“I’m fine, Mom,” I said, as I’d been saying to everyone, as I’d been saying over and over and over to everyone. “Much better.” Eric was behind me, lifting my small, overstuffed duffel bag from the backseat of his Jaguar and shutting the door.
He nodded. “He seems fine,” he said to our mother. “He seems normal, anyway.”
There was an implication in my brother’s voice.
“I am,” I told them both. “I’m fine. I’m full of antipsychotics and antidepressants. Who wouldn’t feel great?”
“Of course he is.” She pulled me toward the front door of the house, leading me by the arm. “Of course.” I had a feeling she didn’t want the neighbors seeing us out here, even though everyone who knew us from the old days had moved away. There were children in the neighborhood, in fact, new generations of young families moving into these old houses. “Well,” Hannah asked, “are you hungry? Both of you? Either of you?”
The medication I was taking left a hollow in my stomach that felt better when empty. I shook my head no. I was supposed to take my pills with food, naturally, but I felt much better not eating. Plus, it was around eleven in the morning, the wrong time of the day to eat.
“I’ll have something,” Eric said. “I had to skip breakfast.” He shot me a quick look. “I’m starved.”
I thought I could see clouds forming in my mother’s eyes. I thought I could see the years multiplying on her face. The vein that ran like a trickle down her temple had become more purple. Her hair was a notch more silver, her skin whiter. “How are your eyes?” I asked.
“My eyes?” As if she didn’t know what I meant.
We stopped on the steps leading to the front door. “You just told me you couldn’t drive because of them. Are things getting cloudier, or—”
“They’re—they’re all right,” she said unsteadily. “They’re good.”
“You’re not seeing double anymore?”
She laughed a nervous laugh. “I’m getting used to it, I guess.”
“You can’t drive,” I said flatly.
Now Eric was the one who laughed. “It wouldn’t be a very good idea.”
I looked at our mother. “Is it because you can’t see the road,” I asked, “or because you can’t see the dashboard?”
“Pilot.” Hannah walked in the door.
Eric brushed past me, carrying my bag. “Pilot, do you ever remember a time when she paid attention to the road?”
“You have a point.”
Inside the house, Eric sat down on the old blue living-room couch, tossing my bag beside him. “Now that you’re home,” he said, “you can look after Mom while we figure out what’s going on. It’s nothing serious, so don’t worry. It’s probably just an infection in her optical nerve or something, something benign. In any—”
“It’s because I’m old,” Hannah interrupted. She was picking up outdated magazines from all the little tables and putting them in stacks. There were Peoples, Times, National Geographics. “It’s because I’m an old lady.”
“You’re not an old lady,” I told her. “Why do you say that?”
She walked into the kitchen. “Because it’s true.”
Eric got up from the couch and followed her, shrugging.
I went in after him. The yellow teapot–motif kitchen was brilliant with late morning light, more gold at the moment than yellow. Outside, just past the yard, the woods rustled and shook in the fall breeze. My mother and brother looked at the woods and then back at me uneasily.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going out there.”
“Do you feel all right about being so close?” Eric asked. It sounded almost genuine, like concern.
“What do you mean?”
“Katherine,” he said, “Katherine told me you were having fears that they would, you know—” He left it hanging.
“Eric,” Hannah said, “he probably doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m not afraid of the woods anymore,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.”
And I saw the anger flashing across my brother’s face. “Just me,” Eric said.
“Eric.”
This in the manner of a tattletale: “Pilot thinks I’m going to kill him.”
“He does not.” She started placing things on the counter, reaching into yellow cabinets and pulling out cans of tuna, boxes of crackers, all kinds of colorful packages. There was Jell-O. There were Oreos. There were Lays potato chips.
“He thinks I killed Fiona.” Eric sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top of his shirt. He rubbed his hands together. “He thinks I did it, Mom, that it was me.”
Our mother grabbed a bag of Wonderbread from the bread box and started putting sandwiches together, taking pressed ham out of the refrigerator and slapping it between the spongy, white slices. She slathered plain French’s mustard on like it was the principal ingredient. She put two of these sandwiches each on two small plates which were decorated with little yellow teapots and set them down on the kitchen table, one for Eric, one for me, even though I had told her I wasn’t hungry, even though I was standing on the other side of the room.
She said, “What do you want to drink?”
“Is there juice?” Eric asked.
She went to the refrigerator again and removed a carton of orange juice. She poured two small glasses. “I can’t find the big glasses,” she said. “These will have to do.”
“These are fine,” I said.
Humming, she set them down. I wasn’t even sitting at the table. I was standing in the archway that led to the dining room, twisting that shoelace around and around my middle finger. What color had this kitchen been when Fiona was alive? When did the teapot-motif start?
After a few bites of his sandwich, Eric sighed. Then he said, “I’m sorry about that, Mom. It’s just—”
“Apologize to your bother.”
Eric looked at me.
I nodded. What difference did it make?
“I talked to your father last night,” Hannah told me. “He says he wants to see you.”
Eric rolled his eyes. “Where has he been?”
