The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [93]
Robert looked at Kathryn, then set the knife carefully beside his plate. “Wait,” he said to Muire as she turned to walk away.
Kathryn watched as the woman halted, slowly pivoted, and studied Robert, tilting her head in a quizzical manner.
“Who were the other pilots?” he asked quickly. “I need the names.”
Kathryn stiffened. She glanced at Robert and then at Muire. She felt herself begin to tremble.
“You know about this?” she asked Robert in a tight whisper. Robert looked down at the table. Kathryn could see the color coming into his face.
“You’ve known all along?” Kathryn asked. “You came to my house knowing that Jack might be involved in this?”
“We knew only that there was a smuggling ring,” Robert said. “We didn’t know who, though we suspected Jack.”
“You knew where this might lead? What I might find out?” Robert raised his eyes to her, and she saw it all, in an instant, pass over his face: Love. Responsibility. Loss.
Particularly loss.
Kathryn stood up, and her napkin fell to the floor. Her movements startled the other diners, who glanced over at her with expressions of faint alarm.
“I trusted you,” she said.
She walked from the dining room straight out the hotel door and stepped into a waiting taxi. She had left her coat and her suitcase in her room. She didn’t care what was in it.
She would change her ticket at the airport.
During the drive, she stared at her hands in her lap, clasped so tightly the knuckles had turned a translucent white. She could not hear or see anything. But she could feel the rage in her blood, actually feel it pumping and churning inside her. She had never known such rage. She wanted only to go home.
At Heathrow, she moved through the revolving door into an international throng, milling in all directions, as if communally lost. She found the British Airways desk and got in line. She would change her flight and the airline itself, and she didn’t care how much it cost.
She felt exposed as she stood in the line, as though she no longer had any insulation at all. Robert might guess her intentions and come looking for her. She would wait for her flight in the bathroom if she had to, she decided.
The line moved too slowly. Her rage began to encompass the inefficiency of the ticket agents.
She wondered if she’d fly over Malin Head, if she’d fly a route similar to the one Jack had flown.
And then she began to feel the gravitational pull. The pure force of it surprised her. She put a hand to her chest.
The pull grew stronger as she moved closer to the beginning of the line.
When it was Kathryn’s turn, she laid her ticket on the counter. The agent looked at her, waiting for her to speak.
“What’s the closest airport to Malin Head?” Kathryn asked.
HER ARMS ARE FULL OF DIRTY LAUNDRY — WET towels, crumpled sheets, and sprung socks that keep slipping from her arms and falling to the floor. She bends to retrieve an errant washcloth, thinking that if she’d brought the basket upstairs first the laundry wouldn’t be so frisky. She hugs the damp bundle even more tightly and walks toward the stairs. As she passes the entrance to their bedroom, she glances in.
It is a fleeting tableau, so brief it barely registers. A subliminal picture, no different from the thousands of subliminal pictures that enter the brain but fail to interest the consciousness. Like seeing a woman in a camel jacket selecting oranges at the supermarket, or seeing but not noticing a locket around a student’s neck.
Jack is bent over his carry-on, packing for a trip. His hand moves quickly, tucks an item out of sight. A shirt, she thinks, blue with yellow stripes. A shirt she has never seen before. Perhaps a shirt he bought in a pinch at an airport kiosk.
She smiles to show that she hasn’t meant to startle him. He straightens and lets the lid of his small suitcase fall closed.
— You need a hand with that? he asks.
She stands for a minute, admiring the way the afternoon sun falls on the old floorboards of the house, setting the pumpkin stain aglow.
— When are you leaving? she asks.
— Ten minutes.