“What’s wrong with them?”
“I spoke to an ophthalmologist. If it’s what he thinks it is, her vision could deteriorate dramatically. It’s bad enough already. But she could go blind from this. Completely.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He bit his lip. “I don’t know what to do. And she won’t let me schedule an MRI.”
“Could it be psychosomatic?”
“Of course it could. But I’ve just never heard of anything like that. Psychosomatic blindness is usually total, not gradual.”
“It’s not bad that I’m telling you about Pilot, is it?” Katherine asked. “I mean, I guess it’s pretty unprofessional.”
“Katherine,” Eric said, leaning forward, “I’m a neurosurgeon. Pilot has schizophrenia. By talking about it with me you certainly aren’t hurting him. In fact, you’re helping him. I can illuminate whatever he’s telling you in therapy. And,” he finished, “if he tells you something that you don’t think I should know, don’t tell me.”
Katherine smiled, hiding her hands beneath the table. “All right.”
“All right.”
“I still don’t think he has schizophrenia,” she said.
“Why not? I thought Dr. Lennox—”
“All of his symptoms went away very fast,” she said. “Practically the instant the Clozaril took effect.”
“It’s a new medication, it’s very effective.”
Katherine shook her head just slightly. “Still.”
Eric looked at his watch. He looked back at Katherine. He said, “Time to go.”
Hannah sat in her bedroom with the window partly open and the cold air coming into the room like thousands of bees and the cancer multiplying into a hive inside her brain. She could hear our voices, Katherine’s and mine, coming upstairs through the floor, could tell when I was launching into a story, could hear the question marks at the end of Katherine’s sentences. She could make it out, if she wanted to, could listen to everything, if she chose. It was early evening, already dark, but Hannah watched Fiona playing with a ball in the backyard. She saw her little girl running back and forth to the trees, jumping rope, squatting beside the pool and filling her plastic pail with water. Fiona wore the red swimsuit she had worn the day she disappeared.
But now she had reappeared. She reappeared every day, in fact, forming out of the mass of colors and shimmering light the world had become to Hannah.
Our mother’s vision had blurred to where she wasn’t just seeing double anymore. Everything seemed ghostly. Only at very close range could she make anything out. She couldn’t read or watch television at all.
The only thing she could see clearly—and it was something she wouldn’t tell anyone about—was Fiona. She could see my little sister helping set the table downstairs. She could see Fiona pouring herself a glass of juice in the kitchen. She could see Fiona curled up in front of the television.
Fiona.
She could see Fiona.
She couldn’t tell anyone, could she? She couldn’t say that she’d been seeing the ghost of her missing daughter around the house. She couldn’t. It was bad enough that I was crazy.
Voices rose through the vent.
“This is going to sound weird,” I was saying. And Hannah strained to listen. Our voices were faint, though, almost as indistinguishable as the colors in the room.
Not the noise of them, Hannah thought, but the people in them. The people in the voices were faint.
“You didn’t make it?” she heard Katherine say. Hannah smiled. She remembered that day, too. She remembered Eric and me coming home through the woods. She remembered the way we smelled of marijuana smoke when we came into the kitchen.
“Pilot didn’t make it,” Eric had said.
I’d put my helmet on the kitchen table.
“Good,” Hannah had said, smiling. “I don’t want two boys playing football, anyway.”
“Coach Parks is queer,” I had said.
“Pilot,” our mother had said.
“He is.”
“That’s a very serious accusation.”
“It’s true,” I had said.
“You boys smell funny,” Hannah had ventured.
“We came through the woods,” Eric had said firmly. “That’s what we smell like.”
“No,” Hannah had said. “It’s something else.” She had known what it was, of course. She had not been so stupid in those days that she wasn’t aware of the smell of marijuana.
I remember waiting, terror in my throat.
“Never mind,” Hannah had said. “Dinner’s almost ready. Why don’t you boys wash up and then help set the table.”
I’d gone upstairs. And our mother had opened the oven to check on the chicken pot pies she had been heating up. Our father had been flying somewhere, in the wild blue yonder. The radio had been tuned to an easy-listening station. Hannah remembered that they were playing an instrumental version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” It was the day, she thought, that she realized that music no longer moved her. It was the day she had understood that her confidence had left her completely, only to return momentarily, and only with the assistance of red wine. She’d go to work every morning for the next ten or fifteen years, literally holding people by the hands—surgeons, violinists, sculptors—helping them bring the movement back, the delicate muscles that had cramped, the swollen knuckles that had stiffened from arthritis, the bones that had been cracked, showing these people how to clutch a ball, how to stretch a tendon to reach a note, how to grip a fine, sharp instrument.
Now she leaned back and listened to us, to Katherine and me, talking downstairs.
“Did you take your helmet off?” she heard Katherine say.
“Yeah,” I said, “I finally took it off, and Eric showed me—he showed me how to inhale it.”
Hannah smiled. She had been right about the marijuana. Of course she had been right.
