Raveling (31 page)

“Go on,” Katherine said.

“Anyway, all this time that Eric was telling me this story, I was sitting there with my helmet on and my face all hot because
I was crying. And Eric was rolling this joint.”

“Had you ever seen one before?”

“I’d seen them, I think, but I had never smoked one. And I didn’t know Eric would show me how to smoke it that day. He was
just telling me this story about Henry Addler and the White Cross.”

“Finish the story,” Katherine said.

I sighed. “What happened was, Eric gave Henry the wrong homework somehow. Not on purpose, he said, but something went wrong
and Henry turned in his biology homework and got a big fat F. So Henry Addler didn’t say anything about it at first. At first
he didn’t even tell Eric. What he did was give him a new kind of pill. He said his mother wasn’t taking White Cross anymore.
Now she was taking something else. And he gave Eric four little yellow pills instead of the one white one he was used to.”

“Yellow?” she said. “Were they—”

“Valium,” I finished. “And he said Eric should take four of them to equal one White Cross.”

“Did Eric take them?”

“That’s what he told me. He took them right there, he said. He used to take speed in fifth period so he was super-athletic
for after-school practice.”

“He must have just passed out, right?”

“Henry Addler pulled out his homework, the one that had the big fat F on it and showed it to Eric. He said, ‘You screwed me
and now you’ve just taken poison and you’re going to die.’”

“He said that?”

“I don’t know what he really said. All I know is that Eric told me all this when I was sitting on the concrete pipe in the
woods with him, and that’s when he handed me the joint.”

“Did you take your helmet off?”

“Yeah. I finally took it off,” I said, “and Eric showed me—he showed me how to inhale it. He told me how I wouldn’t
really feel anything the first time but that I’d get used to it. I know it sounds weird but it was really… nice.”

“But Eric must have panicked about the pills. I mean, didn’t he think he was going to die?”

“He said he didn’t care if he died. He said he didn’t give a shit if he died. And then he said, then he said all he could
think about was me.”

Katherine was quiet. She was looking at her pen, which until now had been poised in midair above her yellow legal pad.

“He said he didn’t give a shit about anybody else,” I continued, “about any of his friends or our stupid parents, that he
just gave a shit about me, and he didn’t care if I didn’t make the football team. The football team, he told me, was all bullshit,
and he said that Coach Parks was queer, anyway. And guys were always snapping towels at your ass in the locker room, and the
whole school just resented you, anyway.”

Katherine smiled. “He made you feel better about being rejected from the team.”

I nodded. “Sometimes Eric could be nice.”

“I guess all brothers can be nice to each other sometimes.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Even Eric.”

“Do you think about that?”

“About what?”

“About that moment, when he said that to you?”

“It’s all I think about,” I confessed. “After Fiona,” I said, “he’s all I ever thought about.”

He would take me to the movies sometimes, and in the theater he’d put a huge bag of popcorn between us.

For years he bought me comic books.

When he learned to drive, Eric took me everywhere, like a chauffeur.

When I was thirteen and wanted an electric guitar, our parents wouldn’t buy me one. But Eric did. It was a Hohner Telecaster
copy with a leopard-print pick guard and silver pickups. He even got me some lessons. This guitar still sits in a corner of
my room. I haven’t touched it in years. I remember the first time I touched it, though, my fingers awkward on the strings.
“You’ll be a rock star,” he told me. “Just remember me when you’re famous.”

“So what happened to Henry Addler?” Katherine asked.

Eric’s face went slack. “Henry—”

“The boy who gave you the yellow Valiums and said they were poison.” She knew she was breaking her confidentiality agreement
with me, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to know the rest of the story. There was a curiosity inside her.

“Pilot told you about that?” Eric was almost laughing, shaking his head, hands on the table in front of him.

“It’s quite a story.”

He had come by her office at noon that day to take her to an unplanned lunch, and now the two of them were sitting inside
the brightly lit Subway Sandwich at the Crestview Shopping Plaza on Sky Highway. Katherine had forty-five minutes, and she
wanted to know.

Eric sighed. “I took the yellow pills, the Valiums, and Henry told me—” he started to laugh “—told me that he’d poisoned me.”

“That’s what Pilot said.” Katherine smiled. “You must have been terrified.” She brought her sandwich to her mouth, turkey
and lettuce, but decided not to take a bite. She held it there while Eric spoke, then put it down and sipped her Seven-Up
instead. The booths here were full of businessmen from the nearby office park. They all wore the same
gray suits, the same wine-red ties. They all brought their sandwiches to their mouths at the same time, chewing in unison.

“I thought if I could make myself throw up,” Eric said, “I would be all right.” Today he wore a deep blue shirt beneath a
dark brown suit. Armani, Katherine guessed. His tie was brown, too, just a shade lighter.

“Did you?” She finally took a bite and immediately wished she could spit it out.

