Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  I see her in a still image, my sister, her legs wrapped around the waist of the blond man with the blond mustache—of Bryce Telliman—her lips inside his ear. He is looking at me, a slight smile on his mouth. What is she saying? Her red one-piece swimsuit is riding high up on her seven-year-old hips and her red high-top sneakers, untied, are dangling off her feet. I can see their laces. His hair is so bleached from the sun that it is white, and his skin is too tan. He seems glamorous, Bryce Telliman, as if he doesn’t belong at this party but should be at another, where all the girls are wearing swimsuits and the music is rock and roll and the people are dancing. But he is here, strangely enough, at my parents’ house. And in this imaginary photograph there are other people behind them, but only in the background, and they are fading into the darkness like images in an old newspaper photograph, and Fiona’s skin shines whitely, illuminated by the fiery torchlight.

  He looks at me directly, and Fiona regards me suspiciously from the corner of her eye while she tells him her secret. What was it? What was she saying?

  Why wouldn’t she tell me?

  Katherine arrived to work late, as usual, as she had practically every morning since she started this job, and took the very last staff spot, walking the entire length of the hospital parking lot to the clinic, her arms full of forms she wouldn’t get to, a newspaper she would never read. The section of the Times she had dropped yesterday still lay on the ground. She stepped over it, thinking she’d pick it up on the way home. She would have to start getting in earlier, she told herself. She would have to get her life together. Katherine held everything under one arm and pushed her fingers through her hair, realizing the familiar insane tangle was even worse than usual. In the car she had noticed a run in her panty hose from her ankle to her knee. There was an ink stain on her sleeve she hadn’t seen at home. Jesus Christ, she was falling apart. How the hell did she expect to impress anyone, much less a neurosurgeon, when she was such a mess?

  She thought of the way she had flirted with my brother last night, the phone call after she’d gotten home, and her face went hot. She would pretend it had never happened.

  As she entered the clinic she saw that Elizabeth had arranged a pot of tea with lemon on a tray and was filling the pot with hot water from the kettle. “Elizabeth,” Katherine said, approaching, her voice soft.

  “I thought I would save you some time,” her secretary said, whispering, “You’re late. And I thought it would be nice.”

  Katherine shook her head. “It is nice,” she said. “You are the nicest person in the world. I don’t deserve you.”

  Elizabeth followed Katherine into her office and placed the tray on the least cluttered piece of desk she could find. “You have David Ogden here right away,” Elizabeth said, still whispering for some reason. “He’s been waiting fifteen minutes already. And then you have Marie Forche and after that, after her, I mean, you have Pilot Airie. That is your morning.”

  “Thanks.” Katherine picked up the little pot and poured herself a cup. “You can send David in right now.” She dipped the wedge of lemon into the cup. There was even a jar of honey.

  I had been coated with molten glass that had since hardened around my skin. It was the medication, I guess. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t frown. If I tried to move the muscles of my face, I thought, it would shatter and cut me to pieces. “I’m sorry about the other day,” I told Katherine, entering, closing the door softly behind me.

  She got up from her desk and extended her hand. “Sorry?”

  “I wasn’t feeling myself.” I moved the shoelace from one hand to the other, shook hers mechanically, and then sat on the office couch. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt like myself. I wondered what myself felt like. Perhaps it wasn’t coated with glass. Perhaps it was all glass. I wore a pair of old gray sweatpants and a T-shirt I remembered buying at least five or six years ago, I think it was in college. I wondered why it was even here. Did my mother bring it? I couldn’t remember putting this T-shirt on. I had a feeling it said something humiliating, but I was too afraid to look down and read it.

  Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy sat in the brown office chair opposite me and smiled reassuringly. “I imagine that’s a bit of an understatement,” she laughed. “Not feeling well, I mean.”

  I tried to form a smile, too, but I could feel the glass starting to crack, so I stopped. I twisted the shoelace around and around my middle finger.

  Around and around and around.

  “Last time we spoke,” she said, “you told me you were hearing voices, arguments in the light fixture, that kind of thing. Have they stopped? Can you still hear them?”

  I felt so ridiculous. “No,” I said. “I can’t hear them now.” There was, however, a rustling outside her door, a gathering of feet. There were ears, I thought, pressed against the keyhole.

  She nodded. “Good.” Katherine’s voice was overly gentle, as if she, too, were afraid the glass that had formed around me would shatter into a billion pieces. “And you were thinking the woods were going to swallow you, or that they had swallowed you somehow?”

  “It was stupid,” I said. “I apologize.”

  “It’s not stupid, Pilot.” Katherine put her hand on one of her knees. I could see a run in her stocking, starting at her ankle and disappearing into her skirt, a skirt I couldn’t quite get the color of. “But you’ve been over all of these questions with Dr. Lennox, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.” I had. The voices, the irrational fears, the disorientation. I felt I had responded adequately. I had answered honestly, in fact.

