The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [24]
“Pilot error,” she said aloud, testing herself.
But it couldn’t be pilot error, she thought quickly. Would not, in the end, be pilot error.
She lay down on the bed, fully clothed. This would be her bed now, she was thinking. Her bed alone. All that room for only herself.
She glanced over at the bedside clock: 9:27.
Carefully — monitoring herself for seismic shifts — she reached down and pulled the top sheet over her. She imagined she could smell Jack in the flannel. It was possible — she hadn’t washed the sheets since he left on Tuesday. But she couldn’t trust her senses, didn’t know what was real or imagined. She looked over at Jack’s shirt flung over the chair. Kathryn had gotten into the habit, early in the marriage, of not bothering to tidy the house until just before Jack got home from a trip. Now, she knew, she would not want to remove the shirt from the chair. It might be days before she could touch it, could risk bringing it to her face, risk catching his smell in the weave of the cloth. And when all of the traces of Jack had been cleaned and put away, what would she be left with then?
She rolled onto her side, looking at the room in the moonlight. Through the small opening in the window, she could hear the water rolling.
She had a vivid image of Jack in the water, bumping along the sand at the bottom of the ocean.
She brought the flannel up over her mouth and nose and breathed slowly through it, thinking that might help to stop the panic. She thought of crawling into Mattie’s room and lying down on the floor next to Mattie and Julia. Had she really imagined she could spend this first night alone in the marriage bed?
She got up quickly from the bed and walked into the bathroom, where Robert had left the bottle of Valium. She took one tablet, then another just in case. She thought about taking a third. She sat on the edge of the bathtub until she began to feel swimmy.
She thought perhaps that she would lie down on the daybed in the spare room. But when she passed the door to Jack’s office, she saw that the light had been left on. She opened the door.
The office was over bright and colorless — white, metallic, plastic, gray. It was a room she seldom entered, an unappealing space with no curtains on the windows and metal file cabinets lining the walls. A masculine room.
She supposed it had its own order — an order known only to Jack. On the massive metal desk there were two computers, a keyboard, a fax, two phones, a scanner, coffee cups, dusty models of planes, a mug with red juice in it (Mattie’s, she guessed), and a blue clay pencil holder that Mattie had made for Jack when she was in second grade.
She looked at the fax machine with its blinking light.
She walked to the desk and sat down. Robert had been here earlier, using the phone and the fax. Kathryn opened the left-hand drawer. Inside were Jack’s logbooks, heavy, dark ones with vinyl bindings and smaller ones that fit into a shirt pocket. She saw a small flashlight, an ivory letter opener he had brought back years ago from Africa, handbooks for airplane types he no longer flew, a book on weather radar. A training video on wind shear. Epaulets from Santa Fe. Coasters that looked like flight instruments.
She closed the drawer and opened up the long middle drawer. She fingered a set of keys that she thought might be left over from the apartment in Santa Fe. She picked up a pair of old tortoiseshell reading glasses that Jack had run over with the Caravan. He insisted they still worked. There were boxes of paper clips, pens, pencils, elastic bands, thumbtacks, two batteries, a spark plug. She lifted a packet of Post-it