Raveling (50 page)

“Does Eric know?”

“He knows.”

“And Patricia?”

“She’s here,” I said. “I’m with her now, in Florida, at their cottage.”

“Oh, yes,” my mother said. “Oh, yes.”

I waited before saying, again, softly, “Mom?”

“I loved him, you know.”

“I know.”

“He left me.”

I watched the light passing in front of the window.

“He didn’t love me… not the way I loved him. He never—”

“He loved you,” I told her. “Hannah, he really did.”

Patricia was behind me. She put her hand on my shoulder. I turned, though, moving away.

“He was… he blamed me… for…”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t blame you. He never—”

“He wanted something… wanted someone… different,” she said, and I knew that was true. “I could never be with someone else….
Only him, only your father.” And I knew
that was also true. She sobbed heavily, saying, “I loved him so much,” as if this had never occurred to her before, as if
she’d never said it out loud. And I could hear the nurse, could hear Thalia in the background asking if everything was all
right. “Pilot,” Hannah said finally, “are you coming home?”

“As soon as I can.”

“What would have made him happy?”

“What do you mean?”

“What would he have wanted?”

I turned to Patricia. “There’s a will,” I said. “He thought of everything. He planned everything.”

Patricia was nodding.

“You’re like me,” our mother said, “aren’t you, my Pilot, stronger than you seem?”

“I’m better now, Mom.”

She said, “I know you are.”

“I’m sane,” I said, the light in the kitchen turning gray, then white, then gray again.

“Come home.”

Our mother called him
flyboy
because he had been a fighter pilot. My father had flown experimental jets in the air force just before the Vietnam War.
Luck and circumstance had prevented him from seeing any action, thankfully, and he’d spent his last tour of duty at Edwards
Air Force Base in California. He had loved flying, however, the way some people love religion, and immediately upon his discharge
went back to flight school, as so many ex-pilots did in those days, learning to operate those big jumbo jets for the airlines.
It was either that, he’d always bragged, or become an astronaut, and “I may be stupid,” he said, “but I’m not crazy. Or maybe
it’s the other way around.” So, most of his career, my father was
an airline pilot, traveling great distances in the world. He’d been to every continent, nearly every country, all the major
cities. He had flown through every kind of bad weather, every possible condition, every type of storm. Therefore—and what
I have been leading to is this—I doubt very much the wind, which was blowing strong in the early evening off the coast of
Florida that day, was a major contributing factor. I do not believe the mild storm that seemed to come up out of nowhere that
afternoon—out of the blue, the expression goes—blowing our hair around a bit, making the canvas of the tent in the clearing
flutter, making the fire burn low, made any difference at all.

My mother, her eyesight deteriorating, was alone the first time she saw the apparition of her daughter running across the
backyard. Alone up there in the sky, perhaps my father saw one, too. Maybe he saw Fiona’s face shaded inside a cloud, and
he directed his plane toward her in a moment of absentminded craziness. It sounds ridiculous, I know. But it is even more
ridiculous to say that he ran out of gas or that his instruments failed or that he was blown away by a strong wind. It is
too easy, for one, because there was no message from him, no Mayday signal over his radio asking for help or even saying good-bye.
There was nothing. His last words to me were, “think of me out there, flying with no pants.”

These are the words of a person who is planning to see you again.

So, at what point did he decide?

When did he choose to leave us?

Was he sobbing? Did he have his head in his hands when the little seaplane finally ran out of gas somewhere over the water
and dropped into the ocean? Was his face set, impassive? Was he screaming with rage? Was he calm? Was he finally, after all
this time, satisfied? Did he allow panic to fill
him at the last instant or did he remain accepting? Did he believe that Eric killed Fiona? Did my father know, as I knew,
that what must have happened, that the only thing that could have happened, was what I had told him?

Was it the truth that killed him?

I knew that day, and in the weeks that followed, during the funeral—attended by me and Eric, Dad’s brother Rich, who came
out from Phoenix, by Patricia and her two sisters, Marsha and Debra, and by the gruff, manly mechanics who worked in the airfield
where he kept his plane—I knew that my father had been a man not much in control of things. He was a person who traveled around
the world all his life, and the world is a sphere that spins, and it goes nowhere.

It was the truth that killed him.

