Raveling (12 page)

Katherine was five feet five inches tall, exactly. She had measured herself so many times as a teenager, hoping she’d
grow that extra inch or two that would make her taller than Michele, her sister younger by nearly two years. It never happened,
of course. Nothing wished for that hard ever happens, it seemed. Michele had grown taller and more beautiful, her body more
lithe and slender, like the stalk of a daffodil, her hair yellow-blond like the flower itself. Michele’s eyes, unlike Katherine’s,
were permanently soft, like she’d been half drunk, half sad all her life. Michele had never had control of her eyes the way
Katherine did.

Trevor Davidson, John Taborre, Jimmy Schindler.

These were the names of the boyfriends Michele had managed to steal from Katherine when they were growing up.

And then, of course, Mark.

How could Michele have done it? What was she thinking?

Katherine’s skin was pale but had an olive cast just beneath the surface that made her overall tone like a sheet of fine writing
paper. The bridge of her nose was decorated with light freckles from too many unprotected summers at the beach—like flecks
of rag inside the linen.

There were too many imperfections to count.

One of Katherine’s breasts was slightly larger than the other. None of the men she’d ever been with had ever mentioned it,
of course. No one, in fact—not even Michele or her mother—had ever said anything about it. But when she stood in front of
the full-length mirror with no clothes on, it was all Katherine could see, the right breast fuller, heavier, almost a C cup,
hanging lower, its nipple larger too; the left breast lighter, the skin tighter, it seemed, pulling it closer to her chest.
This breast—the left one—had a single, dark, curling hair sprouting from the light brown areola. Katherine cut it close to
the skin every couple of months, but before she knew it, it was there again. Naked, she crossed into the living room, where
her mattress lay on the floor. She thought
maybe she’d take a bath, stare at the tiles on the ceiling, sip a cup of tea. She stepped into the efficiency kitchen and
put the glass kettle she’d bought at the Safeway on the stove top. When did she realize the phone was ringing? The answering
machine was already speaking to someone, it seemed. “Hello,” it said. “You’ve reached Katherine DeQuincey-Joy. Please leave
a message at the beep.”

“Katherine,” a voice told the room. “It’s me, Eric. Are you home?”

She hesitated, then picked up. “Eric?” It was a cheap cordless she’d bought at the local Radio Shack. It had the strangest
signal, a high-pitched squeal somewhere inside it.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” She walked across the length of the apartment, in front of the window, hoping the squeal would go away if she moved.

“I just wanted to make sure you got home all right.”

The wine. He’d known about the wine. “Yes, of course. Are you still—”

“I’m in the car.”

“Where do you live, anyway?”

“I live up the road a bit. In the country.”

Could she hear the road he was on? “I see.” The tires on the asphalt?

“I had a nice time.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Did you?”

Katherine smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you, I really did.”

“Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say.”

Katherine looked out the window, at the parking lot and the highway beyond it. She had the same view from her office, more
or less. This must be what it looks like out there, she thought. Parking lots and highways, a smattering of trees in the distance.
“It was nice of you to call.” She would have
to do something about this. She would have to avoid Eric in the future.

“I’m not always such a gentleman.” He laughed a little.

“I’m sure you are.”

“You bring it out in me.”

“Ordinarily I’m sure you’re a terrific bastard.” Could he hear her smiling?

“Terrible.”

“Scum of the earth.”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Doctors aren’t known for being such nice guys.”

She couldn’t let this go any further. She changed the subject. “I’ll be speaking to your brother tomorrow.”

“I’m sure he’s in good hands.”

“Well,” Katherine said, “it’s the medication that will have the greatest effect, as you know. I’ll just try to make sure he
gets back to normal as quickly as—”

“Pilot hasn’t been normal for a while. But thank you in advance for looking out for him.”

“You’re a good brother, Eric.”

“I’m not so sure Pilot would agree.”

The kettle began to scream.

“The water’s boiling,” Katherine said. “I have to go.”

“My mother drinks tea,” Eric said from the car.

“She does?”

“Maybe Freud was right.”

Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy stood in the kitchenette of her
enclosure
, the phone to her ear, naked, and felt the impulse to tell him, to describe herself to Eric—her uneven breasts, the hair
sprouting from her nipple, the chewed nails. But she didn’t, only saying, “Good night, Eric.” And for some reason after she
hung up the phone, she said it again, more clearly this time, to no one at all. “Good night, Eric Airie.”

She would have to stop this, she told herself.

There was another message on her machine, so Katherine pushed the button.

Michele had been calling.

