Eric closed his eyes in frustration. “He’s so crazy.”
She reached up, palm open, to put her hand on his shoulder. Eric was muscular, she noticed, without being overly defined. He had the body of a handsome man, she thought—not a vain one. “You’re a good brother,” she told him. “Pilot will get through this.”
“How can I be a good brother if he thinks I killed Fiona?” Eric shrugged off her touch. “What kind of a brother is that?”
“At least he’s being released.”
“It’s not too soon?”
“The medication will keep his mind from slipping back into the psychosis. I mean, you know about that. And other than the paranoia, Pilot’s fine. I’m not even sure schizophrenia, or even schizoaffective disorder is the right—”
Eric wasn’t listening. “Our mother is practically blind from this, from this optical blurring,” he said, his voice revealing the slightest tremble, “my brother is a paranoid schizophrenic, and my father is flying around somewhere off the coast of Florida with his whore.” His voice was becoming pinched. “What the fuck has happened to my family?”
Katherine put her head against the skin of his arm. Eric was too warm for this, really, and it made her own skin feel prickly. “Maybe you should have a little counseling yourself.”
Eric sighed, shaking his head no.
“Why not?”
“It’s just that someone has to be strong through this, you know. Someone has to be able to handle things without—”
“Going to therapy is a sign of weakness?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well,” Katherine said, rising up against the wall next to him, “you do whatever you think is best.”
The two of them sat together this way for a moment and listened to the sound of the cars on the highway beyond the parking lot. She heard an ambulance go by, then an eighteen-wheeler. Finally, she broke the silence. “What do you remember about that night? I mean, do you mind talking about it?”
“About—”
“About the night your sister was—”
“I remember very little about it, actually.” He faced the window, away from her, and a rim of light flared off his cheekbone. “I was fourteen. It was a party my parents were having. It was hot. They used to have a lot of get-togethers in those days, you know—barbecues, cocktail parties. I was upstairs with my girlfriend, with Dawn Costello, Joannie’s sister, the one you met, and then we went to a party a few blocks away. I got really, really wasted and eventually I came back to my parents’ house and went to sleep. The next morning Fiona was gone.”
“What happened after that?”
“There was a search, you know, which started out small and became enormous. I mean, her picture was on television, my parents were on the news. It was horrible.” He shook his head. “And we, and no one ever found anything. Except Pilot.”
“He found something?”
“He found the sneaker she was, she had been wearing. It was out in the woods somewhere, and he found it.”
“In the woods.”
“And that’s really all there is to remember,” Eric said. “That, and how everything just sort of went to shit afterwards. You know, my parents got divorced. They kept blaming each other, our father was worse about that, really, blaming our mother, I guess, and Pilot was crawling around like a dog, even barking.”
“Tell me about that.”
“About Pilot?”
“It sounds like he had an episode of psychosis.”
“I guess that’s what it was.” Eric shrugged. “Pilot wigged out. He decided that he was an animal, and he started, I don’t know, he would crawl around through the woods on his hands and knees, and he stopped talking for a couple of weeks, just growling and barking. It was comical, in a way. I think he’d seen something on television about the wolf boy, the one they discovered in France. Later on Pilot said he felt like he had lost the power of speech. I’m afraid I, I think I wasn’t so nice to him in those days.”
“You were a kid.”
“I was five years older. I should have been more—”
“Still.”
“Well,” Eric said, “there’s not a lot more to talk about, really. Fiona was gone. Pilot was crazy. My parents were divorced. I just studied, you know. I just lost myself in textbooks and sports.”
“And now you’re a big shot.”
Eric sighed.
“Praised be the fall.”
“What?”
“Praised be the fall,” Katherine repeated. “It’s an old medieval idea about the fall from heaven, the fall from grace. They said praised be the fall because without it, without the fall from Eden, we would never have the blessings of Christ.”
Eric let a small burst of air out through his lips. “Okay.”
“Without the tragedy your family suffered you may never have become a doctor,” Katherine said.
Eric nodded. “A lot of things would have been different.”
“You’re rather amazing,” Katherine said, “for coming out of that experience the way you did. You should be proud.”
“I just wish Pilot had come out of it—and who says I’m all right?”
“He will,” Katherine said. “It’s not too late for him.”
His face turned toward her now. “They accused someone.”
“Who?”
“There was a man at the party the police suspected, but since they never found Fiona—I mean, since there was no body, and no evidence besides the sneaker, they had to let him go.”
“Do you think he did it?”
“People saw him playing with her. The last time anyone saw her, she was with Bryce Telliman.”
Katherine was quiet.
“That doesn’t mean he did anything,” Eric said. “Does it?”
“No,” Katherine said. “A lot of people like children. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I used to wish he had done it,” Eric said. “That way I could have killed him.”
“You think he didn’t?”
“I don’t know. I just, when I was younger, I just wanted to kill whoever had done it, you know. I just wanted to hurt someone, make someone pay.”
“Did you ever tell anyone about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Pilot thinks you want to kill him. Maybe your brother feels guilty about Fiona, feels responsible, so he thinks you want to make him pay.”
