The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [19]
“About what it’s like when you get to the house.”
He scratched the back of his neck. He was not tall, but he gave the impression of height, even when sitting down. She imagined him as a runner.
“Kathryn, this is . . .”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“It helps.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“How would you know?” she asked sharply. “Are we all the same, the wives? Do we all react the same?”
She could hear the anger in her voice, an anger that had been there sporadically throughout the day. Bubbles of anger rising to the surface of a liquid and then popping. She sat down again at the table, across from him.
“Of course not,” he said.
“What if it isn’t true?” she asked. “What if you got the news and told the wife and found out later it wasn’t true?”
“That doesn’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“I spend a fair amount of time standing at the end of driveways with a cell phone in my hand, waiting for absolute confirmation. You may find this hard to believe, but I don’t ever want to tell a woman her husband has died if in fact he has not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought that was banned.”
She smiled.
“Do you mind these questions?” she asked.
“I’m concerned about why you’re asking them, but no, I don’t mind.”
“Then let me ask you this: What are you afraid I’ll say to the press?”
He loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. “A pilot’s wife is naturally very distraught. If she says something, and the press is there to hear it, it goes on the record. A new widow, for example, might say that her husband had been complaining about the mechanics recently. Or she might blurt out, I knew this would happen. He said the airline was cutting corners on crew training.”
“Well, wouldn’t that be OK? If it was true?”
“People say things when they’re distraught they wouldn’t say later. Things they sometimes don’t mean at all. But if it becomes part of the record, there’s no backing away from it.”
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Thirty-eight.”
“Jack was forty-nine.”
“I know.”
“While you’re waiting, you know, for a crash, what do you do?”
“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” he said, shifting in his chair. “I don’t wait around for a crash. I have other responsibilities.”
“Such as?”
“I study the crash investigations pretty closely. I do a lot of follow-up with the pilots’ families. How old is this house?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Yes, I am.”
“It was built in the 1860s. As a convent originally. A kind of retreat.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you. It needs work. It always needs work. It falls down faster than we can repair it.”
She heard the we.
There was never anything not to love about the house, which seemed constantly to change, depending on the light, the seasons, the color of the water, the temperature of the air. Even its eccentricities Kathryn had come to appreciate: the sloping floors in the bedrooms; the shallow closets that had been designed for nuns’ habits; the windows with the old-fashioned storms that had to be painstakingly put up each fall and taken off each spring (Jack discovering that, like snowflakes, no two were precisely alike, so, until he learned to label each window, the task was like that of fitting puzzle pieces together while standing on a ladder), but which when cleaned were beautiful, lovely objects simply in themselves. Indeed, it was sometimes an effort to pull away from the view through those windows when there were chores at hand. Kathryn had often sat in the long front room and allowed herself to daydream. She’d daydreamed particularly about how easy it would be, in such a house, on such a piece of geography, to retreat from the world, to take up an existence that was solitary and contemplative, not unlike the vocation of the house’s earliest inhabitants: the Sisters of the Order of Saint Jean de Baptiste de Bienfaisance, twenty nuns ranging in age from nineteen to eighty-two, wedded to Jesus and to poverty. Often, when she was in the front room, she imagined a long wooden refectory table with a bench set along one side so