Raveling (14 page)

I see her in a still image, my sister, her legs wrapped around the waist of the blond man with the blond mustache—of Bryce
Telliman—her lips inside his ear. He is looking at me, a slight smile on his mouth. What is she saying? Her red one-piece
swimsuit is riding high up on her seven-year-old hips and her red high-top sneakers, untied, are dangling off her feet. I
can see their laces. His hair is so bleached from the sun that it is white, and his skin is too tan. He seems glamorous, Bryce
Telliman, as if he doesn’t belong at this party but should be at another, where all the girls are wearing swimsuits and the
music is rock and roll and the people are dancing. But he is here, strangely enough, at my parents’ house. And in this imaginary
photograph there are other people behind them, but only in the background, and they are fading into the darkness like images
in an old newspaper photograph, and Fiona’s skin shines whitely, illuminated by the fiery torchlight.

He looks at me directly, and Fiona regards me suspiciously from the corner of her eye while she tells him her secret. What
was it? What was she saying?

Why wouldn’t she tell me?

Katherine arrived to work late, as usual, as she had practically every morning since she started this job, and took the very
last staff spot, walking the entire length of the hospital parking lot to the clinic, her arms full of forms she wouldn’t
get to, a newspaper she would never read. The section of the
Times
she had dropped yesterday still lay on the ground. She stepped over it, thinking she’d pick it up on the way home. She would
have to start getting in earlier, she told herself. She would have to get her life together. Katherine held everything under
one arm and pushed her fingers through her hair, realizing the familiar insane tangle was even worse than usual. In the car
she had noticed a run in her panty hose from her ankle to her knee. There was an ink stain on her sleeve she hadn’t seen at
home. Jesus Christ, she was falling apart. How the hell did she expect to impress anyone, much less a neurosurgeon, when she
was such a mess?

She thought of the way she had flirted with my brother last night, the phone call after she’d gotten home, and her face went
hot. She would pretend it had never happened.

As she entered the clinic she saw that Elizabeth had arranged a pot of tea with lemon on a tray and was filling the pot with
hot water from the kettle. “Elizabeth,” Katherine said, approaching, her voice soft.

“I thought I would save you some time,” her secretary said, whispering, “You’re late. And I thought it would be nice.”

Katherine shook her head. “It
is
nice,” she said. “You are the nicest person in the world. I don’t deserve you.”

Elizabeth followed Katherine into her office and placed the tray on the least cluttered piece of desk she could find. “You
have David Ogden here right away,” Elizabeth said, still whispering for some reason. “He’s been waiting fifteen minutes already.
And then you have Marie Forche and after that, after
her
, I mean, you have Pilot Airie. That is your morning.”

“Thanks.” Katherine picked up the little pot and poured herself a cup. “You can send David in right now.” She dipped the wedge
of lemon into the cup. There was even a jar of honey.

I had been coated with molten glass that had since hardened around my skin. It was the medication, I guess. I couldn’t smile.
I couldn’t frown. If I tried to move the muscles of my face, I thought, it would shatter and cut me to pieces. “I’m sorry
about the other day,” I told Katherine, entering, closing the door softly behind me.

She got up from her desk and extended her hand. “Sorry?”

“I wasn’t feeling myself.” I moved the shoelace from one hand to the other, shook hers mechanically, and then sat on the office
couch. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt like myself. I wondered what
myself
felt like. Perhaps it wasn’t coated with glass. Perhaps it was
all
glass. I wore a pair of old gray sweatpants and a T-shirt I remembered buying at least five or six years ago, I think it
was in college. I wondered why it was even here. Did my mother bring it? I couldn’t remember putting this T-shirt on. I had
a feeling it said something humiliating, but I was too afraid to look down and read it.

Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy sat in the brown office chair opposite me and smiled reassuringly. “I imagine that’s a bit of
an understatement,” she laughed. “Not feeling well, I mean.”

I tried to form a smile, too, but I could feel the glass starting to crack, so I stopped. I twisted the shoelace around and
around my middle finger.

Around and around and around.

“Last time we spoke,” she said, “you told me you were hearing voices, arguments in the light fixture, that kind of thing.
Have they stopped? Can you still hear them?”

I felt so ridiculous. “No,” I said. “I can’t hear them now.” There was, however, a rustling outside her door, a gathering
of feet. There were ears, I thought, pressed against the keyhole.

She nodded. “Good.” Katherine’s voice was overly gentle, as if she, too, were afraid the glass that had formed around me would
shatter into a billion pieces. “And you were thinking the woods were going to swallow you, or that they had swallowed you
somehow?”

“It was stupid,” I said. “I apologize.”

