The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [38]
And then Jack reaches out his arm and draws Kathryn into the fold, so that the three of them stand in the hallway, swaying and crying and saying I’m sorry and kissing each other and hugging again and then standing back and laughing slightly through the tears and runny noses, with Mattie offering, helpfully, to get the Kleenex.
That night, Kathryn and Jack make love as they have not done in months — with a ragged edge, as though playing out the rest of the scene with open mouths and small bites, locked thighs and pinned wrists. And the voracious momentum of that night changes, for a time, the tenor of their marriage, so that they look more often into each other’s eyes as they pass in the hallway, trying mutely to say something meaningful, and kiss each other with more enthusiasm whenever they meet, in the house or outside by the cars or even, several times, in public, which pleases Kathryn. But after a while, that too passes, and she and Jack go back to normal, as they have been before, which is to say that they, like all the other couples Kathryn has ever known, live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less than they were the day before.
Which means, on the whole, she thinks, that it is a good marriage.
SHE HAD NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT BEFORE — not even on television or in movies, where a spectacle, she now understood, lost its immediacy, its garish color, its menace. Along the beach road, even before she and Robert had reached the drive, there were parked cars and fat vans with their far wheels stuck into the sandy shoulders. Kathryn saw call letters on the vans, WBZ and WNBC and CNN, a man running with a camera and a complicated brace on his shoulder. People were beginning to look at the car, to peer at the passengers inside. Robert sat hunched over the steering wheel, as though at any minute they might be assaulted. Kathryn resisted the urge to turn her head away or to bring her hands to her face.
“Remind me why we did this?” she asked, her voice tight, her lips barely moving.
The reporters and cameramen were five deep by the wooden gate with its wire fencing. Jack and she had not chosen the gate; it had simply been left over from the convent days. Indeed,
Kathryn thought it surprising the gate even worked: Jack and she had never had any reason to fasten it.
“We’re sending someone over to your grandmother’s,” Robert said.
“Julia won’t like that.”
“I’m afraid Julia doesn’t really have a choice at this point,” Robert said. “And in the end, she may be grateful.”
He gestured toward the crowd outside the car.
“They’ll be all over her lawn before she can blink.”
“I don’t want them anywhere near Mattie,” Kathryn said. “Julia looked pretty formidable to me,” Robert countered. “I’m not sure I’d want to try to get past her.”
A man banged hard against the passenger door window, and Kathryn flinched. Robert moved the car forward, trying to get as close to the gate as he could. He peered through the windshield, looking for a policeman, and almost immediately, the car was engulfed, men and women shouting through the glass.
“Mrs. Lyons, have you heard the tape?”
“Is that her? Wally, is that her?”
“Move, get her face.”
“Can you comment, Mrs. Lyons? Do you think it was suicide?” “Who’s the guy with her? Jerry, is he from the airline?”
“Mrs. Lyons, how do you explain...?”
To Kathryn, the voices sounded like dogs barking. Mouths appeared magnified and watery, the colors around her heightening and then subduing themselves. She wondered briefly if she was fainting. How could she possibly be the focus of so much attention, she who had lived the most ordinary of lives under the most ordinary of circumstances?
“Jesus Christ,” Robert said when a camera lens banged sharply against his window. “That guy just broke his camera.”
Sitting taller to see beyond the crowd, Kathryn spotted Burt Sears, a long, spindly man, stooped with years, pacing behind the gate. He had only the top half of his uniform on, as if he hadn’t been able to find the