The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [99]
Behind the fisherman’s head, Kathryn noted the shoreline, the cliffs with their shalelike geological exposure. The landscape was gothic in its shape, atmospheric even in the good weather, and she could easily imagine this forbidding landscape in a mist. So very different from Fortune’s Rocks, where nature seemingly had subdued herself. And yet, on either side of the Atlantic, reporters had stood, facing each other across the ocean.
“This is the loran reading where they pulled up the cockpit,” he said.
“This?” she asked. And began to tremble. For the moment. For the proximity of death.
She left the wheelhouse and walked to the port railing. She peered over the edge at the water, at its surface, constantly shifting, though seemingly still. A person was not who he had been the day before, Kathryn thought. Or the day before that.
The water seemed opaque. Overhead, gulls circled. She didn’t want to think about why the gulls were there, either.
What had been real? she wondered as she studied the water, trying to find a fixed point, which she couldn’t. Had she herself been the pilot’s wife or had Muire Boland? Muire Boland, who had been married in the Catholic Church, who knew of Jack’s mother and his childhood. Muire, who knew of Kathryn, whereas Kathryn had not known of her.
Or had Kathryn been the real wife? The first wife, the one he had protected from the truth, the wife he wouldn’t leave?
The more Kathryn learned about Jack — and she had no doubt now that she would learn more, would find, among Jack’s things when they were returned to her, other references to M — the more she would have to rethink the past. As if having to tell a story over and over, each time a little differently because a fact had changed, a detail had altered. And if enough details were altered, or the facts were important enough, perhaps the story veered in a direction very different from its first telling.
The boat rocked from another’s wake, and she braced herself on the railing. Jack had been, she thought, only another woman’s husband.
She glanced up briefly at the circling helicopter. Once she had seen a wide-body hovering just off Fortune’s Rocks. The day had wanted to be sunny, and an early fog was just lifting. The plane flew low over the water, and the fat silver slug had seemed too heavy to stay aloft. Kathryn had been afraid for the plane, awed that flight was possible.
Jack would have known his fate, she thought. In the last several seconds, he would have known.
He had called out Mattie’s name at the end, Kathryn decided. She would believe that, and it would be true.
Again, she studied the water. How long had the fisherman been circling? She had lost the ability to perceive the passage of time as it was actually unfolding. When, for example, had the future begun? Or the past ended?
She tried to find a fixed point in the water, but couldn’t.
Did change invalidate all that had gone before?
Soon she would leave this place and fly home and drive to Julia’s. She would say to her daughter, We’re going home now. Kathryn’s life was with Mattie. There could be no other reality.
She took her wedding ring from her finger and dropped it into the ocean.
She knew that the divers would not find Jack, that he no longer existed.
“You all right, then?”
The young fisherman leaned out of the wheelhouse, one hand still on the wheel. His forehead was creased, and he looked worried.
She smiled briefly at him and nodded.
To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.
HE PLACES THE RING ON HER FINGER AND, for a moment, holds it there. The justice of the peace intones the sentences of the simple ceremony. Kathryn looks at Jack’s fingers on the silver, at the gleam of the silver itself. He has