Raveling (4 page)

Yes.

I twisted the broken shoelace around my middle finger, cutting off the flow of blood, and I felt my artery throb.

What I thought had been the path to the turnpike was merely a clearing under an enormous oak. Why didn’t I recognize it? A
squirrel scurried around the trunk of the tree. I walked around it to get a better look at this animal, but he anticipated
me and kept always on the other side.

I was losing time.

As a boy, I had loved the way the breezes moved through the forest, and when I was the wolf boy I could close my eyes and
move, feeling my way through the crackling leaves and snapping, cheek-stinging branches, hearing the sounds of the highway
in the distance, smelling the burnt smell of the
rotting leaves. I pushed my hands into my pockets to keep them from rising into the air like helium balloons. I dug my feet
firmly into the earth as I walked. I closed and opened my eyes in a rhythm.

One of my shoes was slipping on and off. But I didn’t care.

I twisted the shoelace tighter around my finger—tighter and tighter.

Where was the highway? I wished I had a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked in months, I realized, hadn’t even thought about it. But
now the darkness was drifting through the trees and I was feeling light drops of rain. Perfect cigarette weather. My face
had disappeared, too, so I touched it and discovered that it was wet. Rain? Tears? When I looked at my finger I saw the familiar
smear of brownish blood. I was bleeding. It must have been from the snapping of the small branches against my skin. I was
inside the thickest part of the woods now. Yet I could still hear those voices, and every now and then it seemed as though
they were discussing my progress. I tasted the blood on my finger. It made me realize how hungry I was. I looked around with
the eyes of the wolf boy, transformed. I would be coming out on the other side in a moment, I was sure of it, and I could
hear the cars over the next rise, could sense the sky, smoggy and absolute, over the row of convenience stores and discount
centers that I knew were there—the 7-Eleven, the Taco Bell, Marshalls, Amazing Drug Discounts, the Mobil station, Bed, Bath,
and Beyond. I was Balboa nearing the Pacific. If I followed this path, it would lead me there, to Hannah, to our mother, Eric’s
and mine, Hannah who had been seeing ghosts, who waited for Eric to rescue her, but who had no idea that it was only me, Pilot
the wolf boy, who could rescue her truly; it was only her youngest son—starved for the taste of blood, and bleeding—who could
save her.

Hair like a trillion twisted threads of gold, a mole like a drop of blood on her collarbone, her name was Katherine Jane
DeQuincey-Joy. And right now she sat on a mattress in her small apartment—the
enclosure
, as she called it—with a view of these woods and allowed the telephone to ring. She knew who it was—either Mark or Michele—and
she certainly didn’t want to speak to Michele. But when the answering machine answered and she heard Mark’s voice, plaintive,
worried, pained, she couldn’t help herself. “Hello?” she said, knowing the mistake she was making, knowing it would be the
last one of its kind.

I sat down in a clearing I thought I recognized from childhood. There was a tall maple, its branches like a parachute falling
perpetually toward the flattened grasses and ferns. And with the quick-falling darkness I saw behind the limbs of the trees
the sky smoothing over, its colors artificial and flat. I saw the rest of the woods leveling off like a painted backdrop.
I lost my sense of language. I forgot who I was. The woods, I knew, were hungry to swallow things. The woods had already taken
my mother’s house, and I could sense the trees and moss rolling forward like a wave to wash over the entire neighborhood,
subsuming cars, backyard pools, carports, entire cul-de-sacs.

I had already been swallowed long ago.

I was an organ inside its body.

I twisted the shoelace, threaded it between my fingers.

The shoelace
.

It wasn’t long before the sky was completely dark, and I could hear almost nothing in my immediate surroundings. The sound
around me dropped away to an icy stillness, and I
heard only the cars on the highway, the faraway whir of the engines. I saw lights moving overhead and thought of my father
in his little seaplane, flying somewhere. Perhaps Eric had placed surveillance devices, electronic birds and metallic field
mice, all listening to the sounds of the forest, all trying to detect my whereabouts. Overhead were satellites watching the
movement of the trees. Somewhere, my father piloted his little plane through the flat, backdrop sky. If I stayed perfectly
quiet, I thought, and did not move, they couldn’t find me.

I’d had to sacrifice my mother. I knew the woods wanted her, and I wanted to help, but she was gone for now, Eric having made
the move before I could find my way to her. He had simply gotten to her first.

Nothing made sense anymore. But everything made perfect sense.

