The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [95]
Because he loved Mattie too much, she answered herself at once.
She wondered then if Jack and Muire had actually been legally married. Did a wedding in a church automatically confer legal status? She didn’t know how it worked, or how Muire and Jack had specifically worked it. And she would never know. There was so much now that she would never know.
Just outside of Londonderry, she showed her passport at the checkpoint and passed into the Republic of Ireland, simultaneously entering Donegal. She drove north and west through countryside that became noticeably more rural as she went, the number of sheep beginning vastly to outnumber people, the cottages becoming even more rare. She followed signs for Malin Head, Cionn Mhalanna in Irish, through the heavy aroma of peat. The land grew rugged, wilder, with long vistas of cliff and jagged rock, tall sand dunes capped in green and heather. The road narrowed to barely a single lane, and she realized she was driving too fast when she came upon a sharp curve and nearly put the car into a ditch.
Of course, it could have been the mother, Kathryn thought. A desire to recapture the mother, have the mother he’d been denied. Certainly this might have been the case with his having fallen in love with Muire Boland, and even Muire had seemed to understand that. But beyond this speculation, Kathryn thought, the territory grew murky: Who could say what a man’s motivations were? Even had Jack been alive and with her in the car, could he have articulated his own Why? Could anyone? Again, she’d never know. She could only know what she imagined to be true. What she herself decided would be true.
As she drove, certain memories pricked at her, nagged at her, and she knew it might be months or years before they stopped: The thought, for example, that Jack might have taken money from her and Mattie to give to another family was insupportable, and she could feel her blood pressure rising in the car. Or the fight, she remembered suddenly, that horrible fight for which she’d blamed herself. The gall of him, she thought now, letting her believe her own inadequacies had been the cause, when all along he was having an affair with another woman. Was that what Jack had been doing on the computer all that time? Writing to a lover? Is that why he’d been willing to escalate the hostilities so quickly when he’d asked her if she wanted him to go? Had he been flirting with the idea?
Or the lines of poetry, she thought. Had Jack relaxed his vigilance and allowed bits of his relationship with Muire Boland to seep into his marriage with Kathryn? Had Kathryn’s life been invaded in ways she’d never noticed? How many books had she read or films had she seen that Muire might have suggested? How much of the Irish woman’s life had leached into her own?
Again, Kathryn would never know.
She turned off the main road, following the directions she’d been given to the most northwesterly point in Ireland. Astonishingly, the road became even narrower, no wider than her driveway. She wondered as she drove why she had never imagined an affair. How could a woman live with a man all that time and never