Raveling (15 page)

“She’s in bed. She’s in her room,” he told her.

“Still?”

I sat on the couch in the living room and listened to the conversation between Eric and our mother coming from the
kitchen. Their voices walked through the door like people entering a party.

“Maybe she’s in the yard,” I heard him say. “How should I know?”

“Pilot!” our father called. “
Pilot!
”

“Don’t be flip,” our mother warned.

I got up from the couch and walked into the sun-filled kitchen. I had my pajamas on, having slipped into them when I went
back to bed earlier that morning. Once through the door, I said, “What?” even though I knew what I was being summoned for.

Our father and mother sat at the table. It was nearly two in the afternoon. “Go out there and find your sister.”

“Maybe she’s at Tracy’s house,” I offered. Tracy was Fiona’s best friend.

“Tracy’s in Germany,” our mother said.

I shrugged. “Oh, yeah.”

“She’s out in the back somewhere,” Eric said. “She must be.”

“Go out and get her,” our father said to me, irritated. “I’m starting to worry.”

I went outside and stood on the flagstones. Beyond the pool was a stretch of soft grass before our yard became woods, and
just beyond the tree line the woods got deeper, grew thicker and darker, the way things do until a center is reached, a critical
mass is formed.

“
Fiona!
” I shouted. In my pajamas I walked around the pool and across the grass and back to the tree line. “
Fiona!
” Next door, a golden retriever I had never seen before was taking a crap on the neighbor’s lawn. I felt a coolness in the
air, not as distinct as last night’s, but it was there. I yelled for Fiona once again. I heard the kitchen door, its familiar
creak, opening behind me. I turned and saw my father standing on the flagstones.

He cupped his hands to his mouth. “
Fiona!
”

“She’s not out here,” I said.

“Where the hell is she?”

“Maybe she’s in the basement.”

Our father turned around. “Eric,” he said, “check the basement.”

I walked back to the house and into the kitchen. I could feel something rising inside my stomach, something slimy and alive.
“She’s not out back,” I said to our mother.

Her face was a mass of little snakes moving beneath her skin, rippling and squirming.

“Does she ever go into the woods?” our father asked.

“She’s too scared.”

“Could she be at another neighbor’s house?” he said. “Are there any other girls around here she plays with?”

“Just Tracy,” our mother said. Her hands were shaking.

Our father sat down at the table and put cream and sugar in his coffee. He stirred it with the sugar spoon. “I’m so fucking
hungover,” he said. “I don’t have time for—”

“Jim,” our mother said, “the language.”

“Christ, Hannah.”

“Can I have some coffee, too?” I asked.

“No,” my parents said at the same time.

I tried to think of where Fiona might be. “Did anyone look under the bed?”

“Why?”

“It was loud last night. Maybe she didn’t like the noise. Maybe she’s sleeping
under
the bed.”

Dad sighed. He thought this was a stupid idea, I could tell. But he said, “Go look.”

I ran out of the room and up the stairs, as always, two steps at a time like Eric. I knew she wouldn’t be up there. I knew
she was not under the bed. But I walked into her room
and looked, anyway. There were piles of clothes, strewn towels from the pool, crumpled blankets and bed sheets. I looked
underneath her bed and saw only dust and a variety of headless, contorted Barbie dolls. I sat down on her bed and waited a
few minutes until Hannah, our mother, stepped quietly into the room, her ankles making the softest
cricking
.

“She’s not here?”

I shook my head.

“Where could she be?” She was feigning exasperation, pretending that Fiona did this all the time. But Fiona had never done
this before. “She must be somewhere.”

“She must be somewhere,” I repeated.

“A little girl can’t just disappear.”

I nodded. “She can’t.”

“She’ll be home any minute,” Hannah told me.

But that isn’t entirely true, what I just said. Because after I looked under Fiona’s bed, I went around, from room to room,
looking under everything. I looked under my bed, my parents’ bed, under Eric’s. I looked inside the closets of every room.
I was looking under Eric’s bed when I turned a certain way and thought I saw something, something under his desk just across
the room.

And I did see something.

And then I returned to Fiona’s room, and I sat down on her bed, and I could hear my mother coming, the
crick-crick-cricking
sound that her ankles made—still make—coming up the stairs.

Half-empty glasses were everywhere—on the tables, on the arms of chairs, on windowsills, on the floor. There were plastic
cups and paper plates strewn all over the house. There were dark, adult-size footprints on the hallway rug. The downstairs
bathroom sink was smudged with makeup and the toilet was stopped. The light switch in the kitchen had been broken. There were
new stains on all the furniture and carpets. On the grass outside there was a black scorch mark where someone had knocked
a torch onto the ground. There was broken glass beside the pool. There was a stillness forming inside me. There was light
coming through the trees as the afternoon progressed, but I knew that it would not last. There was my father standing in the
yard, hands on his waist, his face radiating anger in bright white spikes. There was my mother in the kitchen, making cup
after cup of tea.

