The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [31]
“Am I going to go to school?” Mattie asked.
“Not till after vacation,” Kathryn said.
Mattie’s face was pale, drawn, the skin gone a grainy white, as though she were operating on only half power. Between her eyes and at the edges of her nostrils were tiny little pimples on bits of reddened skin. She sat hunched over the now unframed toast, pondering the unappetizing cold square on the plate.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Kathryn said.
Mattie shrugged. The one-shoulder shrug — more dismissive than the two-shoulder shrug.
On the kitchen door, up behind Mattie, was a quilted Christmas tree that had been bought at a church Christmas fair years ago and was taken out of its box in the attic each year in early December. Julia didn’t put a lot of decorations up, but she was resolutely faithful: Whatever had been out the year before came out again.
Christmas. A subject Kathryn didn’t want to think about hovered at the edges of her brain, like a dull headache.
She stood up.
“Put your jacket on,” she said to Mattie.
The cold cleared her head, made her body want to move faster. Beyond the stone house, the road became a dirt path and wound up Ely Mountain. It was a modest slope, a graceful landscape of dark pines, abandoned apple orchards, and fields of blueberry bushes. In the late 1980s, a developer had thought to build a set of luxury condos near the summit, and had even cleared a portion of the land and dug a foundation. But the man’s timing had been disastrous, and he’d had to declare bankruptcy six months into a recession that had blanketed and nearly smothered all of New Hampshire. Low scrub now filled the vacant lot, but the abandoned foundation, with its first layer of flooring, gave a stunning view of Ely and Ely Falls to the west, and indeed of the entire valley.
Mattie wasn’t wearing a hat. She walked with her fists pushed hard into the pockets of her shiny black quilted jacket, which was unzipped. Kathryn had long ago given up telling Mattie to zip up her jacket or put on a hat. Sometimes, when Kathryn walked out of the high school after work, she would be amazed to see the girls standing at the curb in forty-degree weather with only unbuttoned flannel shirts over their T-shirts.
“Mom, there’s Christmas,” Mattie said.
“I know.”
“What are we going to do?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Not do it. I don’t know. Do it, I guess. I don’t know.”
“Why don’t we just wait a few days and see.”
“Oh, Mom!”
Mattie stopped short, dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and began to shake uncontrollably. Kathryn put her arms around Mattie, but she wrenched herself away from her mother.
“Oh, God. Mom. Last night when I got out his present...” Mattie was crying hard now. Kathryn sensed that her daughter was too raw, too flayed to be touched again, a hair’s breadth from spiraling herself into a frenzy.
Kathryn shut her eyes and waited. She counted slowly to herself, the way she did when she barked her shin on the open dishwasher or shut a window on a finger. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. When Kathryn heard the crying subside a bit, she opened her eyes. She nudged her daughter forward, like a sheepdog might a sheep or a cow. Mattie was too dazed to resist.
Kathryn handed Mattie a Kleenex and waited for the girl to blow her nose.
“I got him a CD,” Mattie said. “Stone Temple Pilots. He said he wanted it.”
The leaves and frozen snow made a complicated matting at the sides of the dirt path. The ground was hard with ruts.
“Mom, let’s not do it at home, OK? I don’t think I could stand it if we did it at home.”
“We’ll do Christmas at Julia’s,” Kathryn said.
“Are we going to have a funeral?”
Kathryn tried to keep pace with Mattie, who was walking fast, her questions like puffs of steam escaping from her mouth. Kathryn thought that Mattie had probably been asking herself these questions all night and now finally had the courage to voice them.
But Kathryn didn’t know how to answer the last question. If you didn’t have a body, could you have a funeral, or was it called