“Pilot,” my brother said, just saying my name, I think. Just to hear himself say it.
She saw Fiona.
Hannah was in the laundry room unloading the washer. Nearby, another set of ghost hands unloaded a ghost washer. On the floor were piles of laundry, dirty dish towels, floral-patterned sheets, striped pillowcases, each with its ghost companion. She thought she heard something at first, something like footsteps behind her. Fiona used to help Hannah with the laundry when she was a little girl. She liked to get inside the basket of warm clothes after they came out of the dryer. She liked to fold the big sheets with Hannah, her mother. She wanted to turn the fabric over and over in her tiny hands until it was a tiny square.
Hannah saw her.
Everything Hannah looked at had a ghost. Perhaps she was just getting used to the idea of ghosts. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a little girl run by, flashing by the door. She saw the flash of red that was Fiona’s bathing suit. She saw the one red sneaker. It was her. Hannah definitely saw Fiona.
Didn’t she?
She dropped the towel she was holding, and next to her, her ghost hands dropped the ghost towel. She went into the kitchen. There were doubles of everything, glassy transparencies, shimmering overlays of color, a film of opacity blurring whatever fell in her line of sight. What was wrong with her? Had Fiona been in here? Why shouldn’t there be ghosts? she asked herself. Why wouldn’t her daughter be trying to reach her?
“Hello?” Hannah said into the room. “Hello?”
There was no answer, of course, only the dry sound
of the highway in the distance, the wind in the treetops. The usual neighborhood hum.
Hannah felt foolish. She turned to go back into the laundry room, but as she turned, she saw—she thought she saw—that flash of a red bathing suit, the one sneaker, the little-girl flesh, pink and perfect, moving by the kitchen window. Was Fiona outside? Was she trying to get in? Hannah went to the window again. Was someone playing a trick on her?
Outside was restlessness itself. Outside were leaves dying on the tree limbs, were quavering branches, high up, ready to fall. Outside was too-long grass that hadn’t been cut in weeks, since I had gone into the hospital, was wind-blown debris from the woods, her garden unkempt, and of everything she saw outside there was a ghost. But where was Fiona? Hannah opened the kitchen door and looked out into the yard. She rubbed her eyes, hoping to clear away the double images, and squinted into the daylight. It was eleven in the morning, or around then. It was early in the day, anyway, wasn’t it?
Perhaps it was one of the girls from next door. A young family had moved in, with two daughters, little girls around Fiona’s age. No, Hannah corrected herself, around the age Fiona was when she disappeared.
“Is someone out there?” she said. “Hello?”
Sometimes, when she stepped outside through the kitchen door, she expected to see the pool, expected to see the glimmering water, the flashes of sunlight on its surface. She expected to see her children, to see Eric, me, Fiona, splashing in the pool, my father beside it in the deck chair, newspaper unfolded on his chest, sleeping. Instead she saw her garden, the leaves of rhubarb, the vines of pumpkin and squash twisting around and around each other. It was such a mess. Hannah sometimes worried—irrationally, she knew—that Fiona would one day come back through the woods, still seven years old, and not recognize her own home.
Where is the pool? she would think.
She pictured Fiona coming back through the woods.
Fiona would be a grown-up woman now, was the truth. It was possible, it was still possible, that Fiona was somewhere, was grown up, living a life, not remembering. It was possible. There was a boy in Arizona Hannah had read about who had been abducted as a child and was raised to the age of eighteen or twenty before he remembered, before he realized he’d had a life elsewhere, before the memories of his real childhood came flooding back—that he’d had real parents, a real house, real brothers and sisters. They can repress memories, children can make their minds do anything, Hannah thought, dissociating from the truth completely.
But today, wearing an old floral housedress with a bottle of Xanax in her pocket, doing the laundry, seeing double, waiting for me to become sane and return home from the hospital, Hannah thought she saw her daughter.
It was the cancer. It was the knot of cells in her optical cortex blurring her vision, her wishes bleeding into her sight line.
She thought she saw Fiona in the kitchen from the laundry room. She thought she saw her running by the kitchen window. Was it just wishful thinking? Were her eyes playing tricks? Of course they were. She closed the kitchen door on the outside and turned around again. She walked back into the laundry room. She touched her face and realized it was wet. Had she been crying? Was she going insane, too? Like me. Crazy with grief. People said that, didn’t they? She continued to lift the laundry into the basket, folding as she went. It had been so many years. She pretended that Fiona was outside in the yard, seven years old, playing a game. When Hannah pretended like that, she felt some relief. And sometimes she forgot, even for a second, that Fiona wasn’t there, and it felt a little better that way.
“Risk factors for suicide,” according to the DSM-IV, “include being male, age under thirty years, depressive symptoms, unemployment, and recent hospital discharge.”
Me, me, me, me, and me.
Eric was standing behind me, jacket thrown over his shoulder, when I gathered the few things Hannah had brought me, the bits and pieces of clothing, books, and toiletries I’d needed for my stay. “Mom can’t drive you,” Eric said apologetically. “Her eyes, you know. And there’s no one else.”
“It’s all right,” I told him. “There’s no need to apologize.”
