The Pilot's Wife (29 page)

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 suspect? It seemed, at the very least, a monumental act of naïveté, of oblivion. But then she thought she knew the answer even as she asked the question: A dedicated adulterer causes no suspicion, she realized, because he truly does not want to be caught.

Kathryn had never even thought to suspect; she’d never smelled a trace of another woman, never found a smear of lipstick on the shoulder of a shirt. Even sexually, she’d never guessed. She’d assumed the falling off she and Jack had experienced was simply the normal course of events with a couple who’d been married for a decade.

She rolled down her window so that she could breathe the air — a curiously heady mix of sea salt and chlorophyll. The land around her, she realized suddenly, was extraordinary. The texture of the landscape — its rich green hues, its density — gave a feeling of solidity she’d not felt in London. The confluence of ocean and rocky coast, albeit wilder than her own New England shore, struck a responsive chord. She breathed evenly and deeply for the first time since Muire Boland had appeared at the hotel dining-room door.

She entered a village, and would have passed through but for a sight she’d seen before: Only the old fisherman was missing. She slowed the car and stopped. She sat parked along a common ringed by shops and homes. She could see where the cameraman must have stood, where the reporter with the dark hair and umbrella had conducted her interview in front of the hotel. The building was white and smooth and clean. She saw the sign above the door: Malin Hotel.

She thought she should get a room for the night. Her flight back to London didn’t leave until the morning. Maybe she ought to get something to eat as well.

It was several minutes before her eyes adjusted enough so that she could make out the scuffed mahogany of the traditional bar. She noted the scarlet drapes, the stools with beige vinyl tops, the dreariness of the room alleviated only somewhat by a fire at one end. Along the walls were banquettes and low tables and perhaps half a dozen people playing cards or reading or drinking beer.

Kathryn sat at the bar and ordered a cup of tea. Almost immediately, a woman with blond sculpted hair claimed the stool next to hers. Kathryn turned her head away and examined the signs above the register. Too late, she understood that the people in the bar were reporters.

The woman’s face was reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. She was flawlessly made up and looked distinctly American. Their eyes met.

“Can I buy you a drink?” the woman asked, speaking quietly. Kathryn realized immediately that the hushed voice was because the blond didn’t want anyone else in the bar to know that Kathryn was there.

“No, thank you,” Kathryn said.

The woman gave her name, the call letters of her network. “We sit in the bar here,” she explained. “The relatives sit in the lounge. Occasionally a husband or a father will wander in here and order a drink, but in terms of conversation, we’ve pretty much exhausted each other. We’re all bored. I’m sorry if that sounds callous.”

“I imagine even a plane crash can grow tedious,” Kathryn said. The bartender set down Kathryn’s tea, and the journalist ordered a half pint of Smithwick’s. “I recognized you from the photographs,” the reporter said. “I’m sorry for all that you’ve had to go through.”

“Thank you,” Kathryn said.

“Most of the bigger networks and news organizations will keep someone in place until the salvage operation is abandoned,” the woman said.

Kathryn made her tea strong and sweet and stirred it to release the heat.

“Do you mind if I ask why you’re here?” the journalist inquired.

Kathryn took a tentative sip. “I don’t mind,” she said. “But I can’t give you an answer. I don’t know why I’m here myself.”

She thought about her rage and the gravitational pull, about the newfound knowledge of the morning. About how easy it would be to offer to the blond all she had learned. How excited the reporter would be to have what would undoubtedly be the biggest story of the entire investigation, even bigger than the leak of the tape. And once the story was printed, wouldn’t the authorities find Muire Boland? Arrest her and send her to jail?

But then Kathryn thought about the baby who looked like Mattie, about Dierdre, who had a Molly doll.

“It wasn’t suicide,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you.” Robert would have known all along, Kathryn thought. He’d have been briefed before he ever came to the house. The union had suspected Jack and had asked Robert to keep an eye on her. Robert would have watched and waited for some sign that she knew about her husband’s activities, could name the other pilots. Robert had used her.

She no longer had any interest in her tea. The urgency to reach her destination had returned. She got up off her stool.

“Look, can we at least talk?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t think so,” Kathryn answered.

“Are you going out to Malin Head?”

Kathryn was silent.

“You won’t be able to get out to the site. Here.”

The blond removed a card from her wallet, turned it over, and wrote a name on it. She handed it to Kathryn. “When you get there, ask for Danny Moore,” she said. “He’ll take you out there. This is my card. When you’re done, if you change your mind, give me a call. I’m staying here. I’ll buy you dinner.”

Kathryn took the card and looked at it. “I hope you get to go home soon,” she said.

On her way out of the hotel, as she passed the lounge, Kathryn glanced in and saw a woman sitting in an armchair with a newspaper on her lap. The paper hadn’t been opened, and the woman wasn’t looking at the type. Kathryn thought the woman could not see anything at all in front of her, so vacant was her gaze. By a fireplace at the far end of the room, a man with a similar look stood with his hands in his pockets.

She recrossed the common and got into her car. She looked again at the card in her hand.

She already knew what she would do. She could not control what actions Robert Hart might eventually, or even immediately, take. But she could control what she herself would do. Indeed, she felt, in a quiet way, more in control of herself than she had been in years.

To reveal what she knew about the reasons for the plane’s explosion would mean that Mattie would discover Jack’s other family. And Mattie would never get over that. Of this, Kathryn was certain. She ripped the card into pieces and let them fall to the floor.

