Raveling (18 page)

It had been two weeks.

“Pilot,” he said when I got close enough.

I looked at his face.

“I just want you to know,” he said, “that if you ever want to talk to me about something, about something maybe you’re afraid
to tell anybody else, well… well, you just go ahead and give me a call.”

It seems to me I could see individual blades of grass on the lawn across the street. I could hear particular wheels against
the pavement on the highway. “Okay,” I said.

“Anytime,” he said. “Doesn’t have to be now. Doesn’t have to be anytime soon.” He smiled.

“Okay,” I said again.

“Now,” he said, “I’ll go in and talk to your parents.”

“I’m really sorry,” my brother said. “I guess you were expecting someone else.” He stood in Katherine’s concrete
hallway with his hands in his pockets, his face like a begging dog. This was not his customary face.

“I just ordered a pizza.” Katherine stood in the doorway of her apartment clutching a twenty-dollar bill. “I thought you were—”

“—the pizza guy, obviously. I’m really, really sorry. I just, well, I was going to call you, but—”

With her other hand she held together her old blue terry-cloth robe, stained from years of wear. The air between them was
like the moment before a concert, everyone taking their seats. So Katherine gave my brother a look of forgiveness, her green
eyes softening. “Why don’t you come in, anyway?” she said. “Even if you’re not the pizza guy.”

“Thanks.” Eric walked into the apartment, looking everywhere, taking everything in.

“You have an unlistened-to message.” He indicated the answering machine, the red light-emitting-diode number blinking steadily.

“Michele, my sister.”

“How do you know?”

“I was here when she left it. I didn’t pick up.”

He nodded. “Younger or—”

“Younger,” Katherine said.

“Are you close?”

“Not really.” Katherine walked across the room. “It’s small,” she said, meaning the apartment. “And not—” She searched for
the right word.

“Decorated?” Eric offered.

“Not decorated,” she said with a laugh. “That’s it.”

Eric removed his hands from his pockets. “I went by your office and Elizabeth told me you had just left for the day. I looked
up your address in the hospital personnel directory. I would have called, but I figured you’d be on your—”

“I was just changing.” Katherine gestured toward her bedroom. “Do you mind if I—”

“No, please,” Eric told her. “Go ahead and do what you were doing. I’m embarrassed now. I guess I didn’t—”

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Katherine said. “You wanted to talk about Pilot, right?”

Eric was silent, meaning yes, she thought. Or meaning something else. She suddenly felt extremely ugly.

“Let me throw some jeans on.” She turned her face away. “And I’ll be right back.” Katherine went into the tiny bedroom and
located a pair of faded blue jeans in a pile of dirty clothes. Did she have a blouse that wasn’t wrinkled? A sweater? Anything?
Jesus Christ, what the hell was he doing here? She threw her robe off as quickly as possible and—to hell with underwear—pulled
the jeans on. Then she slipped her arms into the least dirty white cotton blouse. It wasn’t too wrinkled, she hoped. She knew
she had worn it at least once. Buttoning, she opened the bedroom door and slipped quickly into the bathroom, shouting, “One
more minute.”

“Take your time,” he called back.

The bathroom light had broken her first week here, and only one bulb above the mirror burned. Katherine had been keeping the
door open whenever she used it. But now she had to squint in the dim illumination. Was her makeup all right? Fuck it, she
thought. She was hideous anyway. Who cares? She left the bathroom and saw my brother at the door paying the Pizza Hut guy.

He turned around. “Good news. Your pizza’s here.”

“Let me pay you for that,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well,” Katherine sighed, “you can share it with me, at least.”

“I really apologize again for just dropping in out of the
blue,” Eric said, closing the door and handing her the pizza box. “Obviously“—he waved his hand around—“you haven’t even
properly moved in yet. It was rude of me to—”

“Stop apologizing.” Katherine rolled her eyes, sinking to the floor. “Have a slice of pizza.” She folded her legs. “No chairs,”
she said. “But the floor’s clean.” She patted the space beside her. “Sort of.”

Eric sank down, too, legs bending. Katherine wondered how long it had been since he had sat like this.

“I spoke to my mother,” he said seriously. He wore a dark brown suit today, the perfect color and weight for the weather.
It had volumes of fabric that draped across his body like a flag. His tie was
goldenrod
. Katherine noticed the monogram on his Egyptian cotton shirt.

“Yes.”

“She told me that you felt Pilot still had some symptoms.”

Katherine held a slice of pizza in front of her mouth. “He’s no longer hearing voices, he says, which is very good, and it
means he’s responding well to the medication. However, he’s—how shall I put this?” She placed the slice of pizza on top of
the pizza box. “Pilot’s suffering from paranoia. It’s not uncommon, I’m sure you know. But it means he may need more medication,
or perhaps if he doesn’t respond to that, he’ll require some other antipsychotic.” She tried to appear as calm as possible
about this, as if it meant nothing. She picked up the slice again.

My brother seemed to let this sink in before asking, “Did he say, did Pilot tell you what his paranoia was about?”

“There are a couple of things,” she answered, taking a small bite and swallowing. “He’s worried that your mother has a brain
tumor that is affecting her eyesight somehow—”

“Our mother is having problems with her eyes, that’s all.”

“She told me.” She said this without pausing: “Pilot’s also convinced that you killed your sister.”

Eric put his slice of pizza back into the box. “Oh, shit.”

“And that you’re going to kill him, too.” She was about to take another bite. “Or something like that. It’s not entirely clear
to me at this point.”

