The Pilot's Wife (17 page)

“I’m glad to see you,” she said, surprising herself.

And it was true. She could feel a weight — not all of the weight, but something small and gelatinous — slide off her shoulders.

“How’s Mattie?” he asked, crossing the room and sitting down on the red lacquered chair.

It would make an interesting photograph, Kathryn thought suddenly, the man on the red lacquered chair against the lime green paint. An attractive man. An arresting face. The widow’s peak and the dust-colored hair, combined with the way he sat slouched with his hands in his pockets, made him look vaguely British, like a character in a World War II movie. Someone who would have been in ciphers, she thought.

“Terrible,” Kathryn said, feeling relieved to have someone to talk with about Mattie. Julia’s fatigue had been such that Kathryn had not wanted to burden her grandmother too much with her private worries. Julia’s were harrowing enough, more than any seventy-eight-year-old woman should have to bear.

“Mattie’s a mess,” Kathryn said simply to Robert. “She’s jumpy. She’s nervous. She can’t concentrate on anything. Sometimes she tries to watch television, but that’s not safe anymore. Even if it isn’t a news bulletin, there’s always something that reminds her of her father. Last night, she went over to Taylor’s house to be with some of their friends, and she came back inconsolable. A friend of Taylor’s father who was at the house asked Mattie if there would be a trial, and Mattie apparently just dissolved. Taylor’s dad had to drive her home.”

Robert, Kathryn noticed, was studying her intently.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m worried, Robert. Really worried. Mattie’s brittle. She’s fragile. She doesn’t eat. Sometimes she breaks into hysterical laughter. She doesn’t seem to have the appropriate reaction to anything anymore. Although I’d like to know what is appropriate. I told Mattie that life doesn’t just dis-integrate, that we can’t break all the rules, and Mattie said, quite rightly, that all the rules had already been broken.”

He crossed his legs the way men do, an ankle resting on a knee.

“How was Christmas?” he asked.

“Sad,” she said. “Pathetic. Every minute was pathetic. The worst was how hard Mattie was trying. As if she owed it to Julia and me. As if she owed it somehow to her father. I wish now we had canceled the whole thing. How was yours?”

“Sad,” he said. “Pathetic.”

Kathryn smiled.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked, looking around the room as though something in it might provide a clue.

“I’m trying to avoid having to clean the house. I’ve always used this room as a kind of retreat. I hide in here. What are you doing here? is a better question.”

“I have a few days off,” he said.

“And?”

He uncrossed his legs and put his hands in the pockets of his trousers.

“Jack didn’t spend his last night in the crew apartment,” he said.

In the room, the air went thick and heavy.

“Where was he?” Kathryn asked quietly.

How quickly a person could ask a question she didn’t want the answer to, Kathryn thought, and not for the first time. As though one part of the psyche dared the other to survive.

“We don’t know,” Robert said. “As you know, he was the only American on the crew. When the plane landed, Martin and Sullivan got in their cars and drove home. We do know that Jack went to the apartment, however briefly, because he made two phone calls, one to you and one to a restaurant for a reservation for that night. But according to the maid, no one slept there Monday night. Apparently, the Safety Board has known for some time. It will be on the news today. At noon.”

Kathryn lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. She hadn’t been home when Jack had called, and he’d left a message on the machine.
Hi, hon
, he’d said.
I’m here. I’m going downstairs to get something to eat. Did you call Alfred? Talk to you soon.

“I didn’t want you to be taken by surprise,” he said. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“Mattie … ,” she said.

“I’ve told Julia,” he said. He got up, crossed the room, and sat at the bottom of the daybed, at its edge, barely sitting at all. His shirt was a darkish cotton, possibly gray, although Kathryn wondered if it, too, could be called taupe.

Her mind felt pushed, compressed. If Jack hadn’t slept in the crew apartment, where had he been? She shut her eyes, not wanting to think about it. If anyone had asked her, she would have said that she was certain her husband had never been unfaithful. It wasn’t like Jack, she wanted to tell Robert. That wasn’t him at all.

“This will end,” Robert said.

“It wasn’t suicide.” She felt compelled to say this at least. She felt it absolutely.

He reached over and put his hand on hers. Instinctively, she started to pull her hand away, but he held on to it.

