Raveling (6 page)

Downstairs, Katherine sighed. “A pilot?” she said. “Why the hell not?”

A voice said, “Thanks, Kate.” Now the door was open. From behind it appeared the face of a man in his late forties, salt-and-pepper
hair, slightly rumpled. It was Dr. Lennox. “He’s not a pilot, though,” he said. “That’s his name. His
name
is Pilot.”

Katherine smiled. “Get me some tea?”

“Milk?”

“Lemon.”

Dr. Lennox disappeared. Katherine tried to neaten up her desk, and when the psychiatrist returned, smiling, she had cleared
just enough space for the Styrofoam cup. “His name is Pilot Airie,” Dr. Lennox said, placing a wedge of lemon on a white napkin.
“Not even thirty years old.” He pointed to the window. “Found in the woods near the highway, been out there three days.”

“Three
days?
Has he been medicated?” Katherine squeezed the lemon, dipping it into the water, teasing some color from the bag.

“You bet.”

I had been sedated like a zoo animal.

“Family?”

“They live in the area.”

“Full admittance?”

Lennox’s eyebrows rose as if on strings. “Absolutely.”

“Has he been in therapy?” She took a sip. “I mean, was there any warning?”

“I don’t think so,” Lennox said. He frowned briefly, then returned to his near-permanent smile.

“What’s his name again?”

“Pilot Airie.”

“Unusual.”

He settled into Katherine’s couch, haunches shifting. “The mother, Hannah Airie, is a physical therapist,” he said. “Hands,
I think. She used to be with the hospital. The father’s an airline pilot.”

“Explains the name.”

“More importantly,” Lennox continued, “the brother—”

“Also psychotic?”

He shook his head. “Other end of the spectrum. He’s a consulting physician for the hospital.”

Katherine nodded. “I’ve met him.” She had been introduced around—had smiled to my brother, in fact, from across the hall.
Eric had lifted his hand in a small wave of hello.

Airie
.

She’d thought it sounded familiar.

Dr. Lennox was still smiling. “Pilot has been in the hospital all morning.”

I lay in bed, faceup. I knew the movements of every person around me. I heard the thoughts of every human being who knew me.
I heard this
chattering
coming from the light fixture above my head, an electronic discussion.

Katherine shrugged. There was little to do, anyway, she told herself. Just make sure the medication was taking hold. Begin
me on the snaking path toward normalcy. This is all that can be done with schizophrenics these days. “I’ll skip lunch. I’m
not hungry, anyway.”

She had no idea what she was in for.

“Thanks, Kate.” Dr. Lennox was standing now, hands in his pockets, nodding and smiling. He gestured toward the door with his
head.

Katherine raised her Styrofoam cup.

I twisted my shoelace.

Alone again in an office with a stack of cardboard boxes, an ugly brown couch and chair, an oversize wood-laminated desk,
a window overlooking the parking lot, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy looked through this window, across the parking lot, at
the highway, its mid-morning traffic still heavy, and across the highway to the wide patch of trees, still green but fading,
yellow at the edges. I had spent three days in those woods, and Katherine tried to imagine it. Had I been quiet the whole
time, she wondered, catatonic, like a predator
waiting for its prey? Or the other way around? Had I grown hungry? Was I hiding from something in particular? Why would anyone
name their son
Pilot?
The intercom buzzed again. “Katherine?” Elizabeth said. “Your next appointment is here.”

I remember Fiona in still images, like a series of old photographs.

In one of these images I just see her face, the wide cheekbones, the gray-green eyes—like mine—and the light brown freckles
across the bridge of her nose. I remember the dimple on the left side of her cheek. I remember her wispy blond hair curling
at her temples. I remember Fiona, my sister, smiling shyly.

In another one of these pictures that I keep inside my head Fiona is standing by our backyard pool. There is a puddle of water
beneath her. Reflective, it is shining in the light of the sun. She is smiling brightly. Fiona has a daisy-patterned towel
wrapped tightly around her shoulders, and she wears her red one-piece bathing suit, a matching flower made of thread positioned
between her nonexistent breasts. Behind the pool, on the other side of the yard, the leaves of the trees and bushes are emerald
and yellow. At the base of the yard, at grass level, there is a blackness encroaching. I can see Fiona’s feet splayed out,
ballet style. There were lessons, I think, practices and recitals. Her toes are round, and her toenails are painted a garish
pink. There is movement behind her, it seems, or almost-movement, near-movement, about-to-be-movement. There is a ripple on
the surface of the water. There is a rustling in the treetops. Her hair is scraggly and wet at the side of her face. The flowers
of the towel are represented by a washed-out, Kodachrome yellow. In this
picture of Fiona, which I have carried around inside my head because it is the only way I can remember her and because our
mother has taken all the real pictures and hidden them away somewhere, there are tiny bumps of gooseflesh rising on the skin
of her arms. There is a blur of red inside her mouth. There is a gurgling sound coming from somewhere inside her.

