The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [44]
Kathryn drew curlicues in the wet sand. It was one of the things she and Jack had had in common, she thought: They were orphans. Not true orphans, precisely, and not for their entire childhoods, but as good as, both of them abandoned when they were too young to know what was happening to them. In Jack’s case, his being orphaned had happened in a more conventional way. His mother had died when he was nine, and his father, who had never been an emotionally demonstrative man, apparently withdrew so far into himself when his wife died that Jack had always had the distinct feeling that he was on his own. In Kathryn’s case, her parents had been physically present but emotionally absent, and had not even been able to provide the simple rudiments of a child’s care. For nearly all of her childhood, Kathryn and her parents had lived with Julia in her narrow stone house three miles southwest of town. It was Julia who supported her parents, who had both been laid off from work when the Ely Falls mills had begun to close. Julia, whose husband had died when Kathryn was only three, did this with the proceeds from her antiques shop. This unusual arrangement did little to improve the relationship between Kathryn’s mother and Julia, and gave Julia a position of control within the household that even Kathryn’s father sometimes found hard to take. But when Kathryn was a girl, she did not think that her family was unusual in any respect. In her class at school, which numbered thirty-two in first grade and dwindled each year until there were only eighteen at graduation, nearly all of the children seemed to live at the margins. Kathryn had friends who lived in trailers, or who had no central heat in the winter, or whose houses would remain dark and shuttered the entire day so that their fathers or uncles could sleep. Kathryn’s parents fought often and drank every day, and even this was not unusual. What was unusual was that they didn’t behave like adults.
For years, it had been only Julia who had fed and dressed Kathryn, taught her to read and to play the piano, and saw her off each day to school. In the afternoons, Kathryn would help Julia at the shop or would be sent outside to play. Together, they watched the soap opera of her parents’ lives unfold — perhaps not always from a distance, but from a safe place inside Julia’s tall and oddly shaped house. For nearly all of Kathryn’s childhood, Julia and she had been cast into the curious role of parents to the parents.
When Kathryn went away to college and was sitting in her dormitory in Boston, she was sometimes certain she would not ever be able to go back to Ely, that she did not ever again want to witness the endlessly repeatable drunken scenes between her parents. But on an unseasonably warm January afternoon during Kathryn’s freshman year, her parents fell into the runoff from Ely Falls, which inexplicably they seemed to have been trying to cross, and drowned. Kathryn discovered, to her surprise, that grief overwhelmed her — as if children had died — and that when the time came to return to Boston after the double funeral, she could not leave Ely or Julia.
Julia had been at least as good as two parents, Kathryn thought now, and in that she had been lucky.
She was startled by a footfall on a rock above and behind her. Robert’s hair was standing out from his head, and he was squinting.
“I was hoping you would bolt,” he said, hopping down into the protected space.
She put her arms back into the sleeves of her jacket and tried to hold her hair in the wind so that she could see his face.
He leaned against a rock and brushed his hair back in place. He took a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket. He turned away from the wind, but even in the shelter of the rocks, he was having trouble with his lighter. Finally, the cigarette caught, and he inhaled deeply, snapping the lighter shut. He slipped it back into his pocket, and immediately the wind blew