“What is wrong with him?” my mother was saying right now.

Eric remained silent. He turned the radio on to an all-news station.

Hannah put a hand over one of her eyes. “And what’s wrong with
me?
” The cancer cells inside her brain divided and multiplied, tendrils of aberrant DNA curling around her optical neurons. Her
eyesight disintegrated one more degree.

“I think maybe we should schedule an MRI,” Eric said.

“Do you think it’s neurological?”

“Well.” He was driving his sleek black Jaguar sedan. I could feel that automobile moving smoothly, animal-like, through the
faraway streets. “I don’t know.” I could see out through Eric’s eyes.

“Is it a symptom of something you’ve heard of?”

“I just want to make sure,” he said.

Hannah looked out of the window. “Where’s Pilot?”

“He’s probably on his way back by now. Maybe he discovered your car, saw that it was empty—”

“Do you think we should have waited?”

“I want to get you home. Are you still seeing ghosts?”

“Yes.” Our mother began to sing, “
Yes, I am, yes, I am, yes, I am
.”

“Please,” Eric said.

“What?”

“I can’t hear the radio.”

She stopped. They listened to the announcer, who described break-ins and robberies, car heists, and drug seizures. There was
a new war in a Latin American country. There was civil unrest in the Middle East. There was a whole new country in the Balkans.
Someone had detonated a bomb at a local high school. Innocent animals were being tortured, it turned out, in the name of science.
A group of scientists had found a way to extend the existence of human cells far beyond their natural life. There was reason
for alarm, celebration, and dismay. My brother adjusted the balance. He fine-tuned the reception. This was, after all, a Blaupunkt.
He drove his Jaguar sedan evenly, deliberately, the engine droning like a politician’s speech.

“Mom,” he said during a commercial break, “do me a favor. Cover each eye and then tell me if you see any ghosts.”

Our mother covered her right eye. “Ghosts,” she said.

“Now your other one.”

“More ghosts.”

Eric nodded.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that it’s probably neurological. Aside from seeing double images, do things seem unfocused?”

It was cancer.

“Blurry?” she asked.

“Yes, blurry.”

She said, “Maybe a little.”

They pulled into Hannah’s driveway. They did not notice the woods receding into the background, slipping away from the house
like a wave returning to the ocean, like one animal that has been stalking another and isn’t quite ready to strike. Like the
meaning of a word that escapes you. They got out of Eric’s car. “Can you walk okay?”

“I can
walk
,” our mother said. “For Christ’s sake, I can walk.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

“I’m not dead yet,” she snapped.

“Would you relax?”

“Where’s Pilot? Where the hell is your brother?”

I had twisted the shoelace around and around my finger until I felt like it would explode. I huddled down against the rough,
damp trunk of a tree so no one could detect me. I knew what she meant. I knew exactly what our mother meant.

I wasn’t dead yet, either.

They waited. Hannah paced back and forth across the old blue-and-white oriental carpet, humming nervously, her eyes unfocused,
her ankles making that
crick-crick-cricking
sound. Eric sat on the old blue couch with his elbows on his knees and his fingers touching each other, tip to tip, like
a spider and its reflection, his eyes on the door. It’s hard for me to imagine what he was expecting at this moment. Would
I walk through the door, sneakers covered in mud? Would I stay gone forever? He went to the kitchen and straightened things
up, compulsively washing the cups in the sink, the pot of coffee on the stove. Had he been in this kitchen only this morning?
When he went back out to the living room, our mother was holding the door open,
peering into the dark front yard. “Mom, he probably won’t even come in that way.” Eric walked to the door and pulled it closed.
She sighed and went back to pacing across the oriental.

Eventually, my brother suggested she take an aspirin and lie down, that it might make the ghosts go away. She nodded, finding
a blue Valium in her purse. But she couldn’t lie down, she said.

“I have to go.” Eric held his hands out.

“Go,” she said.

And Eric left.

And so she waited alone, ghosts everywhere, doubles of everything.

And by eight o’clock I was still gone.

And by nine.

And by ten o’clock that night our mother had waited long enough. Long enough, she told herself.

At eleven she called Eric.

“He’s not back yet?” My brother’s voice was filled with incredulity, but not panic.

“I thought he might have taken the car to your house.”
Her
voice was panicked.

“No,” Eric said. “He’s not here. Besides, does he even
have
a set of keys for the Mercedes? And why would he come here?”

Our mother made a high-pitched whimpering noise.