The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [94]
— And you’ll be back when?
— Tuesday. Around noon. Maybe we’d better call Alfred Zacharian, get him in to take a look at the leak. It’s worse today.
She notices that his hair is still wet from the shower. He’s slimmed down some, she observes; there’s hardly any sign of a stomach now. She watches as he crosses to the closet, takes his uniform jacket from a hanger, and slips it on. She has never failed to be moved by the sight of Jack in his uniform, at the immediate authority that drapes itself over his shoulders, that clarifies itself as he fastens the three gold buttons.
— I’ll miss you, she says impulsively.
He turns and steps into a block of sunlight. Around the eyes, he looks tired.
— What is it? she asks.
— What’s what?
— You look worried about something.
— It’s just a headache, he says, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes.
She watches him relax his features, smooth his brow muscles.
— You want some Advil? she asks.
— No, I’m fine, he says.
He zips the suitcase shut, grasps the handle, and pauses. He seems about to say something to her, then appears to change his mind. He swings the bag off the bed.
— Just leave the dry cleaning until I get home, he says, walking to her. He holds her eyes for a second longer than he might have. Across the bundle of dirty laundry, he kisses her. The kiss slides off the side of her mouth.
— I’ll take care of it on Tuesday, he says.
SHE WAS TRYING TO READ THE MAP WHILE REMEM-bering to drive on the left, a challenge that taxed all of her concentration, so that it was some time before she realized the irony of being on the Antrim Road as it led west, away from the Belfast airport. The flight had been uneventful, the car rental straightforward. She felt an almost physical urgency to get to her destination.
By landing west of Belfast, she’d missed the city altogether, had seen none of the bombed-out buildings and bullet-scarred facades she’d heard about. Indeed, it was difficult to reconcile the pastoral landscape spreading out before her with the unsolvable conflict that had claimed so many lives — most recently one hundred and four persons in an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean. The unadorned white cottages and pastureland were marred only by wire fences, telephone lines, occasionally a satellite dish. In the distance, the hills seemed to change their color and even their shape, depending on how the sun shifted through the fair-weather clouds. The land looked ancient, trespassed upon, and the hills had a worn and mossy look, as though they had been trampled by many feet. On the ridge of hills closest to the road, she could see the scattered white dots of hundreds of sheep, the plowed and furrowed bits of patchwork, the low green hedgerows that bordered the crops like lines drawn by a child.
This would not be what the bloody struggle had been about, she thought as she drove. It was something else she’d never fathom, never understand. Though Jack, in arrogance or love, had presumed to do so, had involved himself in Northern Ireland’s complex conflict, thus causing even Kathryn and Mattie to be peripheral, if unwitting, participants.
She knew few facts about the Troubles, only what she’d absorbed, like everyone else, from headlines and from television when events occurred that were catastrophic enough to make news in the United States. She’d read or heard about the sectarian violence of the early 1970s, the hunger strikes, the cease-fire of 1994, and the breakdown of the cease-fire, but she knew little about the why of it all. She’d heard of kneecapping, of car bombings, and of men in ski masks entering civilian homes, but she had no sense of the patriotism driving these terrorist activities. At times, she was tempted to think of the participants in this struggle as misguided thugs cloaking themselves in idealism like murderous religious zealots of any age. At other times, the cruelty and the sheer stupidity of the British had seemed positively to invite a frustration and a bitterness that might lead any group of people to violent action.
What baffled her now, though,