Raveling (30 page)

“I was a mean kid,” Eric said, his voice resigned. “I had a tough time growing up, and I picked on my little brother. I’m
sorry about that now.”

“Did you tell him those things?” Katherine asked quietly.

“Those things,” he repeated, as if not quite listening. There was something faintly amused about his expression, she thought.
It was the same expression she had seen on Hannah’s face. “It couldn’t have been those particular—”

“About what happened to Fiona? About her being tied up, raped—”

He rubbed one of his eyes. He said, “I don’t remember saying anything like that.” Then he paused, and after a moment, he said,
“I couldn’t have. Because that was all before.”

“When did you do this, then? Do you remember when?”

“What day?”

Katherine felt this was important to know. “When did you, when did you torment Pilot like this? How old were you?”

“I was a kid,” my brother said. “It was all before Fiona disappeared. All before.”

“So Pilot would have been nine years old or younger?”

“I guess so.”

“He remembers it differently.”

Eric sighed. “Obviously,” he said. “But I only wanted to threaten him. I just wanted to scare him. I felt, I felt like I had
to be good all the time, you know. Good in school, good on the football team, good in science. I could be bad around Pilot,
to
Pilot.”

She cleared her throat. “I think,” Katherine said softly, “that at some point he’ll need to, to talk to you about that stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“He found it pretty traumatizing.”

“Do you think it contributed to his illness?”

She thought for a moment, biting her lip. “Not really,” Katherine said. “Brothers and sisters are rough on each other, that’s
all. It’s part of the family mechanism. As the oldest sibling your position in the family was threatened by him, so you found—”

“—found a way to put him down.”

“And you know more about brain chemistry than I do. His condition may have been triggered by trauma, but not created by it.”

Eric turned and put his feet on the floor. “What a shitty brother I was.”

“You can make up for it now.”

He reached back to put a hand on Katherine’s leg. “How?”

“You can be very, very nice to him.” She curled into him, wrapping her body around his.

“That’s your expert psychological advice?”

“Yes,” Katherine said, “it is.” She slid down in bed, so she was completely tucked around the curve of Eric’s body, facing
the window. Then, conspiratorially, she said, “I told him we wouldn’t be seeing each other until after his therapy was over.”
Across the parking lot outside was a broken street lamp. It flickered on and off, glowing yellow light like the tail of a
firefly on a summer evening.

“That could be years.”

“Years,” Katherine said. “I don’t think so.”

“He’ll know.”

“You know what’s weird?” she said. “Pilot told me a while ago that he was omniscient.”

At that moment I was standing in my mother’s kitchen, my bare feet on the cold tile floor. My hand was on the refrigerator
door handle, but I hadn’t moved in over ten minutes. Upstairs, a radio was playing.

Behind the woods, across the highway, down the turnpike, in Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy’s
enclosure
, my brother turned, pushing Katherine’s tangle of hair to the side and nestling his chin into the hollow of her shoulder.
“Strange.”

“How
did
he know?” she asked.

“About us?”

“About us.”

“Good question,” Eric said. “He just knew, I guess. He sensed it somehow. Pilot’s intelligent, if nothing else.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“I haven’t seen him lately. I’ve been afraid to. I’ve been afraid to talk to him about anything.”

Katherine shook her head, somewhat bewildered. “What about your mother, could she have—”

“I didn’t tell her, either.” Eric paused for a moment. “Or maybe I did,” he said. “Maybe he found out about it from her somehow.”

The wind beat against the glass of the complex again, and the entire wall rattled. Katherine thought this flimsy building
would blow over if it became much stronger. She saw my mother now, imagined her sitting in her old-lady bedroom, drinking
a cup of tea, listening to the same wind blowing through the same treetops outside, seeing two of everything, eyes permanently
unfocused.

“How is she, anyway?” Katherine said.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’s something serious?”

“I think it’s some kind of infection in her optic nerve, viral, bacterial, I don’t know.”

“Is that common?”

“It’s a bit unusual.”

“What do you do for it?”

“There are medications. The passage of time often helps with things like this.”

“She’s still seeing ghosts, then, I take it?”

“Says she is.”

“Double of everything?”

“Double.”

Katherine shook her head back and forth in amazement, her face like an egg inside a basket of hair. “How did I get mixed up
with you people?”

“Weird, aren’t we?”

“What an understatement.”

“I’m sorry.”

“One year ago,” she said incredulously, “a couple of months ago, in fact, I was living with a lawyer in the city. I had a
whole different job, a different man in my bed, different clients coming to my office, a different boss.”

“Some things are better,” Eric said, “aren’t they?”

His hand had found its way around her belly. His finger and palm felt large and warm to Katherine there, pressing lightly
into her skin.

“Yes.” She giggled. “Some things are much better.” She closed her eyes against the flickering yellow street lamp.

Later, she looked at me for a long moment, her eyes revealing the formulation, I could tell, of a question she believed would
be difficult for me to answer. “I think we should talk about—” she began, then stopped. She touched her eye, pushing something
out of its corner. Then she started again, saying, “I wanted to ask you, Pilot, to ask if you can sort out your feelings and
thoughts about your brother for a moment.” She put one hand flat on the yellow legal pad. The other was poised above it, holding
her silvery pen. “Do you think you can do that for me?”

I still had my shoelace, and now tiny pieces of it, little time-blackened shreds, were starting to come off in my hands. I
picked and picked, tearing bits of the end off and dropping them onto my leg. After a minute of this, I’d brush the little
tearings onto the floor. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“I’ll ask you some questions, that’s all, and you just answer me as honestly as you can.”

Upstairs, Hannah listened, eyes clouded over. Cancer threaded its way through her optical cortex.