“I know you don’t want to see me.”
“Eric,” I said, “what are you talking about?”
My brother shrugged. “I guess we’ll talk about it later,” he said. “Anyway, how are you feeling? Better, I guess. I mean, they’re letting you out, anyway.” He was acting nervous. Why was he so nervous? Or better yet, why was he acting?
“I feel much, much better,” I told him. “Really.” It’s what I’d been saying to everyone. And it was true, mostly.
“We were all pretty concerned about you,” he said. “We still are.”
I looked at his face, a face that had turned out to be our father’s face. There was something slightly plastic about its handsomeness, as if it had been preformed. “Thank you,” I said.
“You think you’ll be all right at Mom’s?” he asked. “I mean, I know you might not be entirely comfortable moving back in with her, I know I wouldn’t be, and I thought—”
“Where else am I going to go?”
“You could stay with me.”
I said this flatly: “Mom’s will be fine.”
“Pilot,” Eric said, “I just—”
“It’s all right.” I finished stuffing all my things into my bag. “It’s fine, really. It’s really fine. I’m all medicated up now. I can’t go crazy,” I laughed, “even if I wanted to.”
Eric tossed his car keys from one hand to the other. They made a jangling sound. He wore his usual blue tie, white shirt, navy suit. He wore a concerned smile. He wore his hair differently, I thought, parted in a new way. I thought it must have something to do with Katherine. “I got a new haircut,” he said. He saw me notice it, I guess. “It looks stupid, I know.”
“It looks good,” I said. “Very stylish.”
Sarcastically, he said, “You’ve always been so big on style.”
I changed the subject. “They want me to keep up with the counseling.” I twirled my finger around my temple. The shoelace was threaded around my fingers.
He nodded. “I think it’s a good idea.”
“They think they’ve got the schizophrenia thing under control,” I said, “with medication.”
“Clozaril,” Eric said. “Very effective.”
“But I have other… issues, they tell me.”
“Pilot,” Eric said, “you don’t have to tell me any of this. I’m your brother, and I’ll do whatever it is, whatever I can do, to help you. I promise. But you’re not obligated to—”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s just that I know about you and Katherine.”
He looked at his hands.
I took a final look around the room to see if there was anything I had missed. On the windowsill were get-well cards from my mother’s friends. I decided to leave them.
I had already said good-bye to Harrison and some of the other patients and nurses I had met.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Eric repeated me, saying, “Let’s go.” Minutes later, in the car, he said, “I’m not trying to kill you.”
I laughed. “You’re not?”
“Pilot, why the fuck would I want to kill you?”
“I know,” I told him. “I know what happened. I know exactly what happened to Fiona.”
“What happened to Fiona?”
“I know what you did to Halley, too.”
“You have to let it go, brother.” He closed his eyes, turned the key in the ignition. “It’s in the past.” The Jaguar’s engine started.
“You were practicing,” I said.
“Pilot.”
“To become a doctor.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Which is why they never found her.”
“Jesus Christ, Pilot.”
“Because she’s in a million little pieces, isn’t she, Mr. Junior Scalpel?”
From the wo
ods I could see bodies moving around the pool. Shadows from here, the partygoers’ faces flared up every now and then in the torchlights, drunken smiles frozen on their lips. I could see flames through the trees in yellow-gold flickering stripes. Voices of men and women commingled in the boughs above me—laughing shrieks, arguments, passionate conversations, chatter. I saw him stepping in, a blond man with long hair. I saw the way he moved, his body swaying, a man who had been drinking too much. It was as though my senses had been heightened, sharpened on a stone. I could pinpoint individual conversations swirling into the woods from the party. I could sense the rising and falling of a woman’s chest. I could smell the perfume and aftershave and alcohol on the bodies of these people. I could hear my father, his voice bellowing arrogantly, and my mother, hers soft and accommodating. The man who walked into the woods put his hand against a tree, his body leaning into his arm. He looked down, his chest heaving. He was going to be sick. But when he looked up, I caught that eye-flash of recognition, the light in his face that said he saw me, too. I could have spoken to him then. I could have said something—anything—and it would have been impossible later. If I had said something, if he had said something, then everything—everything that ever happened in my life after that—would have been changed. But he didn’t. And I didn’t. He stepped out beyond the tree line, then, onto my parents’ lawn.
“I’ve been out flying,” he said. “Patricia and me were—”
“Patricia and I.”
“Yes,” my father said. Hannah was always correcting his grammar. It had always annoyed him, and she knew this. “Anyway,” he said, “I got your message.”
“It’s Pilot.”
My father’s teeth came together. “What now?”
“James, I think he needs you. I think this time he—”
When Eric and I drove up to the house that morning Hannah came out to the driveway in her floral housecoat, saying, “Oh, Pilot, I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t come and get you myself.” I got out of the car, and she placed one cool hand on my cheek and the other around my neck. Her old cream-colored Mercedes sports car sat parked in front of the house, covered in dust, dead leaves, brown whirlies. “How do you feel, sweetheart?” she said. “You know I can’t drive anymore. It’s this darn thing with my eyes. It’s nothing, but, but, how are you?”
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