Knowing her destination was not far, Kathryn once again followed signs for Malin Head. She passed ruined cottages, no more than toppled stones, the thatched roofs long fallen in and rotted. She saw velvet grass bunched along a cliff — an emerald green even in the dead of winter. On ropes strung from pole to pole, clothes stiffened in the sun, the abstract art of wash on the line. Good drying weather, she thought.

As she rounded a corner, the horizon line of the North Atlantic surprised her. In the middle of that horizon line was a dark gray shape, a ship. A helicopter circled overhead. Brightly colored fishing boats hovered near the larger ship, like pups with a mother seal. The salvage boat, she thought.

This, then, was the place where the plane had gone down. She parked the car and got out, walking as far as she dared toward the edge of the cliff. Below her were three hundred vertical feet of rock and shale descending to the sea. From such a height, the water looked stationary, a scalloped border on a distant beach. The spray hit the rocks below in star-bursts. A red fishing boat was headed in toward shore. For as far as Kathryn could see, the water was a single color, gunmetal blue.

She doubted she had ever seen a more theatrical piece of coastline — raw and deadly, wild. It put a disaster in perspective, she thought, if anything could. There had probably been many disasters here.

She followed the fishing boat with her eyes until it disappeared behind the jutting peninsula that was Malin Head itself. Starting up the car again, she drove the narrow road, keeping the boat in sight when she could catch glimpses of it. It pulled into a small harbor formed by a long concrete pier. She stopped the car and got out.

The boats tethered to the pier were shiny with primary colors — orange, blue, green, and yellow — making her think more of Portuguese vessels than of Irish ones. The boat she’d been watching maneuvered around the pier and then threw out her mooring line. Kathryn walked toward the pier. There were uniformed guards at one end, and beyond them groups of men in civilian dress. As she walked, the fisherman aboard the red boat unloaded a piece of silver metal the size of a chair and placed it on the pier, where it immediately captured the attention of the men in civilian dress, who crowded around it. One of the men stood and beckoned to the driver of a truck, which backed onto the pier. The metal shard, presumably a piece of Jack’s plane, was loaded onto the truck.

At the entrance to the pier, a guard stopped her. “Can’t go beyond this point, miss.”

Perhaps he was a soldier. A policeman. He held a machine gun. “I’m a relative,” she said, eyeing the gun.

“Sorry for your loss, Ma’am,” the guard said. “There are scheduled trips for the relatives. You can inquire about them at the hotel.”

Like a whale watch, Kathryn thought. Or a cruise.

“I just need to talk to Danny Moore for a second,” Kathryn said.

“Oh, well then. That’s him there,” the guard said, gesturing. “The blue boat.”

Kathryn murmured a thank you and walked briskly past the man.

Avoiding eye contact with the officials in civilian dress, who were beginning to notice her, Kathryn called out to the fisherman in the blue boat. She saw that he was preparing to leave the pier.

“Wait,” she cried.

He was young, with dark hair cut close to the head. He wore a gold earring in his left ear. He had on a sweater that had probably once been ivory colored.

“Are you Danny Moore?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Can you take me out to the site?”

He seemed to hesitate, perhaps also about to tell her of the scheduled trips for relatives.

“I’m the pilot’s wife,” Kathryn said quickly. “I need to see the place where my husband went down. I don’t have much time.”

The fisherman reached up and took her hand.

He gestured for her to sit on a stool in the wheelhouse. Kathryn watched as one of the men in civilian dress strode toward the boat. The fisherman untied the mooring, came into the wheelhouse, and gunned the engine.

He said a word she couldn’t understand. She leaned forward, but the noise from the engine and the wind made conversation difficult.

The boat, she saw, had been scrubbed clean and bore no signs of fishing. Why fish when there was this task to be performed, this work for which those in charge might pay good money? “I’ll pay you,” Kathryn said, being reminded.

“Ah, no,” said the man, looking shyly away. “I don’t take money from family.”

As soon as the boat rounded the pier, the wind began in earnest. The fisherman smiled slightly when she made eye contact.

“You’re from here,” Kathryn said.

“Yes,” he answered, and he again uttered a word Kathryn could not make out. She thought it must be the name of the town where he lived.

“Have you been doing this since the beginning?” she shouted. “Since the beginning,” he said and looked away. “It’s not so bad now, but at first …”

She didn’t want to think about what it had been like at first. “Pretty boat,” she said to change the subject.

“It’s grand.”

She heard in his accent an uncomfortable reminder of Muire Boland.

“Is it yours?” she asked.

“Ah, no. It’s my brother’s. But we fish together.”

“What do you fish for?”

The engine made a steady grinding sound through the water. “Crab and lobster,” he said.

She stood and turned, facing the bow. Beside her at the wheel, the young man shifted his weight. She teetered some in her shapeless heels. “You fish now, in this cold?” she asked, clutching her suit jacket around her.

“Yes,” he said. “All weathers.”

“You go out every day?”

“Ah, no. We’ll make away on a Sunday evening and return on the Friday.”

“Hard life,” she said.

He shrugged. “It’s fine weather we’re having now,” he said. “There’s always mist at Malin Head.”

As they drew closer to the salvage ship, Kathryn observed the other fishing boats engaged in the operation — gaily colored boats, such as the one she was in, boats too festive for their ugly task. On the deck of the salvage boat, divers stood in wet suits. The helicopter continued to hover overhead. The debris, of course, would have gone down over a large area.

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.