I sat up on the old blue couch and registered its rough fabric from time to time with my hands. “I can try.”

I can try
. I felt like I had been saying this a lot lately.

I had been saying it for years.

“Can you tell me what, what happened when Fiona disappeared?” Katherine was looking directly at me. “I mean, if Eric did it,
if Eric took her, can you tell me how he did it, precisely, and what happened, step by step, as you remember it?” She wore
the gray suit and the green satin shirt. The suit was lined with silk. I knew, because I heard it rustling beneath the gray
outer fabric. Her hair was messier than usual, lights and darks all mixed together. Today, it was colder outside. A wintry
wind had arrived. Brown leaves swirled in the yard.

“You know,” I said, “I feel much better. I feel much more animated.”

“That’s good.” Katherine smiled. “That’s great, in fact.”

“And you know,” I said, “there was a good side of Eric.”

She leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

In the living room, I sat up on my mother’s couch. I tore a little piece of the shoelace off and dropped it on my leg. Katherine
watched me. I saw her register the shoelace. Still, she didn’t say anything about it. “I mean,” I went on, “I’m not saying
that I don’t, that I don’t love my brother.” I took a deep breath. “He could be nice sometimes, and not just—well, you know,
not just a bastard.”

“How was he nice?”

“This is going to sound weird,” I said. “But it really was a positive experience.”

“Don’t worry about how weird it sounds right now. We’ll worry about that later. Besides, maybe it’s not so weird.”

“He got me into grass, when I was eleven or twelve, I think. He turned me on to marijuana for the first time.”

“Really?” She was smiling.

“I was trying out for the football team,” I told Katherine, “the Thomas Edison Junior High School Chargers. I was terrible.
And Eric would come to watch. Our father was flying somewhere, usually, and when Dad was home, you know, he was sleeping most
of the time. So Eric came.” I laughed a little bit, my eyes closed. “I thought he just wanted to humiliate me, you know, see
how pathetic I was. But he was, I don’t know, he was there with his girlfriend, with Dawn Costello.”

“Dawn Costello.”

I thought I saw something flicker across Katherine’s face.

“Yeah,” I said. “She was beautiful, and he watched me get slaughtered. I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking. I was thinking,
I guess, that because Eric had been the star running back for the Junior Chargers, then I’d be at least good enough to make
the team, you know. He used to come for every practice. He’d come and watch from the bleachers. This was junior high, and
Eric was already a high school senior, I think.”

Katherine nodded.

“Anyway, when they called out the names for the team, I wasn’t on there. I was missing from the list. My name was—”

“You didn’t make it?”

“No.”

“Was that disappointing?”

“I guess it was. I was crying, I remember, and I wouldn’t take my helmet off because I was afraid the other kids could see
the tears on my face.”

I stopped talking. I was looking at the little bits and pieces of the shoelace I had piled on my leg. I’d have to stop, I
thought, or I’d tear the whole thing apart, and there would be nothing left.

“Pilot?”

“What?”

“So what happened?”

“Oh.” I looked up. “So I went and sat on the bleachers and waited for Eric. He almost always walked home with me. Thomas Edison
Junior High, it’s just on the other side of the woods from here.” I pointed to the window. “And he said good-bye to Dawn,
and then they—”

“What happened to her?”

“To Dawn?”

“Yes,” Katherine said. “What happened to her?”

“I don’t know. She’s still here somewhere. She has a family.”

Katherine nodded. “Okay, go on.”

“So he said good-bye to Dawn and started walking home. And I followed him, wearing my stupid helmet the whole time because
I was still crying, because I could never stop once I started. I was all hot under there, too, but I just followed him, and
instead of taking the usual path, Eric walked into the woods, the deeper part of it.”

“Weren’t you afraid of the woods when you were—”

“No,” I laughed, “that came later. That’s only recent, that fear.” I paused for a moment. “Fiona was afraid of the woods,”
I said. “Not me.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” I felt my face. I remembered the scratch that had been there. It was finally gone. How long had it been gone?
“You’d think I would be afraid, right, the kind of kid I was?”

She shrugged.

“So we went into the woods,” I continued, “and Eric went to this clearing. It was one of those places, you know, where kids
smoke pot and drink beer. Cigarette butts everywhere, bottle caps.”

“Is it still there?”

“The clearing? Yeah,” I said. “Of course it is. Kids still use it, I’m sure. Anyway, we sat down on this old piece of concrete
pipe someone had left out there—”

“Were you still wearing the helmet?”

“I didn’t take it off for a while, because I was still crying, you know, always a crybaby, my father said.”

“Go on.”

“And Eric, he told me this story.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He was fourteen.” I pushed the balls of my hands into the sockets of my eyes. “And there was a kid in his class named Henry
Addler. Henry wasn’t a big kid or anything, but he was unpredictable, the kind of kid that could fly into a rage, you know,
the kind of kid teachers are afraid of because he’s so crazy. Naturally, perhaps stupidly, Eric wasn’t afraid of Henry Addler
at all. Eric was the smartest kid in class—and not a nerd, either. He was by far the best science student, and he was also
the best athlete. Altogether that made him pretty much the most popular kid at Thomas Edison. Henry Addler was the most unreasonable
kid. They were both superlatives, I guess, and that made them friends, or at least they had some weird kind of mutual respect.”

“So what happened?” Katherine was interested, leaning forward.

“Eric was doing homework for Henry, and in return Henry was stealing White Cross tablets from his mother’s medicine cabinet
and giving them to Eric.”

“Isn’t that an amphetamine?”

“Yeah. Eric was really into speed. It helped him with sports.”