The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [14]
The divers, she knew, were searching for the flight data recorder and the CVR, the box with the last words. She was afraid of the divers’ finding the latter. It was the one news bulletin she knew she would not be able to bear — hearing Jack’s voice, the authority in it, the control, and then what? It seemed ghoulishly intrusive to record the last seconds of a man. Where else but on death row did they do that?
She stepped out of the shower, toweled herself off, and then realized, in the way a woman might absentmindedly get into a car and remember that she had forgotten her keys, that she had not used any soap or shampoo. She turned the water on again and stepped back in. There were spaces between her thoughts now — dead air, cotton fluff.
She stepped out of the shower for a second time, dried herself off, and looked quickly around her for her robe. The shirt and socks and leggings she had had on all day were strewn over the tile floor, but she had forgotten her robe. She looked at the back of the door.
Jack’s jeans were on a hook. Old jeans, faded in the knees. He would have worn these his last day home, she was thinking.
She pressed the jeans to her face. She breathed through the denim.
She took the jeans off the hook and laid them on the bathroom counter. She heard change in the pockets, the crinkle of papers. She reached into a back pocket and found a wad of papers, slightly curved, compacted from having been sat on. She extracted a fold of money from the papers, several ones and a twenty. There was a receipt from Ames, for an extension cord, a package of lightbulbs, a can of Right Guard. There was a pink dry-cleaning slip: six shirts, light starch, hangers. A receipt from Staples: printer cable and twelve pens. A receipt from the post office for a twenty-two-dollar purchase; stamps, she guessed, looking at it quickly. There was a business card: Barron Todd, Investments. Two lottery tickets. Lottery tickets? She hadn’t known that Jack had played the lottery. She looked at one of the tickets more closely. There was a faint note scribbled in pencil. M at A’s, it read. Followed by a series of numbers. Mattie at someone’s? But what did the numbers mean? There were a lot of them. Another lottery pick? And then, unfolding the dense wad more thoroughly, she saw that there were two pieces of white lined paper. On the first was written several lines from what looked like a poem, written in ink, real fountain-pen ink. It was Jack’s handwriting.
Here in the narrow passage and the pitiless north, perpetual
Betrayals, relentless resultless fighting.
A random fury of dirks in the dark: a struggle for survival
Of hungry blind cells of life in the womb.
Puzzled, she leaned against the wall. What poem was this, and what did it mean? she wondered. Why had Jack written it down?
She unfolded the second piece of lined paper. It was a remember list. Jack had made one every morning he’d been home. She read the items on the list: Extension cord, Call gutter, Mattie HP color printer, Bergdorf FedEx robe to arrive 20th.
Bergdorf. FedEx robe. To arrive 20th.
Bergdorf Goodman? The New York department store?
She tried to think, to remember the December calendar on the fridge. Today, despite its agonizing length, was still December 17. On the 20th, she was to have been in school, the last day before vacation. And Jack would have been home that day. Between trips.
Was this a reference to her Christmas present?
She gathered the papers in her hand, clutched them tightly. She leaned her back against the door and slid down its length.
Her exhaustion was bone deep. She could barely hold up her head.
THE CAR FILLS WITH OVERLY WARM AIR. HER stomach is so full from Julia’s Christmas dinner