The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [102]
She moved the six or seven steps to the door as if in a trance, and opened it.
He leaned against the door frame with his hands in his pockets. He had on a white T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He’d cut his hair, she saw, and had some color. Beyond that, she couldn’t make out much because the sun was behind him. She could feel him there, however, in the curious mix of determination and resignation that seemed to emanate from his body. She thought he must be waiting for her to shut the door or to ask him to leave or to demand of him, curtly, what it was that he expected from her now.
The air seemed crowded between them.
“Has enough time passed?” he asked.
And she wondered, as she stood there, exactly how much time would be enough.
“Mattie has a fish,” she said, coming to, remembering. “I’ve got to get the camera.”
She found the camera where she thought it was. She put a hand to her forehead as she passed through the house. Her skin was hot to the touch and abrasive with layers of beach sand and sea salt. Earlier, she and Mattie had gone bodysurfing, crawling from the undertow on their hands and knees like two shipwrecked sailors.
She crossed the lawn again, preoccupied now with the man she’d left in the doorway. She wondered, briefly, if she had dreamt him there, only imagined that he stood backlit by the sun. She took a dozen pictures of her daughter and the fish, wanting to prolong the moment, to give herself some time. Only when Mattie grew impatient did Kathryn put the camera around her neck and help Mattie haul the equipment and the fish to the porch.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked Mattie, referring to the filleting of the fish. But Kathryn thought it was a question she might well have asked herself.
“I want to try,” Mattie said.
Mattie had the keener sight and saw the man on the porch just before her mother did. The girl stopped and lowered her fish slightly. Her eyes flickered with a warning, the memory of a bad dream.
The messenger, Kathryn thought.
“It’s OK,” she said quietly to her daughter. “He’s just come.” The woman and the girl crossed the lawn together, walking in from fishing as countless others had done before them, the parent carrying the rod, the child carrying the trophy, the first of many fish caught in a lifetime. Last week, Mattie had found Jack’s fishing pole and tackle in the garage and had methodically set out to recall what Jack had taught her the previous summer. Kathryn had not been able to help her much, never having liked fishing herself. But Mattie was determined and had learned to manage the oversized equipment, developing some skill along the way.
The wind shifted to the east, and immediately Kathryn felt the faint chill in the air that came with an east wind. In a few minutes, there would be whitecaps on the ocean. She thought of Jack then, as she always did, and she knew that she would never again experience an east wind without remembering the day she had stood on the porch, the day Jack had told her of the offer on the house. It was one of hundreds of triggers, small moments: There it is again, the east wind.
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