The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [49]
She was thinking that she’d been foolish to come back so soon, but she could not ignore her house forever. The clearing up had to be done. Julia, Kathryn knew, would have come in her place, but Kathryn could not allow that. Julia was exhausted, near to collapse herself, not only from the memorial service and the caring for Kathryn and Mattie, but also from her own finely honed sense of obligation: Julia had been determined to fill the Christmas rush orders from the shop. Privately, Kathryn had thought this misguided effort might kill her grandmother, but Kathryn could not dissuade Julia from her sense of duty. And so the two of them, with Mattie helping sporadically, had spent several long nights boxing and packing and wrapping and ticking off names and addresses from a list. And in its own way, Kathryn thought, the work had been mildly therapeutic. Julia and she had slept when they literally could no longer see, and thus they had avoided the insomnia that might have been their fate.
This morning, however, Kathryn had insisted that Julia stay in bed, and, not too surprisingly, Julia had finally acquiesced. Mattie, too, was sleeping late and might remain in bed until the early afternoon, as she had been doing for days. Actually, Kathryn wished her daughter would sleep for months in a peaceful coma and then awaken to a consciousness dulled by time, so that she would not be hit again and again with the pain that was always absurdly and cuttingly fresh. It was why Mattie slept so long, Kathryn thought, to postpone that awful moment of knowing.
Kathryn wished she herself could manage a coma. Instead, she felt herself to be inside a private weather system, one in which she was continuously tossed and buffeted by bits of news and information, sometimes chilled by thoughts of what lay immediately ahead, thawed by the kindness of others (Julia and Robert and strangers), frequently drenched by memories that seemed to have no regard for circumstance or place, and then subjected to the nearly intolerable heat of reporters, photographers, and curious onlookers. It was a weather system with no logic, she had decided, no pattern, no progression, no form. Sometimes she was unable to sleep or eat or, most oddly, to read even a single article through to the end. And not because the subject matter was Jack or the explosion, but because she couldn’t summon the necessary concentration. At other times, when speaking to Julia or Mattie, she couldn’t get to the end of a sentence without forgetting what the beginning had been, nor could she remember, from moment to moment, what task it was that she had been engaged in. Occasionally she found herself with the telephone to her ear, a number ringing, and no idea who it was she had called or why. Her mind felt crowded, as though there were a critical fact teasing her at the periphery of her brain, a detail she ought to be thinking about, a memory she ought to be seizing, a solution to a problem that seemed just beyond her grasp.
Worse, however, were the moments of relative calm that suddenly gave way to anger, all the more confusing because she could not always attach the anger to the appropriate person or event. It seemed composed of bits, tiny stone chips of an ugly mosaic: irritation at Jack, as though he were standing next to her, for something as trivial as the fact that he had neglected to tell her the name of their insurance agent (which she realized she could easily get, and did get, for herself by calling the company), or for the