The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [4]
The interviewer, a dark-haired woman with a black umbrella, asked the old man to describe what he had seen.
It were moonlight with dark water, he said haltingly.
His voice was hoarse, his accent so thick they had to print what he was saying at the bottom of the screen.
There were bits of silver falling from the sky and landing all around the boat, he said.
The bits fluttered like
Birds.
Birds that were wounded.
Falling downward.
Spiraling, like, and spinning.
She walked to the TV and knelt on the carpet so that her face was even with the old man’s on the screen. The fisherman was waving his hands around to show what he meant. He made a cone shape and moved his fingers up and down and then drew a ragged edge. He told the interviewer that none of the strange bits had actually landed in his boat and that by the time he had motored to the places where it seemed the things had fallen, they had disappeared or sunk into the sea and he could not get at them, not even with his nets.
Facing the camera, the reporter said that the man’s name was Eamon Gilley. He was eighty-three, she said, and he was the first eyewitness to come forward. No one else appeared to have seen what the fisherman had seen, and nothing had been confirmed yet. Kathryn had the feeling that the reporter wanted very much for Gilley’s story to be true but felt obliged to say that it might not be.
But Kathryn knew that it was true. She could see the moonlight on the sea, the way it must have twitched and sparkled, the silvery glints falling from the sky, falling, falling, like tiny angels coming down to earth. She could see the small boat in the water and the fisherman standing at its bow — his face turned upward toward the moon, his hands outstretched. She could see him risk his balance to catch the fluttering bits, poking the air like a small child grabbing for fireflies on a summer night. And she thought then how strange it was that disaster — the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face — could be, at times, such a thing of beauty.
Robert reached over and turned off the television.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“When did you say it happened?”
He rested his elbows on his knees and folded his hands. “One fifty-seven. Our time. Six fifty-seven theirs.”
Above his right eyebrow, there was a scar. He must be in his late thirties, she thought, closer to her age than to Jack’s. He had the fair skin of a blond and brown eyes with flecks of rust in the irises. Jack had had blue eyes, two different blues — one a washed-out blue, almost translucent, a watercolor sky; the other brilliant, a sharp royal. The unusual coloring drew others’ eyes to his, made people examine his face as though this asymmetrical characteristic suggested imbalance, perhaps something wrong.
She thought: Is this the man’s job?
“That was the time of the last transmission,” the man from the union said in a voice she could hardly hear.
“What was the last transmission?” she asked.
“It was routine.”
She didn’t believe him. What was routine about a last transmission?
“Do you know,” she asked, “what the most common last words are from a pilot when he knows he’s going down? Well, of course you know.”
“Mrs. Lyons,” he said, turning to her.
“Kathryn.”
“You’re still in shock. You should have some sugar. Is there juice?”
“In the fridge. It was a bomb, wasn’t it?”
“I wish I had more to tell you.”
He stood up and walked into the kitchen. She realized that she didn’t want to be left alone in a room just yet, and so she followed him. She looked at the clock over the sink. 3:38. Was it possible that only fourteen minutes had elapsed since she had peered at the clock on the night table upstairs?
“You got here fast,” she said, sitting again on the kitchen chair.
He poured orange juice into a glass.
“How