The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [48]
— She was Irish, you once said.
— She was born there. She had a beautiful voice, a beautiful accent.
— You had your dad.
Jack makes a short, derisive sound. — Dad isn’t exactly the correct word. My father was an asshole.
The word, which Jack seldom uses, shocks her.
She unzips his jacket, snakes her arms inside.
— Jack, she says.
He softens slightly and pulls her head toward him. She smells leather mixed with sea air.
— I don’t know what it is, he says. — Sometimes I’m afraid. Sometimes I think I have no center on gray days. No beliefs.
— You have me, she says quickly.
— This is true.
— You have Mattie, she says.
— I know, I know. Of course.
— Aren’t we enough? she asks.
— Where is Mattie? he asks, suddenly pulling away. Kathryn whips around and scans the beach. Jack spots her first, a brief flash of red among the gray. Kathryn, inexplicably paralyzed, watches Jack race across the sand and wade with high steps into the waves. She waits an endless minute and then sees Jack snatch Mattie like a small dog from the surf. He holds his daughter facedown by the waist, and she thinks for a moment that he will shake Mattie dry like a dog as well. But then she hears a familiar cry. Jack kneels on the beach, whips off his leather jacket, and enfolds the small body. When Kathryn reaches the two of them, he is wiping seawater from his daughter’s face with the tail of his shirt.
Mattie looks stunned.
— The wave knocked her down, Jack says breathlessly.
— And the undertow was taking her out.
Kathryn picks Mattie up, cradles her in her arms.
— Let’s go, Jack says quickly. — In a minute, she’ll be freezing. They begin to walk fast back to the house. Mattie coughs and wheezes from the seawater. Kathryn murmurs soothing words. Mattie’s face is bright pink from the cold.
Jack holds Mattie’s hand as if attached to his daughter by an umbilical cord. His pants are soaked, his shirt untucked. Kathryn thinks that he, too, must be freezing. The thought of what might have happened to Mattie had he not seen her in time weakens her arms, her knees.
She stops abruptly on the beach, and, in a natural movement, Jack encircles her and Mattie with his arms.
— Aren’t we enough? she asks again.
Jack bends his head and kisses Kathryn on her forehead.
— Enough of what? Mattie asks.
two
SOMETIMES IT WAS AS THOUGH SHE HAD LIVED THREE, four years in eleven days. At other times it seemed just minutes ago that Robert Hart stood at her door and uttered the two words — Mrs. Lyons? — that had changed her life. She could not remember time looping in on itself in such a manner before, except perhaps for those two or three sublime days when she had first met Jack Lyons and fallen in love, and life had been measured out in minutes rather than in hours.
She lay on the daybed in the spare room, her arms outstretched, her head slightly raised on a pillow so that she could see past the red lacquered chair and out to sea. It was sunny when she’d driven to the house, but now the sky was beginning to cloud over, just swirls of cloud, milk drops in a water glass. She pulled a butterfly clip from the back of her head and tossed it to the floor, where it skidded along the polished wooden boards and came to rest against the baseboard. She had meant that morning to reenter the house and begin the long process of cleaning up and clearing away all traces of the past eleven days so that Mattie and she might move back from Julia’s and begin their lives again. The gesture had been an admirable one, Kathryn thought, but her courage had thinned and dissipated when she’d walked into the kitchen and seen the pile of newspapers with their front-page photographs of Jack and her and Mattie, one edition of which had fallen onto the floor, making small tents on the tiles. There were rock-hard bagels in a waxed-paper bag on the table and a half dozen opened cans of Diet Coke on the counter, although someone had thoughtfully taken the trash out of its bin, so the house didn’t smell as awful as Kathryn had feared it might. Climbing the stairs, she had opened