It must feel awful, she thought, to know your own little brother is terrified of you—to believe that he hates you, and so irrationally that there is no way to explain yourself.
Katherine slipped her clothes off, dropping them onto the floor, and got into the tub, now full. It was too hot at the moment, but she would get used to it. She put her head back against the tiles. She felt her skin go all prickly. Out in the other room, on the kitchen counter, the red message light on the answering machine continued to blink. Katherine had lied to my brother. She hadn’t been here when the message came in. She knew it was Michele, and she just couldn’t bring herself to listen.
Katherine lay in the tub. I lay in my bed at the clinic. She could hear a couple talking upstairs, their voices bored but content, a radio playing. I could hear Harrison, the man next to me, apologizing to no one. He was so sorry, he kept saying. So very, very sorry. The long branch of a tree tapped against the window as if to call me back out to the woods. There was a faraway rustling in the leaves. There was the faintest whispering in the light fixture. There was a cluster of diseased cells forming deep inside my mother’s brain.
The next morning Dr. Lennox’s gray-speckled head appeared from behind Katherine’s office door without warning. “Kate,” he said brusquely. “A minute?” His smile was painted on, it seemed.
Katherine looked up. “Come in, Greg. Please, sit down.”
The doctor didn’t enter, but stood in the doorway rocking from side to side on his heels. “I just wanted to go over your patient list quickly and tell you that I’ll be seeing Pilot Airie today, as per your request for more medication.”
“Thank you,” Katherine said.
At this moment I was studying the television. If I could see inside it, I was thinking, perhaps it could see inside me.
“You mentioned that he still has symptoms?”
She cleared her throat. “Yes, paranoid delusions, among other things,” Katherine said. “He thinks his mother has a brain tumor and that his brother is out to kill him.”
“That qualifies.” The doctor’s smile widened. “Did you speak to his family about this?”
Katherine nodded. “There is some basis in fact, at least. The mother has an optical-nerve problem of some sort, and the brother, well, you know Eric Airie, don’t you?”
“A very well respected physician.” Dr. Lennox chuckled. “I’m sure he’s not out to kill anyone.” He looked at Katherine squarely. “I’ll speak to Pilot myself, and if he tells me the same things, I’ll give him a higher dosage of Clozaril. All right?” His smile was more insincere than usual, she thought.
“Thanks, Greg.”
Dr. Lennox started to turn away from the door, then he hung back, saying, “Out of curiosity,” his whole face a question mark, “is Pilot talking about his sister at all?”
Katherine was surprised. “You know about that?”
He exhaled through his teeth. “Well, you don’t forget that kind of thing.”
Katherine touched her face. “Pilot thinks Eric killed his sister. It’s another one of his delusions.”
Dr. Lennox entered the room. “Really?”
She nodded. Then she asked, “What really happened with that, anyway?”
“As I remember it,” he said, sitting down on the brown couch, “—and it was a long, long time ago, so I could be misremembering—they had accused someone, a man they had known, I think, of taking the little girl, but of course they never found her, never found her body, that is, and eventually they were forced to let the whole thing drop.”
“Awful.”
Dr. Lennox touched his chin. “I have two daughters.”
“I have a sister.”
He shuddered. “I can only imagine what that must have been like.” He got up and started to leave the office, still smiling.
“Could that have contributed to Pilot’s illness?”
“I don’t think so.” Dr. Lennox stood in the doorway again, ready to leave.
“Is it possible at all,” Katherine asked, “that Pilot isn’t schizophrenic?”
“How do you mean?”
“Eric said he became unstable after his sister was abducted, but that he was more or less manageable for years after that. I keep thinking there must have been some kind of trigger for this particular episode. Do you know what I mean? If the first one was due to his sister disappearing, then this one must be—”
“Maybe.” Dr. Lennox shrugged. “The trauma of losing his sister could have caused a psychotic episode in childhood, and it may be connected even now. Or something else entirely. It doesn’t matter. I would imagine that Pilot had a predisposition to schizophrenia beforehand, and that he’s just extremely unfortunate. Maybe something else, if it hadn’t been his sister—maybe something else would have set him off.”
“Extremely unfortunate,” Katherine repeated.
“We’ll see how his symptoms change,” Dr. Lennox said dismissively. “Maybe he’ll be fine. Maybe he won’t.”
“I can’t wait to see you.”
Katherine smiled into the car phone. “You’re being ridiculous.” Could he hear it? Could he tell she was smiling?
“Seven?”
She was driving down Sky Highway toward the enclosure. “Seven-thirty.”
“At your apartment?”
“That would be fine.”
Expectantly, he said, “Bye.”
“Good-bye,” Katherine said.
And Eric waited for her to hang up.
“Good-bye,” she said again, ashamed of herself, but still smiling. And to Katherine this meant something. That he waited, it meant something important.
When the nurse came with my medication I was like a goldfish rising up for food. Then I would sink back down to the bottom of my tank, eyes bulging, gills flexing. When I moved, it was through thick water, my motions slow, inhibited. I found I could sit in front of the blue Caribbean mural in the lobby and spend more than an hour forming a single thought. At other times I felt like I had been scooped up in a net, and now I was twitching and flopping on a countertop.