“It’s not stupid, Pilot.” Katherine put her hand on one of her knees. I could see a run in her stocking, starting at her ankle
and disappearing into her skirt, a skirt I couldn’t quite get the color of. “But you’ve been over all of these questions with
Dr. Lennox, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” I had. The voices, the irrational fears, the disorientation. I felt I had responded adequately. I had answered honestly,
in fact.

“Do you know what’s happening to you?”

“I’m freaking out,” I answered. “I’ve gone nuts.” The shoelace was cutting off my circulation. My finger was starting to swell.

“You haven’t gone nuts,” Katherine said. “You’ve had a relatively major psychotic episode, though.” Her green eyes widened.
“Dr. Lennox thinks you may have some form of schizophrenia, which nowadays is an eminently treatable disorder. You’re not
crazy, Pilot, no matter what you’ve heard or what anybody tells you.”

Schizophrenia
. The word stuck out in her sentence like a thorn.

“I’m glad you think so,” I said.

“I can see that you’re responding well to the Clozaril,” Katherine said, “which is a very good sign.”

There were interesting shadows forming on the wall behind her, as if they were hinting at the shapes of things, of animal
legs, of tree limbs. “I always respond well to medication,” I said. Of fingers curling, ferns reaching up toward the sun.

“What does that mean?”

“I did a lot of drugs in high school,” I told her. “Grass. Acid. That’s probably why my brain is so weak now.”

“Weak? Your brain is not weak, Pilot, and, as far as anyone knows, smoking pot and dropping acid never caused schizophrenia.”

My voice felt flat and electronic, but I tried to make it sound funny, anyway. “Maybe they just didn’t do as much acid as
me.”

Katherine shook her head, but I could see she was amused. “One of the triggers of schizophrenia can often be stress. I was
wondering if there was anything bothering you last week.” She looked up. “Anything upsetting that you think may have—well,
just if there was anything that upset you.”

“Last week?”

Schizophrenia
. She was using the word over and over, trying to desensitize it, scrape the meaning from its skin.

“Before you went into the woods.”

“You’ve spoken to my mother?”

Katherine nodded. “Briefly.”

“She’s seeing ghosts,” I told her. “She has a brain tumor.” Hadn’t anything been done about this yet? All the way from here,
I knew that at this moment, this very instant, it doubled, radical cells dividing.

“Seeing ghosts?”

“Apparitions, walking transparencies, double images moving across her field of vision. Why do you think I went into the woods?”
My face was starting to melt the glass away.

She touched her hair, and it was even crazier than yesterday. “Apparitions of anyone in particular?”

“She has a brain tumor,” I insisted. “A formation at the base of her optic nerve. I’m sure of it. Did you talk to Eric?”

“I spoke to Eric,” Katherine said.

“Didn’t he tell you?”

She shook her head no. “Nothing about a tumor.”

“He knows it’s there,” I informed Katherine, “but he won’t do anything about it.”

She looked away, constructing a hypothesis in her head, considering my diagnosis. “Eric told me you had a sister—”

“Fiona,” I broke in.

“—and that when she disappeared—”

“Eric killed Fiona,” I said.

Katherine stopped talking.

I repeated myself. “Eric
killed
Fiona.”

Katherine permitted a silence to enter this office. It descended like the folds of a new white sheet over the two of us. And
then she began, “You think your brother—”

“He killed her,” I said, laughing. “And now he’s going to have to kill me.”

I could see that Katherine was trying to remain calm, but that this was upsetting to her, confounding her belief in my progress,
the so-called positive response I was having to the medicine.

“Pilot,” Katherine said, “have you ever told anyone about this before?”

“No,” I said. “It just occurred to me to mention it.”

“Just now?”

“Last week, before the episode.”

“Your mother’s brain tumor,” Katherine said. “Where do you think it came from?”

“I don’t know where brain tumors come from, Katherine, I just know—”

“Okay.”

“—that Eric knows and won’t do anything about it.”

Katherine leaned back. I shouldn’t have been saying any of this, I knew. I knew I was screwing everything up as usual. But
I liked Katherine—Katherine with the shadows moving on the wall behind her, shadows of animal legs and tree limbs against
a grass clearing in the day’s last light, a clearing somewhere in the woods, a patch of woods somewhere in the world, a world
dropping like a rock down a well, a faraway splash. There should have been pictures on the wall, I thought, something to keep
the white paint from receding away forever into nothingness and snow.

“Let’s talk about this,” Katherine said.

I twisted the shoelace even tighter, and my face was starting to feel normal again.

The day after the party, our mother was in the kitchen putting the kettle on for tea. “Where is—”

“—Fiona?” Eric said.

“Yes, where is your sister?”

“I haven’t seen her,” he said.

But how did he know? How did he know what she was going to ask?