Michele had been calling on and off for a couple of years now, but the messages were increasing lately, and growing longer,
more frantic, month by month. Often when Katherine came home from work and saw the message light blinking, she’d listen, holding
her finger a millimeter above the delete button. “Katherine,” her sister would say. “Katherine, it’s me, it’s Michele. I just
wanted you to know that I’m doing great, that everything’s great, really great, and, and, and I’m probably going to get this
new job at a, well, at this nice little bookstore. I thought you’d like that, right? I mean, how you love to read and everything.
Anyway—” And if it became too much, Katherine pushed the delete button, a single depression of the middle finger saying,
Fuck you, Michele—disappear
.

Sometimes, Katherine just listened to hear her sister’s voice, the desperation so far inside it, so much a part of it that
it had retained a permanent quaver, a modulation like an uncertain stroke across the string of a cello. Sometimes Katherine
deleted the message before she’d even heard it. She knew it was Michele, she told herself, by the way the message light on
her answering machine blinked.

My brother got into his vintage black Jaguar after seeing Katherine to her sapphire-blue VW Rabbit in the parking lot of the
barbecue restaurant and waited, watching, while she pulled out onto the highway. He wondered how much wine she’d had before
he arrived. Perhaps she shouldn’t be driving, he thought. A few moments later, he pulled out himself. He had a long drive
ahead of him, but one he was accustomed
to making. He put a disc into the Blaupunkt, Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
, and he whistled along with it, the even measures of music filling the car’s interior.

Eric liked Katherine. He liked her tangle of crazy hair. He liked her clear, freckled skin. He liked her green, anxious eyes.
He especially liked the intelligence that beamed out of them, and, being Eric, my brother, he liked the idea of the challenge
her eyes represented.

He thought of our mother’s eyes, of the ghosts she’d been seeing, the double images and blurred outlines.

Could it be cancer?

He drove this way for a while, trying to relive each beat of his conversation with Katherine, considering the way she used
her silverware, divining her socioeconomic background. He saw a strong father, middle class, an intellectual but unfulfilled
mother. He saw Katherine’s girlhood head behind book after book, her eventual transcendence into graduate school, her yearning
for independence.

He smiled to himself.

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon, he thought.

The clock on his mahogany dashboard said five after eleven. He’d wait another few minutes, and then he would call. Just to
check in, make sure she was all right. Tell her what a good time he had.

Women like that.

He whistled along with the music. He stared ahead at the highway, its gray asphalt rushing toward him, the yellow lines slipping
under the tires like time. He gripped the wheel and accelerated, pushing his car from seventy, to eighty, to ninety miles
an hour. He was alone out here. His radar detector, clipped beneath the dash, didn’t even blink. No police. He was free and
clear. He turned off the music and picked up the phone, dialing information for the number.

When Katherine’s machine answered, he was, at first, concerned. “Katherine,” he said. “It’s me, Eric. Are you home?”

But she picked up after a moment, and her voice revealed everything.

I was moved from the squeaking vinyl couch in the lobby by a nurse with a wide, beautiful brown face and soft, warm hands.
“Come with me, honey,” she said. “Come back to bed now and rest.” Her eyes were dead, though, clouded over like the sky outside
the windows. I got up and followed her, my feet shuffling in slippers I couldn’t remember putting on. Later, in my room, I
heard the voices in the light fixtures whispering, arguing, commenting, but I couldn’t quite make out exactly what they were
saying anymore—they were just out of reach. I heard the long, thin branch of the tree outside tapping away at the glass. I
heard the soft hum of the hospital itself. I could hear my mother all the way across the highway and the woods and the cul-de-sac.
I could hear her voice. She was talking to herself, just softly, her feet
crick-crick-cricking
across the blue-and-white oriental, a cup of tea in her hands. From my hospital bed I could hear across the highway and beyond
the woods and far out over the hills that lay past East Meadow to my brother in his car, the even measures of
The Four Seasons
playing on his car stereo, his fingers gripped tightly on the wheel. His thoughts were racing over the yellow lines quicker
than his tires. I reached up to feel the scratch on my face. Was it fading? I felt the shoelace twisted around the middle
of my right hand like a reminder. I tried to smile—tried to move my face at all—when an aide came and turned out the overhead,
quieting the voices, dimming the room. I could feel my cheekbones hardening inside my face, the skull turning to porcelain,
my teeth like glass. Somewhere down the hall, a man was saying, “Oh
please, oh please, oh please.” There were long shadows cast across my body, and my body was too thin and too long and I was
as brittle as a skeleton.

The afternoon before the night of the party when Fiona disappeared forever, our mother was putting eye shadow on, green to
match her eyes, in front of the gold-framed vanity mirror she kept in her dressing room. Fiona was standing behind her, hand
on her shoulder, fascinated by every application of color.

I wanted money. “Hey, Mom,” I said, standing in the doorway. “Can I have five bucks?”

Our mother smiled through this question. “What for?”

“I helped get the house ready for the party.”

She kept smiling. “That wasn’t out of the kindness of your heart, my dear one?”