Raveling (32 page)

Our mother’s vision had blurred to where she wasn’t just seeing double anymore. Everything seemed ghostly. Only at very close
range could she make anything out. She couldn’t read or watch television at all.

The only thing she could see clearly—and it was something she wouldn’t tell anyone about—was Fiona. She could see my little
sister helping set the table downstairs. She could see Fiona pouring herself a glass of juice in the kitchen. She could see
Fiona curled up in front of the television.

Fiona.

She could see Fiona.

She couldn’t tell anyone, could she? She couldn’t say that
she’d been seeing the ghost of her missing daughter around the house. She couldn’t. It was bad enough that I was crazy.

Voices rose through the vent.

“This is going to sound weird,” I was saying. And Hannah strained to listen. Our voices were faint, though, almost as indistinguishable
as the colors in the room.

Not the noise of them, Hannah thought, but the people in them. The people in the voices were faint.

“You didn’t make it?” she heard Katherine say. Hannah smiled. She remembered that day, too. She remembered Eric and me coming
home through the woods. She remembered the way we smelled of marijuana smoke when we came into the kitchen.

“Pilot didn’t make it,” Eric had said.

I’d put my helmet on the kitchen table.

“Good,” Hannah had said, smiling. “I don’t want two boys playing football, anyway.”

“Coach Parks is queer,” I had said.

“Pilot,” our mother had said.

“He is.”

“That’s a very serious accusation.”

“It’s true,” I had said.

“You boys smell funny,” Hannah had ventured.

“We came through the woods,” Eric had said firmly. “That’s what we smell like.”

“No,” Hannah had said. “It’s something else.” She had known what it was, of course. She had not been so stupid in those days
that she wasn’t aware of the smell of marijuana.

I remember waiting, terror in my throat.

“Never mind,” Hannah had said. “Dinner’s almost ready. Why don’t you boys wash up and then help set the table.”

I’d gone upstairs. And our mother had opened the oven to check on the chicken pot pies she had been heating up. Our
father had been flying somewhere, in the wild blue yonder. The radio had been tuned to an easy-listening station. Hannah
remembered that they were playing an instrumental version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” It was the day, she thought, that
she realized that music no longer moved her. It was the day she had understood that her confidence had left her completely,
only to return momentarily, and only with the assistance of red wine. She’d go to work every morning for the next ten or fifteen
years, literally holding people by the hands—surgeons, violinists, sculptors—helping them bring the movement back, the delicate
muscles that had cramped, the swollen knuckles that had stiffened from arthritis, the bones that had been cracked, showing
these people how to clutch a ball, how to stretch a tendon to reach a note, how to grip a fine, sharp instrument.

Now she leaned back and listened to us, to Katherine and me, talking downstairs.

“Did you take your helmet off?” she heard Katherine say.

“Yeah,” I said, “I finally took it off, and Eric showed me—he showed me how to inhale it.”

Hannah smiled. She had been right about the marijuana. Of course she had been right.

“I feel like we’re having an affair,” Katherine said.

There was a pause, then, “Is that good or bad?”

She shrugged. “It’s exciting, anyway.”

They had a free weekend, Eric and Katherine, and wanted to spend more than a single evening together. So they were unpacking.
Eric was, at least, carefully removing his clothes from his brand-new black leather overnight bag and placing each item—sweaters,
socks, shorts, and jeans—inside the drawers of a white particleboard dresser in the all-white bedroom of
his all-white beach house. Outside, waves sloshed onto the shore and a high-pitched wind whistled through the eaves.

Katherine had thrown her things next to the bed, sat down, and kicked her shoes onto the floor. Now, with her hair splayed
out on the mattress behind her, she lay back, watching my brother like an obedient pet. He bought this beach house, he had
told her on the drive down, completely unfurnished, and then he filled it with cheap, modern catalog furniture, everything
white and light wood. Everything here seemed relentlessly practical, she thought, and, at the same time, flimsy.

“You are so incredibly tidy.” Katherine rolled her face to see him walk to the closet.

“A little obsessive-compulsive disorder never hurt anybody.”

From the bed, she laughed.

“Are you hungry?”

She could hear the autumn waves smashing themselves up against the shore outside, the shrieking wind. Katherine rose from
the bed and then moved toward Eric steadily, her face to his face, and put her lips against his, not kissing, just pressing
lightly against him, just touching. My brother stiffened at first and then relaxed into it. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go
outside,” pulling his arm. “Let’s go out and look at the ocean.”

