Raveling (27 page)

“I’ve been out flying,” he said. “Patricia and me were—”

“Patricia and I.”

“Yes,” my father said. Hannah was always correcting his grammar. It had always annoyed him, and she knew this. “Anyway,” he
said, “I got your message.”

“It’s Pilot.”

My father’s teeth came together. “What now?”

“James, I think he needs you. I think this time he—”

When Eric and I drove up to the house that morning Hannah came out to the driveway in her floral housecoat, saying, “Oh, Pilot,
I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t come and get you myself.” I got out of the car, and she placed one cool hand on my cheek and the
other around my neck. Her old cream-colored Mercedes sports car sat parked in front of the house, covered in dust, dead leaves,
brown whirlies. “How do you feel, sweetheart?” she said. “You know I can’t drive anymore. It’s this darn thing with my eyes.
It’s nothing, but, but, how are you?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I said, as I’d been saying to everyone, as I’d been saying over and over and over to everyone. “Much better.”
Eric was behind me, lifting my small, overstuffed duffel bag from the backseat of his Jaguar and shutting the door.

He nodded. “He seems fine,” he said to our mother. “He seems normal, anyway.”

There was an implication in my brother’s voice.

“I am,” I told them both. “I’m fine. I’m full of antipsychotics and antidepressants. Who wouldn’t feel great?”

“Of course he is.” She pulled me toward the front door of the house, leading me by the arm. “Of course.” I had a feeling she
didn’t want the neighbors seeing us out here, even though everyone who knew us from the old days had moved away. There were
children in the neighborhood, in fact, new generations of young families moving into these old houses. “Well,” Hannah asked,
“are you hungry? Both of you? Either of you?”

The medication I was taking left a hollow in my stomach that felt better when empty. I shook my head no. I was supposed to
take my pills with food, naturally, but I felt much
better not eating. Plus, it was around eleven in the morning, the wrong time of the day to eat.

“I’ll have something,” Eric said. “I had to skip breakfast.” He shot me a quick look. “I’m starved.”

I thought I could see clouds forming in my mother’s eyes. I thought I could see the years multiplying on her face. The vein
that ran like a trickle down her temple had become more purple. Her hair was a notch more silver, her skin whiter. “How are
your eyes?” I asked.

“My eyes?” As if she didn’t know what I meant.

We stopped on the steps leading to the front door. “You just told me you couldn’t drive because of them. Are things getting
cloudier, or—”

“They’re—they’re all right,” she said unsteadily. “They’re good.”

“You’re not seeing double anymore?”

She laughed a nervous laugh. “I’m getting used to it, I guess.”

“You can’t drive,” I said flatly.

Now Eric was the one who laughed. “It wouldn’t be a very good idea.”

I looked at our mother. “Is it because you can’t see the road,” I asked, “or because you can’t see the dashboard?”

“Pilot.” Hannah walked in the door.

Eric brushed past me, carrying my bag. “Pilot, do you ever remember a time when she paid attention to the road?”

“You have a point.”

Inside the house, Eric sat down on the old blue living-room couch, tossing my bag beside him. “Now that you’re home,” he said,
“you can look after Mom while we figure out what’s going on. It’s nothing serious, so don’t worry. It’s probably just an infection
in her optical nerve or something, something benign. In any—”

“It’s because I’m old,” Hannah interrupted. She was picking up outdated magazines from all the little tables and putting
them in stacks. There were
Peoples, Times, National Geographic
s. “It’s because I’m an old lady.”

“You’re not an old lady,” I told her. “Why do you say that?”

She walked into the kitchen. “Because it’s true.”

Eric got up from the couch and followed her, shrugging.

I went in after him. The yellow teapot–motif kitchen was brilliant with late morning light, more gold at the moment than yellow.
Outside, just past the yard, the woods rustled and shook in the fall breeze. My mother and brother looked at the woods and
then back at me uneasily.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going out there.”

“Do you feel all right about being so close?” Eric asked. It sounded almost genuine, like concern.

“What do you mean?”

“Katherine,” he said, “Katherine told me you were having fears that they would, you know—” He left it hanging.

“Eric,” Hannah said, “he probably doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m not afraid of the woods anymore,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.”

And I saw the anger flashing across my brother’s face. “Just me,” Eric said.

“Eric.”

This in the manner of a tattletale: “Pilot thinks I’m going to kill him.”

“He does not.” She started placing things on the counter, reaching into yellow cabinets and pulling out cans of tuna, boxes
of crackers, all kinds of colorful packages. There was Jell-O. There were Oreos. There were Lays potato chips.

“He thinks I killed Fiona.” Eric sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top of
his shirt. He rubbed his hands together. “He thinks I did it, Mom, that it was me.”

Our mother grabbed a bag of Wonderbread from the bread box and started putting sandwiches together, taking pressed ham out
of the refrigerator and slapping it between the spongy, white slices. She slathered plain French’s mustard on like it was
the principal ingredient. She put two of these sandwiches each on two small plates which were decorated with little yellow
teapots and set them down on the kitchen table, one for Eric, one for me, even though I had told her I wasn’t hungry, even
though I was standing on the other side of the room.

She said, “What do you want to drink?”

“Is there juice?” Eric asked.