The lights in my room brightened and dimmed unnaturally, irregularly. In my room there was a finger tapping on the glass, a bright eye looking in.
She had worn her black sleeveless dress—too summery but the only nice thing she had—and fake Jackie Kennedy pearls, and now Katherine’s arms and shoulders were prickled with goose bumps. This restaurant was far too cold, and Eric seemed far away across the cream-colored expanse of linen, glimmering candles, and glass. She felt the need to shout, but the hush of this restaurant, its thick carpeted floors and dim light, compelled her to speak in whispers.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Eric was whispering, too. “You’re thinking this place is too fancy.”
Katherine shrugged.
“I had no idea it was this uptight,” he apologized. “Someone recommended it to me.” A black-jacketed waiter hovered annoyingly, intrusively nearby. A sentimental aria by Puccini played at low volume over the sound system. Silverware clinked and scraped. Few people here were under sixty. He started to laugh. “Someone I’ll never take restaurant advice from again.”
Katherine raised her eyebrows. “Who was that?”
“Greg Lennox.”
“Did you tell him you were taking me here?”
“No.”
Katherine sighed in relief.
“It’s hard to talk, isn’t it?” Eric said.
“You do seem kind of distant.”
“That’s what my last girlfriend said,” my brother dead-panned.
Katherine laughed.
“She didn’t understand me.”
“What did she do?”
“She was—well, she is a dance instructor.”
“A dance instructor.” Katherine put her glass of wine down. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She got up from the table and walked to the other side, leaning toward Eric. “And when I come back,” she whispered, “I don’t want to talk anymore abou
t your dance instructor girlfriend or how distant she thought you were.”
“Got it,” my brother said.
She walked briskly away.
In the ladies’ room she immediately looked at herself in the mirror. She looked good, she thought. Her black sleeveless dress revealed as much cleavage as she was comfortable with, dignified by the fake pearls Michele had bought for her years ago. Her messy hair was somewhat under control, for once, pulled away from her face in a silly twist. Still, she thought, her nose was too long and too pointy. Her jaw was just a bit too strong. Her bottom row of teeth wasn’t perfectly straight. Her breasts uneven, shoulders too wide.
My brother, on the other hand, was so fucking handsome it was like being out with a GQ cover model. His blue suit must have cost a million dollars. His watch appeared to be an heirloom from the Rockefellers. Were those diamond cuff links? He was far, far too handsome for her. The black hair, the blue eyes, the high-school-football-star face. He was a fucking brain surgeon, Katherine thought to herself. What was he doing with her?
It was a good question. And what was she doing with him was an even better one.
She went into the nearest stall and sat down on the toilet. Someone had written something on the back of the door, but it had been rubbed off, and Katherine couldn’t make out what it was. She tried to imagine a woman, all dressed up in this elegant restaurant, coming into the bathroom and writing something profane in the toilet stall. Katherine tried to imagine the rebellious state of mind this woman must have been in. Squinting, Katherine still couldn’t piece together what it said.
Back at the mirror, she asked herself if she should reapply her lipstick. No. She’d be eating in a few minutes, anyway. She looked at her eyes, burning green, and at her skin, veiled in makeup. She had cover-up on, a thin coating over her face, but beneath it she could still see the fine, tiny wrinkles forming at the corners of her mouth and the edges of her eyes. She squinted too much, probably, and smiled too much, too, like Dr. Lennox, and she always forgot to apply lotion before she went to bed.
It didn’t matter to her, but she knew it mattered to other people. It mattered to men, anyway. Especially men like Eric.
When she returned, their plates were on the table.
“Was I gone long?”
“Of course not,” my brother said. “But your food’s here. Don’t let it get cold.”
She had ordered the duck in raspberry. It came with carrots cut into tiny slivers and small, round, peeled potatoes. “Do you visit the city often?” she asked.
Eric cut into his steak au poivre. “Not as often as I’d like,” he said. “I have symphony tickets, and I try to make it to at least four or five football games every year. Otherwise, I’m mostly working.”
“Giants or—”
“Jets,” Eric finished.
“Do you like it?”
“The city?”
Katherine cut a small piece of the duck and placed it gently in her mouth. It was undercooked. She had to force herself to swallow.
“I guess I do,” Eric said. “I really like it out here, though. I mean, I’m close to my family, what’s left of it, anyway, and I like having access to the country. I have a beach house.”
“And do you like your work?” Katherine asked. “I mean, do you like being a neurosurgeon?” She tried a potato. At least that was all right.
“I love it.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you love your job?”
Katherine sighed. “I love my field,” she said. “I love psychology. I love to read about it. I love the human mind. My job, I mean, the actual working, the enormous amount of failures, the sadness, I don’t always love so much.”
“I know what you mean.” My brother set to work on his steak now, knifing away large pieces and wolfing them down. “I was hungry,” he said. “Is yours good?”
“It’s all right.”
“What about you?” Eric said. “You must go to the city all the time.”
