Raveling (2 page)

I was looking in the mirror, too, staring and staring at my empty, empty face, when I decided that my brother would simply
have to kill me.

Behind the house, the house we grew up in—or didn’t, depending on how it’s viewed—was a flagstone patio that led
to an old, kidney-shaped, in-ground swimming pool. Years ago, before Fiona disappeared, we used this pool constantly, swimming
in it every summer day. When he wasn’t flying, our father lay in a deck chair beside it, his feet up, the
Times
spread over his chest, snoring through a smile. Our mother would bring out a tray of iced tea, a round slice of lemon over
the lip of each glass—something she’d seen in
House Beautiful
, probably—and place it at the pool’s edge. We could swim up, all of us kids, and take our drinks. Usually our father’s had
whiskey in it, too, and sometimes I would steal a sip and feel that strange stinging on my tongue, the delicious numbness
that followed.

Later, after Fiona disappeared, after the yard had been allowed to go fallow, and the pool had been emptied, and the weeds
had grown into it and made cracks in the concrete, my mother had it filled in with earth.

A truck arrived one day, and the backyard of our house was transformed.

She mowed, tended, planted, groomed.

When the pool was filled, our mother kept a garden there, growing yellow and orange marigolds around the perimeter to keep
the bugs away. She planted the vegetables of her New England girlhood. She grew carrots and potatoes, beets, radishes and
parsnips, string beans and turnips. For the past several years she had even been growing rhubarb. And now, this year, early
fall, tall pink and green stalks rose, their broad, purple leaves waving hello to the house.

Hello from the past.

When she came home from Eric’s office that day, our mother was not seeing ghosts, I believe, because she was making a rhubarb
pie. Not that anyone ever ate these pies our mother made. They had a strange, rubbery flavor, I’d always thought, like a sweetened
bicycle tire. But she remembered being a little girl in Massachusetts, picking rhubarb and
bringing it home to our great-aunt Jenny, who would wash the stalks and make a cone out of a page of newspaper. She’d put
sugar in the cone, and little Hannah would dip the stalks into it, skipping merrily back to the woods. I always imagined her
bounding along, her reddish hair all crazy against a flushed face, an October wind fierce inside her pink girl ears. When
I imagine our mother’s childhood it is the nineteenth century, even though she was born during the Second World War, and she
wears a cape like Little Red Riding Hood.

Sometimes I imagine Fiona that way, too.

The past all blurs together.

My own past, Hannah’s, my brother’s. Memory’s soft focus.

When I was a boy, I liked to hide in the woods behind our house in East Meadow, pretending to be the wolf boy. Alone, the
English language forgotten, I’d growl, crawling through leaves. Once, a year or so before the pool was filled in, a year or
so after Fiona disappeared, I sneaked into the house on a Sunday afternoon and removed a steak from the refrigerator. I snarled
and tore at it with my teeth, right there on the kitchen floor. It felt slimy and tasted like blood. “Pilot,” our mother said.
She stood behind me. I was eleven, on my hands and knees, a raw piece of meat in my mouth, on the kitchen floor, suddenly
made aware of my actual identity—and disappointed by it, of course. “We were going to have that for dinner.”

“It’s still good,” I said, my face hot.

Eric appeared next to her. “Jesus Christ, Pilot, what the hell are you doing?”

I am the wolf boy
, I wanted to say.
I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands
.

“He’s pretending to be a dog.”

But today, in that same kitchen, Hannah had made a
rhubarb pie, and when I came downstairs in my old blue bathrobe, I could smell it, sweet and woodsy, filling the house. “Did
you see Eric?” I asked.

She only hummed.

“What did he say?”

“He said not to worry—
not to worry, not to worry, not to worry
.”

I sat down at the kitchen table while she took the pie out of the oven.

“I made a pie,” she announced.

“I can see that.” I was insane, by the way. I had moved back home at the age of twenty-nine. I had been rescued by Eric, in
fact, found on the beach in California, out of money, suicidal, experiencing one senseless epiphany after another.

“It’s not ready to eat yet,” my mother warned. “Still too hot.”

The theme of her kitchen was the teapot, and on the tablecloth was a cheerful pattern of fat ones, all yellow. I traced the
outline of one of these yellow teapots with my finger and examined the pie she had placed in front of me, the crust underdone,
and I asked, “Are you seeing any ghosts?”

She had a mean streak sometimes. She said, “Just you.”

Recently, I’d been feeling my hands and feet grow light and I was afraid that if I moved, I’d float away, carried up into
the air the way a child’s body floats to the surface of a pool when she’s pretending—

“But I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”

Hannah put a hand over her mouth and left the room.

—pretending that she has drowned.

Sometimes, in the woods, as the wolf boy, on my hands and knees, stalking a rabbit or a mouse or a squirrel,
pretending
,
I would stop, and in a moment of embarrassed self-consciousness I could not remember who I was—Pilot or Eric. More accurately,
I couldn’t remember who I was supposed to be. I knew I wasn’t really the wolf boy. I knew that I was only a boy, a human being,
who belonged to the house with the white-painted brick walls on the other side of the trees, past the open, overgrown lawn,
behind the empty, unused, cracked pool and the buckling flagstones.

I am the wolf boy
, I wanted to say.
I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands
.

That day in the kitchen, the scent of my mother’s rhubarb pie strong in the air, the crust all melty and underdone, there
was a dead-on collision of forgetfulness and memory. I found myself looking through the eyes of the wolf boy again. How long
had it been?

That day, our mother saw double, but I saw one thing.

One thing, twenty years old, clear for a fraction of an instant.

Later, I was on the phone with my brother.

“Is there anything wrong with her?” I wanted to know.

“It’s too early to tell,” Eric said. “I’m not sure.”

I suddenly realized that I was standing in the living room. I said, “You’re the brainiac. I thought you understood these things.”

His voice was dismissive, as usual. “It could be anything,” he said. “It’s probably just stress.”

“Stress.”

“Things bother her.”

Our mother’s living room had become cluttered. Mismatched pillows and throw blankets, decorator styles and patterns merged
recklessly—plaids with paisleys, stripes with florals. “I guess so.” I couldn’t remember walking into this room. I remembered
how it used to be so tasteful, a page from a magazine.

“And what about you?”

“What about me?” I looked at the phone. Suddenly it was black. I had never noticed that this telephone was black. It had a
rotary dial, too. I didn’t remember dialing it. I looked at my finger. What fucking year was this?