Raveling (28 page)

“I guess that makes sense.” I heard gunfire coming from the television. I heard the narrator’s voice describing something
about the Pacific Theater, the Japanese navy.

“Has Mom mentioned anything about her eyes?”

His voice hardened. “What’s wrong with your mother’s eyes?”

“She’s seeing ghosts, she says. She’s seeing weird transparent things, double images. I don’t know. Eric says it’s nothing,
but, but, but she can’t drive. I guess I kind of need to look after her until she gets that straightened out, too. I mean,
that’s another reason—”

“Christ almighty, we’re having all kinds of problems here, aren’t we?”

I tried to make this sound funny: “I guess we’re falling apart, Dad.” It came out pathetic.

There was a pause. In this pause I believe I could have lived and died a million times. In this pause, I believe, entire generations
of people could have lived and died. Civilizations could have risen from ignorance and destroyed themselves with knowledge.

“The offer stands,” my father said firmly. “Anytime,” he said. “Anytime you want to come down, Pilot, we’ll take the plane,
just you and me if you want, go anywhere, or at least as far as those little wings can carry us.” He got cute when he talked
about his airplane.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“You take care of yourself.” He was desperate to get off the phone.

“I will.”

“I’m serious.”

I knew he was serious. He was never anything but serious. He was, after all, my dad.

In the last spot of the clinic parking lot, the following Tuesday, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy started her sapphire-blue
VW Rabbit and, instead of driving to the
enclosure
across from the strip mall, she took Sky Highway to Exit 10, which led down a narrow road into Foxwood Court, the cul-de-sac
of houses where Eric and I had grown up. Katherine had never been out this way before—had, in fact, only imagined what my
childhood home looked like. She had thought it would be modern, sterile and beige, with sleekly designed blond-wood furniture
adorned by glass vases filled with water and stark branches. She pictured oriental prints on the walls, pale watercolors,
black-and-white photographs. She imagined spare, tightly woven Berber carpets. She thought there would be shelves of hardbound
textbooks and a telescope placed handsomely in front of a window.

She was wrong.

Our house, like so many others around here, was early fifties colonial, made of white-painted brick and covered on one side
by ivy. It stood in the shade of overly large trees, two maples and an oak. It had a two-car garage filled with the detritus
of our childhoods, with a Ping-Pong table, every imaginable sort of game, a full wet suit hanging in front of the garage window
like the body of a dead man.

Katherine pulled her car up behind our mother’s cream-colored Mercedes and sat there for a moment, making sure she had a pad
of paper in her purse, making sure she had her thoughts gathered together properly, making sure of things, in general—that
this was even the right place.

Katherine had imagined everything wrong, but she was still right—all the pieces still fit together properly.

Sometimes a person can imagine everything wrong and still be right. Sometimes. And I think it helps to be crazy.

Even though she was seeing double, seeing two old oaks on the front lawn, two each of our neighbors’ houses with cars too
multiple to count, our mother had been watching from the dining room window, hands folded under her chin, waiting for my therapist
to arrive. “Katherine DeQuincey-Joy is here,” she said when she saw the two VW Rabbits pull up behind her two Mercedeses.
As it always had, my mother’s voice carried easily—cutting like piano wire—through the walls and ceiling to where I sat in
my bedroom looking at my feet. I had been positioned this way for an hour, for some reason, not moving except to breathe.
It was the medication, which made me sluggish to the point of catatonia. I think it was the medication, anyway. I had started
to put a sock on and had just stopped, mid motion. Catatonia, of course, is one of the many symptoms of schizophrenia. I had
become totally catatonic in the woods, as a matter of fact, to the point where I was absolutely frozen, could not move at
all. My memory of the three days I spent out there was returning a little bit at a time. If Eric had wanted to kill me, I
thought, he could have done it then, so easily. Anyone could have. It was like I had been caught in one of his traps.

“I’ll be right down,” I said now, the spell broken.

I put the other sock on, not even checking to make sure it matched, rose from the single bed and descended stiffly downstairs,
my hand touching the macramé animals my mother had hung there years ago—an owl, a sparrow, a hawk.

Katherine stood in the middle of our living room, smiling nervously at Hannah. Poor Katherine. She wore a black suit today,
with a gray silk shirt, a triple string of pearls. Her mass of hair, at day’s end, had frizzed into a collection of blond-brown
curlicues so twisty and confused it was hard to believe it wasn’t alive. She looked up at me, and I
could see the relief in her face. Hannah can be a bit intimidating to strangers. Her absentmindedness comes off as cold,
and that day, with her eyes unfocused, she was particularly strange.

“Hello, Katherine,” I said.

“Pilot.”

My mother asked, “Can I get you something, Miss DeQuincey-Joy? Some tea, perhaps?” It was like she was repeating a line from
a movie.

“No,” Katherine said. “No, I think I’m fine, thank you.”

I looked at my mother. “Where should we do this?”

“Oh,” Hannah said, touching a finger to her lips, “I hadn’t thought about that. Wherever you’re most comfortable, Pilot.”

I tried to make a joke, saying, “Then I’m afraid we’ll have to leave the country.”

Hannah smirked. “Why don’t you use the living room?” She pointed to the stairs. “I’ll go to my room and listen to the radio.”

I said, “That’s fine.”