He shook his head. “Well—”

“Eric.” She put the pizza down again. “These kinds of delusions are very, very common in schizophrenia, and they’re what we
call positive symptoms. In other words, they’re in addition to what’s normal behavior. In most cases, medication can eliminate
positive symptoms. He’s just very confused, that’s all.”

Eric was nodding like he knew all this. “It’s not the first time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pilot has accused me of, of things before.”

“Of murdering your sister?”

“Of things like that,” he said. “Yes.”

But this wasn’t true. I had never accused my brother of anything. In fact, I have spent my life protecting him.

“Whatever’s going on in Pilot’s brain right now,” Katherine said, “is extremely disordered and confusing, especially to him.
He’s more or less living in a completely different reality than we are. He also believes, for instance, that the woods tried
to swallow him.” She laughed a little at this. “None of these things are even remotely rational.”

Eric picked up his pizza slice again. “I heard about that one,” he said grimly. “About the woods, I mean.”

“I’m still trying to see if there was a trigger,” Katherine said. “Is your mother’s optical problem—”

“I looked at her myself,” Eric said. “It’s a mystery, if you want to know the truth. For some reason, she’s seeing ghostlike
images.”

“But she doesn’t have a serious—”

Eric gestured with his pizza. “She doesn’t have cancer. I
mean, she hasn’t been in for an MRI yet, but it seems more like an optical-nerve problem to me, a virus, at the very worst.
What upsets me,” Eric said, “is that my own brother—that he’s afraid of me.”

“I know.”

“I’m a doctor,” he said, “but I still can’t think like one when it comes to him.” His tone was almost argumentative. His face
avoidant, eyes everywhere—all over the room—but on Katherine.

“It’s hard.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Not really,” she said. “I’d like him to cycle through some more medication before I ask him too many questions. Counseling
is pretty limited with patients like Pilot. Well, you know about that. There’s no need for me to probe too deeply. I’m just
looking for—”

“Are you using cognitive techniques?”

“Sort of.” Katherine shrugged. “I use whatever works. I just want to make sure he understands that he’s sick, and that he
can help himself get better.”

“Sounds like a good approach.” Eric had eaten only one slice. “Thanks for the pizza.” He didn’t even finish the crust.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t offer you something better.”

“Please, I shouldn’t have—”

“Stop apologizing.”

He smiled and nodded. “Sorry.”

“Your father,” Katherine said, “is he—”

“I can’t get ahold of him right now. He’s flying around somewhere. He goes flying, him and Patricia, his girlfriend, all over
Florida, out to the Caribbean.”

Our father was somewhere in the clouds above us, at that moment. I was in the clinic listening to the whir of a little airplane
engine way, way up in the sky. In the bed next to me, a
man named Harrison was talking to himself, pleading for someone’s forgiveness.

“He sounds like an interesting person,” Katherine said about our father.

“He’s an asshole.”

Katherine got up from the floor with the pizza box in one hand and carried it to the little faux-marble kitchen counter. “I
don’t have anything to drink,” she announced. “Nothing but water.”

“There’s a nice place nearby,” Eric said. “Would you—”

“Tonight I think I should stay in,” Katherine said, thinking she would have to stop this here, she would have to maintain
professional standards of behavior.

“But what about Friday?”

“Friday….”

“Dinner?”

Why was this so uncomfortable? She felt her heart beating. Why did he have to be so handsome?

She gave in, more to herself than to him. “Okay.”

Eric rose from the floor. “I won’t apologize again,” he said. “I’ll just leave.” He extended his hand, and this time Katherine
took it without worrying if he saw hers. He had seen her in her bathrobe and had still asked her out. What difference were
bloody fingertips going to make?

She closed the door behind my brother and stood still for a moment, hand resting on the cold doorknob. She hadn’t flirted
this time, at least. At least she had seemed relatively professional—hadn’t she? Relieved, she went back to the pizza and
finished it off. She’d skipped lunch today, as usual, squeezing in more time for her clients. She’d have to give me some time,
she thought, a few days at least, before we spoke
again. She wondered if there was much hope for a real recovery. Despite the new medications, schizophrenia tended to be a
degenerative disease. These people—
we
—could maintain control, she knew, but most of us never functioned quite normally after a major episode.

She went into her dark, little bathroom and ran water into the tub. While it was filling, she stood in front of the sink and
removed her makeup. She brushed her teeth. She put her hair in a towel. She thought of me. She thought of how much Eric was
concerned.

Katherine thought of her sister, Michele, her long thin body, those soft eyes.

It must feel awful, she thought, to know your own little brother is terrified of you—to believe that he hates you, and so
irrationally that there is no way to explain yourself.

Katherine slipped her clothes off, dropping them onto the floor, and got into the tub, now full. It was too hot at the moment,
but she would get used to it. She put her head back against the tiles. She felt her skin go all prickly. Out in the other
room, on the kitchen counter, the red message light on the answering machine continued to blink. Katherine had lied to my
brother. She hadn’t been here when the message came in. She knew it was Michele, and she just couldn’t bring herself to listen.

Katherine lay in the tub. I lay in my bed at the clinic. She could hear a couple talking upstairs, their voices bored but
content, a radio playing. I could hear Harrison, the man next to me, apologizing to no one. He was so sorry, he kept saying.
So very, very sorry. The long branch of a tree tapped against the window as if to call me back out to the woods. There was
a faraway rustling in the leaves. There was the faintest whispering in the light fixture. There was a cluster of diseased
cells forming deep inside my mother’s brain.