She didn’t want to ask, she didn’t, but she had to, and she could see that he was waiting for the question. She sat up slowly, withdrawing her hand, and this time Robert let it go.

“The reservation was for how many?” she asked as casually as she could.

“For two.”

She pressed her lips together. It didn’t mean anything necessarily, she thought. It could easily have been for Jack and a member of his crew, couldn’t it? She saw Robert’s gaze flicker to the window and back. Which member of the crew? she wondered.

“How did you keep in touch with Jack when he was away?” Robert asked.

“He called me,” she said. “It was easier that way, because my schedule was always the same. He’d call me as soon as he got to the crew apartment. If I had to reach him, I would leave a message on his voice mail. We had arranged it that way because I could never be sure when he was trying to get some sleep.”

She thought about that arrangement. Had it been her idea or Jack’s? They had done it for so many years, she could no longer remember when it had begun. And it had always seemed a logical system, too practical to question. Odd, she thought, how a fact, seen one way, was one thing. And then, seen from a different angle, was something else entirely. Or perhaps not so odd.

“Obviously, we can’t ask the crew,” she said. “No.”

She thought about the question Mattie had asked her on the day she’d learned of the suicide rumor: How do you ever know that you know a person?

Kathryn stood up and walked over to the window. She had on an old sweatshirt and a pair of jeans with shot knees that she had been wearing for days. Even her socks weren’t clean. She hadn’t thought she would see anyone today. With grief, she thought, appearance was the first thing to go. Or was it dignity?

“I can’t cry anymore,” she said. “That part is over.” “Kathryn …”

“It’s unprecedented,” she said. “It’s absolutely unprecedented. No pilot has ever been accused of committing suicide in an airliner.”

“Actually,” said Robert, “it’s not unprecedented. There is one case.”

Kathryn turned from the window.

“In Morocco. A Royal Air Maroc airliner crashed near Agadir in August of 1994. The Moroccan government, basing its opinion on the
CVR
tapes, said the crash was caused by the captain’s suicidal act. Apparently, the man deliberately disengaged the autopilot and pointed the aircraft at the ground. The plane began to break up before impact. Forty-four people died.”

“My God,” she said.

She put her hands over her eyes. It was impossible not to see, if only for an instant, the horror of the copilot as he watched his captain kill himself, the terrified bewilderment of the passengers in the cabin as they felt the sudden descent.

“When will they release the tape?” she asked. “Jack’s tape.” Robert shook his head. “I doubt very much that they ever will,” he said. “They don’t have to. The transcripts are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. When tapes have been released, either what’s on them isn’t sensitive or else they’ve been heavily censored.”

“So I won’t ever have to listen to it.”

“I doubt it.”

“But then … how will we ever know what happened?” “Thirty separate agencies in three countries are working on this crash,” Robert said. “Believe me, the union hates the accusation of suicide more than anyone — even the hint of suicide. Every congressman in Washington is calling for stricter psychological testing of pilots, which from the union’s point of view is a nightmare. The sooner the case gets resolved, the better.”

Kathryn rubbed her arms, trying to get the circulation going. “It’s all political, isn’t it?” she said.

“Usually.”

“It’s why you’re here.”

He was silent as he sat on the bed. He smoothed the bedspread with his palms. “No,” he said. “Not at the moment.”

“So you’re here as…?”

“I’m here,” he said, looking up at her. “I’m just here.”

She nodded her head slowly. She wanted to smile. She wanted to tell Robert Hart how glad she was that he was there, how very hard it was to go through all of this alone, to not have with her the one person she needed, who was Jack.

“Is that a good shirt?” she asked quickly. “Not particularly,” he said.

“You feel like doing some chores?”

R
AIN
FALLS
IN
HEAVY
SHEETS
OUTSIDE
THE
MAS
-sive paned windows of the auditorium. The room is old and sloping, built in the 1920s and not yet renovated. The walls are wood paneled, etched here and there with declarations of love and students’ initials. Heavy maroon drapes that never seem to work exactly right hang to either side of the stage. Only the seats, mercilessly poked at and ripped open over the years with pens and pocket knives, have been replaced. Now the audience sits on seats removed from the Ely Falls Cinema when that building was demolished to make way for a bank.