“I couldn’t,” Eric said. “I couldn’t make myself throw up for some reason.” He looked at his own sandwich now, a ham and Swiss.
“I’ve never really been able to do that. I guess I had no future as a bulimic.”

“Obviously.” Katherine swallowed.

“And by that time,” said Eric, “the Valiums were starting to have their effect on me.” He swirled his fingers in front of
his face.

“You were getting bleary?”

“Everywhere I looked all the colors were running together. It was like I was seeing through a fish-eye lens. You know how
it feels.” He bit into his sandwich again, chewing slowly.

“Sounds like one of those government antidrug films they showed us in high school.”

He nodded, swallowing. “That’s exactly what it was like.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went to my coach and told him that Henry Addler gave me some weird pills.”

“You could tell your coach something like that?”

“Coach Parks. He was terrific.”

“Really?”

“Sure, and he knew right off the bat what they were. In those days all the suburban housewives were taking those yellow and
blue Valiums. He knew just what I had taken, and he also knew they weren’t going to kill me.”

“So he didn’t take you to a doctor?”

“Nah,” Eric said, “I only would have gotten in trouble, and then I wouldn’t have been able to play for a couple of games.”
My brother laughed. “He needed me, so he let me sleep it off in his office.”

Katherine didn’t really want this sandwich, she decided. It happened to her often when she ordered lunch, especially lately.
She was hungry, but she couldn’t eat. “You put a different spin on it when you told Pilot the same story.”

Eric swallowed, then sipped some of his large Coke through a straw. He wrinkled his brow. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Katherine said, “that you told him you were afraid you were going to die, and that your only thought was of losing
him.”

Eric took a long sip. Afterwards, he rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “That was a long time ago,” he said finally. “I don’t
remember what I told Pilot. I said I was a bad brother. What do you—”

“Pilot remembers it as something
nice
.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something nice.” Katherine shook her head. “You told him that story and gave him his first joint after he didn’t make it
onto the Junior Chargers.”

“His first joint.” Eric looked down, examining his hands. “Out in the woods, right? After his practice.”

“You thought only of losing him, you said.” Katherine brought her eyes up from her Seven-Up to meet his.

My brother kept looking at his hands.

“You weren’t such a bad brother,” she said. “Even Pilot doesn’t remember you as being a bad brother all of the time.” His
eyes were such a bright color, Katherine thought, an amazing blue. And his clothes were so incredibly clean. She wondered
if he dry-cleaned his suits each time he wore them.

“So things are going all right with him?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said. “We just started. It’s hard to tell. It could take a little while.”

“Has he said anything about our mother?”

“What do you mean, about—”

“About her eyes?”

“No,” Katherine said. “Why?”

“They’re getting worse.” He pushed his ham and Swiss away and leaned back in the booth, hands behind his head.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“I spoke to an ophthalmologist. If it’s what he thinks it is, her vision could deteriorate dramatically. It’s bad enough already.
But she could go blind from this. Completely.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He bit his lip. “I don’t know what to do. And she won’t let me schedule an MRI.”

“Could it be psychosomatic?”

“Of course it could. But I’ve just never heard of anything like that. Psychosomatic blindness is usually total, not gradual.”

“It’s not bad that I’m telling you about Pilot, is it?” Katherine asked. “I mean, I guess it’s pretty unprofessional.”

“Katherine,” Eric said, leaning forward, “I’m a neurosurgeon. Pilot has schizophrenia. By talking about it with me you certainly
aren’t hurting him. In fact, you’re helping him. I can illuminate whatever he’s telling you in therapy. And,” he finished,
“if he tells you something that you don’t think I should know, don’t tell me.”

Katherine smiled, hiding her hands beneath the table. “All right.”

“All right.”

“I still don’t think he has schizophrenia,” she said.

“Why not? I thought Dr. Lennox—”

“All of his symptoms went away very fast,” she said. “Practically the instant the Clozaril took effect.”

“It’s a new medication, it’s very effective.”

Katherine shook her head just slightly. “Still.”

Eric looked at his watch. He looked back at Katherine. He said, “Time to go.”

Hannah sat in her bedroom with the window partly open and the cold air coming into the room like thousands of bees and the
cancer multiplying into a hive inside her brain. She could hear our voices, Katherine’s and mine, coming upstairs through
the floor, could tell when I was launching into a story, could hear the question marks at the end of Katherine’s sentences.
She could make it out, if she wanted to, could listen to everything, if she chose. It was early evening, already dark, but
Hannah watched Fiona playing with a ball in the backyard. She saw her little girl running back and forth to the trees, jumping
rope, squatting beside the pool and filling her plastic pail with water. Fiona wore the red swimsuit she had worn the day
she disappeared.

But now she had reappeared. She reappeared every day, in fact, forming out of the mass of colors and shimmering light the
world had become to Hannah.