“He’s been out flying.” She started to wipe the counter. I could hear the girl in her when she spoke about our father. Our mother had never seen another man after he left, had been permanently heartbroken by this second loss, had never even tried to see anyone else, as far as I knew. “Out flying that damn airplane,” she said. “Your father is lost,” she went on, and Eric and I knew exactly how she would finish this, but she surprised us, not finishing. We looked at each other across the kitchen—it was the kitchen our mother had put in, I remembered, the summer she and our father had decided to sleep in separate rooms.
Our father was a tall man, an inch or two taller than Eric. He had a square jaw and gleaming blue eyes. He had a two-seater seaplane that he flew off the coast of Florida. He lived only a mile or two from the water. Years before, before the beginning of time, our father flew test jets for the air force, and he lived in California briefly, before he met our mother, and then he became an airline pilot for TWA, and then he met Hannah, and then he had us, and all the rest.
After Fiona disappeared, our father hardly came home at all. He took the most difficult, time-consuming flight routes the airline offered. He flew all over the world, one flight after another, with just enough time in between to check our report cards and ask if there had been any news about his daughter. When I was in college we learned that Dad had been flying to and from Atlanta all these years and that he had a girlfriend there, a woman named Patricia. He announced to our mother one night that she could have everything—the house, the money, his retirement benefits—as long as he could take just enough to buy a small plane.
Hannah had grown so used to not seeing him anyway that it would make little difference, she supposed. He had blamed her for Fiona’s disappearance, too. They had not slept in the same room, in fact, since Eric went to school.
&nb
sp; The summer of the yellow teapot kitchen.
Our father wore a salt-and-pepper beard. He had broad, muscular shoulders, blue, blue, blue eyes—eyes like Eric’s. I dialed his number, sitting in the living room on the old blue couch. Upstairs, Hannah ran the water for a bath. I could hear it filling the tub.
“Hello?” came a voice.
“Patricia?” I said. “It’s Pilot.”
“Pilot?” she said. “How are you?” Patricia’s voice was always overly enthusiastic, bordering on desperate.
“I’m much better, thanks,” I said, feeling a bit like I’d been programmed to say these words. “I’m really much, much better.”
“I’m so glad to hear that.” She was distracted, I could tell. I felt like I had interrupted something. “Let me get your dad. He’s in the other room. Jim!” I heard her yell. “Jim, it’s Pilot! Pilot! Hold on,” Patricia said into the phone, “he’s coming.”
The phone was transferred from one hand to another.
“Pilot?”
I could hear the television in the background. It sounded like one of those World War Two documentaries.
I became soft. “Hey, Dad.” I felt like I was in trouble.
“Pilot, Jesus Christ, are you better?”
I said my line.
“We weren’t here, you know. Otherwise we would have called right away. I didn’t talk to your mother until—”
“It’s all right. Where were you?”
“Island hopping, you know.”
“Sounds great.”
“Can you tell me what happened?” His voice was filled with something like amazement, something beyond concern, like I had accidentally gone to the moon. Was he almost proud?
“There’s not a lot to tell. I had a psychotic episode,” I said. “I had a schizophrenic reaction. I was afraid the woods—”
“What do you mean?” he said. “Were you hearing voices and—”
“Exactly,” I said. “It was just exactly like it is on television—voices, uncontrollable thoughts, irrational fears, the whole nine yards.” It was an expression I thought he would like, the language of football, the whole nine yards.
“And what did they do for you?”
“They medicated the hell out of me. I’m taking a new drug. It really makes a big, big difference,” I said. “I don’t have any more symptoms at all. I’m fine now, totally back to normal.”
“Well,” he said uneasily, “that’s great, Pilot.”
“So.” I examined the black telephone I held on my lap. The last time I had used it, I remembered, I was going crazy. It had always been a black, heavy, rotary-dial phone. It had always been that way, I told myself. I recalled the amazement I had felt looking at it. I really had been nuts. “So how have you been?” I still had the shoelace around my finger, the reminder.
“We’re having a lot of fun, Pilot. Just living day to day.”
“How’s Patricia?”
“She’s great.”
“Great,” I said.
Our father cleared his throat. “What would you think of, uh, what would you think about coming down here for a while? You could stay on the couch. There’s not a lot of room, but there’s plenty of space to roam around outside, and we could take the plane out. There’s this little island I found, I call it Nowhere—”
“Well, Dad, thanks,” I said, “it’s just that they kind of want me to do some, to do some therapy, you know, and I kind of have to—”
“Therapy.”
“Right.”
“I guess that makes sense.” I heard gunfire coming from the television. I heard the narrator’s voice describing something about the Pacific Theater, the Japanese navy.
“Has Mom mentioned anything about her eyes?”
His voice hardened. “What’s wrong with your mother’s eyes?”
“She’s seeing ghosts, she says. She’s seeing weird transparent things, double images. I don’t know. Eric says it’s nothing, but, but, but she can’t drive. I guess I kind of need to look after her until she gets that straightened out, too. I mean, that’s another reason—”
“Christ almighty, we’re having all kinds of problems here, aren’t we?”