“How do you feel?” my brother was saying.

“What?”

Had my eyes been open?

“How do you feel, Pilot? Are you all right?” I was in a bed, in a bed in a hospital, the hospital where my brother worked,
my arms trapped under the covers. The light above him was filled with electric voices, an argument over how I should be murdered,
the methods and timing. If I could just keep them arguing, I thought, if I could just contribute to their indecision, I’d
buy some time. “Can you understand me?”

“Understand you?” I narrowed my eyes. “In the picture,” I informed him, “there is darkness encroaching, there is a shadow
falling over her, just touching her. It is the photographer.” Beneath the covers I felt the shoelace. It was still twisted
around my finger, a reminder.

“Jesus,” my brother said. “Come on, Pilot.”

“In the picture,” I said. The voices inside the light fixture continued to argue, squawking like a yardful of chickens. The
light formed a halo around Eric’s head.

I was in a room suddenly, a room so far and deep inside the woods that everything was white.

“We found you in the woods,” my brother was saying. “What the hell were you doing out there?”

“Someone,” I said, “had to rescue Hannah.”

“Pilot, Jesus Christ.”

“Eric.” Inside the light fixture the voices couldn’t decide. Keep arguing, I thought. Continue the debate. There was a gray
nylon curtain hanging behind him. “There is a small dot,” I said, “on the very base of her optical nerve.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hannah.” I twisted the shoelace. I wound it around and around my finger.

“Mom?”

“You are the fucking brain surgeon,” I said. “But you are aware of this, aren’t you? You just don’t want to admit it.”

“You were out there for three days,” Eric said. “Did you know that?”

“It’s cancer.” I heard a tittering inside the lights. “I know what you’re doing,” I said. “I knew it then. I know it now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve followed through.” I looked at him. “Haven’t you?”

“Followed through on what, little brother?”

“All your plans.”

“Pilot, for Christ’s sake.”

Eric would slip into my room at night and kneel beside my bed, as if in prayer. “I’m going to kill you,” he would say. “You
better not say a word or I’ll do it right now. I’m going to cut your throat from ear to ear. I’m going to take you out into
the woods and hang you in the big tree. I’m going to put Drano in your applesauce. I’m going to kill you like no one has ever
been killed in the entire history of murder.” I would close my eyes as tightly as possible in the darkness. Sometimes I would
put my hands over my ears. But Eric would pull them away. “I’m going to take Dad’s gun out of the closet,” he once said, “and
I’m going to march you out into the woods, way out there so no one can hear you scream, and I’m going to put one bullet in
your left leg.”

“Stop it,” I whispered.

“And then I’m going to put one bullet in your right leg,” he whispered back. “And then another—”

“Eric, please.”

“—in your left hand, shattering all those little bones in your fingers, the metacarpals and phalanges. And then I’m going
to shoot you in your elbow, and that’s just four bullets, there’s two more to go.”

“Please, stop,” I said. His voice was velvety, like a radio announcer’s.

“And then I’m going to shoot you in the stomach, and you’re going to lie there and squirm and bleed all over yourself, you
stupid little whiner. You’ll probably throw up and taste your own stomach acids and the dinner you had mixed with your own—”

I was crying.

“—blood, you stupid fucking little crybaby. And then, when I’m totally bored with you, when I can’t think of more interesting
ways to torture you, I’m going to put the gun right up to your forehead, and as slowly as I can, I’m going to pull the trigger,
and I’ll watch your brains ooze out of the back of your skull. Not that you’ve got a whole lot in there anyway.”

I closed my eyes even tighter and held my breath, letting a blackness cover everything, and when I lifted my eyelids, Eric
was gone.

Until morning I’d lie in silence, waiting for him to return. Sometimes, when Eric and I were doing the dishes together, when
our mother or father had left the room, he would whisper, “I’m going to kill you,” putting his finger over his mouth to keep
me silent.

I didn’t doubt him. I never doubted him. And I kept silent, too.

I never told anyone.

I never told anyone
.