they are not a hundred feet from the water. She can see whitecaps, the twitching of a slightly agitated sea. Astonishing herself, she begins to cry.

— Are you OK? he asks quickly, seeing the tears. He puts his hand on her thigh. He shakes his head. — I never should have done that, he says. — I’m so sorry. I thought you would enjoy it.

She turns to look at him. She covers his hand with her own and takes a deep shuddering breath.

— That was thrilling, she says. And she means it.

I
T
WAS
FRIGID
IN
THE
CAR
.
KATHRYN
WAS
BARELY
ABLE
to hold onto the steering wheel, having left the house in a rush and forgotten her gloves. How cold was it out? she wondered. Fifteen? Twenty? Below a certain point, she thought, it didn’t seem to matter much. She felt the strain in her shoulders as she hunched forward, trying not to touch anything — not even the seat back — until the heat kicked in.