Raveling (26 page)

She saw Fiona.

Hannah was in the laundry room unloading the washer. Nearby, another set of ghost hands unloaded a ghost washer. On the floor
were piles of laundry, dirty dish towels, floral-patterned sheets, striped pillowcases, each with its ghost companion. She
thought she heard something at first, something like footsteps behind her. Fiona used to help Hannah with the laundry when
she was a little girl. She liked to get inside the basket of warm clothes after they came out of the dryer. She liked to fold
the big sheets with Hannah, her mother. She wanted to turn the fabric over and over in her tiny hands until it was a tiny
square.

Hannah saw her.

Everything Hannah looked at had a ghost. Perhaps she was just getting used to the idea of ghosts. Out of the corner
of her eye, she saw a little girl run by, flashing by the door. She saw the flash of red that was Fiona’s bathing suit. She
saw the one red sneaker. It was her. Hannah definitely saw Fiona.

Didn’t she?

She dropped the towel she was holding, and next to her, her ghost hands dropped the ghost towel. She went into the kitchen.
There were doubles of everything, glassy transparencies, shimmering overlays of color, a film of opacity blurring whatever
fell in her line of sight. What was wrong with her? Had Fiona been in here? Why shouldn’t there be ghosts? she asked herself.
Why wouldn’t her daughter be trying to reach her?

“Hello?” Hannah said into the room. “Hello?”

There was no answer, of course, only the dry sound of the highway in the distance, the wind in the treetops. The usual neighborhood
hum.

Hannah felt foolish. She turned to go back into the laundry room, but as she turned, she saw—she
thought
she saw—that flash of a red bathing suit, the one sneaker, the little-girl flesh, pink and perfect, moving by the kitchen
window. Was Fiona outside? Was she trying to get in? Hannah went to the window again. Was someone playing a trick on her?

Outside was restlessness itself. Outside were leaves dying on the tree limbs, were quavering branches, high up, ready to fall.
Outside was too-long grass that hadn’t been cut in weeks, since I had gone into the hospital, was wind-blown debris from the
woods, her garden unkempt, and of everything she saw outside there was a ghost. But where was Fiona? Hannah opened the kitchen
door and looked out into the yard. She rubbed her eyes, hoping to clear away the double images, and squinted into the daylight.
It was eleven in the morning, or around then. It was early in the day, anyway, wasn’t it?

Perhaps it was one of the girls from next door. A young family had moved in, with two daughters, little girls around Fiona’s
age. No, Hannah corrected herself, around the age Fiona was when she disappeared.

“Is someone out there?” she said. “Hello?”

Sometimes, when she stepped outside through the kitchen door, she expected to see the pool, expected to see the glimmering
water, the flashes of sunlight on its surface. She expected to see her children, to see Eric, me, Fiona, splashing in the
pool, my father beside it in the deck chair, newspaper unfolded on his chest, sleeping. Instead she saw her garden, the leaves
of rhubarb, the vines of pumpkin and squash twisting around and around each other. It was such a mess. Hannah sometimes worried—irrationally,
she knew—that Fiona would one day come back through the woods, still seven years old, and not recognize her own home.

Where is the pool? she would think.

She pictured Fiona coming back through the woods.

Fiona would be a grown-up woman now, was the truth. It was possible, it was still possible, that Fiona was somewhere,
was
grown up, living a life, not remembering. It was possible. There was a boy in Arizona Hannah had read about who had been
abducted as a child and was raised to the age of eighteen or twenty before he remembered, before he realized he’d had a life
elsewhere, before the memories of his real childhood came flooding back—that he’d had real parents, a real house, real brothers
and sisters. They can repress memories, children can make their minds do anything, Hannah thought, dissociating from the truth
completely.

But today, wearing an old floral housedress with a bottle of Xanax in her pocket, doing the laundry, seeing double, waiting
for me to become sane and return home from the hospital, Hannah thought she saw her daughter.

It was the cancer. It was the knot of cells in her optical cortex blurring her vision, her wishes bleeding into her sight
line.

She thought she saw Fiona in the kitchen from the laundry room. She thought she saw her running by the kitchen window. Was
it just wishful thinking? Were her eyes playing tricks? Of course they were. She closed the kitchen door on the outside and
turned around again. She walked back into the laundry room. She touched her face and realized it was wet. Had she been crying?
Was she going insane, too? Like me. Crazy with grief. People said that, didn’t they? She continued to lift the laundry into
the basket, folding as she went. It had been so many years. She pretended that Fiona was outside in the yard, seven years
old, playing a game. When Hannah pretended like that, she felt some relief. And sometimes she forgot, even for a second, that
Fiona wasn’t there, and it felt a little better that way.

“Risk factors for suicide,” according to the
DSM-IV
, “include being male, age under thirty years, depressive symptoms, unemployment, and recent hospital discharge.”

