The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [77]
“Are you all right?” Muire asked from across the room. Kathryn opened her eyes, wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her jacket.
“I have thought . . . ,” Muire began. “I have wondered if you would come. When you called, I was sure that you knew. I was sure when he died it would come out.”
“I didn’t know,” Kathryn said. “Not really. Not until I saw the baby. Just now.”
Or had she known? she wondered. Had she known from the moment she’d heard that transatlantic silence?
There were shallow wrinkles about the eyes of the dark-haired woman, the suggestion of parentheses that would one day form at either side of her mouth. The baby woke suddenly and began to wail in an uninhibited, lusty way that had once been familiar to Kathryn. Muire tried to comfort the child, bringing him to her shoulder, patting his back. But nothing seemed to work.
“Let me put him down,” Muire said over the cries.
When she left the room, the girl trailed after her, not willing to be left alone with the stranger.
Jack had been married in a Catholic church. The dark-haired woman had known that he was already married.
Kathryn tried to stand, then felt she could not. She crossed her legs in an effort to look not quite so shaken. Not quite so flattened. Slowly, she swiveled her head, trying to take in the entire room. The brass sconces with the electric candles on the walls. The magazines on the cocktail table, an oil painting of a working-class city street. She wondered why it was that she could not feel rage. It was as though she had been cut, the knife having gone so deep that the wound was not yet painful; it produced merely shock. And the shock seemed to be producing civility.
Muire had known, had imagined this day. Kathryn had not. Along one wall was a cabinet that Kathryn guessed would contain a television and a sound system. She thought suddenly of Pink Panther movies, the ones she and Jack and Mattie had rented, movies guaranteed to reduce Jack and Mattie to helpless giggles. They had prided themselves on being able to quote long passages of dialogue.
Kathryn turned her head at a sound. Muire Boland stood in the doorway, watching her from the side. She stepped into the room, crossed to one of the white chairs, and sat down. Immediately, she opened a wooden box on the cocktail table and took out a cigarette, which she lit with a plastic lighter next to the box.
Jack couldn’t tolerate being in the same room with a smoker, he had said.
“You want to know how it happened,” Muire said.
Though she was angular, she might be described as voluptuous. It was the baby, Kathryn thought. The nursing. Perhaps there was just the slightest suggestion of a belly, which would also be the baby.
Kathryn had another unexpected memory then, a picture, really, that Jack had taken. Kathryn was sleeping facedown in a quilted bathrobe on an unmade bed, her arms tucked under her. Jack, who’d been holding the five-month-old Mattie, had placed the sleeping baby, also facedown, on the hump made by Kathryn’s butt and the dip of the lower back. Kathryn and Mattie had together taken a nap, and Jack, moved by the sight of the mother and her papoose, had snapped the photograph.
Muire leaned back against a cushion, draped one arm along its back. She crossed her legs. Kathryn thought she might be six feet tall, nearly as tall as Jack. Kathryn tried to imagine what her body looked like unclothed, how she and Jack might look together.
But her mind protested and rebelled, and the pictures refused to form. Just as the image of Jack’s body as it may have lain in the ocean had at first refused to form. The pictures would come later, Kathryn knew, when she least wanted them.
“Yes,” Kathryn said.
Muire took a pull on her cigarette, leaned forward, and flicked an ash. “I flew with him five and a half years ago. I was a flight attendant with Vision.”
“I know.”
“We fell in love,” the