The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [32]
“I don’t know,” Kathryn said truthfully. “I need to talk to . . .” She almost said Robert, but caught herself in time.
“Julia,” Kathryn said.
Although, surprisingly, it was Robert Kathryn wanted to ask. “Do I have to go?” Mattie asked.
Kathryn thought a minute.
“Yes, you should,” she said. “It’s hard, I know; it’s awful, Mattie, but they say it’s better to experience the funeral of a loved one than not. It’s a kind of closure. You’re old enough to do that now. If you were younger, I’d say no.”
“I don’t want to close anything, Mom. I can’t do that. I have to keep it open as long as I can.”
Kathryn knew precisely what her daughter meant. Yet Kathryn also felt she should do for Mattie what Julia had done for her. When were you supposed to stop being a rational parent, Kathryn wondered, and admit to being just as bewildered as your child?
“He’s not coming back, Mattie.”
Mattie took her hands out of her pockets, folded her arms across her chest, and made her hands into fists.
“How do you know that, Mom? How can you be so absolutely sure?”
“Robert Hart said there were no survivors. That no one could have survived the explosion.”
“What’s he know?”
It wasn’t a question.
They walked in silence for a distance. Mattie began swinging her arms hard, increasing her speed. Kathryn tried for a minute to keep up with her and then realized she wasn’t supposed to. That was the point.
Kathryn watched Mattie walk faster and faster until the girl broke into a run and turned a corner so that she could no longer be seen.
Kathryn had no idea how they would all survive Christmas, only seven days away. An accident had occurred that had thrown their universe off kilter, so that they were spinning in a foreign orbit now — one adjacent to, but different from, that of others around them.
Kathryn found Mattie sitting on the cement wall of the low foundation, breathing hard, the way she did after a field hockey game. She looked up at her mother.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
Kathryn gazed out at the view. That, at least, was still the same. Behind them, to the east, was the Atlantic. If they were to walk farther up the hill to its actual summit, they would be able to see the ocean. Almost certainly smell it.
“Let’s declare a moratorium on apologies for a while, OK?” Kathryn said.
“We’ll be all right, won’t we, Mom?”
Kathryn sat down beside her daughter, put her arm around her. Mattie laid her head on Kathryn’s shoulder.
“Eventually,” Kathryn said.
Mattie toed the snow. “I know this is hard for you, too, Mom. You really loved him, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Once I saw this documentary? On penguins? Do you know about them?”
“Not much,” Kathryn said.
Mattie sat up. Her face was suddenly animated and flushed. Kathryn slid her arm from her daughter’s shoulder.
“Well, what they do is, the male picks out one female from all the others, and sometimes there are hundreds; I don’t know how he can tell the difference, they all look just alike. And then when he’s picked her out, he goes and finds five smooth stones and, one by one, lays them at her feet. And if she likes him, she’ll accept the stones, and they’ll be mates for life.”
“That’s sweet,” Kathryn said.
“And later, after the documentary, we went to the aquarium, when we went to Boston with our class. And the penguins — oh, Mom, it was so great — these penguins were, like, mating? And the male, he just covered the female, like he was a blanket lying on her, and then he quivered a bit and flopped down beside her, and they both looked exhausted, but kind of like happy? They nuzzled each other’s face and neck, like they were in love. And this guy beside me, Dennis Rollins, what a jerk, you don’t know him, kept making all these weird jokes. That part sucked.”
Kathryn stroked her daughter’s hair. This seemed a giddiness very close to tears.
“You know, Mom, I’ve done it.”
Kathryn’s hand stopped in