The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [13]
“I’m all right.”
“You know,” Julia said. “When your mother and father drowned, I literally thought I couldn’t stand it. I literally thought I’d one day just burst apart. The pain was terrible. Terrible. Losing a son is — it’s unimaginable until it happens. And I blamed your mother, Kathryn. I won’t pretend I didn’t. She and your father were lethal together when they were drinking, horribly careless and dangerous. But there you were, bewildered by the loss of these parents you hadn’t even properly had. That’s what saved me, Kathryn. Saving you saved me. Having to take care of you. I had to stop asking why Bobby had died. I just had to stop asking. There was no why. And there isn’t now.”
Kathryn laid her head on the mattress. Julia began to stroke her hair.
“You loved him. I know you did,” Julia said.
Kathryn left Mattie’s room and walked into the bathroom. In the shower, she turned on the water as hot as she could stand it and let it run over her body without moving. Her eyes were swollen and ached from crying. Her head felt heavy. She’d had to blow her nose so many times the skin between her nose and upper lip stung. She’d had a headache since early morning and had been swallowing Advil tablets without counting. She imagined her blood thinning out and draining away with the water from the shower.
There will be many days like this, Robert had said earlier. Not quite as bad, but bad.
She could not imagine surviving another day like the one she had just been through.
She could not remember the sequence of things. What had happened first or second or third. What had happened in the morning or in the afternoon, or later in the morning or earlier in the afternoon. There were bulletins on the TV, newscasters who spoke words that made her stomach kick and contract when she heard them: Downed after taking off . . . Baby clothes and a floating seat ...Tragedy in the... Ninety seconds for the wreckage . . . Shock and grief on both sides of the . . . The fifteen-year-old T-900 . . . Debris spread over . . . The continuing story of Vision Flight 384 . . . Reports indicate that . . . Early morning businessman’s . . . The jointly-owned British and American airline... Gathering at the airport . . . FAA maintenance inspection . . . Speculation that a massive . . .
And then there were the images Kathryn doubted would ever leave her. A girl’s high school yearbook photo that filled the screen; a vast plain of ocean with a helicopter hovering and flipping white slivers from the tops of the waves; a mother who held her arms out, palms pushing the air, as though she could ward off an unwanted flow of words. Men in complex diving gear, anxiously peering over the edge of a boat; relatives at the airport, scanning a manifest. And then, immediately after the footage of the relatives, three still photographs appeared, one above another, three men in uniform and in formal poses, with their names written underneath. Kathryn hadn’t ever seen that particular picture of Jack, could not imagine for what purpose it had been taken. Not for this eventuality, surely. Not just in case. But whenever else did a pilot’s face appear on the news? she wondered.
All day, Robert had told her not to watch. The pictures would stay with her, he had warned, the images would not leave. It was better not to see, not to have them, for they would come back, in the daytime and in her dreams.
It was unimaginable, he said to her.
Meaning, Don’t imagine it.
But how could she not? How could she stop the flow of detail, the flow of words and photographs in her mind?
Throughout the day, the phone had rung continuously. Most often Robert had answered it or given it to one of the people from the airline, but sometimes, when they were watching the bulletins, he let it ring, and she heard the voices on the answering machine. Tentative, inquiring voices from news organizations. The voices of friends and neighbors in town, calling to say how terrible it was (I can’t believe it was Jack. . . .), (If there is anything we can do . . .). The voice of an older woman from