The auditorium slowly fills with parents as the band struggles courageously with “Pomp and Circumstance.” Conducting in the pit just below the stage, Kathryn manages to coax from the twenty-three high school musicians a barely passable rendition of the graduation processional. Susan Ingalls, on the clarinet, is wildly off-key, and Spence Closson, on the bass drum, seems particularly nervous tonight, hesitating just a fraction on each measure.

Overtime, Kathryn thinks to herself. In any other job, this would be called overtime.

Fortunately, this is not graduation itself, just Awards Night. Kathryn has five seniors in the band, two of whom might win academic prizes. It’s one of the few advantages of a small school, she thinks. Awards Night is usually short.

With her baton still in her hand, she sits on a chair next to Jimmy DeMartino, tuba. She debates the merits of taking Susan Ingalls backstage and trying to tune her clarinet. The principal begins his address, which will be followed by talks from the vice-principal and the valedictorian of the senior class. Kathryn tries to pay attention, but her mind is more fixed on the grades she must do tonight when she gets home. The last several weeks of the school year are always harried and emotional. Every day for the past five days, she’s conducted band practice during lunch so that the seniors — all twenty-eight of them — can practice marching to “Pomp and Circumstance” for graduation. Not once this week has the song, even badly played, failed to produce tears. But by graduation night, Kathryn knows, all the tears will be used up, the wistful heartache of leaving school will be well played out, and the seniors will be thinking only of the all-night party ahead. Every year it is the same.

The speeches over, the principal begins to announce the awards. Kathryn looks at her watch. A half hour at the outside, she calculates. Then the band will play “Trumpet Voluntary,” everyone will go home, and she can start computing grades for her sophomore history class. Mattie has a math final tomorrow.

She hears applause, the hush of anticipation as a name is read, another round of applause, sometimes a whistle from the crowd. Seniors from the front row of the auditorium mount the stage and return with ribbon-tied scrolls in their hands, occasionally a trophy. Beside her, Jimmy DeMartino receives an award for outstanding academic achievement in physics. She holds his tuba for him while he is on stage.

After thirty minutes have passed, Kathryn listens for the lull in the proceedings that will signal that the evening is coming to a close. In preparation, she stands and walks toward the conductor’s box, making small motions with her hand to remind the musicians to pick up their instruments. She changes the music on the stand, waits with her hands folded in front of her to begin.

But she is mistaken. The principal is not done. There is one more award to be given.

Kathryn hears the words
highest possible score
and
sophomore.
A name is called. A girl stands and hands Kathryn her clarinet. In a white T-shirt, a skimpy black skirt, and work boots, the girl ascends the stage. The audience, in a mixture of admiration for the achievement and relief that the assembly is over, breaks into applause. Kathryn tucks Mattie’s clarinet under her arm and claps as hard as any of them.

Jack should be here, Kathryn thinks.

Afterward, in the band room, Kathryn smothers Mattie in a hug.

— I’m so proud, she says.

— Mom, Mattie says breathlessly, breaking away, — can I call Dad and tell him? I really want to.

Kathryn thinks a moment. Jack is in London and will be sleeping in preparation for another trip, but she knows he wouldn’t mind being woken for this.

— Sure, Kathryn says to Mattie. — Why not? We’ll use the phone in the principal’s office.

Using her calling card number, she dials the crew apartment, but there is no answer. She hangs up and tries again. Through the window, she can see the wind sending gusts of rain down the street. Kathryn tries a third time, thinking that the repetition of calls alone will signal to Jack that she’s trying to reach him. It’s one-thirty in the morning in London. Where is he?

— We’ll call from home, she tells Mattie with a smile.

But at home, when she dials the London number, there is still no answer. Kathryn calls three times, twice while Mattie isn’t looking. She leaves a message on the voice mail. Feeling the enthusiasm and pride of the evening beginning to dissipate, Kathryn abandons the effort to reach Jack, and to celebrate Mattie’s achievement, makes up a batch of brownies. Mattie, too excited to study for her math test, sits at the kitchen table while her mother mixes the batter. For the first time ever, they discuss colleges, and Kathryn thinks of schools she might not have considered before. She looks at her daughter in a slightly new way.