“I haven’t been there since I left,” Katherine said. “I lived there all my life, and now I haven’t been there in more than four months.”
“Is that weird for you?”
“Very,” Katherine said. “I feel like I’m in exile.” She looked at the large piece of underdone duck on her plate. She didn’t want it now.
“Plus, our mother still believes that Fiona will return.”
“I imagine any mother would hold out hope for that,” Katherine said, “forever.”
“And she couldn’t bear it if Pilot or I left the area. Permanently, I mean.”
“I understand.”
“It’s more than the ordinary empty-nest syndrome.”
“I really understand. It must have been—”
“You do, I can tell.” Eric smiled at her, and now he glanced at her plate. “It’s bad?”
“I need you to tell me something,” she said, ignoring her food.
“Anything.”
“I need you to tell me this isn’t a conflict.”
Eric put his fork down. “This is not a conflict.”
“And that we’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Katherine,” he said firmly, “there are people who would think this is a conflict because Pilot is your patient and he’s my brother, but if it’s not a conflict to me—or to you—then that’s all that matters.”
She held her gaze on him, looking for a sign of guilt, for any indication of insincerity. But his eyes remained steady, unblinking, and his mouth curled faintly into a smile. “I have to be honest,” she said. “I hate this restaurant.”
Hannah seldom dialed my father’s number, but right now her long, bloodless fingers found each hole in the rotary-dial, black telephone on the living room end table, and she dialed from memory, as if she called him all the time. She saw two of them, of course.
“Hello,” the answering machine said. It was my father’s voice. “Can’t come to the phone now, so leave a message.”
“James,” my mother began, “it’s Hannah.” She touched one finger to her forehead, and she told him everything.
When he opened the door to let her out of his Jaguar, Eric said, “Do you like pasta? This place has the best anywhere, even better than Little Italy.”
Katherine smirked. “We’ll see about that.”
Inside, a woman with wide hips and long black hair, about thirty-five years old, smiled broadly. “Nice to see you as always, Dr. Airie.”
Eric smiled back. “Joannie, this is Katherine. Katherine, this is Joannie, a very, very old friend of mine.”
“Hi,” Katherine said.
“I’m not so old,” Joannie said to Eric, and then she burst into too-loud laughter. “Unless you are, too.” And then, just as quickly, she said to Katherine, “We went to high school together, Kathy. Now he’s a big-shot doctor, but he still has time to visit his old pals.” She burst out laughing again, too loud, too large. “At least when he’s hungry.”
“How’s your sister?” Eric said this as if by rote, as if it was part of a routine.
“Still missing you.” Joannie looked at the ceiling in an expression of cartoonish longing. “Still wasting away.”
My brother rolled his eyes. “I used to date Joannie’s sister.”
“They were high school sweethearts.”
“I see.” Katherine smiled weakly.
Joannie led them to a table by the wall. “So,” she asked sarcastically, “you two just come from the opera?”
“I took Katherine to that new French place off Sky Highway,” Eric told Joannie, shaking his head. “A big mistake.”
“I’ve heard about that. Extremely fancy.” Joannie wagged her wrist.
“Too fancy. Katherine was starting to think I was a snob.”
Katherine leveled her gaze at him. “You don’t know how close you came.” She felt an urge to watch the television affixed to the corner of the room, but she forced
herself to pay attention to Eric and Joannie.
“Did I save myself?”
She narrowed her green eyes to little slits. “We’ll see.”
Joannie burst into that enormous laugh. “Well, Kathy,” she said, “you’ll like the food here, at least.” She cracked herself up completely, saying, “At least we know you’ll like the food.” When she calmed down, she said, “So, what’ll you have?”
“Spaghetti, right?” said Eric. “Marinara sauce? A bottle of red?”
Katherine nodded. “That would be great.”
A family was sitting nearby. The boy was twirling his noodles around inside a large spoon. His parents were arguing openly. Behind them, a television played a rerun of Mork and Mindy. Robin Williams pulled on his suspenders and spoke in a high-pitched baby voice. Pam Dawber sighed heavily, rolling her huge television eyes. Katherine felt odd in her black velvet sleeveless dress watching a pair of teenagers coming in to pick up a pizza at the counter, a grown man playing a video game in the corner. She tried to think of something to talk about.
“You—you knew her in high school?” she said finally.
“Joannie?” Eric said. “Yeah. Her sister was my high school girlfriend.”
“What was her name?”
“Dawn Costello, of course.”
“Of course. What happened to Dawn?”
“She married the guy that manages the Amazing Drug Discounts just down the road here, actually. His name is Bobby Westering. They’ve got four kids now, all boys. They’re a really nice family, you know, churchgoing, active in the community.” His smile was full of irony.
“What’s so funny?”
“It could’ve been me.”
“What saved you?”
“Medical school.”
When Joannie brought out the food, Katherine and Eric ate almost entirely without speaking, only smiling at one another from time to time between mouthfuls of pasta and gulps of the cheap red wine.
Every now and then my brother held up a forkful, saying, “Good?”
Katherine couldn’t help but laugh. “Didn’t you just eat an entire steak?”
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