Raveling (25 page)

I twisted the shoelace around and around my middle finger. I said, “Okay.”

“I just want you to consider the possibility that what you’re remembering might be closer to, say, a dream, or a nightmare
even, than it is to a memory of something that actually happened.”

I waited for a moment, considering whether I should argue. I wanted to get out of here, though. Desperately. “I’ll try,” I
said.

Smiling, Dr. Lennox said, “What would you think about being released from the clinic?”

“I’d like that,” I said quietly. “That would be excellent.”

“You would go back to stay with your mother?”

“I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

“What about your brother?”

“I have to deal with him, too, I guess.”

The doctor looked at me, and then he said, “Okay. But I’m going to ask that you stay on the medication. Would that be all
right with you?”

“No problem.”

“And I would like you to have some counseling with Kate.”

I hesitated, then said, “All right.”

He seemed concerned. “Would you rather someone else did it?”

I thought for a moment, wondering if I should tell Dr. Lennox that Katherine and Eric were fucking. But I decided against
it. “No,” I said. “Katherine’s good. She’s fine with me.”

“Great.” He clapped his hands against his legs. “Why don’t we check you out tomorrow morning, then? Is that enough time to
get ready?”

I tried to regain my positive attitude. “Ready when you are, Doc.”

Dr. Lennox looked at me, his eyes fixing somewhere in the middle of my body, taking me in, I supposed, objectively.

I could feel the muscles of my face moving beneath my skin. I rose from the couch.

He said, “I’ll see you later, Pilot.”

“I have one question.”

“Okay.”

“What am I?”

“What do you mean?”

“What is my diagnosis?”

He looked at that place on the wall now. “A diagnosis is just a word, Pilot,” he said. “Just a way for us to describe and
categorize illnesses and conditions. It’s not an identity.”

The definition of
psychotic
in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, Fourth Edition—or the
DSM-IV
, as it’s known in the trade—is this: “delusions or prominent hallucinations, with the hallucinations occurring in the absence
of insight into their pathological nature.”

Does that sound like me?

Did I fail to see my own “pathological nature”?

Definitions of various forms of schizophrenia, according to the
DSM-IV
, are as follows:

Schizophrenia is a disturbance that lasts for at least 6 months and includes at least I month of active-phase symptoms (i.e.,
two [or more] of the following: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior,
negative symptoms). Definitions for the Schizophrenia subtypes (including Paranoid, Disorganized, Catatonic, Undifferentiated,
and Residual) are also included in this section
.

Schizophreniform Disorder is characterized by a symptomatic presentation that is equivalent to Schizophrenia except for its
duration (i.e., the disturbance lasts from 1 to 6 months) and the absence of a requirement that there be a decline in functioning
.

Schizoaffective Disorder is a disturbance in which a mood episode and the active-phase symptoms of Schizophrenia occur together
and were preceded or are followed by at least 2 weeks of delusions or hallucinations without prominent mood symptoms
.

Delusional Disorder is characterized by at least 1 month of nonbizarre delusions without other active-phase symptoms of Schizophrenia
.

Brief Psychotic Disorder is a psychotic disturbance that lasts more than 1 day and remits by 1 month
.

Shared Psychotic Disorder is a disturbance that develops in an individual who is influenced by someone else who has an established
delusion with similar content
.

In Psychotic Disorder Due to a General Medical Condition, the psychotic symptoms are judged to be a direct physiological consequence
of a general medical condition
.

In Substance-Induced Psychotic Disorder, the psychotic symptoms are judged to be a direct physiological
consequence of a drug of abuse, a medication, or toxin exposure
.

Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified is included for classifying psychotic presentations that do not meet with criteria
for any of the specific Psychotic Disorders defined in this section or psychotic symptomology about which there is inadequate
or contradictory information
.

“He really thinks you killed her,” Katherine said.

My brother sat up against the wall, pushing the sheet off his chest with one hand, rubbing his face with the other. “He really
does?” His voice was pained. “How could he—” but he stopped himself.

Katherine pulled her portion of the sheet up to her chin. It was getting cold out, an early winter this year, and the heat
hadn’t come on in her building yet. They were in the
enclosure
, on the mattress on the floor of her tiny living room, all the lights off. “He does,” she was forced to say. “It’s irrational,
I know, but he really thinks—”

“Did he tell you how? Did he say
how
he thought I killed her, for Christ’s sake?”

Katherine sighed. “He didn’t say anything to me about that. Perhaps he said something to Dr. Lennox. I know Greg talked to
him about it this afternoon. Pilot’s—well, he’s very vague.”

Eric closed his eyes in frustration. “He’s so crazy.”

She reached up, palm open, to put her hand on his shoulder. Eric was muscular, she noticed, without being overly defined.
He had the body of a handsome man, she thought—not a vain one. “You’re a good brother,” she told him. “Pilot will get through
this.”

