The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [104]
“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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anita 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
. . . AND HER MOST RECENT NOVEL
In January 2000, Little, Brown and Company will publish
Fortune’s Rocks.
Following is a preview.
IN THE TIME IT TAKES FOR HER TO WALK FROM THE bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune’s Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire. Desire that slows