The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [71]
Her feet hurt, and she wanted to sit down. But to do so would have meant sandwiching herself between two overburdened passengers. In any event, there were only minutes left until they boarded. Kathryn had on her black wool crepe suit, her funeral suit, and she resembled, she thought, more a businesswoman than a schoolteacher. A lawyer, possibly, headed to London for a deposition. She wore her hair in a loose twist, and she had on pearl earrings. She had her leather gloves in one hand and a black chenille scarf around her neck. She thought she looked rather good, under the circumstances, certainly more put together than she had in weeks. But she had lost weight in her face and knew she looked older than she had twelve days ago.
That morning, after she had told Robert about her proposed trip to London, she had driven over to Julia’s to tell Mattie of her plans. Mattie had been painfully indifferent to Kathryn’s trip. Her only lucid comment, amidst sighs and a muffled groan of exasperation, had been a dismissive Whatever.
“I’m only going for two days,” Kathryn had said.
“Cool,” Mattie had said. “Can I go back to bed now?”
In the kitchen, Julia had tried to explain Mattie’s seeming indifference.
“She’s fifteen,” said Julia, who had been up for hours. She was dressed for her day in a pair of jeans with an elastic waist and a green sweatshirt. “She has to have someone to blame, so she’s blaming you. I know it’s irrational. You don’t remember this, but for a time, right after your parents died, you blamed me.”
“I did not,” Kathryn said heatedly.
“Yes, you did. You never said it outright, but I knew. And it passed. Like this, too, will pass. Right now, Mattie wants to blame her father. She’s furious with him for leaving her, for upsetting her life in such a drastic way. But blaming him is out of the question. She’s practically his only defender. Eventually, Mattie’s anger will slide away from you and find its proper target. What you need to do is to make sure the anger doesn’t come about full circle so that she begins to blame herself for her father’s death.”
“Then I should stay,” Kathryn said weakly.
But Julia had been adamant that Kathryn should go. Privately, Kathryn understood that Julia wanted to get her out of the house not for her sake, but for Mattie’s.
As the widow of a pilot, Kathryn was entitled to fly on a pass wherever Vision went, in the first-class section whenever seats were available. She gestured to Robert to take the window, and she stowed her luggage under the seat in front of her. Immediately she became aware of the stale air inside the plane, with its distinctive artificial smell. The door to the cockpit was open, and Kathryn could see the crew. The size of the cockpit never failed to startle her: Many of them were smaller than the front seats of automobiles. She wondered how it was possible for the scenario suggested by the CVR on Jack’s plane to have taken place. There seemed hardly room for three men to sit, let alone move around and have a scuffle.
From her vantage point, she could see only the inner third of the cockpit, bits of each pilot in shirtsleeves. It was impossible, gazing at the tableau — the thickish arms, the confident gestures — not to imagine the man in the left-hand seat as Jack. She pictured the shape of his shoulder, the whiteness of his inner wrist. She had never been a passenger on an airliner Jack was flying.