The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [27]
As if in answer, he angles the plane steeply up, an angle so sharp she thinks he must be testing the very laws of physics. She is certain they will fall from the sky. She calls out his name, but he is intent upon his instruments and doesn’t answer.
Gravity pins her against the back of her seat. They climb into a long, high loop, and for a second, at its apex, they are motionless, upside down, a speck suspended over the Atlantic. The plane dives then into a run out the other side of the loop. She screams and grabs for whatever she can reach. Jack glances over at her once quickly and puts the plane nearly vertical to the ground. She watches Jack at the controls, his calm movements, the concentration on his face. It amazes her that a man can make a plane do tricks — tricks with gravity, with physics, with fate.
And then the world is silent. As if surprised itself, the plane begins to fall. Not like a stone, but rather like a leaf, fluttering a bit and then dipping to the right. Heartsick, she glances at Jack. The plane begins then to spin crazily, its nose pointed toward the ground. She arches her back, unable even to scream.
When he pulls out of the spin, they are not a hundred feet from the water. She can see whitecaps, the twitching of a slightly agitated sea. Astonishing herself, she begins to cry.
— Are you OK? he asks quickly, seeing the tears. He puts his hand on her thigh. He shakes his head. — I never should have done that, he says. — I’m so sorry. I thought you would enjoy it.
She turns to look at him. She covers his hand with her own and takes a deep shuddering breath.
— That was thrilling, she says. And she means it.
IT WAS FRIGID IN THE CAR. KATHRYN WAS BARELY ABLE to hold onto the steering wheel, having left the house in a rush and forgotten her gloves. How cold was it out? she wondered. Fifteen? Twenty? Below a certain point, she thought, it didn’t seem to matter much. She felt the strain in her shoulders as she hunched forward, trying not to touch anything — not even the seat back — until the heat kicked in.
In the wake of Robert’s news — which he insisted Kathryn must absolutely refuse to credit — she had wanted only to be with Mattie. As Kathryn stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking at Robert’s face, the desire for her daughter had overwhelmed her, filling her up as quickly as water rushing into a jar. Still in the clothes she had slept in, she had brushed past Robert and nearly simultaneously slipped her arms into her parka, stepped into her boots, and unhooked the keys by the back door. In the Caravan, she had rattled down the long drive, sped past several men who were running toward the gate, and for almost a mile had had the speedometer at nearly sixty. And then she’d skidded badly in a turn and come to rest on a sandy shoulder on the road from Fortune’s Rocks into Ely. She put her forehead silently against the steering wheel.
It couldn’t be suicide, Kathryn thought. Suicide was absolutely impossible. It was unimaginable. Unthinkable. Out of the question.
How long she sat there, she didn’t know, perhaps ten minutes. And then she started out again, this time at a slower pace and with an odd sort of calm — a calm born of exhaustion, possibly, or simply a disguised numbness — descending upon her. She would get to Mattie, she told herself, and it wouldn’t be true what was being said about Jack.
The sun broke the horizon line, turning snowy lawns pink and criss-crossing them with the long blue shadows of trees and cars. The town was still, though occasionally Kathryn could see exhaust rising in billows from cars left running in driveways so that the owners could defrost the windshields and bear to sit on the upholstery. Along the eaves of some of the houses were strings of colored lights, and she saw numerous Christmas trees in front windows. She passed a blue-shingled cape with an outline of gaudy colored bulbs at the picture window. The auto-parts-store-look, Jack had once commented as they’d driven by.
Once commented. Had commented. Won’t ever comment again. The envelope of time,