  “Do you know what’s happening to you?”

  “I’m freaking out,” I answered. “I’ve gone nuts.” The shoelace was cutting off my circulation. My finger was starting to swell.

  “You haven’t gone nuts,” Katherine said. “You’ve had a relatively major psychotic episode, though.” Her green eyes widened. “Dr. Lennox thinks you may have some form of schizophrenia, which nowadays is an eminently treatable disorder. You’re not crazy, Pilot, no matter what you’ve heard or what anybody tells you.”

  Schizophrenia. The word stuck out in her sentence like a thorn.

  “I’m glad you think so,” I said.

  “I can see that you’re responding well to the Clozaril,” Katherine said, “which is a very good sign.”

  There were interesting shadows forming on the wall behind her, as if they were hinting at the shapes of things, of animal legs, of tree limbs. “I always respond well to medication,” I said. Of fingers curling, ferns reaching up toward the sun.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I did a lot of drugs in high school,” I told her. “Grass. Acid. That’s probably why my brain is so weak now.”

  “Weak? Your brain is not weak, Pilot, and, as far as anyone knows, smoking pot and dropping acid never caused schizophrenia.”

  My voice felt flat and electronic, but I tried to make it sound funny, anyway. “Maybe they just didn’t do as much acid as me.”

  Katherine shook her head, but I could see she was amused. “One of the triggers of schizophrenia can often be stress. I was wondering if there was anything bothering you last week.” She looked up. “Anything upsetting that you think may have—well, just if there was anything that upset you.”

  “Last week?”

  Schizophrenia. She was using the word over and over, trying to desensitize it, scrape the meaning from its skin.

  “Before you went into the woods.”

  “You’ve spoken to my mother?”

  Katherine nodded. “Briefly.”

  “She’s seeing ghosts,” I told her. “She has a brain tumor.” Hadn’t anything been done about this yet? All the way from here, I knew that at this moment, this very instant, it doubled, radical cells dividing.

  “Seeing ghosts?”

  “Apparitions, walking transparencies, double images moving across her field of vision. Why do you think I went into the woods?” My face was starting to melt the glass a
way.

  She touched her hair, and it was even crazier than yesterday. “Apparitions of anyone in particular?”

  “She has a brain tumor,” I insisted. “A formation at the base of her optic nerve. I’m sure of it. Did you talk to Eric?”

  “I spoke to Eric,” Katherine said.

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  She shook her head no. “Nothing about a tumor.”

  “He knows it’s there,” I informed Katherine, “but he won’t do anything about it.”

  She looked away, constructing a hypothesis in her head, considering my diagnosis. “Eric told me you had a sister—”

  “Fiona,” I broke in.

  “—and that when she disappeared—”

  “Eric killed Fiona,” I said.

  Katherine stopped talking.

  I repeated myself. “Eric killed Fiona.”

  Katherine permitted a silence to enter this office. It descended like the folds of a new white sheet over the two of us. And then she began, “You think your brother—”

  “He killed her,” I said, laughing. “And now he’s going to have to kill me.”

  I could see that Katherine was trying to remain calm, but that this was upsetting to her, confounding her belief in my progress, the so-called positive response I was having to the medicine.

  “Pilot,” Katherine said, “have you ever told anyone about this before?”

  “No,” I said. “It just occurred to me to mention it.”

  “Just now?”

  “Last week, before the episode.”

  “Your mother’s brain tumor,” Katherine said. “Where do you think it came from?”

  “I don’t know where brain tumors come from, Katherine, I just know—”

  “Okay.”

  “—that Eric knows and won’t do anything about it.”

  Katherine leaned back. I shouldn’t have been saying any of this, I knew. I knew I was screwing everything up as usual. But I liked Katherine—Katherine with the shadows moving on the wall behind her, shadows of animal legs and tree limbs against a grass clearing in the day’s last light, a clearing somewhere in the woods, a patch of woods somewhere in the world, a world dropping like a rock down a well, a faraway splash. There should have been pictures on the wall, I thought, something to keep the white paint from receding away forever into nothingness and snow.

  “Let’s talk about this,” Katherine said.

  I twisted the shoelace even tighter, and my face was starting to feel normal again.

  The day after the party, our mother was in the kitchen putting the kettle on for tea. “Where is—”

  “—Fiona?” Eric said.

  “Yes, where is your sister?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” he said.

  But how did he know? How did he know what she was going to ask?

  “She’s in bed. She’s in her room,” he told her.

  “Still?”

  I sat on the couch in the living room and listened to the conversation between Eric and our mother coming from the kitchen. Their voices walked through the door like people entering a party.

  “Maybe she’s in the yard,” I heard him say. “How should I know?”

  “Pilot!” our father called. “Pilot!”

  “Don’t be flip,” our mother warned.

  I got up from the couch and walked into the sun-filled kitchen. I had my pajamas on, having slipped into them when I went back to bed earlier that morning. Once through the door, I said, “What?” even though I knew what I was being summoned for.

