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Katherine leaned forward in our father’s old wing chair. “And you believe your brother gave you, that he gave you drugs to
make you experience hallucinations, psychotic hallucinations?”

I looked at her directly. My face was made of metal. My eyes were glass. “There’s no other way to explain it, is there?”

Katherine cleared her throat. “When did Eric give you the drugs? When could he have—”

“The pills on the plane, maybe.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s very clever.”

“And he did it because—”

“Because he wanted everyone to believe I was crazy, because I was finally telling the truth about what happened to Fiona,
because he has everything to lose if—”

“Is it possible,” Katherine said, “even remotely possible that all this business about the shoe and knife was a hallucination?
Memories are tricky, Pilot. Sometimes they seem real, but they’re not.”

I untwisted the shoelace from my middle finger. “If I hallucinated the shoe, why would I have this?” I held it out, dangling
it in front of her like a hypnotist’s watch.

Katherine took it in her open palm, and without looking up, said, very matter-of-factly, “You have the shoe.” It was a question.

“And the knife.”

She looked at the shoelace. It was completely black, frayed at the ends. “You’ve had this since—”

“Since they found me in the woods,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed it?”

“It’s out there?” Katherine looked at me with a sudden realization. “The other shoe, the knife—these things are out there
in the woods somewhere, where you hid them? Is that what you’re thinking?”

They gained material, then. Somewhere out in the woods, even though I couldn’t remember exactly where, these items came into
being, particles forming around the nucleus of an idea like the cancer cells forming around my mother’s optical nerve.

“Yes.” I exhaled heavily. “I know they’re somewhere out there, inside an old Wonderbread bag.”

“You don’t remember what you did with it?”

“There’s a lot I don’t remember, obviously.”

“Pilot,” Katherine said, “I think we should end our session early today.” She still had the shoelace in her open palm, as
if it were a small animal, something wounded. “Can I keep this?” she asked me. “Do you mind?”

At the clinic, Dr. Lennox leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyelids until they were pink. “I guess,” he said sadly,
“I guess the question is this.” He put his hands on the desk in front of him. He seemed tired. His smile, though permanent,
was wearing thin. “If Pilot Airie is handing you evidence, Kate, actual evidence from a crime, or at least what he believes
is actual, should you investigate?” He paused now, looking out the window behind her. “And I don’t know the answer. I mean,
we’re not the police here, are we?”

She was standing in the door, leaning against the jamb, arms folded. “Pilot’s still making delusional, paranoiac accusations
about his brother,” she said. “Not much of it makes any sense, but it’s deeply entrenched. I mean, he will
not
let go. But the thing is, it’s not bizarre.”

“Not bizarre.”

“It’s not—” she searched for a word “—crazy.”

“You’re saying it’s possible.”

“I’m not saying Pilot isn’t delusional, but he’s not talking about having his brain removed by invisible little men or a secret
cave inside his body where pink elephants live. He’s talking about something that is… well, at least it’s based in reality.”
She stepped forward. “Which is not psychotic. It may be wrong, but it doesn’t indicate schizo—”

“True.” The doctor nodded, his fingers to his lips.

“So I think we should, I mean, I should—”

“Is there anything else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is he exhibiting any other symptoms of schizoid-affective disorder or schizophrenia, anything at all?”

“Not really. He seems a bit sluggish still, that’s all.”

“That’s not much for the diagnosis, is it? Exactly what are his accusations?”

“Primarily, that Eric had something to do with their little sister’s abduction twenty years ago.”

“What else?”

“Pilot’s suggesting that Eric gave him drugs to, to make him psychotic, to make him seem crazy, so no one would believe his
accusations.”

“Dr. Airie is a neurosurgeon.” This was as if to say brain doctors are incapable of wrongdoing.

This was my brother’s advantage. He’d used it for years. He was Eric Airie, floating like air through the advancing defense
to score the touchdown, untouched.

Katherine nodded. “Yes, he is.”

“I’m wondering,” Dr. Lennox said, “if we’re dealing with a simple case of a brother’s jealousy.”

“Cain and Abel?”

“Something like that.”

“And they’re fighting over—”

“Their mother.”

“It’s so Freudian.” Katherine laughed. “I guess it’s possible.”

