The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [23]
“I used to think about that, too,” Robert said. “I think every pilot probably does at one time or another.”
“The company had grown too fast, Jack said. It had become too impersonal, and he hardly knew any of the crew he flew with. A lot of the pilots were British and lived in London. Also, he missed the hands-on flying he’d known earlier. He wanted to be able to feel the plane again. For a while, we got brochures for strange-looking stunt planes in the mail, and he even went so far as to ask me one morning if I’d be willing to go with him to Boulder, where there was a woman who was selling her school. And of course I had to say yes, because he’d once done it for me, and I remember being worried about how unhappy he was and thinking perhaps he really did need a change. Although I was relieved when the subject finally drifted off the screen. After that, there wasn’t any more talk of leaving the airline.”
“This was five years ago?”
“About. I’m no good with time. I know that getting the Boston-Heathrow route helped,” she said. “I guess I was just so glad the crisis was over, I didn’t dare raise the subject again by asking about it. I wish I had now.”
“After that, he didn’t seem depressed anymore?” Robert asked. “No. Not really.”
She thought that it would be impossible to say with any certainty what accommodations Jack had made inside himself. He had seemed to put his discontent into the same place he had put his childhood — a sealed vault.
“You look tired,” she said to Robert.
“I am.”
“You probably should go now,” she said.
He was silent. He didn’t move.
“What does she look like?” she asked. “Your wife, I mean. Ex-wife.”
“She’s your age. Tall. Short dark hair. Very pretty.”
“I trusted him not to die,” Kathryn said. “I feel like I’ve been cheated. Does that sound terrible? After all, he died, and I didn’t. He may have suffered. I know he suffered, if only for seconds.”
“You’re suffering now.”
“It’s not the same.”
“You have been cheated,” he said. “Both you and your daughter.”
At the mention of her daughter, Kathryn’s throat tightened. She put her hands in front of her face, as if to tell him not to say anything else.
“You have to let this happen to you,” he said quietly. “It has its own momentum.”
“It’s like a train rolling over me,” she said. “A train that doesn’t stop.”
“I want to help you, but there isn’t a lot I can do except watch,” Robert said. “Grief is messy. There’s nothing good about it.”
She put her head down on the table and shut her eyes.
“We have to have a funeral, don’t we?” she asked.
“We can talk about that tomorrow.”
“But what if there’s no body?”
“What religion are you?” he asked.
“I’m nothing. I used to be Methodist. Julia is a Methodist.” “What was Jack?”
“Catholic. But he was nothing, too. We didn’t belong to a church. We weren’t married in a church.”
She felt Robert’s fingers touch the top of her hair. Lightly. Quickly.
“I’m going now,” he said.
When Robert was gone, Kathryn sat for a minute by herself and then got up and walked through the downstairs rooms of the house, turning out lights. She wondered what precisely was meant by pilot error. A left turn when a right was called for? A miscalculation of fuel? Directions not followed? A switch accidentally flipped? In what other job could a man make a mistake and kill 103 other people? A train engineer? A bus driver? Someone who worked with chemicals, with nuclear waste?
It couldn’t be pilot error, she said to herself. For Mattie’s sake, it couldn’t.
She stood for a long time at the top of the stairs, then turned down the hallway.
It was cold in the bedroom. The door had been shut all day. She let her eyes adjust to the dark. The bed was unmade, just as she had left it at 3:24 in the morning.
She circled the bed and looked at it, the way an animal might do — wary and considering. She pulled back the comforter and top sheet and studied the fitted sheet in the moonlight. It was cream-colored, flannel for the winter. How many times had Jack and she made love on that bed? she wondered.