Excerpt from The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"When did you say it happened?"

He rested his elbows on his knees and folded his hands.

"One fifty-seven. Our time. Six fifty-seven theirs."

Above his right eyebrow, there was a scar. He must be in his late thirties, she thought, closer to her age than to Jack's. He had the fair skin of a blond and brown eyes with flecks of rust in the irises. Jack had had blue eyes, two different blues--one a washed-out blue, almost translucent, a watercolor sky; the other brilliant, a sharp royal. The unusual coloring drew others' eyes to his, made people examine his faceas though this asymmetrical characteristic suggested imbalance, perhaps something wrong.

She thought: Is this the man's job?

"That was the time of the last transmission," the man from the union said in a voice she could hardly hear.

"What was the last transmission?" she asked.

"It was routine."

She didn't believe him. What was routine about a last transmission?

"Do you know," she asked, "what the most common last words are from a pilot when he knows he's going down? Well, of course you know."

"Mrs. Lyons," he said, turning to her.

"Kathryn."

"You're still in shock. You should have some sugar. Is there juice?"

"In the fridge. It was a bomb, wasn't it?"

"I wish I had more to tell you."

He stood up and walked into the kitchen. She realized that she didn't want to be left alone in a room just yet, and so she followed him. She looked at the clock over the sink. 3:38. Was it possible that only fourteen minutes had elapsed since she had peered at the clock on the night table upstairs?

"You got here fast," she said, sitting again on the kitchen chair.

He poured orange juice into a glass.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

"We have a plane," he said quietly.

"No. I mean, tell me. How is it done? You have a plane waiting? You sit around waiting for a crash?"

He handed her the glass of juice. He leaned against the sink and ran the middle finger of his right hand vertically along his brow, from the bridge of his nose to his hairline. He seemed to be making decisions then, judgments.

"No, I don't," he said. "I don't sit around waiting for a crash. But if one occurs, we have procedures in place. We have a Lear jet at Washington National. It flies me to the nearest major airport. In this case, Portsmouth."

"And then?"

"And then there's a car waiting."

"And you did it in..."

She calculated the time it would take him to travel from Washington, which was where the union headquarters was, to Ely, New Hampshire, just over the Massachusetts border.

"A little over an hour," he said.

"But why?" she asked.

"To get here first," he said. "To inform you. To help you through it."

"That's not why," she said quickly.

He thought a minute.

"It's part of it," he said.

She smoothed her hand over the cracked surface of the pine table. On nights when Jack had been home, Jack and she and Mattie had seemed to live within a ten-foot radius of that table---reading the paper, listening to the news, cooking, eating, cleaning up, doing homework, and then, after Mattie had gone to bed, talking or not talking, and sometimes, if Jack didn't have a trip, sharing a bottle of wine. In the beginning, when Mattie was little and early to bed, they had sometimes had candlelight and made love in the kitchen, one or the other of them seized by a sudden lust or fondness.

She tilted her head back and shut her eyes. The pain seemed to stretch from her abdomen to her throat. She felt panicky, as though she had strayed too close to the edge. She drew in her breath so sharply that Robert looked over at her.

© 1999 by Anita Shreve