The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [43]
There was a question on Robert’s face.
“Everything all right, Mrs. Lyons?” Somers from the Safety Board asked.
“Just fine,” Kathryn answered. “Just fine. That’s apart from the fact that my daughter is struggling to absorb the idea that her father may have committed suicide and taken a hundred and three people with him.”
“Mrs. Lyons . . .”
“May I be permitted to ask you a question, Mr. Somers?” Kathryn heard the anger in her voice, a good mimic of her daughter’s. Perhaps anger was contagious, Kathryn thought.
“Yes, of course,” the investigator said warily.
“What other scenarios besides suicide have you imagined, given the material that is theoretically on the CVR?”
Somers looked discomfited. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that just now, Mrs. Lyons.”
Kathryn uncrossed her arms, folded her hands in front of her. “Oh, really?” she asked quietly.
She looked down at her feet, then up at the faces in her living room. They were backlit, haloed by the light from the windows.
“Then I guess I’m not at liberty just now to answer your questions,” she said.
Robert stood up.
“This interview is over,” she said.
Walking blindly across the lawn, her head down against the wind, she made wispy footprints in the frost gauze of the grass. Within minutes, she was at the seawall, the granite boulders slick with sea spit. She hopped onto a stone the size of a bathtub, felt herself slipping, then sensed that the only way to stay upright was to keep moving, alighting briefly on each rock and then springing to the next. In this way, she reached the “flat rock,” so dubbed by Mattie when she was five and first able to negotiate the rocky sea border. Thereafter, the flat rock became a favored picnic spot for the two of them on sunny days. Kathryn jumped off the edge of the rock onto a five-foot square of sandy beach nestled among the boulders — an outdoor room, a partial shelter from the wind, a hiding place. She turned her back to the house and sat down on the wet sand. She slid her arms out of their sleeves and hugged her chest inside her zippered parka.
“Shit,” she said to her feet.
She let the white noise of the water fill her head, pushing away the voices and faces from the house, faces with thin veils of sympathy over features marked by intense ambition, faces with solemn mouths below keen eyes. Kathryn listened to the soft click of pebbles tumbling in the receding waves. In the pebbles, there was a memory, flirting with her, teasing her. She shut her eyes and tried to concentrate, then gave it up, and in the moment of giving up, found it. A memory of her father and her sitting on pebbles in their bathing suits and letting the sea rush beneath them and wobble the small stones under their thighs and calves. It was summer, a hot day, and she was perhaps nine or ten years old. They were at Fortune’s Rocks, she remembered, and the pebbles tickled her skin. But why were she and her father at the beach without her mother or Julia? Perhaps Kathryn remembered this moment because it was such a rare occurrence, her father and her alone together. He was laughing, she recalled, laughing with genuine, unalloyed pleasure, as a child might do, as he so seldom did. And she thought she would join him in this laughter and just let herself go, but she was so overcome by the sight of her father happy — happy in her presence — that she felt more reverent than uninhibited and, as a result, became confused. And when he turned to ask her what was wrong, she had the distinct sense that she had disappointed him. And so she had laughed then, too loudly, too earnestly, hoping he’d forget the disappointment, but the moment was over, and already he was staring out to sea. She remembered the way her laughter had sounded hollow and contrived, and the way her father had