“Sometimes Freud’s okay.” Dr. Lennox smiled. “Sometimes.” He looked at his desk, which was a mosaic of pink and yellow sticky
notes. “Anyway, Pilot’s not a patient of the clinic anymore, Kate. He’s your client, and it’s your decision about what to
do with him. You don’t think he’s a danger to anyone, do you?”

“He’s perfectly sane,” Katherine said. “I mean, otherwise, he’s totally rational, taking care of his mother and the house.
It’s weird.” She was shaking her head.

The doctor shrugged. “Try the library,” he said. “Look up all the old articles about the case, see what really happened to
Pilot’s sister, or at least what the police think happened.”

“I might do that.”

“Something could turn up that can help you.” Dr. Lennox leaned back again, hands behind his head. “I have to ask, though,
Kate, what is your aim here? How are you helping Pilot with this?”

“Sudden psychotic episodes like his are usually brought about by extreme trauma or stress, right? And Pilot experienced nothing
like that, not according to him or his family, anyway. Nor do they report noticing any gradual symptoms, except maybe that
trip he took to California.” Katherine walked forward into Dr. Lennox’s office, approaching his desk. “I want to know what
caused his psychosis. I think if I knew,” she said, “I could help him, I could help his whole family.”

“And you want to know,” Dr. Lennox said matter-of-factly, “what happened to Fiona.”

Katherine could not help but admit it. “Yes.”

“That’s not necessarily going to help the family, though, is it?”

“Do you think the truth can hurt?”

Dr. Lennox gave her a look and lifted his hands just slightly. It meant she was on her own.

Our mother lived in a swirl of soft colors and blurs. The only clear image that moved in front of her eyes at present was
her daughter, Fiona, our sister, who glided about the house and backyard with the clarity of a photorealistic hologram, sharp
at the edges, colors vivid and bright. Fiona even whispered in Hannah’s ear sometimes, coming up behind her, telling her the
little things daughters tell their mothers, asking if she could go into the pool, could she have ice cream after dinner, could
she stay up past nine. Other voices, real ones, mine and Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy’s, rose from downstairs through the
ventilation system. Hannah heard my voice on the telephone, my voice and Eric’s arguing—bits and pieces of conversation rising
up like mist.

Hannah listened to the radio sometimes, too, but mostly she listened to her daughter’s laughter in the backyard.

If that’s what it was.

She saw memories more clearly now than her present reality.

It was all in her head, according to Eric.

“Pilot,” she said sometimes, and her voice was so clear and sharp it cut through every wall of the house.

I’d come into her room. “Mom?” I’d have been out in the backyard raking the leaves. Next door, a new family had moved in,
and two little girls, nine and ten years old—sisters—one blonde, one brunette, had arrived with them. They giggled and squealed,
their voices shrill and joyful.

“Pilot,” Hannah would say, “I think we should have pork chops for dinner.”

“Pork chops?”

“Could you go out and get them?”

I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me nodding. “I can get them.”

“Do you know how to prepare them?”

“Will you come down to the kitchen and tell me?”

“Those children, the new ones next door—girls?”

“Little girls,” I said. “One blonde, one brunette.”

Hannah cleared her throat. “I’ll come down now.”

Twice a week I drove my mother to the hospital, where a therapist, a woman not unlike my mother—but an expert on eyes, not
hands—led her through a series of exercises to help her regain the ability to squeeze her eyeballs into focus. I’d sit in
the lobby and try to read a magazine, but end up just looking at the pictures of celebrities and television personalities,
the actors and rock stars.

“It’s painful,” she’d say on the way home.

“What’s that, Mom?”

“The squeezing, the tension around my eyes.”

“What does she have you doing?”

“Squinting, mostly.”

“Does it help?”

“Am I getting more wrinkles around my eyes?”

Sometimes when I came into her room, she didn’t even know I was there. Sometimes I’d come in and she’d whisper, “Fiona? Little
baby, is that you?” and I’d have to back out as quietly as I could, not making a noise, and then, five minutes later, re-enter,
but boisterously, so she’d know it was me.

Eric wanted to know how she was.

“She’s going blind,” I told him. “Crazy, too.”

“What do you mean, crazy?”

“She’s seeing ghosts,” I said.

“No,” Eric said, “they’re double images.”

“No,” I said, “they started as double images, and now they’re ghosts. She thinks Fiona is in the house.”

“I’m coming over,” he said to me.