  Our father and mother sat at the table. It was nearly two in the afternoon. “Go out there and find your sister.”

  “Maybe she’s at Tracy’s house,” I offered. Tracy was Fiona’s best friend.

  “Tracy’s in Germany,” our mother said.

  I shrugged. “Oh, yeah.”

  “She’s out in the back somewhere,” Eric said. “She must be.”

  “Go out and get her,” our father said to me, irritated. “I’m starting to worry.”

  I went outside and stood on the flagstones. Beyond the pool was a stretch of soft grass before our yard became woods, and just beyond the tree line the woods got deeper, grew thicker and darker, the way things do until a center is reached, a critical mass is formed.

  “Fiona!” I shouted. In my pajamas I walked around the pool and across the grass and back to the tree line. “Fiona!” Next door, a golden retriever I had never seen before was taking a crap on the neighbor’s lawn. I felt a coolness in the air, not as distinct as last night’s, but it was there. I yelled for Fiona once again. I heard the kitchen door, its familiar creak, opening behind me. I turned and saw my father standing on the flagstones.

  He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Fiona!”

  “She’s not out here,” I said.

  “Where the hell is she?”

  “Maybe she’s in the basement.”

  Our father turned around. “Eric,” he said, “check the basement.”

  I walked back to the house and into the kitchen. I could feel something rising inside my stomach, something slimy and alive. “She’s not out back,” I said to our mother.

  Her face was a mass of little snakes moving beneath her skin, rippling and squirming.

  “Does she ever go into the woods?” our father asked.

  “She’s too scared.”

  “Could she be at another neighbor’s house?” he said. “Are there any other girls around here she plays with?”

  “Just Tracy,” our mother said. Her hands were shaking.

  Our father sat down at the table and put cream and sugar in his coffee. He stirred it with the sugar spoon. “I’m so fucking hungover,” he said. “I don’t have time for—”

  “Jim,” our mother said, “the language.”

  “Christ, Hannah.”

  “Can I have some coffee, too?” I asked.

  “No,” my parents said at the same time.

  I tried to think of where Fiona might be. “Did anyone look under the bed?”

  “Why?”

  “It was loud last night. Maybe she didn’t like the noise. Maybe she’s sleeping under the bed.”

  Dad sighed. He thought this was a stupid idea, I could tell. But he said, “Go look.”

  I ran out of the room and up the stairs, as always, two steps at a time like Eric. I knew she wouldn’t be up there. I knew she was not under the bed. But I walked into her room and looked, anyway. There were piles of clothes, strewn towels from the pool, crumpled blankets and bed sheets. I looked underneath her bed and saw only dust and a variety of headless, contorted Barbie dolls. I sat down on her bed and waited a few minutes until Hannah, our mother, stepped quietly into the room, her ankles making the softest cricking.

  “She’s not here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Where could she be?” She was feigning exasperation, pretending that Fiona did this all the time. But Fiona had never done this before. “She must be somewhere.”

  “She must be somewhere,” I repeated.

  “A little girl can’t just disappear.”

  I nodded. “She can’t.”

  “She’ll be home any minute,” Hannah told me.

  But that isn’t entirely true, what I just said. Because after I looked under Fiona’s bed, I went around, from room to room, looking under everything. I looked under my bed, my parents’ bed, under Eric’s. I looked inside the closets of every room. I was looking under Eric’s bed when I turned a certain way and thought I saw something, something under his desk just across the room.

  And I did see something.

  And then I returned to Fiona’s room, and I sat down on her bed, and I could hear my mother coming, the crick-crick-cricking sound that her ankles made—still make—coming up the stairs.

  Half-empty glasses were everywhere—on the tables, on the arms of chairs, on windowsills, on the floor. There were plastic cups and paper plates strewn all over the house. There were dark, adult-size footprin
ts on the hallway rug. The downstairs bathroom sink was smudged with makeup and the toilet was stopped. The light switch in the kitchen had been broken. There were new stains on all the furniture and carpets. On the grass outside there was a black scorch mark where someone had knocked a torch onto the ground. There was broken glass beside the pool. There was a stillness forming inside me. There was light coming through the trees as the afternoon progressed, but I knew that it would not last. There was my father standing in the yard, hands on his waist, his face radiating anger in bright white spikes. There was my mother in the kitchen, making cup after cup of tea.

  I was ordered to go door-to-door to all of the neighbors’ houses who had little girls and ask if Fiona was there or if they had seen her at all today.

  Eric and my father explored the woods.

  Hannah waited by the telephone.

  I went to Marsha Grierson’s house. I visited Debbie Brandice, Tracy Shaw, and Bernadette Duprix. I saw some of the grown-up faces from the party last night.

  “Have you seen Fiona, my sister?” I said politely. “Have you seen her?” I tried not to appear panicked. I tried to remain calm.