“How can I be a good brother if he thinks I killed Fiona?” Eric shrugged off her touch. “What kind of a brother is that?”

“At least he’s being released.”

“It’s not too soon?”

“The medication will keep his mind from slipping back into the psychosis. I mean, you know about that. And other than the
paranoia, Pilot’s fine. I’m not even sure schizophrenia, or even schizoaffective disorder is the right—”

Eric wasn’t listening. “Our mother is practically blind from this, from this optical blurring,” he said, his voice revealing
the slightest tremble, “my brother is a paranoid schizophrenic, and my father is flying around somewhere off the coast of
Florida with his whore.” His voice was becoming pinched. “What the fuck has happened to my family?”

Katherine put her head against the skin of his arm. Eric was too warm for this, really, and it made her own skin feel prickly.
“Maybe you should have a little counseling yourself.”

Eric sighed, shaking his head no.

“Why not?”

“It’s just that someone has to be strong through this, you know. Someone has to be able to handle things without—”

“Going to therapy is a sign of weakness?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well,” Katherine said, rising up against the wall next to him, “you do whatever you think is best.”

The two of them sat together this way for a moment and listened to the sound of the cars on the highway beyond the parking
lot. She heard an ambulance go by, then an eighteen-wheeler. Finally, she broke the silence. “What do you remember about that
night? I mean, do you mind talking about it?”

“About—”

“About the night your sister was—”

“I remember very little about it, actually.” He faced the window, away from her, and a rim of light flared off his cheekbone.
“I was fourteen. It was a party my parents were having. It was hot. They used to have a lot of get-togethers in
those days, you know—barbecues, cocktail parties. I was upstairs with my girlfriend, with Dawn Costello, Joannie’s sister,
the one you met, and then we went to a party a few blocks away. I got really, really wasted and eventually I came back to
my parents’ house and went to sleep. The next morning Fiona was gone.”

“What happened after that?”

“There was a search, you know, which started out small and became enormous. I mean, her picture was on television, my parents
were on the news. It was horrible.” He shook his head. “And we, and no one ever found anything. Except Pilot.”

“He found something?”

“He found the sneaker she was, she had been wearing. It was out in the woods somewhere, and he found it.”

“In the woods.”

“And that’s really all there is to remember,” Eric said. “That, and how everything just sort of went to shit afterwards. You
know, my parents got divorced. They kept blaming each other, our father was worse about that, really, blaming our mother,
I guess, and Pilot was crawling around like a dog, even barking.”

“Tell me about that.”

“About Pilot?”

“It sounds like he had an episode of psychosis.”

“I guess that’s what it was.” Eric shrugged. “Pilot wigged out. He decided that he was an animal, and he started, I don’t
know, he would crawl around through the woods on his hands and knees, and he stopped talking for a couple of weeks, just growling
and barking. It was comical, in a way. I think he’d seen something on television about the wolf boy, the one they discovered
in France. Later on Pilot said he felt like he had lost the power of speech. I’m afraid I, I think I wasn’t so nice to him
in those days.”

“You were a kid.”

“I was five years older. I should have been more—”

“Still.”

“Well,” Eric said, “there’s not a lot more to talk about, really. Fiona was gone. Pilot was crazy. My parents were divorced.
I just studied, you know. I just lost myself in textbooks and sports.”

“And now you’re a big shot.”

Eric sighed.

“Praised be the fall.”

“What?”

“Praised be the fall,” Katherine repeated. “It’s an old medieval idea about the fall from heaven, the fall from grace. They
said praised be the fall because without it, without the fall from Eden, we would never have the blessings of Christ.”

Eric let a small burst of air out through his lips. “Okay.”

“Without the tragedy your family suffered you may never have become a doctor,” Katherine said.

Eric nodded. “A lot of things would have been different.”

“You’re rather amazing,” Katherine said, “for coming out of that experience the way you did. You should be proud.”

“I just wish Pilot had come out of it—and who says I’m all right?”

“He will,” Katherine said. “It’s not too late for him.”

His face turned toward her now. “They accused someone.”

“Who?”

“There was a man at the party the police suspected, but since they never found Fiona—I mean, since there was no body, and
no evidence besides the sneaker, they had to let him go.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“People saw him playing with her. The last time anyone saw her, she was with Bryce Telliman.”

Katherine was quiet.

“That doesn’t mean he did anything,” Eric said. “Does it?”

“No,” Katherine said. “A lot of people like children. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I used to wish he had done it,” Eric said. “That way I could have killed him.”

“You think he didn’t?”

“I don’t know. I just, when I was younger, I just wanted to kill whoever had done it, you know. I just wanted to hurt someone,
make someone pay.”

“Did you ever tell anyone about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Pilot thinks you want to kill him. Maybe your brother feels guilty about Fiona, feels responsible, so he thinks you want
to make
him
pay.”

“Pilot,” my brother said, just saying my name, I think. Just to hear himself say it.