A Pilot's Wife

Falling

Enjoy. Leave comments or a review. 

--------------------------------------------

It had been a few hours since she had last been questioned by the investigators and airlines. Elliot had held her for hours after, just letting her listen to his heart beat. 

She was inside her bedroom, the clock hitting five pm. She wondered what was meant precisely by pilot error. A left turn when a right turn 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 344 other people? A train engineer? Someone who worked with chemicals? With nuclear waste?

It couldn't be pilot error, she thought. For Julia's sake, it couldn't. 

It was cold in the bedroom. The door had been shut all day. The bed was unmade, just as se had left it at 3:30am in the morning the day she had been told James had died. The 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. How many times had James and her made love on that bed? she wondered. She touched the sheet with her fingers, her hand dragging over the wrinkles. 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 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 to herself

But it couldn't be pilot error, she thought quickly. It 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 5:20. 

Carefully-Monitoring herself for seismic shift-reached down and pulled the top sheet over her. She imagined she could smell James in the sheets. It was possible-she hadn't washed the sheets since he left. But she couldn't trust her senses, didn't know what was real or imagined. She looked over at James' shirt flung over the chair. Olivia had gotten into the habit, earlier in the marriage, of not bothering to tidy the house just until James 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 in the weave of the cloth, and when all the traces of James had been cleaned and put away, what would she be left with then?

She brought the the flannel up over her mouth and nose and breathed slowly through it, thinking that might help to stop the panic. She got up quickly from the bed and walked into the bathroom, her tired eyes looking back at her. Her feet then took her outside her bedroom, and past James' office. She saw that the light had been left on. The office was over bright and colorless, white, metallic, plastic, grey. It was a room she seldom entered, an unappealing space with no curtains on the windows and metal file cabinets lining the walls. A masculine room. 

She supposed it had its own order, an order only know to James. On the massive metal desk there were two computers, a keyboard, a fax, two phones, a scanner, coffee cups, dusty models of planes, a mug with red juice in it, Julia's she guessed, and a blue clay pencil that Julia had made in the beginning of kindergarten year. She looked at James' fax machine with its blinking light. She walked to the desk and sat down. Robert had been here, earlier. Using the phone and the fax. Olivia opened the left hand drawer. Inside were James' logbooks, heavy, dark ones with vinyl bindings and smaller ones that fit into a shirt pocket. She saw a small flashlight, an ivory letter opener, he had brought a few years ago from Africa. There were handbooks for airplane types he no longer flew, a book on weather radar. A training video on wind shear. Coasters that looked like flight instruments.