The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [103]
“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,