My father, our father, Eric’s, mine, and Fiona’s, disappeared, just like his daughter.

Did he go looking for her?

When Eric took the news from me, he panicked, his whole body developing an argument, and he hung up the phone quickly—too
quickly, he thought later. He had to think. Things were different now. He had to
think
. Had Dad ever known what really happened? he asked himself. Had he ever really figured it out? Eric was in his office, as
always, thinking about his plans, his postures, positions, looking at his clean, brain-surgeon hands flat on the black lacquer
desktop in front of him, and the lifetime of lies he had created was complicating exponentially. Hannah, who for so many years
had protected him, clear-eyed and cold, who had helped him with this, developed this with him, was coming undone—
she was a blind old lady seeing the ghost of her long-disappeared daughter. And worse, his brother was going sane. I had
become by accident of circumstance—he didn’t know how—uncrazy, the spool of thread that was my mental health spinning together
once again in such a way that, Eric knew, I was starting to see through the bullshit, could see through to the truth and not
turn it immediately into fear. Eric exhaled, trying to calm himself. Katherine, he knew, was going to believe me. Katherine,
he realized, had not been programmed as I was to believe every lie he told.

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.

After hanging up on me, Eric had walked out of his office and into his examining room, where he had washed his hands again.
But he wasn’t washing away guilt, he thought. It was the bacteria, the flora and fauna, the organisms that lived out of sight.
He scrubbed his skin red, using only the hot water, water that to anyone else would feel scalding. “Pilot,” he’d said, “why
would he do this?” He had tried to imply, just by asking, that there was guilt associated with our father’s suicide, that
it had something to do with Fiona, that our father had done something to her.

I hadn’t bought it, though. I never would. And he knew it. Our father had been vain, arrogant, self-absorbed. But he was never
abusive. He never hit us. He never laid an unkind hand on Fiona. And that night, the night of the party, he was the host.
Eric knew this, knew all of this.

Jesus Christ, he had to think.

“Are you taking your medication?” he had asked.

“Yes.” It was a lie.

“Good.”

Eric looked out his window. It was winter now, deep December, overcast and gray, a film of wetness covering everything. His
view was of a parking lot and a small suburban
office park. There were dentists; there were lawyers, a design firm, glass and steel, concrete and asphalt. As long as I
stayed on the medication, Eric thought, things might be all right. If I got off it, if I realized that I was sane, if I knew
that I wasn’t crazy, I might figure things out for myself. That was the key, my own sanity, my own rationality. And he knew
it was happening.

He went back to his desk. Should he call Katherine? He imagined I was on the phone with Hannah now. He was right about that.
He imagined Katherine was closing in on the evidence. He was right about that, too. He would have to plan this out carefully,
he realized. He would have to find a way to get to it before she did.

Eric asked himself, where had Pilot—where had I—kept that evidence all these years?

Where?

He found himself angry, looking at his hands again. He laughed at himself. He had washed them clean enough, hadn’t he? As
he would say later, he was only protecting his brother. He was only doing what he thought was right. Shit. He would have to
call Katherine. He would have to get to the evidence before she did. Eric remembered placing those things—the shoes and the
bloody knife—inside the plastic Wonderbread bag and sliding it under his desk, a stupid place to put it. So incredibly stupid.
He remembered coming back into the room and seeing it was gone.

And by then, I was gone, too.

“What did you do with it?” Eric asked me all those years ago.

“Do with what?” I said.

“Did you want a hunting knife?” He had me by the shirt. “Is that all?”

“Will you get me one?”

Later that afternoon, I had claimed to have found the red shoe in the woods, and the police were out looking for the other
one, combing the forest floor for any sign of Fiona. Eric and I sat in the living room with our parents, our hands in our
laps, waiting for the telephone to ring with news of something—of anything. It must have been difficult for him, knowing and
not being able to say.

Right now in his office Eric remembered our father. Had he loved our father? There were patients scheduled for the rest of
the day. There were people, Eric knew, who had cancer growing like weeds inside their brains, tendrils of death curling around
the folds of tissue, twisting and burrowing into their nervous systems. He imagined having cancer himself, the waves of radiation
therapy, like an unfurling blanket, passing over him.

Why had our father done this? He had never known about what happened. It had only been the two of us, and me only through
the veil of near-sanity. Or had he known everything?