Raveling (5 page)

“Mom,” Eric said. “Stay calm.”

“Where is he?”

“He probably took the car somewhere.” Eric sighed. “I’ll drive by and see if it’s still out there.”

But I hadn’t taken the car.

I was in the woods, experiencing one amazing realization after another.

I was comprehending things.

Understanding
.

Our mother sat in Dad’s old blue wing chair by the window with her hand covering her mouth, holding in a scream. This is what
happened before, she was telling herself. This is exactly how it had felt when Fiona—

Twenty minutes later, Eric drove his Jag by our mother’s car on Sky Highway. Naturally, the Mercedes remained exactly where
she had left it. He drove to our mother’s house to see if I had returned in the meantime.

And of course I had not.

So Eric picked up the black, rotary-dial phone that sat heavily on the end table, and, with a look of resignation, he called
the police.

She waited with the telephone in her lap—black, heavy, rotary-dial. Where did it come from? She waited while she paced every
inch of the house, her feet touching every inch of floor, every weave of carpet. She waited while sitting in my room on the
edge of my bed, looking at the pile of books and magazines I had left there, the
National Geographic
s, the
Smithsonian
s, the
Playboy
I had sneaked in under my shirt a few weeks ago. She waited and refused food, instead drinking endless cups of tea, all day
and all night, ceaselessly, falling into a near-trance to take the place of sleep. She kept all the radios and televisions
on. She listened to the local news. She saw those ghosts, double images of everything, shimmery and translucent. She saw two
living room couches, two dining room tables. Our mother saw two pool/gardens in our backyard. She saw four police detectives
at the front door, but when she let them in she heard only two voices. She tried to remain calm but her hand kept flying to
her mouth and these sounds—these
sounds
, just the beginning of something, something high-pitched and awful—
kept coming out of her. She kept telling herself, Not again, not again, this can’t be happening again. She saw two Erics
sitting on the blue couch. “Mom,” he kept arguing, “you have to tell him.”

“When he comes back, when we find him, I’ll tell him then.” She meant my father. She hadn’t told my father I was missing.

“I’m going to tell him.”

“No,” our mother said, “you will not.”

Eric sighed, rubbed his hands together. “Are you seeing the ghosts?”

There were two couches, two blue wing chairs, two Erics, two of everything. “I’m seeing them right now.” Her eyes were filled
with tears, as well, blurring the edges.

“Stress,” he said. “It’s just stress.”

There was a doubling of cancer cells at that moment deep inside the ganglia of nerves that let images travel electrically
from her eye to her brain. They twisted like a helix around and around the wires leading to her eyes. Like the shoelace around
and around my finger.

“Go out,” Hannah told him, tears on her cheeks, finger pointing to the woods. “Go out and find your brother, goddamn it.”

Eric reached for his jacket.

Our mother put her hands to her face and said, “This couldn’t possibly be happening again, this couldn’t possibly be happening
to me again.”

After he left, she stood at the kitchen counter and looked at the woods, filled with double trees, double branches, double
everything, and she knew that I was somewhere inside them, swallowed whole, knew I had been taken the same way Fiona had.

Imperceptibly, without her knowledge, without her
seeing
,
the woods crept closer, waiting for her to turn away from the window, just for a split second, so they could roll over her,
take her and the whole neighborhood with her.

She boiled another kettle of water. She poured another cup of tea.

Across the woods, across the highway, across a parking lot of dull sedans, a cheap telephone was pressed hard to a woman’s
delicate ear. And her eyes were closed, and her voice was hoarse, and she would be talking like this—arguing like this—for
hours. And it was only this woman—Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy, her fingernails bitten beyond the quick, the acrid and strong
taste of blood on her lips—it was only Katherine who could save me.

The telephone rang and she was on it instantly. “Yes?”

“They found him.”

Our mother breathed in a jagged breath. “… oh God, oh God….”

“He’s, he’s had an episode.” It was Eric.

“An episode?” Our mother sank into the wing chair, one hand to her forehead. “What do you mean? Is he all right?” She looked
up and saw the ghost of the black, rotary-dial telephone on the ghost end table. In the background, she heard voices speaking
over an intercom, that faint institutional hum. She knew exactly where Eric was calling from.

“Pilot—he’s, he’s physically all right. I mean, there’s nothing to worry about.” His voice was rushed, a vein of worry running
through it, a hint of warning. “He’s not harmed or anything. He hasn’t been hurt,” he said. “He’s just—”

“Just what?” Hannah looked at the picture window, silvery
and reflective, and at the black sky outside. Where had I been? she wondered. Where the hell had I been?

