The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [17]
— We’ll have our own home now, he says. — You’ll be on the water. You’ve always wanted to be. Mattie will go to school here. You’ll get a teaching job when you finish your degree. Julia is excited that you — we — will be near her.
Kathryn nods slowly.
He lifts the hair off her neck and runs his tongue along the top of her spine and into her hairline. She shivers with the sensation, as she is meant to do, and sets her champagne upon the windowsill. She leans forward and braces herself against the frame of the window. In the glass, she can see a faint reflection of the two of them.
“I WISH YOU’D EAT SOMETHING.” Across the table, Robert Hart was finishing the last of a bowl of chili.
“I can’t,” she said. She studied his empty bowl. “But you were hungry.”
He nudged the bowl to one side.
It was late, and Kathryn had no clear idea what time it was. Upstairs, Mattie and Julia were still asleep. In front of Kathryn, in addition to the chili, there was a loaf of garlic bread and a salad and a cup of lukewarm tea. Earlier, she had made an effort to dip the bread into the chili and taste it, but her throat had refused to swallow. She had on clean clothes — jeans and a navy sweater, ragg socks, a pair of leather boots. Her hair was still wet. She knew her eyes and nose and mouth were swollen. She thought she had probably cried more on the floor of the bathroom than at any other time during the day. Possibly her life. She felt drained, emptied, simply from the crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?” she asked. “For eating?”
He shrugged. “For all of it.”
“Your job is unimaginable,” she said suddenly. “Why do you do it?”
He seemed startled by the question.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked. “I could go outside, if you’d rather.”
Jack had hated smokers, couldn’t tolerate being in a room with them.
“It’s fifteen degrees out there,” she said. “Of course you can smoke in here.”
She watched as he turned and reached into his jacket on the back of the chair for a pack of cigarettes.
He sat with his elbows on the table, his hands folded under his chin. The smoke curled in front of his face.
He gestured with his cigarette.
“AA,” he said.
She nodded.
“Why do I do it?” he asked, clearing his throat nervously. “For the money, I suppose.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Truthfully?”
“Truthfully.”
“I suppose I’m drawn to moments of intensity,” he said. “In the range of human experience.”
She was silent. Aware for the first time that there was music in the background. Art Tatum. While she had been in the shower, Robert must have put on a CD.
“That’s fair,” she said.
“I like watching people mend,” he added. “Do they? Mend?” she asked.
“Given enough time, the women usually do. Unfortunately . . .” He stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sick of people saying they’re sorry. Really, I am.” “Children don’t heal as well,” he said slowly. “They say that children are resilient, but they’re not. They change...they mutate with disaster and make accommodations. I hardly ever see grief-stricken men because not too many women are pilots. And when I do see men, they’re fathers, and they’re angry, which is another story.”
“I’ll bet they’re angry,” Kathryn said.
She thought of Jack as a father and how insane with rage and grief he’d have been if it had been Mattie on the plane. Jack and Mattie had been close. With Jack, there had seldom been any of the whining or bristling that had sometimes characterized Mattie’s exchanges with Kathryn. For Jack, the givens, the parameters, had been different right from the beginning: They weren’t as fraught.
Soon after the three of them had moved to Ely, when Mattie was in kindergarten, Jack had “hired” her as his assistant while he worked on the house — painting, scraping, fixing broken windows. He talked to her continuously. He taught her to ski and