Raveling (37 page)

“You’re seeing ghosts,” he said to our mother.

“I’m seeing blurs,” Hannah told him good-naturedly. “All blurs and swirls.” She was different around him. When Eric was there
she behaved as if she were in public.

Eric gave me a stern look. “
Pilot,
” he said.

“What?”

He opened his hands as if to say,
See?

“Are you hungry?” Hannah said. “Do you want something?”

“Eric doesn’t have time to eat,” I said. “He’s too busy screwing my therapist.”

Eric sighed.

“Well, you
are,
” I said.

Now it was our mother’s turn to say it. “
Pilot
.”

I rubbed my finger where I had been twisting my shoelace. I didn’t have it anymore. I had given it to Katherine.

It was called Cassavettes Sports. And beneath the layer of fake trophies, game jerseys, and signed pennants was evidence of
multiple renovations. Katherine imagined a suburban archeology, the decades peeling away layer by layer until the weak wooden
structure was revealed beneath, the sublayer of gypsum and particleboard. “He gave me a shoelace,” Katherine said, her eyes
avoiding my brother’s.

“A shoelace.”

They sat as far in the back of Cassavettes as possible, trying to avoid the large television monitors that blared the sports
channels at top volume. There were two men at the bar. There was one other couple near the front eating chicken wings.

Katherine felt exposed, as if someone would discover her.

“He’s been carrying it around,” she said, “nervously wrapping it around and around his fingers. I had noticed it.” She shrugged.
“But I hadn’t thought about what it meant.” She took a sip of her sour white wine.

“I noticed it, too.” Eric opened his hands to her. “But I didn’t think it meant—”

“He says it’s from—” she said this as though she were ashamed, looking down “—he says it’s from your sister’s shoe.”

Eric sighed. “That shoe,” he said, “was taken in evidence by the police a million years ago.” He shook his head. “Pilot doesn’t
have that shoe. It’s impossible.”

“He says it’s from the other one.”

My brother rolled his eyes. “There’s no other one.”

“Well,” Katherine said, “there
has
to be another one somewhere, right? And Pilot says he has it.”

Eric put his head in his hands. “My family is so fucked up.” He pulled his dark, cropped hair, his face mock crazy, all frustration.
“What the hell is going on?”

“Eric.” Katherine reached across the table and touched my brother’s arm. “What if Pilot really did hide it somewhere all those
years ago? What if inside all this confusion there’s some kind of truth? Maybe he really found the evidence in the woods that
day and he’s confusing it with a time when he found an old football under your bed or something. What if this other piece
of evidence could lead to the real, to the real abductor?” She waited a second, then said, “Jesus Christ, Eric, he says there’s
a knife, too.”

“A knife.”

“He says it has blood on it.”

“Oh God.” As far as Katherine could see, Eric did not believe it. He sighed heavily. “What are you going to do with the shoelace?”

“Who was the police detective assigned to the case?” she asked. “Do you remember?”

“How could I forget? His name was Jerry Cleveland.” Eric chuckled. “He was the most incompetent detective they possibly could
have—”

“Was he young?”

“He wasn’t that young.”

“Do you think he’s still around?”

Eric pushed his beer away. “I don’t know, Katherine.” He looked around, then, trying to locate the waiter.

“I’ll try to find him,” she said. “Of all people, he’ll know what to do with the shoelace, right? Come on, Eric, what if it
still has some of that man’s DNA on it? That’s admissible now. What was his name?”

“The man they accused?”

Katherine nodded.

“Bryce Telliman.”

“What if the shoe or the knife or something has his fingerprints—or anything. Isn’t it worth checking into?”

“Katherine,” Eric said, “my brother is crazy. He’s schizophrenic, all right? He’s heavily medicated, yes, but that doesn’t
mean all of this isn’t some paranoid reac—”

“I think it’s worth looking into for Pilot’s sake,” Katherine said. “And I don’t think he’s schizophrenic. I don’t know what
he is, but it’s not that. He doesn’t have enough symptoms. And who knows, you might even find the person who, who took your
sister. Hiding the evidence may have been the act of a very troubled boy and after all these years Pilot’s become
confused about where he found it. I don’t understand why you’re resisting. He might really have this stuff.”

My brother sighed. “Do you have any idea what this will do to my mother?”

Katherine was silent.

“Do you?”

“No,” she said.

“She already has some bizarre psychosomatic blindness, and this is the kind of thing that could—”

Katherine touched his arm again, stopping him. “Let me contact this detective, Eric. How many other little girls has this
man taken and, and hurt all because he wasn’t caught after he took your sister?”

The muscles of Eric’s face seemed to tighten now, gathering beneath his skin like that twisting bundle of snakes.

Katherine released Eric’s arm and sat back. They sat together without talking for a moment, and Katherine sipped her wine.
Eric examined his glass of beer. “Can I see it?” he said finally.

“See what?”

“Can I see the shoelace?”

