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“I didn’t realize I was doing it,” I said.

I could feel her eyes closing as she said this. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it about Eric.”

“I knew you knew.”

“Please, Pilot, you have to get better.”

“Better,” I said. “I know. I’m really trying.”

He lost his virginity with Dawn Costello when he was thirteen years old. He had sex with her sister, too—with Joannie—who
was two years older. My brother had a number of girlfriends in high school, including Renée Faust, Tanya Zellwieger, and Constance
Johns. Of course, there were others. Girls he had been with at parties after football games. Girls he knew secretly. Girls
he had brought into the woods. Girls he took into the tunnel that separates the woods from the highway island on the other
side of Sky Highway. By his senior year Eric had even slept with an assistant teacher named Judith Freitag. She disappeared
from Albert Einstein High under mysterious conditions. Someone had found out about them, I think. Once he got to college Eric
began the systematic sexual elimination of the entire female student population. He slept with dozens, if not hundreds, of
young women. I doubt he ever had to try very hard. In those days Eric’s handsomeness meant more. Not that women wouldn’t fall
for him later on—they would. It’s just that when he was in college, girls walked up to him and sat on his lap. They whispered
in his ear the things
they planned to do with him. They led him by the hand back to their dorm rooms and walk-up apartments. I believe there were
occasions where Eric had sex with more than one woman at a time. Over the years he had sex with every physical variety of
female. By the end, as medical school was approaching, Eric had settled on one woman. Unexpectedly, she was not even beautiful.
She even might be described as plain. Her name was Stephanie, a blonde with a slim build and a white scar that ran up her
forehead and disappeared under her hairline. I don’t know what my brother saw in her. But it didn’t matter, because she refused
to follow him to medical school in Virginia, even though he offered to marry her.

As far as I know, Eric never developed any unusual sexual proclivities in all that time. He never got into pain, or strange
costumes, or unusual fetishes. Sex, for my brother, became like water—something that was everywhere, just reach for it. His
thrills came from school, from learning about the internal composition of the human body, from understanding the function
of our various parts, the structure underlying the structure. He was always that way. Even sex could not dissuade him from
his life’s first addiction:

He liked to dissect.

“Eric,” Katherine said into the phone, “Pilot knows.” Eric was in his car. She was in the
enclosure
.

“Knows what?”

She was nervous, biting through a scab on her middle finger. “He knows that we’ve, that we’ve been together. He knows about
us.”

“He does not.” It was night. Eric swerved to miss a dog standing in the middle of the road, eyes silvery-red in the headlights.

“I’m telling you,” Katherine said, “Pilot guessed it somehow. Or someone told him. Anyway, I was so flustered that I basically
confessed.”

My brother sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I’m not sure I should be his thera—”

“Katherine, I don’t see a conflict.”

“Maybe we should take a break.” She tasted the blood, raw and warm, on her finger. “At least until he’s, you know, until he’s
more cogent.” She was naked, pacing the small area of tiles in her kitchenette. If anyone could see in, she didn’t care. As
usual, the message light on her answering machine blinked steadily. Michele had called again.

Eric’s voice was querulous. “I have a very good feeling about you, Katherine, and I don’t want to let this slip away.”

“I don’t either.” She looked out the window, across the highway and the parking lot. “It’s just that Pilot is my client and
I, and I want to be professional, I want to help him as much as I can. It’s my first responsibility.”

“He’s getting better. The medication—”

“I’m not so sure about that. He really believes you’re trying to get him or something, that you’re trying to…” Her voice trailed
off.

“Jesus.” Eric was turning into his long driveway that curved around to the front of his house. Katherine could hear the gravel
crunching under the wheels of his Jaguar.

“He thinks you’re using me as a way to get to him. And he really believes you, believes you had something to do with your
sister’s—”

He cut off the engine. “Well, you’re right,” Eric said. “Maybe we should cool it for a while.”

“Why does he think that, Eric?”

“I don’t know.” My brother sat still, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the phone. “He’s always been jealous
of me. He’s always had trouble relating to people. Maybe when we were kids I could have been nicer, less of a bully.” Eric
sighed. “Christ, I don’t know.”

“Is there any way to prove it to him?”

“What do you mean?”

“To prove that your sister was—”

“It was twenty years ago, Katherine.” His voice was angry now, the volume up. “There’s no way to prove anything.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I think it’s best to just leave that one alone and focus on getting Pilot to function like a normal human being.”

Katherine didn’t say anything for a moment. She cleared her throat.

“Katherine,” my brother said.

Her voice was small. “I’m not used to getting yelled at.”

“Katherine, I’m sorry.”

She stared at the message light on the answering machine. Michele had called again, she was certain.

A voice said, “Katherine, it’s me. It’s Michele.” Katherine paced back and forth in her little kitchen, raw fingers in her
mouth, her bare feet on the cool tiles. She waited for the kettle to boil. “I just wanted to tell you where I was, where I
am,
” Michele went on. “I’m in Seattle, if you can believe it. Remember how you said you always wanted to live in Seattle? Well,
I’m here! And I haven’t seen a drop of rain. Of course, it’s only been a little over a week, and they’re telling me it’s not
unusual to go this long without precipitation… oh my God, I can’t believe I used that weatherman word,
precipitation!
Anyway, Katherine, I’m just, you know, checking in. As soon as I get a permanent place to stay I’ll leave my new number,
all right?” In the background, Katherine heard
cars driving by. Were there seagulls? Was Michele really in Seattle? “Anyway,” Michele said finally, “bye.”

“Pilot,” Katherine said. I was sitting in my chair in the patient leisure area, looking deeply into the Caribbean ocean of
the wall-size mural. I saw that she was speaking to me. I saw her voice making sharp little cuts and tears in the air around
me. But at the same time, I didn’t hear her. At the same time, I didn’t hear anything. “Pilot,” she said again. “I want to
talk to you. Would that be all right?”

I turned my head away from the Caribbean mural toward Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy and said mechanically, “It would be all
right.” My voice was made by a faraway sound-making machine.

“I just want to clear something up, okay?” Her voice was urgent, red-tinged at the edges.

“Okay.”

“Your brother, Eric, and I are just friends, and that’s all.” Katherine pulled a chair up so she could face me. “And until
you leave the clinic we’re not going to see each other.” She made so many patterns in the air I couldn’t see the mural for
a moment. “Not socially, anyway.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It matters to me.”

In the distance, where the tropical blue water shimmered, it seemed almost like this picture were moving, as if the water
were real. Or perhaps it was the air around Katherine’s head, the atmosphere made all shimmery by her hair.

“If you’d like,” she said, “I can arrange for you to have another therapist, someone else. That way—”

“No,” I said. “No. I want you, and you don’t have to stop seeing Eric.” I attempted a reassuring look.

I’m not quite sure what she got, because she asked, “Why do you think Eric is trying to hurt you, Pilot?”

“Because he took Fiona,” I answered, “and because I know all about it.”

“I see.”

“And because he told me he would kill me if I ever said anything.”

He came up behind me in the hallway. I could hear the shower running in our mother’s bathroom. It was less than a month. There
were still neighborhood searches. There was still a vigil at the East Meadow Presbyterian. There was still a moment every
night on the news when they showed her little face. He put his hand over my mouth.

“You want a hunting knife?” he said. “Is that all?”

I shook my head no.

“If I get you a hunting knife, you’ll give me the other one?”

Again—no.

“Do you want to go where Fiona went?”