“I feel like we’re having an affair,” Katherine said.
There was a pause, then, “Is that good or bad?”
She shrugged. “It’s exciting, anyway.”
They had a free weekend, Eric and Katherine, and wanted to spend more than a single evening together. So they were unpacking. Eric was, at least, carefully removing his clothes from his brand-new black leather overnight bag and placing each item—sweaters, socks, shorts, and jeans—inside the drawers of a white particleboard dresser in the all-white bedroom of his all-white beach house. Outside, waves sloshed onto the shore and a high-pitched wind whistled through the eaves.
Katherine had thrown her things next to the bed, sat down, and kicked her shoes onto the floor. Now, with her hair splayed out on the mattress behind her, she lay back, watching my brother like an obedient pet. He bought this beach house, he had told her on the drive down, completely unfurnished, and then he filled it with cheap, modern catalog furniture, everything white and light wood. Everything here seemed relentlessly practical, she thought, and, at the same time, flimsy.
“You are so incredibly tidy.” Katherine rolled her face to see him walk to the closet.
“A little obsessive-compulsive disorder never hurt anybody.”
From the bed, she laughed.
“Are you hungry?”
She could hear the autumn waves smashing themselves up against the shore outside, the shrieking wind. Katherine rose from the bed and then moved toward Eric steadily, her face to his face, and put her lips against his, not kissing, just pressing lightly against him, just touching. My brother stiffened at first and then relaxed into it. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go outside,” pulling his arm. “Let’s go out and look at the ocean.”
Her hair, long and blond and black all at once, curling and spiraling like the seaweed washed up onshore, and getting tangled hopelessly in itself, whipped around her eyes and mouth in the salt wind. She kept brushing it away and smiling apologetically, as if it could hurt Eric somehow. The cold wasn’t stinging yet, but it gave her that numb feeling. She should have br
ought a hat. Or at least a bandeau. She said, “My family used to spend Thanksgivings at the beach.” Katherine noticed the choppiness of the water—far, far out, how gray it was. Her skin tightened around her body. She wore an old jean jacket, but it wasn’t enough. “My sister and I would play out in the sand all day. We didn’t care how cold.”
“That sounds nice,” Eric said. “Two girls.” He wore a brand-new blue sweater—cashmere, of course. His face was perfectly unshaved, complete with movie-star stubble. “You never talk about your sister.”
Katherine nodded. “Michele.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s nothing much to talk about.”
“Do you speak to her often?”
“I haven’t spoken to her in two years.”
Eric put his hands in his pockets.
She was shouting a little over the wind and the waves. “You look like a model in an aftershave commercial.”
He turned to smile back, completing the effect.
“Thank you for taking me here,” she said. The sun felt warm, at least. Katherine had taken her shoes off and was pushing her feet into the cold, damp sand. She had tucked the shoes, a pair of old loafers, under a large piece of driftwood near the top of the beach. Now she walked up and wrapped her arms around my brother’s waist and curled her toes.
“Thank you for coming here,” he said.
Katherine’s insane hair swept around in the wind and punished them. “Sorry,” she said.
“About what?”
“My hair.”
“I love your hair.” Eric took her hand and they resumed walking. It was nearing sunset, the light glowing more yellow, more gold. This was one of those posters, Katherine thought, a couple on the beach, hand in hand, a sharp silhouette against the setting sun.
“Do you come here alone sometimes?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“I thought I would.” He was yelling a little, too. “I planned to, anyway. When I first bought the place I thought I would come here alone all the time, but, but it’s not the same, you know, when you’re by yourself. You just end up staying indoors and reading. I might as well stay near the hospital if I’m going to do that.”
“I would come here every weekend,” Katherine said. “Every free minute I had.”
“Alone?”
“Sure, alone. I think it’s wonderful.”
He smiled. “You’re pretty wonderful.” It was a quarterback smile, all perfect teeth and handsomeness. She had never been with anyone so handsome. It was almost unreal, she thought, his beauty. She remembered what I had told her, that he was more beautiful than she was.
Katherine forced a laugh. “Are you trying to make me blush?” She wondered if it—if all of this—was actually happening.
“Can I tell you something ridiculous?”
“Absolutely.”
“You’re not like anything, you’re not like anyone I’ve ever met,” Eric said. “You’re totally, completely different from everyone else. I hope you, I hope you’re willing to hang around for—” He looked away. Way up the beach was a man and a black Labrador retriever. “—for a little while, anyway.” The lab was bouncing and jumping at something in the man’s hand.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Katherine said.
“I mean, I’m not always that easy to get along with.”
“Eric.”
“It’s part of being a doctor, I think, or just of being me. I’m kind of, kind of high-strung, you know. But, but, Jesus Christ, Katherine, you’re learning everything about my childhood, what a crappy kid I was, what a terrible brother I was to Pilot—”
“Eric, you weren’t—”
“—and you still seem to like me.”
