The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [9]
EVEN BEFORE KATHRYN REACHED THE TOP OF THE stairs, she could hear Mattie walking into the bathroom. Her daughter’s hair had a lovely natural curl, but each morning Mattie would get up to wash her hair and painstakingly blow-dry it to straighten it. It always seemed to Kathryn that Mattie was trying to subdue her hair, as though wrestling with a part of herself that had emerged not long ago. Kathryn was waiting for Mattie to outgrow this stage and had been thinking that any day now her daughter would wake up and let her hair go natural. Then Kathryn would know that Mattie was all right.
Mattie had probably heard the cars in the driveway, Kathryn thought. Perhaps she had heard the voices in the kitchen, too. Mattie was used to waking up in the dark, particularly in the winter.
She knew she had to get Mattie out of the bathroom. Already she was thinking that it was not a safe place to tell her daughter.
She stood outside the door. Mattie had turned on the shower. Kathryn could hear her undressing.
Kathryn knocked.
“Mattie,” she said.
“What?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Mom. . . .”
The way Mattie said it, in that familiar singsong tone, as if annoyed already.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m having a shower.”
“Mattie, it’s important.”
“What?”
The bathroom door opened abruptly. Mattie had a green towel wrapped around her.
My lovely, beautiful daughter, Kathryn thought. How can I possibly do this to her?
Kathryn’s hands began to shake. She crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her hands under her armpits.
“Put on a robe, Mattie,” Kathryn said, feeling herself beginning to cry. She never cried in front of Mattie. “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
Mattie slipped her robe off the hook and put it on, stunned into obedience.
“What is it, Mom?”
A child’s mind couldn’t take it in, Kathryn decided later. A child’s body couldn’t absorb such grotesque facts.
Mattie flung herself down onto the floor as if she had been shot. She flailed her arms furiously all around her head, and Kathryn thought of bees. She tried to seize Mattie’s arms and hold tightly onto her, but Mattie threw her off and ran. She was out of the house and halfway down the lawn before Kathryn caught her.
“Mattie, Mattie, Mattie,” Kathryn said when she had reached her.
Over and over and over.
“Mattie, Mattie, Mattie.”
Kathryn put her hands behind Mattie’s head and pressed her face close to her own, pressed it in hard, as though to tell her she must listen, she had no choice.
“I will take care of you,” Kathryn said.
And then again.
“Listen to me, Mattie. I will take care of you.”
Kathryn folded her daughter into her arms. There was frost at their feet. Mattie was crying now, and Kathryn thought her own heart would break. But this was better, she knew. This was better.
Kathryn helped Mattie into the house and made her lie down on the couch. She wrapped her daughter in blankets and held onto her and rubbed her arms and legs to stop the shivering. Robert tried to give Mattie some water, which made her gag. Julia, Kathryn’s grandmother, the woman who had raised her, was called. Kathryn was vaguely aware of other people in the house then, a man and a woman with suits on, standing at the kitchen counter, waiting.
She could hear Robert talking on the telephone and then murmuring with the people from the airline. She hadn’t realized that a television was on, but Mattie suddenly sat up and looked at her.
“Did they say a bomb?” Mattie asked.
And then Kathryn heard the bulletin, in retrospect, the way one realizes that subliminally all the words have been heard and are there in the mind just waiting to be called forth.
Later Kathryn would come to think of the bulletins as bullets. Word bullets that tore into the brain and exploded, obliterating memories.
“Robert,” she called.
He came into the living room and stood next to her. “It’s not confirmed,” he said.
“They think a bomb?”
“It’s just a theory. Give her one of these.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a Valium.”
“You carry these?” she asked. “With you?”
Julia