The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [0]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, 1998 First Back Bay paperback edition, 1999
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Excerpt from “Antrim” by Robinson Jeffers from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Three Volumes, edited by Tim Hunt. Reprinted with the permission of the publishers, Stanford University Press. Copyright © 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
First eBook Edition: July 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-02567-6
Book design by Julia Sedykh
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
TWO
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
THREE
Chapter 21
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY ANITA SHREVE
The Weight of Water
Resistance
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
For Christopher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is an entirely fictional story about a woman whose husband goes down with his plane. The characters are not drawn from life and do not resemble anyone I know or have ever heard about.
I would like to thank the following people at Little, Brown and Company: my editor, Michael Pietsch, for his sharp eye, his love of editing, and his quiet wisdom; my publicist, Jen Marshall, for the ease with which she appears to be able to solve any problem that comes her way; and Betsy Uhrig, for the clarity and care she brought to the task of copyediting this book.
I would like to thank as well my daughter, Katherine Clemans, for helping to shape the portrait of Mattie; Alan Samson of Little, Brown and Company, U.K., for reading the manuscript and for his continuing support; and Gary DeLong, for sharing with me details about the harsh reality of the grieving process.
As ever, I am grateful to John Osborn, who always has first look at any manuscript and who consistently manages to steer me ever so gently in the right direction.
And finally, though certainly not least — indeed, she is the linchpin of all my books — I would like to thank my agent and friend, Ginger Barber, for her excellent criticism and unwavering graciousness.
one
SHE HEARD A KNOCKING, AND THEN A DOG BARKING. Her dream left her, skittering behind a closing door. It had been a good dream, warm and close, and she minded. She fought the waking. It was dark in the small bedroom, with no light yet behind the shades. She reached for the lamp, fumbled her way up the brass, and she was thinking, What? What?
The lit room alarmed her, the wrongness of it, like an emergency room at midnight. She thought, in quick succession: Mattie. Then, Jack. Then, Neighbor. Then, Car accident. But Mattie was in bed, wasn’t she? Kathryn had seen her to bed, had watched her walk down the hall and through a door, the door shutting with a firmness that was just short of a slam, enough to make a statement but not provoke a reprimand. And Jack — where was Jack? She scratched the sides of her head, raking out her sleep-flattened hair. Jack was — where? She tried to remember the schedule: London. Due home around lunchtime. She was certain. Or did she have it wrong and had he forgotten his keys again?
She sat up and put her feet on the freezing floorboards. She had never understood why the wood of an old house lost its warmth so completely in the winter. Her black leggings had ridden up to the middle of her calves, and the cuffs of the shirt she had slept in, a worn white shirt