“He’s just sort of gone over the edge.”

“Over the edge? Sort of?”

Eric was regaining composure, formulating a theory. “It’s like he’s experienced some kind of psychotic break.” He allowed
a pause. “Or something.” Right now he stood in the lobby of the East Meadow Community Hospital Emergency Services Center.

“Or something.” Our mother nodded, repeating him, running her thin fingers through her thinning, graying hair. Then she put
her hand on the back of her neck. She saw two blue couches opposite her. She saw two gaudy chandeliers hanging over two time-worn
dining room tables. She saw two porcelain tea cups on the floor near her feet, the real and the ghost of each. “Okay.” This
was not unexpected. This was within the realm of what she understood about me. “Okay.” This was not even surprising.

I had gone over the edge before.

“I’m having him admitted right away,” Eric announced. “And then I’ll come and get you, all right?” He was in control again,
Hannah could hear it in his voice, a tightness forming around the consonants, a liquid fluidity in the vowels.

“Did he say anything? Did he say why—”

“I don’t think he even recognizes me, Mom.”

“Oh God.”

“Just hang on there. Are you seeing any ghosts right now?”

“I’m so used to it I can’t tell the difference anymore.” She looked around, the first smile on her lips in three days—since
I had disappeared. I was all right, she told herself. Eric had called and I was all right. “I see them everywhere.” I was
alive, incoherent and insane, but alive.

“Just wait.”

“Eric, I’m waiting,” she said. “I’ve
been
waiting.”

With difficulty, her breath misting in the air outside, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy removed herself—as well as her pocketbook,
a disorganized clutch of papers, and yesterday’s edition of the
New York Times
—from her newly purchased but formerly owned, sapphire-blue VW Rabbit. It was a brightly lit fall morning. Glorious, in fact.
The sun was runny as a broken egg, smearing its gooey yolk over the trees that rimmed the far side of the highway. But it
stung her eyes like vinegar. Katherine had been up all last night arguing with Mark again, whom she would think of from now
on as her
ex
, even though they had never really been married. And now she felt a pain forming, a thin coating of glass that shattered
inside the back of her mouth when she swallowed.

She was hungry, too—she knew this because her hands were trembling—yet she had no appetite, and she would have to face the
entire day at the clinic without a break. She let a section of the
Times
slip away. It drifted as if in slow motion, the headlines announcing new diseases, old wars, mistaken identities, all blurring
their way to the ground. If she tried to retrieve it, she knew, everything would fall—her pocketbook, the papers, the rest
of the
Times
, her whole life. So she just stepped over it, closing her eyes momentarily and lifting her feet.

She’d have some tea with lemon.

Katherine smiled at two nurses who walked by, then stepped in through the clinic’s plate-glass doors. Her heels
clacked
down the long orange linoleum-tiled hallway. She said hello to her secretary, a large-eyed girl in a floral dress, who said,
“Maryanne MacDonald is your first appointment.”

“Thank you, Elizabeth.”

“You’re welcome.”

Katherine pushed the office door open with her shoulder, throwing everything—her pocketbook, the paperwork she
hadn’t looked at, the sections of the
Times
that hadn’t fallen—onto the hideous brown couch against the wall, let the door swing shut, and sat down heavily at her desk.
It was covered in papers, pastel-colored sticky notes, psychological profiles to fill out, the clinical bureaucracy getting
its long fingers in right away. It had been two weeks since she’d started at the East Meadow Psychiatric In-Patient Clinic,
and her boxes from the old office in the city remained stacked in the corner by the empty shelves. Nothing had been hung on
the wall, not even her diplomas. She’d meant to pick up something to throw over that couch—a blanket, a bedspread,
anything
. “Katherine?” her intercom said. It was Elizabeth again, her voice sweet as music. “I forgot to tell you, Dr. Lennox wants
to know if you can take on a new client.”

“Today?”

“There’s an emergency client, a Pilot something-or-other, psychotic. Dr. Lennox has already admitted him.”

Eyes closed, I was in a bed upstairs, my arms under the covers so they wouldn’t float away. Outside the window a single branch
was reaching toward the room, unfurling itself to tap against the glass, keeping me awake, warning me. I had a scratch across
my face that began at my temple, crossed my cheek, and ran all the way to my upper lip. I had an old shoelace wrapped tightly
around my middle finger. I had a problem. I had a psychosis, is what they told me later.