Katherine looked smilingly at the furnishings.

Hannah stood by the stairs for a moment, her frail hand on the banister. “Well,” she said, “all right then. Have fun.” It
was an odd thing to say. She turned and walked up the steps to the second floor. “Help yourself to whatever’s in the kitchen
if you need anything.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Airie.”

I could see that Katherine was taking in the living room, the mismatched pillows and drapes, the blue-and-white oriental on
the floor, and the relic from the seventies—the ancient blue couch.

“We’re finally alone,” I said, as if we were lovers.

“Your mother has a beautiful house.” Katherine was trying to be sincere, and I could see that it was difficult.

“It’s insane,” I said. “Even crazier than me. It was more
orderly once. Once, it had a design to it, a visual approach, a point of view. Now it contains everything. Everything and
nothing.”

Laughing, Katherine sat down in the old wing chair my father used to sit in to read his spy thrillers. “Is this all right
for you, Pilot? I mean, would you be more comfortable somewhere else?”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

“Let’s begin, then.”

“All right.” I sat down, feeling the grain of the coarse fabric.

“How are you feeling?”

“A little slow,” I admitted. “Sluggish.”

“You’ve been taking your medication?”

“As directed.”

“Good.” Katherine opened her bag and pulled out her pad of yellow legal paper. I could see a fresh wound on one of her fingers,
where she had recently chewed past the skin. “So I trust you’ve had no voices or, or strange thoughts?”

“Just from my mother,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure she’s real, unfortunately.”

Katherine wrote something on her legal pad. Then she leaned forward. “Pilot, I know we haven’t really talked about this until
now because our main concern was making sure you stayed—”

“Sane?”

“I was going to say rational.”

“Same thing.”

I twisted the shoelace, just to check if it was still there.

“Anyway,” Katherine said, “I think we should talk about some of the feelings you expressed to me at the clinic last week.”

“About you sleeping with my brother?”

“I thought we had worked that out.”

“Sorry. I’m just being a wiseguy.”

“I think we should talk about what happened to your sister.”

“Eric happened to her.”

“That’s what you mentioned before,” she said. “You should know he finds that deeply troubling.”

“Of course he does,” I said. “No one wants to get caught.”

Katherine sighed. “Can you let me try to explain something to you?” she asked. “I don’t want you to think I don’t believe
you or that I’m calling you a liar, because I’m not. I absolutely believe that you’re telling the truth. But I want you to
listen to a theory I have. I just want you to listen. Just listen. Would you do that for me?”

I shrugged. “All right.”

“Here goes.” Katherine’s hand was pressed flat against the pad of paper, bloody fingertips pointed toward me. Her other hand
held a small silvery pen. “Because you’re a human being, Pilot, you have a very complex and active brain.” Her fingers started
to stroke the smooth paper, the way Halley the Comet would gently paw at a sweater. “Unfortunately, your brain is not, is
not as chemically balanced as it should be, and that’s why you suffered that, that scary episode. Now, one thing we know about
schizophrenia is that it doesn’t alter the logic part, or thinking part, of your brain. Are you following me so far?” Her
tone was that of someone talking to an animal or a retarded person.

I nodded. I knew all this. I had read about it a million times, in fact.

“Anyway,” she continued, “what is affected is the sensing part of your brain. You’re hearing voices, you’re getting disordered
imagery through your eyes. So your logic part of your brain—which is completely intact—tries to make sense of all that wrong
sensory data and tries to do the logical thing, but nothing really makes sense, right?”

“Nothing made sense,” I said, nodding. “That’s what I remember.”

“And the result is crazy behavior, because you’re trying to interpret what the right thing to do is based on the information
you’re getting.”

“Okay.” I unraveled the shoelace from my ring finger, then twisted it around my middle finger again, raveling it back.

She seemed to be looking at it. For the first time, I thought, Katherine noticed my shoelace. “Pilot,” she said, “when you
were suffering from all those chemicals rushing around in your head, I think some things got, well, got reordered, you know,
reshuffled, and reorganized, and they didn’t get put back in the right places after you started taking the medication, and
that’s why you have these feelings about your brother.”

“I see.”

“And what I would like to try to do is, is try to help you clear all that stuff up.”

“So, Katherine,” I said, “you don’t think I’m lying. You think I’m nuts.”

“No,” Katherine said.

“You think I’m stupid.”

“Pilot, I don’t think you’re crazy or stupid or anything. I think your brain is lying to you. I think you’re getting some
bad information. And it’s hurting people. This is your family we’re talking about, your brother, and he loves you.”

I considered the idea. I sat back, saying, “It’s possible,” twisting and untwisting the shoelace—raveling, unraveling.

“Of course it is.”

“Anything for my brother’s girlfriend.”

Now Katherine reached up and touched her forehead. “Okay,” she began, “like I said, I’m not Eric’s girlfriend. I went out
with him a couple of times for dinner and I think
he’s a very nice man, but as long as you want me to continue being your therapist I don’t have to see him. We talked about
it and both of us feel that is the right thing.”

I repeated her. “You and Eric talked about it.”

“Does that make you feel any better?”

I leaned forward on the couch. I said, “It didn’t suddenly occur to me, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy.”

“What didn’t suddenly—”

“That Eric killed Fiona.”