It was in her purse, the brown leather one that sat at her feet under the table. I had seen her put it in there, in fact,
just last night. “Oh,” she said, “it’s, it’s at the office, in a drawer, it’s—”

My brother nodded. And she could see that he didn’t believe her.

And that is when it began, the doubt inside Katherine growing like Hannah’s cancer.

And the awareness of her doubt growing in my brother’s mind.

She drank more wine. She was terrible at lying. “I’ll show it to you later,” she said. “Tomorrow, if you—”

“Don’t worry about it.” He looked down. “Just take it to the police. Find Cleveland, or whoever is in charge of that
kind of thing, and, and let’s get this over with.” He touched the rim of his beer glass. “I have to get something else.”
He grimaced slightly. “I don’t want this anymore.”

When the phone rang and it was my father, Hannah caught her breath like a teenage girl about to be asked to the prom.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“I’m fine. I was just—”

“Listen,” he began right away, “about Pilot.”

“He’s much better,” she said. “He’s really—”

I was in the kitchen. I had been hanging around in there lately, watching old movies on the little black-and-white on the
counter. I could hear that it was him just from the tone of her voice. I could feel his presence through her. She was in the
living room on the black rotary-dial, of course, the only telephone either one of us used.

“I want him to come down, at least for a little while. I’ve made arrangements to have someone look after you, Hannah. I just
think it would be good for him to get away from that house, okay?”

She nodded. “I can take care of myself.”

“I’ve already spoken to Eric. He’s going to have a nurse come and watch out for you. You know, just in case of, of, of whatever
might happen.”

“I’ll be fine. That’s totally unnecessary.”

They were silent for a moment, each in their living rooms, phones to their ears, and then he asked how she was.

I was to fly down to our father’s cottage in Florida and stay with him for a month. Fishing, hiking, fresh air, a trip in
his seaplane. It was supposed to be good for me. A nurse was coming to take care of Hannah. “It will be great to see you,”
our father told me on the phone. “Think of it as a break—like a break from life.” I could hear his smile through the miles
of fiber-optic cable. When he smiled, it was genuine. “Anything you want,” he said. “Sleep late, watch TV all night, read,
go for a walk, a swim, fishing. You name it, you got it. Sound good to you?”

It sounded bizarre to me. It sounded so alien I could hardly imagine it. “Sounds great.”

I was on a plane three days later. I had my medication in my backpack, enough to last a month. I had Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy’s
home phone number in case I needed to talk to her at any hour of the night. I had a warning from Eric not to drag our father
into any of my craziness. I had a feeling I was moving beyond the present moment and that I could see what would happen to
all these people sitting around me on this airplane.

The blur.

The woman next to me would get a divorce within the year. The man across the aisle would die in a car accident. The little
blond girl who ran up and down the aisle throughout the entire flight, much to the disapproval of the flight attendants, would
be running just like this through a mall in Greensboro, North Carolina, away from her mother, and a man would grab her by
the wrist and lead her outside to the parking lot, to a virtual city of gray vans and blue sedans. The police would find this
little girl by the highway, scratched, but largely unhurt, dazed, with little memory of what had happened. The story would
be considered so common by the local reporters that it would not even make the papers. I looked down through the airplane
window and saw all those infinitesimal lives unfolding into the next year and the next decade and the next century. I heard
all of their conversations and thoughts.

I knew them. I knew everything about them.

At the airport, my father was there to greet me. Patricia, his girlfriend, stood nearby, smiling nervously.

Their faces lit up with recognition—truly happy, it seemed, to see me. My father had become more gruff since he retired from
the airline. He had become a character from a Hemingway novel, I thought. When he was younger, he was smooth, a city man.
But he had become more and more grizzled, countrified, macho, since he had moved down to Florida. He had been developing this
persona for years, the one he had always wanted.

Patricia hugged me a little too hard, as though she really had missed me. “Sweetheart,” she said, “it’s so good to see you.”
But she had never even known me.

“Hi, Patricia.”

“Pilot,” Dad said. He had his hand extended. It was brown and wrinkled. It had become, somehow, an old fisherman’s hand.

I gripped it as firmly as I could, trying not to seem limp-wristed, sissyish, trying not to seem like a fragile mental patient.
Like myself.

He clapped his other hand around mine and pumped. “Glad you’re the hell out of that woman’s icy clutches.” He meant Hannah.

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like that.”

Dismissively, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?”

“Jim,” Patricia cautioned.

I tried to be funny. “Nothing that a lot of strong antipsychotic medication can’t take care of.”

“Psychotic,” my father repeated, shaking his head. “The car’s this way, Mr. Psychotic. Got any more luggage?”

“No.” I had a duffel bag and a backpack.

We walked out to the parking lot. The sky here was white, I noticed, with white clouds descending like a sheer white curtain,
against a thin, faded green horizon. This was winter in Florida. I had been here once before, years ago, but hadn’t looked
at these things. There was a wet smell in the air, a dampness.