Her hair, long and blond and black all at once, curling and spiraling like the seaweed washed up onshore, and getting tangled
hopelessly in itself, whipped around her eyes and mouth in the salt wind. She kept brushing it away and smiling apologetically,
as if it could hurt Eric somehow. The cold wasn’t stinging yet, but it gave her that numb feeling. She
should have brought a hat. Or at least a bandeau. She said, “My family used to spend Thanksgivings at the beach.” Katherine
noticed the choppiness of the water—far, far out, how gray it was. Her skin tightened around her body. She wore an old jean
jacket, but it wasn’t enough. “My sister and I would play out in the sand all day. We didn’t care how cold.”

“That sounds nice,” Eric said. “Two girls.” He wore a brand-new blue sweater—cashmere, of course. His face was perfectly unshaved,
complete with movie-star stubble. “You never talk about your sister.”

Katherine nodded. “Michele.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s nothing much to talk about.”

“Do you speak to her often?”

“I haven’t spoken to her in two years.”

Eric put his hands in his pockets.

She was shouting a little over the wind and the waves. “You look like a model in an aftershave commercial.”

He turned to smile back, completing the effect.

“Thank you for taking me here,” she said. The sun felt warm, at least. Katherine had taken her shoes off and was pushing her
feet into the cold, damp sand. She had tucked the shoes, a pair of old loafers, under a large piece of driftwood near the
top of the beach. Now she walked up and wrapped her arms around my brother’s waist and curled her toes.

“Thank you for coming here,” he said.

Katherine’s insane hair swept around in the wind and punished them. “Sorry,” she said.

“About what?”

“My hair.”

“I love your hair.” Eric took her hand and they resumed walking. It was nearing sunset, the light glowing more yellow, more
gold. This was one of those posters, Katherine
thought, a couple on the beach, hand in hand, a sharp silhouette against the setting sun.

“Do you come here alone sometimes?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“I thought I would.” He was yelling a little, too. “I planned to, anyway. When I first bought the place I thought I would
come here alone all the time, but, but it’s not the same, you know, when you’re by yourself. You just end up staying indoors
and reading. I might as well stay near the hospital if I’m going to do that.”

“I would come here every weekend,” Katherine said. “Every free minute I had.”

“Alone?”

“Sure, alone. I think it’s wonderful.”

He smiled. “You’re pretty wonderful.” It was a quarterback smile, all perfect teeth and handsomeness. She had never been with
anyone so handsome. It was almost unreal, she thought, his beauty. She remembered what I had told her, that he was more beautiful
than she was.

Katherine forced a laugh. “Are you trying to make me blush?” She wondered if it—if all of this—was actually happening.

“Can I tell you something ridiculous?”

“Absolutely.”

“You’re not like anything, you’re not like anyone I’ve ever met,” Eric said. “You’re totally, completely different from everyone
else. I hope you, I hope you’re willing to hang around for—” He looked away. Way up the beach was a man and a black Labrador
retriever. “—for a little while, anyway.” The lab was bouncing and jumping at something in the man’s hand.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Katherine said.

“I mean, I’m not always that easy to get along with.”

“Eric.”

“It’s part of being a doctor, I think, or just of being me. I’m kind of, kind of high-strung, you know. But, but, Jesus Christ,
Katherine, you’re learning everything about my childhood, what a crappy kid I was, what a terrible brother I was to Pilot—”

“Eric, you weren’t—”

“—and you still seem to like me.”

“—a bad brother, you were—”

“Which either means you’re crazy yourself, and that’s—”

“—a very, very nice, normal—”

“—fine, that’s all right, or—”

“—brother, perfectly normal.”

“—you’re exceptionally wonderful, which is what I believe must be the case.”

“Eric, come on.”

“I’m really crazy about you, Katherine.” He looked at her again, the same smile, only more sensitive this time, something
bashful in the eyes.

Did he know he was doing this? Was it under control?

Katherine smiled. “I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” she said. “Shall I part my hair
behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.” She wanted to break the spell,
say something weird. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”

“What?”

“It’s a poem.”

“A poem?”

“By T. S. Eliot,” she said. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Eric pulled her body into his. “I’m cold,” he said. “And you’re talking about poetry from freshman English.”

Katherine put her arms around his neck, then, saying this: “Let me warm you.”

She was fumbly—nervous. They’d had sex before, of course, but only at night, and for some reason, it wasn’t the same. Here,
at the beach, waves crashing romantically outside, a high-pitched wind howling, the room filled with light, she breathed unevenly,
the air coming into her lungs jaggedly, a kind of romance sucked out of the situation, but replaced by another. Eric seemed
larger here, the muscles of his body writhing more effortlessly beneath the surface of his skin. She went down on him, hands
on his thighs, digging in with her fingers a little, and he did the same for her, lifting her entire body to his mouth. She
wasn’t particularly small, but when he did this she felt tiny and light. And when he was inside her, on top of her, moving
in and out of her in a building rhythm, his chin locked around her shoulder, his whiskers rough on her skin, he whispered
to her, saying he loved her, couldn’t stand not being near her, thought of her, only of her.