She went to the refrigerator again and removed a carton of orange juice. She poured two small glasses. “I can’t find the big
glasses,” she said. “These will have to do.”

“These are fine,” I said.

Humming, she set them down. I wasn’t even sitting at the table. I was standing in the archway that led to the dining room,
twisting that shoelace around and around my middle finger. What color had this kitchen been when Fiona was alive? When did
the teapot-motif start?

After a few bites of his sandwich, Eric sighed. Then he said, “I’m sorry about that, Mom. It’s just—”

“Apologize to your bother.”

Eric looked at me.

I nodded. What difference did it make?

“I talked to your father last night,” Hannah told me. “He says he wants to see you.”

Eric rolled his eyes. “Where has he been?”

“He’s been out flying.” She started to wipe the counter. I could hear the girl in her when she spoke about our father.
Our mother had never seen another man after he left, had been permanently heartbroken by this second loss, had never even
tried to see anyone else, as far as I knew. “Out flying that damn airplane,” she said. “Your father is lost,” she went on,
and Eric and I knew exactly how she would finish this, but she surprised us, not finishing. We looked at each other across
the kitchen—it was the kitchen our mother had put in, I remembered, the summer she and our father had decided to sleep in
separate rooms.

Our father was a tall man, an inch or two taller than Eric. He had a square jaw and gleaming blue eyes. He had a two-seater
seaplane that he flew off the coast of Florida. He lived only a mile or two from the water. Years before, before the beginning
of time, our father flew test jets for the air force, and he lived in California briefly, before he met our mother, and then
he became an airline pilot for TWA, and then he met Hannah, and then he had us, and all the rest.

After Fiona disappeared, our father hardly came home at all. He took the most difficult, time-consuming flight routes the
airline offered. He flew all over the world, one flight after another, with just enough time in between to check our report
cards and ask if there had been any news about his daughter. When I was in college we learned that Dad had been flying to
and from Atlanta all these years and that he had a girlfriend there, a woman named Patricia. He announced to our mother one
night that she could have everything—the house, the money, his retirement benefits—as long as he could take just enough to
buy a small plane.

Hannah had grown so used to not seeing him anyway that it would make little difference, she supposed. He had blamed her for
Fiona’s disappearance, too. They had not slept in the same room, in fact, since Eric went to school.

The summer of the yellow teapot kitchen.

Our father wore a salt-and-pepper beard. He had broad, muscular shoulders, blue, blue, blue eyes—eyes like Eric’s. I dialed
his number, sitting in the living room on the old blue couch. Upstairs, Hannah ran the water for a bath. I could hear it filling
the tub.

“Hello?” came a voice.

“Patricia?” I said. “It’s Pilot.”

“Pilot?” she said. “How are you?” Patricia’s voice was always overly enthusiastic, bordering on desperate.

“I’m much better, thanks,” I said, feeling a bit like I’d been programmed to say these words. “I’m really much, much better.”

“I’m so glad to hear that.” She was distracted, I could tell. I felt like I had interrupted something. “Let me get your dad.
He’s in the other room.
Jim!
” I heard her yell. “
Jim, it’s Pilot! Pilot!
Hold on,” Patricia said into the phone, “he’s coming.”

The phone was transferred from one hand to another.

“Pilot?”

I could hear the television in the background. It sounded like one of those World War Two documentaries.

I became soft. “Hey, Dad.” I felt like I was in trouble.

“Pilot, Jesus Christ, are you better?”

I said my line.

“We weren’t here, you know. Otherwise we would have called right away. I didn’t talk to your mother until—”

“It’s all right. Where were you?”

“Island hopping, you know.”

“Sounds great.”

“Can you tell me what happened?” His voice was filled with something like amazement, something beyond concern, like I had
accidentally gone to the moon. Was he almost proud?

“There’s not a lot to tell. I had a psychotic episode,” I said. “I had a schizophrenic reaction. I was afraid the woods—”

“What do you mean?” he said. “Were you hearing voices and—”

“Exactly,” I said. “It was just exactly like it is on television—voices, uncontrollable thoughts, irrational fears, the whole
nine yards.” It was an expression I thought he would like, the language of football,
the whole nine yards
.

“And what did they do for you?”

“They medicated the hell out of me. I’m taking a new drug. It really makes a big, big difference,” I said. “I don’t have any
more symptoms at all. I’m fine now, totally back to normal.”

“Well,” he said uneasily, “that’s great, Pilot.”

“So.” I examined the black telephone I held on my lap. The last time I had used it, I remembered, I was going crazy. It had
always been a black, heavy, rotary-dial phone. It had always been that way, I told myself. I recalled the amazement I had
felt looking at it. I really had been nuts. “So how have you been?” I still had the shoelace around my finger, the reminder.

“We’re having a lot of fun, Pilot. Just living day to day.”

“How’s Patricia?”

“She’s great.”

“Great,” I said.

Our father cleared his throat. “What would you think of, uh, what would you think about coming down here for a while? You
could stay on the couch. There’s not a lot of room, but there’s plenty of space to roam around outside, and we could take
the plane out. There’s this little island I found, I call it Nowhere—”

“Well, Dad, thanks,” I said, “it’s just that they kind of want me to do some, to do some therapy, you know, and I kind of
have to—”

“Therapy.”

“Right.”