The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [78]
The name Mattie produced a frisson in the air, a tension that quivered between the two women. Muire Boland had spoken the name too easily, as if she’d known the girl.
Kathryn thought: He wouldn’t leave his daughter, but he could betray his wife.
“When was this exactly?” Kathryn asked. “The affair.”
“June 1991.”
“Oh.”
What had she herself been doing in June of 1991? Kathryn wondered.
The woman had delicate white skin, an almost flawless complexion. The complexion of someone who spent little time outdoors. Though she might have been a runner.
“You knew about me,” Kathryn repeated. Her voice didn’t seem her own. It was too slow and tentative, as if she had been drugged.
“I knew about you from the very beginning,” Muire said. “Jack and I did not have secrets.”
The greater intimacy, then, Kathryn thought. An intentional knife wound.
The rain slid along the bowed windows, the clouds giving a false sense of early evening. From an upstairs room, Kathryn heard the distant squawk of a cartoon character on a television. Still perspiring, she shed her jacket and stood up, realizing as she did so that her blouse had become untucked. She made an effort to push it back into her skirt. Aware of the intense scrutiny of the woman across from her, a woman who may very well have known Jack better than she did, Kathryn prayed her legs would not betray her. She walked across the room to the mantle.
She took down the picture in its marquetry frame. Jack had on a shirt Kathryn had never seen before, a faded black polo shirt. He cradled the tiny newborn. The girl, the one Kathryn had just seen playing with the construction blocks, had Jack’s curls and brow, though not his eyes.
“What’s her name?” Kathryn asked.
“Dierdre.”
Jack’s fingers were deep in the girl’s hair. Had Jack been the same with Dierdre as he had been with Mattie?
Kathryn briefly closed her eyes. The hurt to herself, she thought, was nearly intolerable. But the hurt to Mattie was obscene. One could see — how could anyone fail to observe? — that the girl in the photograph was extraordinarily beautiful. A beguiling face, with dark eyes and long lashes, red lips. A veritable Snow White. Had memories that Mattie held sacred been repeated, relived, with another child?
“How could you?” Kathryn cried, spinning, and she might have been speaking to Jack as well.
Her fingers, slippery from perspiration, lost hold of the frame. It slid out of her hands, crashed against an end table. She hadn’t meant for that to happen, and she felt the small breakage as an exposure. The woman in the chair flinched slightly, though she did not turn her head to look at the damage. It was an unanswerable question. Though the woman wanted to answer it.
“I loved him,” Muire said. “We were in love.”
As if that were enough.
Kathryn watched as Muire put out her cigarette. How cool she was, thought Kathryn. Even cold.
“There are things I can’t talk about,” Muire said.
You bitch, Kathryn thought, a bubble of anger popping to the surface. She tried to calm herself down. It was hard to imagine the woman in the chair a flight attendant in a uniform with little wings on the lapel. Smiling at passengers as they entered a plane.
What were the things Muire Boland couldn’t talk about?
She put her hands on the mantle, leaned her head forward. She breathed in deeply to calm herself. A distant rage made a sound like white noise in her ears.
She pushed herself away from the mantle and crossed the room. She perched near the edge of the wooden chair, as if she might, at any moment, have to get up and leave.
“I was willing to do whatever it took,” Muire Boland said. She fingered her hair away from her forehead. “I tried once to throw him out.