Read Online The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve - Free Book Online Page B

I mean. Ex-wife.”
    “She’s your age. Tall. Short dark hair. Very pretty.”
    “I trusted him not to die,” Kathryn said. “I feel like I’ve been cheated. Does that sound terrible? After all, he died, and I didn’t. He may have suffered. I know he suffered, if only for seconds.”
    “You’re suffering now.”
    “It’s not the same.”
    “You
have
been cheated,” he said. “Both you and your daughter.”
    At the mention of her daughter, Kathryn’s throat tightened. She put her hands in front of her face, as if to tell him not to say anything else.
    “You have to let this happen to you,” he said quietly. “It has its own momentum.”
    “It’s like a train rolling over me,” she said. “A train that doesn’t stop.”
    “I want to help you, but there isn’t a lot I can do except watch,” Robert said. “Grief is messy. There’s nothing good about it.”
    She put her head down on the table and shut her eyes.
    “We have to have a funeral, don’t we?” she asked.
    “We can talk about that tomorrow.”
    “But what if there’s no body?”
    “What religion are you?” he asked.
    “I’m nothing. I used to be Methodist. Julia is a Methodist.” “What was Jack?”
    “Catholic. But he was nothing, too. We didn’t belong to a church. We weren’t married in a church.”
    She felt Robert’s fingers touch the top of her hair. Lightly. Quickly.
    “I’m going now,” he said.

    When Robert was gone, Kathryn sat for a minute by herself and then got up and walked through the downstairs rooms of the house, turning out lights. She wondered what precisely was meant by pilot error. A left turn when a right was called for? A miscalculation of fuel? Directions not followed? A switch accidentally flipped? In what other job could a man make a mistake and kill 103 other people? A train engineer? A bus driver? Someone who worked with chemicals, with nuclear waste?
    It couldn’t be pilot error, she said to herself. For Mattie’s sake, it couldn’t.
    She stood for a long time at the top of the stairs, then turned down the hallway.
    It was cold in the bedroom. The door had been shut all day. She let her eyes adjust to the dark. The bed was unmade, just as she had left it at 3:24 in the morning.
    She circled the bed and looked at it, the way an animal might do — wary and considering. She pulled back the comforter and top sheet and studied the fitted sheet in the moonlight. It was cream-colored, flannel for the winter. How many times had Jack and she made love on that bed? she wondered. In sixteen years of marriage? She touched the sheet with her fingers. It felt worn and smooth. Soft. Tentatively, she sat on the edge of the bed, seeing if she could stand that. She no longer trusted herself, could no longer say with any certainty how her body would react to any piece of news. But as she sat there, she felt nothing. Perhaps, during the long day, she had finally become numb, she thought. The senses could only bear so much.
    “Pilot error,” she said aloud, testing herself.
    But it couldn’t be pilot error, she thought quickly. Would not, in the end, be pilot error.
    She lay down on the bed, fully clothed. This would be her bed now, she was thinking. Her bed alone. All that room for only herself.
    She glanced over at the bedside clock: 9:27.
    Carefully — monitoring herself for seismic shifts — she reached down and pulled the top sheet over her. She imagined she could smell Jack in the flannel. It was possible — she hadn’t washed the sheets since he left on Tuesday. But she couldn’t trust her senses, didn’t know what was real or imagined. She looked over at Jack’s shirt flung over the chair. Kathryn had gotten into the habit, early in the marriage, of not bothering to tidy the house until just before Jack got home from a trip. Now, she knew, she would not want to remove the shirt from the chair. It might be days before she could touch it, could risk bringing it to her face, risk catching his smell