I was ordered to go door-to-door to all of the neighbors’ houses who had little girls and ask if Fiona was there or if they
had seen her at all today.

Eric and my father explored the woods.

Hannah waited by the telephone.

I went to Marsha Grierson’s house. I visited Debbie Brandice, Tracy Shaw, and Bernadette Duprix. I saw some of the grown-up
faces from the party last night.

“Have you seen Fiona, my sister?” I said politely. “Have you seen her?” I tried not to appear panicked. I tried to remain
calm.

“No,” they all said. “We haven’t seen her. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.” I smiled mechanically, not wanting people to worry unnecessarily. “But would you call my mother if you see
her? Do you have our number?”

“I hope she’s all right,” Tracy Shaw’s mother said.

“She’s probably just out playing somewhere and lost track of time,” I said easily. “We’ll find her.”

I went from house to house this way, knocking on every door in the neighborhood where I knew a girl anywhere near
Fiona’s age lived. But by five o’clock I had exhausted every possibility I could think of, so I went home, walking in through
the kitchen.

“Did she come home?” I said. “Mom?”

Hannah was on the telephone. She held a finger up, as if to put me on pause. “Thank you,” she was saying. “I’ll wait.” She
looked at me. The snakes under the skin on her face had hardened, and now she had a permanent look of surprise. “I’m calling
the police,” she said. It’s a look she would never quite lose.

I sat down at the kitchen table, exhausted, starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since last night’s potato chips.

“Oh, thank you,” my mother said into the kitchen phone. “Yes, I want to talk to you about my daughter. She’s, well, we can’t
find her, that is. We can’t find her anywhere.” She twisted the white cord around her wrist. “She’s seven years old,” she
said. “Yes. No, we checked everywhere, all her friends, all the neighbors. Please, can you send someone over? Thank you. Yes.
Only seven years old. Thank you very much. Good-bye.” Hannah put the phone down in the cradle. “They’re sending someone,”
she informed me.

I looked at her. I tried to give my mother a look that would seem reassuring. But I only wanted to throw up. “We’ll find her,”
I said. “She’s probably just out playing somewhere and lost track of time.” I waited and watched her pour another cup of tea
before I said, “I’m really hungry.”

Hannah sighed. “Well, get yourself some cereal or something.”

“All right.”

Then Eric and my father walked in, and I could smell the earth on their feet. “Did she come home?” Dad said.

We didn’t answer.

“I called the police. They’re sending someone.”

“You called the
police
?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell can they do about it?”

“What if she—”

“
Hannah
.”

“I swear to God, Jim.”

Eric looked at me and I saw all the murderous hatred of his threats inside his eyes. I sifted some cornflakes out of a box.
I felt like I shouldn’t be eating, but I was hungry. At the same time that I wanted to throw up, I was hungry. My hands were
trembling, in fact, I was so incredibly hungry. I remember, anyway, that my hands were trembling. I remember that clearly.

Upstairs in my blue-and-red race-car bedroom I had the lights off. I had the radio on, and I was listening to the American
Top 40 with Casey Kasem. And when I heard my name called to come downstairs, I understood exactly what I would be asked. For
some reason, I could hardly move off the bed.

In our dining room, at the table where we sat only for holidays, there was a black man, with eyes that saw through walls,
it seemed, they held so long on a single object. He wore a suit made of odd, thick material, and he smelled strongly of pipe
tobacco. He had a little notebook out on the table and a stubby pencil. His name was Detective Cleveland, I learned later.
“When did you first notice Fiona missing?” he was saying to my parents.

Our father pinched his eyes. “This morning,” he said. He ran his hand through his short, dark hair. “It was—”

“It was early this afternoon,” our mother corrected. “We had a party last night and didn’t get out of bed until after one
o’clock.” She shot our father a look, as if to say
Pay attention
. “It wasn’t this morning.”

“Okay.” Cleveland smiled. “This afternoon. Can you tell me when you last saw her?”

“Last night,” I said.

Our parents nodded.

Eric folded his arms over his chest. “Early last night,” he said, “for me, anyway.”

“You didn’t check on her before you went to bed?” Cleveland asked my parents.

My father said, “No.”

My mother looked down.

“That’s all right. Your kids are pretty independent, I guess. They all are these days.”

“There were a lot of people here,” our father told him. “A big party. We were distracted.”

“You say you’ve checked all the houses around here where she likes to play? And you’ve looked out back in the woods and in
all the playgrounds in the area?” Detective Cleveland’s voice was quiet, with a trace of raspiness to it, like he had a sore
throat.

“We checked everywhere.”

“You looked in the woods out back, all along that highway?”

“Fiona won’t go in the woods,” I told him. “And there aren’t really any playgrounds.”

“What’s that, son?”

I repeated it.

“Why’s that?”