The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [54]
After that day at Ingerbretson’s, Kathryn had stopped looking at newspapers or watching television. A visit to Julia’s that was meant to last only the night following the memorial service extended through Christmas and beyond. Kathryn, like Mattie, could not reenter her own house, and she could not reasonably ask Mattie to return with her to their home until it had been cleared of any artifacts that might send Mattie spinning out the door. Only once, at Julia’s, had the television inadvertently been left on, so that before Kathryn had quite realized what was happening, she found herself looking at an animated rendition of the events following the explosion in the cockpit of Vision Flight 384. According to the sequence, the cockpit broke away from the body of the plane, which itself disintegrated into smaller fragments during a second explosion. The animation showed the trajectory of the various parts as they fell into the ocean. According to the reporter, the descent would have taken approximately ninety seconds. Kathryn could not move her eyes away from the screen. She followed the arc of the small animated cockpit to the water, where it made a little cartoon splash and sank.
The cloud layer, its milky swirls gradually thickening, dimmed the light in the window of the spare room. Kathryn sat up in the daybed, determined to begin the cleaning now. She heard footsteps in the hallway and swung her legs over the side of the bed. It would be Julia, she thought, coming to help after all. But when Kathryn glanced up, she saw that it was not Julia, but Robert Hart who was standing in the doorway.
“I went to your grandmother’s,” he said straight away, “and she said you were here.”
He had his hands in the pockets of his sport coat, an indistinct smooth color, taupe, maybe. He looked different in jeans. His hair was windblown, as though he had just combed it with his fingers.
“I’m not here officially,” he said. “I have a few days off. I wanted to see how you were doing.” He stepped into the room.
She wondered if he had knocked on the back door, and if he had, why she hadn’t heard him.
“I’m glad to see you,” she said, surprising herself.
And it was true. She could feel a weight — not all of the weight, but something small and gelatinous — slide off her shoulders.
“How’s Mattie?” he asked, crossing the room and sitting down on the red lacquered chair.
It would make an interesting photograph, Kathryn thought suddenly, the man on the red lacquered chair against the lime green paint. An attractive man. An arresting face. The widow’s peak and the dust-colored hair, combined with the way he sat slouched with his hands in his pockets, made him look vaguely British, like a character in a World War II movie. Someone who would have been in ciphers, she thought.
“Terrible,” Kathryn said, feeling relieved to have someone to talk with about Mattie. Julia’s fatigue had been such that Kathryn had not wanted to burden her grandmother too much with her private worries. Julia’s were harrowing enough, more than any seventy-eight-year-old woman should have to bear.
“Mattie’s a mess,” Kathryn said simply to Robert. “She’s jumpy. She’s nervous. She can’t concentrate on anything. Sometimes she tries to watch television, but that’s not safe anymore. Even if it isn’t a news bulletin, there’s always something that reminds her of her father. Last night, she went over