The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [75]
The rain poured over the edges of her umbrella and soaked the back of her legs, spotting and then running down her stockings. There was a moment, as she stood on the steps in front of the imposing wooden door, when she thought: I don’t have to do this. Though she understood in the same moment that it was knowing that she would positively do this that had allowed her the luxury of indecision.
She raised the heavy brass knocker and rapped on the door. She heard footsteps on an inner staircase, the short impatient cry of a child. The door opened abruptly, as though the person behind it were expecting a delivery.
It was a woman — a tall, angular woman with dark hair that fell along her jawline. The woman was thirty, perhaps thirty-five. She held a child on her hip, a child so astonishing that it was all Kathryn could do not to cry out.
Kathryn began to tremble inside her coat. She held the umbrella at an unnatural angle.
The woman with the child looked surprised, and for a moment quizzical. And then she did not seem surprised at all.
“I’ve been imagining this moment for years,” the woman said.
THE FEATURES OF THE WOMAN IMPRESSED THEM-selves upon Kathryn’s consciousness, like acid eating away at a photographic plate. The brown eyes, the thick, dark lashes. The narrow jeans, long-legged. The ivory flats, well worn, like slippers. The pink shirt, sleeves rolled. A thousand questions competed for Kathryn’s attention. When? For how long? How was it done? Why?
The baby in the woman’s arms was a boy. A boy with blue eyes. The hues were slightly different, though the difference was not as pronounced as it had been in his father’s eyes.
The envelope of time ripped open, and Kathryn dropped in. She struggled not to have to lean against the door with the shock of the woman, of the boy’s face.
“Come in.”
The invitation broke the long note of silence that had passed between the two women. Although it was not an invitation at all, not in the way such offers are normally made, with a smile or a step backward into a hallway to allow entry. It was, rather, a statement, simple and without inflection, as though the woman had said instead: Neither of us has a choice now.
And the instinct was, of course, to enter the house, to get in out of the wet. To sit down.
Kathryn lowered the umbrella and collapsed it as she stepped over the doorsill. The woman inside the house held the door with one hand, the baby with the other arm. The baby, perhaps having noted the silence, looked at the stranger with intense curiosity. A child in the hallway had stopped her playing to pay attention.
Kathryn allowed the umbrella to drip onto the polished parquet. In the several seconds the two women stood in the entry-way, Kathryn noticed the way the woman’s hair swayed along her chin line. Expertly cut, as Kathryn’s was not. She touched her own hair and regretted doing so.
It was hot in the hallway, excessively hot and airless. Kathryn could feel the perspiration trickling inside her blouse, which was under her suit coat, which was under her wool coat.
“You’re Muire Boland,” Kathryn said.
The baby in Muire Boland’s arms, despite the different sex, despite the slightly darker hair color, was precisely the baby that Mattie had been at that age — five months old, Kathryn guessed. The realization created dissonance, a screeching in her ears, as though this woman she had never met were holding Kathryn’s child.
Jack had had a son.
The dark-haired woman turned and left the hallway for a sitting room, leaving Kathryn to follow. The child in the hallway, a beautiful girl with enlarged pupils and a cupid mouth, picked up a handful of construction blocks, pressed them to her chest, and, eyeing Kathryn the entire time, edged along the wall and entered the sitting room, moving closer to her mother’s legs. The girl looked like her mother, whereas the boy, the son, resembled the father.
Kathryn put down the umbrella in a corner and walked from the entryway to the sitting room. Muire Boland stood with her back to the fireplace, waiting for her, although there