I tried to make this sound funny: “I guess we’re falling apart, Dad.” It came out pathetic.
There was a pause. In this pause I believe I could have lived and died a million times. In this pause, I believe, entire generations of people could have lived and died. Civilizations could have risen from ignorance and destroyed themselves with knowledge.
“The offer stands,” my father said firmly. “Anytime,” he said. “Anytime you want to come down, Pilot, we’ll take the plane, just you and me if you want, go anywhere, or at least as far as those little wings can carry us.” He got cute when he talked about his airplane.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“You take care of yourself.” He was desperate to get off the phone.
“I will.”
“I’m serious.”
I knew he was serious. He was never anything but serious. He was, after all, my dad.
In the last spot of the clinic parking lot, the following Tuesday, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy started her sapphire-blue VW Rabbit and, instead of driving to the enclosure across from the strip mall, she took Sky Highway to Exit 10, which led down a narrow road into Foxwood Court, the cul-de-sac of houses where Eric and I had grown up. Katherine had never been out this way before—had, in fact, only imagined what my childhood home looked like. She had thought it would be modern, sterile and beige, with sleekly designed blond-wood furniture adorned by glass vases filled with water and stark branches. She pictured oriental prints on the walls, pale watercolors, black-and-white photographs. She imagined spare, tightly woven Berber carpets. She thought there would be shelves of hardbound textbooks and a telescope placed handsomely in front of a window.
She was wrong.
Our house, like so many others around here, was early fifties colonial, made of white-painted brick and covered on one side by ivy. It stood in the shade of overly large trees, two maples and an oak. It had a two-car garage filled with the detritus of our childhoods, with a Ping-Pong table, every imaginable sort of game, a full wet suit hanging in front of the garage window like the body of a dead man.
Katherine pulled her car up behind our mother’s cream-colored Mercedes and sat there for a moment, making sure she had a pad of paper in her purse, making sure she had her thoughts gathered together properly, making sure of things, in general—that this was even the right place.
Katherine had imagined everything wrong, but she was still right—all the pieces still fit together properly.
Sometimes a person can imagine everything wrong and still be right. Sometimes. And I think it helps to be crazy.
Even though she was seeing double, seeing two old oaks on the front lawn, two each of our neighbors’ houses with cars too multiple to count, our mother had been watching from the dining room window, hands folded under her chin, waiting for my therapist to arrive. “Katherine DeQuincey-Joy is here,” she said when she saw the two VW Rabbits pull up behind her two Mercedeses. As it always had, my mother’s voice carried easily—cutting like piano wire—through the walls and ceiling to where I sat in my bedroom looking at my feet. I had been positioned this way for an hour, for some reason, not moving except to breathe. It was the medication, which made me sluggish to the point of catatonia. I think it was the medication, anyway. I had started to put a sock on and had just stopped, mid motion. Catatonia, of course, is one of the many symptoms of schizophrenia. I had become totally catatonic in the woods, as a matter of fact, to the point where I was absolutely frozen, could not move at all. My memory of the three days I spent out there was returning a little bit at a time. If Eric had wanted to kill me, I thought, he could have done it then, so easily. Anyone could have. It was like I had been caught in one of his traps.
“I’ll be right down,” I said now, the spell broken.
I put the other sock on, n
ot even checking to make sure it matched, rose from the single bed and descended stiffly downstairs, my hand touching the macramé animals my mother had hung there years ago—an owl, a sparrow, a hawk.
Katherine stood in the middle of our living room, smiling nervously at Hannah. Poor Katherine. She wore a black suit today, with a gray silk shirt, a triple string of pearls. Her mass of hair, at day’s end, had frizzed into a collection of blond-brown curlicues so twisty and confused it was hard to believe it wasn’t alive. She looked up at me, and I could see the relief in her face. Hannah can be a bit intimidating to strangers. Her absentmindedness comes off as cold, and that day, with her eyes unfocused, she was particularly strange.
“Hello, Katherine,” I said.
“Pilot.”
My mother asked, “Can I get you something, Miss DeQuincey-Joy? Some tea, perhaps?” It was like she was repeating a line from a movie.
“No,” Katherine said. “No, I think I’m fine, thank you.”
I looked at my mother. “Where should we do this?”
“Oh,” Hannah said, touching a finger to her lips, “I hadn’t thought about that. Wherever you’re most comfortable, Pilot.”
I tried to make a joke, saying, “Then I’m afraid we’ll have to leave the country.”
Hannah smirked. “Why don’t you use the living room?” She pointed to the stairs. “I’ll go to my room and listen to the radio.”
I said, “That’s fine.”
Katherine looked smilingly at the furnishings.
Hannah stood by the stairs for a moment, her frail hand on the banister. “Well,” she said, “all right then. Have fun.” It was an odd thing to say. She turned and walked up the steps to the second floor. “Help yourself to whatever’s in the kitchen if you need anything.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Airie.”
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