The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [12]
Julia stirred.
“Hi,” Kathryn whispered, so as not to wake Mattie. “How is she?”
“I hope she sleeps all night,” Julia said, rubbing an eye. “Robert’s still here?”
“Yes.”
“He’s going to stay?”
“I don’t know. No. I imagine he’ll go to the inn with the others.”
Kathryn wanted to lie down with her grandmother and her daughter. Periodically throughout the day, she’d felt the strength in her thighs giving out and had been overwhelmed with the need to sit down. There was a hierarchy at work here, she thought. In Kathryn’s presence, Mattie could be a child. In Julia’s presence, Kathryn found herself wanting Julia’s solace and embrace.
Downstairs, on a table in the hallway, there was a photograph of Julia, an evocative photograph from another era. In the picture, Julia had on a narrow, dark skirt that fell just below the knees, a white blouse, and a short cardigan sweater. There were pearls at her throat. She was long waisted and thin, and her glossy black hair was parted to one side. Her features were strong, what people meant when they said a handsome woman. In the photograph, Julia was sitting on a sofa, leaning forward to reach for something out of the frame. In her other hand she was holding a cigarette in the sort of pose that had once made cigarette smoking seductive: the cigarette held casually in slender fingers, the smoke curling around the throat and chin. The woman in the photograph was perhaps twenty years old.
Now Julia was seventy-eight and wore baggy jeans that were always slightly too short, loose sweaters that attempted to camouflage a prominent stomach. There was no longer any trace of the young woman with the glossy hair and slender waist in the woman with the thinning silver hair who was now with Mattie. Perhaps in the eyes there was a resemblance, but even there time had destroyed beauty. Julia’s eyes were sometimes watery now and had lost nearly all their lashes. No matter how often Kathryn observed the phenomenon, she found it hard to comprehend: the way nothing could remain as it had been, not a house that was falling down, not a woman’s face that had once been beautiful, not childhood, not a marriage, not love.
“I can’t explain it,” Kathryn said. “I feel as though I’ve temporarily lost Jack and I need to find him.”
“You’re not going to find him,” Julia said. “He’s gone.”
“I know, I know.”
“He didn’t suffer.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Mr. Hart was pretty sure.”
“No one knows anything yet. It’s all rumor and speculation.” “You should get out of here, Kathryn,” Julia said. “It’s a madhouse at the end of your driveway. I don’t want to frighten you, but they’ve had to bring back Charlie and Burt to help keep everyone away from the gate.”
Behind Kathryn, a cold slice of air slid through the crack of the opened window, and she breathed it in deeply, smelling the salt. She hadn’t been outside all day except to bring Mattie back inside.
“I don’t know how long this will take to die down,” Julia said. “Robert says it may take a while.”
Kathryn inhaled deeply. It was like breathing in ammonia the way the air cleared the head, sharpened the senses.
“No one can help you with this, Kathryn. It’s something you have to do by yourself. You know that, don’t you?”
Kathryn briefly closed her eyes.
“Kathryn?”
“I loved him,” Kathryn said.
“I know you did. I know you did. I loved him, too. We all loved him.”
“Why did this happen?”
“Forget the why,” Julia said. “There is no why. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help. It’s done, and it can’t be undone.”
“I’m . . .”
“You’re exhausted. Go