The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [5]
“We have a plane,” he said quietly.
“No. I mean, tell me. How is it done? You have a plane waiting? You sit around waiting for a crash?”
He handed her the glass of juice. He leaned against the sink and ran the middle finger of his right hand vertically along his brow, from the bridge of his nose to his hairline. He seemed to be making decisions then, judgments.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t sit around waiting for a crash. But if one occurs, we have procedures in place. We have a Lear jet at Washington National. It flies me to the nearest major airport. In this case, Portsmouth.”
“And then?”
“And then there’s a car waiting.” “And you did it in...”
She calculated the time it would take him to travel from Washington, which was where the union headquarters was, to Ely, New Hampshire, just over the Massachusetts border.
“A little over an hour,” he said.
“But why?” she asked.
“To get here first,” he said. “To inform you. To help you through it.”
“That’s not why,” she said quickly.
He thought a minute.
“It’s part of it,” he said.
She smoothed her hand over the cracked surface of the pine table. On nights when Jack had been home, Jack and she and Mattie had seemed to live within a ten-foot radius of that table — reading the paper, listening to the news, cooking, eating, cleaning up, doing homework, and then, after Mattie had gone to bed, talking or not talking, and sometimes, if Jack didn’t have a trip, sharing a bottle of wine. In the beginning, when Mattie was little and early to bed, they had sometimes had candlelight and made love in the kitchen, one or the other of them seized by a sudden lust or fondness.
She tilted her head back and shut her eyes. The pain seemed to stretch from her abdomen to her throat. She felt panicky, as though she had strayed too close to the edge. She drew in her breath so sharply that Robert looked over at her.
And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.
The images assaulted her. The feeling of Jack’s breath at the top of her spine, as though he were whispering to her bones. The sliding sensation against her mouth when he gave her a quick kiss as he went off to work. The drape of his arm around Mattie after her last field hockey game, when Mattie was sticky and sweaty and crying because her team had lost eight-zip. The pale skin on the inside of Jack’s arms. The slightly pitted skin between his shoulder blades, a legacy of adolescence. The odd tenderness of his feet, the way he couldn’t walk along a beach without sneakers. The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly. The images pushed and jostled and competed rudely with each other for space. She tried to stop them, but she couldn’t.
The man from the union stood at the sink and watched her. He didn’t move.
“I loved him,” she said when she could speak.
She got up and ripped a sheet of paper towel from its holder. She blew her nose. She felt a momentary bewilderment of tenses. She wondered if time were opening up an envelope and would swallow her — for a day or a week or a month or possibly forever.
“I know,” said Robert.
“Are you married?” she asked, sitting down again.
He put his hands in the pockets of his trousers and jiggled the change there. He had on gray suit trousers. Jack hardly ever wore a suit. Like many men who wore a uniform to work, he had never been a particularly good dresser.
“No,” he said. “I’m divorced.”
“Do you have children?”
“Two boys. Nine and six.”
“Do they live with you?”
“With my wife in Alexandria. Ex-wife.” “Do you see them much?”
“I try.”
“Why did you get divorced?”
“I stopped drinking,” he said.
He said this matter-of-factly, without explanation. She wasn’t sure she understood. She blew her nose again.
“I have to call the school,” she said. “I’m a teacher.”
“That can wait,” he said. “No one will be there anyway. No one is awake yet.” He looked at his watch.
“Tell me about your job,” she said.
“There isn’t a lot to tell. It’s mostly public relations.”
“How many