“—a bad brother, you were—”
“Which either means you’re crazy yourself, and that’s—”
“—a very, very nice, normal—”
“—fine, that’s all right, or—”
“—brother, perfectly normal.”
“—you’re exceptionally wonderful, which is what I believe must be the case.”
“Eric, come on.”
“I’m really crazy about you, Katherine.” He looked at her again, the same smile, only more sensitive this time, something bashful in the eyes.
Did he know he was doing this? Was it under control?
Katherine smiled. “I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” she said. “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.” She wanted to break the spell, say something weird. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”
“What?”
“It’s a poem.”
“A poem?”
“By T. S. Eliot,” she said. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Eric pulled her body into his. “I’m cold,” he said. “And you’re talking about poetry from freshman English.”
Katherine put her arms around his neck, then, saying this: “Let me warm you.”
She was fumbly—nervous. They’d had sex before, of course, but only at night, and for some reason, it wasn’t the same. Here, at the beach, waves crashing romantically outside, a high-pitched wind howling, the room filled with light, she breathed unevenly, the air coming into her lungs jaggedly, a kind of romance sucked out of the situation, but replaced by another. Eric seemed larger here, the muscles of his body writhing more effortlessly beneath the surface of his skin. She went down on him, hands on his thighs, digging in with her fingers a little, and he did the same for her, lifting her entire body to his mouth. She wasn’t particularly small, but when he did this she felt tiny and light. And when he was inside her, on top of her, moving in and out of her in a building rhythm, his chin locked around her shoulder, his whiskers rough on her skin, he whispered to her, saying he loved her, couldn’t stand not being near her, thought of her, only of her.
He actually said these things.
Mark had never said anything when they had sex. Mark had been as silent as stone.
But today Katherine was the silent one. My brother had a hand placed on the small of her back, and his mouth was next to her ear, and he was whispering, “Katherine.”
She came then, biting her lower lip, only a small sound escaping, and it rose from somewhere deep in her throat, from somewhere else, someone else, it seemed.
When Eric came, he clutched her thighs, pulling her legs up and leaning hard into her, and his chin lifted, back arched.
A few hundred miles away, I stood in front of the kitchen sink with my hand over my eyes. Hannah was upstairs waiting for me to bring her some tea.
Katherine and Eric hadn’t changed positions once.
He was on top. She was on the bottom.
Missionary.
They were on a mission, I thought at the kitchen sink.
I could see everything.
This is the difference, Katherine was thinking, between men and women. Women come first, and men never see them in their delirium. Men never get to see this behavior clearly. But the women lie there, accommodating, holding them by the back of the neck, with their minds clear and their bodies satisfied, when men come.
“That was so nice,” Katherine said softly now. “You are so nice.”
“You are so beautiful,” Eric told her.
They lay like this for a while, locked together, their bodies too warm to be touching, but touching. And she thought of Michele. And she thought of Mark, whose eyelids would flutter when he came, who was so feminine and soft, like she had been today.
“What do you look for in a chicken?” Katherine asked. In the little grocery store in the tiny beach town they were selecting poultry. She had hardly done this before.
“Interesting question,” Eric said. “Tenderness, I suppose.”
“Featherlessness,” Katherine said.
“Also a good quality.”
Katherine lifted a small one fr
om the refrigerator case and placed it in their cart. “Does this one look good to you?” It was covered in clear plastic wrap, its skin the color of a pale human’s—like mine.
“I don’t see any feathers,” Eric said. He started to walk toward the produce aisle. “Carrots? Celery? What else?”
“Thank you,” Katherine said suddenly.
“For the chicken?”
“Thank you, Eric, for taking me here, taking me—”
“You,” he said, pushing the cart over to her. He walked around it and placed his face against her cheek, kissing her jawline. “You are the one to thank.”
“No.”
“And Pilot,” he said.
“Pilot?”
“Pilot for going crazy.”
“Praised be the fall,” she said.
Eric smiled but didn’t seem to hear this. “You know,” my brother said, “when I’m with you, when you’re here with me, I have no doubt that he’ll get better, that he’ll be all right.”
They were in the vegetable aisle now, surrounded by green beans, broccoli, carrots. There was a stack of large oranges by the cash register. “Oranges?” Eric asked. “Grapes?”
“Oranges,” Katherine answered. She was smiling stupidly now, uncontrollably. “Grapes.”
I had been sitting on the back steps that led out of the kitchen, watching the woods rustle and groan under the fall wind. Behind me, I could hear my mother washing the dishes. Porcelain and silver clink-clanked in the sloshing water. I believed I could even hear the song she was humming, the melody changing every bar, mutating and shifting with consistent irregularity. “Pilot,” she said eventually, and I heard the tap cut off.
“Yes?”
“Is there anything out there?”
“What do you mean?”
“In the yard, I can’t see properly, you know, is there anything—”
“There’s the same things there always are.”
“Are there…”
“What?”
“… children?”
“Mom, come on.”
“The little girls from next door, I thought. Perhaps—”
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