Me, me, me, me, and me.

Eric was standing behind me, jacket thrown over his shoulder, when I gathered the few things Hannah had brought me, the bits
and pieces of clothing, books, and toiletries I’d needed for my stay. “Mom can’t drive you,” Eric said apologetically. “Her
eyes, you know. And there’s no one else.”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “There’s no need to apologize.”

“I know you don’t want to see me.”

“Eric,” I said, “what are you talking about?”

My brother shrugged. “I guess we’ll talk about it later,” he said. “Anyway, how are you feeling? Better, I guess. I mean,
they’re letting you out, anyway.” He was acting nervous. Why was he so nervous? Or better yet, why was he acting?

“I feel much, much better,” I told him. “Really.” It’s what I’d been saying to everyone. And it was true, mostly.

“We were all pretty concerned about you,” he said. “We still are.”

I looked at his face, a face that had turned out to be our father’s face. There was something slightly plastic about its handsomeness,
as if it had been preformed. “Thank you,” I said.

“You think you’ll be all right at Mom’s?” he asked. “I mean, I know you might not be entirely comfortable moving back in with
her, I know I wouldn’t be, and I thought—”

“Where else am I going to go?”

“You could stay with me.”

I said this flatly: “Mom’s will be fine.”

“Pilot,” Eric said, “I just—”

“It’s all right.” I finished stuffing all my things into my bag. “It’s fine, really. It’s really fine. I’m all medicated up
now. I can’t go crazy,” I laughed, “even if I wanted to.”

Eric tossed his car keys from one hand to the other. They made a jangling sound. He wore his usual blue tie, white shirt,
navy suit. He wore a concerned smile. He wore his hair differently, I thought, parted in a new way. I thought it must have
something to do with Katherine. “I got a new haircut,” he said. He saw me notice it, I guess. “It looks stupid, I know.”

“It looks good,” I said. “Very stylish.”

Sarcastically, he said, “You’ve always been so big on style.”

I changed the subject. “They want me to keep up with the counseling.” I twirled my finger around my temple. The shoelace was
threaded around my fingers.

He nodded. “I think it’s a good idea.”

“They think they’ve got the schizophrenia thing under control,” I said, “with medication.”

“Clozaril,” Eric said. “Very effective.”

“But I have other… issues, they tell me.”

“Pilot,” Eric said, “you don’t have to tell me any of this. I’m your brother, and I’ll do whatever it is, whatever I can do,
to help you. I promise. But you’re not obligated to—”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s just that I know about you and Katherine.”

He looked at his hands.

I took a final look around the room to see if there was anything I had missed. On the windowsill were get-well cards from
my mother’s friends. I decided to leave them.

I had already said good-bye to Harrison and some of the other patients and nurses I had met.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Eric repeated me, saying, “Let’s go.” Minutes later, in the car, he said, “I’m not trying to kill you.”

I laughed. “You’re not?”

“Pilot, why the fuck would I want to kill you?”

“I know,” I told him. “I know what happened. I know exactly what happened to Fiona.”

“What happened to Fiona?”

“I know what you did to Halley, too.”

“You have to let it go, brother.” He closed his eyes, turned the key in the ignition. “It’s in the past.” The Jaguar’s engine
started.

“You were practicing,” I said.

“Pilot.”

“To become a doctor.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Which is why they never found her.”

“Jesus Christ, Pilot.”

“Because she’s in a million little pieces, isn’t she, Mr. Junior Scalpel?”

From the woods I could see bodies moving around the pool. Shadows from here, the partygoers’ faces flared up every now and
then in the torchlights, drunken smiles frozen on their lips. I could see flames through the trees in yellow-gold flickering
stripes. Voices of men and women commingled in the boughs above me—laughing shrieks, arguments, passionate conversations,
chatter. I saw him stepping in, a blond man with long hair. I saw the way he moved, his body swaying, a man who had been drinking
too much. It was as though my senses had been heightened, sharpened on a stone. I could pinpoint individual conversations
swirling into the woods from the party. I could sense the rising and falling of a woman’s chest. I could smell the perfume
and aftershave and alcohol on the bodies of these people. I could hear my father, his voice bellowing arrogantly, and my mother,
hers soft and accommodating. The man who walked into the woods put his hand against a tree, his body leaning into his arm.
He looked down, his chest heaving. He was going to be sick. But when he looked up, I caught that eye-flash of recognition,
the light in his face that said he saw me, too. I could have spoken to him then. I could have said something—anything—and
it would have been impossible later. If I had said something, if he had said something, then everything—everything that ever
happened in my life after that—would have been changed. But he didn’t. And I didn’t. He stepped out beyond the tree line,
then, onto my parents’ lawn.