Raveling (39 page)

“Do you know about Mom’s eyesight?”

“She’s having some trouble with her vision, is that it? Eric told me a little.” He teased the line.

“She was seeing ghosts,” I said. “At least that was how she put it. It was like she was seeing double, I think. But now she’s
having trouble seeing anything. There’s a nurse coming to the house to take care of her.”

“She’ll be all right.”

“Did he tell you about Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy?”

He gave me a questioning look.

“My therapist.”

Shrugging. “I knew you were in therapy.”

“He’s sleeping with her.”

“Who?”

“Eric, your son, my brother, he’s—”

“With the therapist?” My father smiled. He laughed a little bit, too.

“It’s funny?”

“Pilot, what difference does it make?”

“A lot.”

“Why don’t you get another one?”

“Because if I can convince her,” I said, “I can convince anyone.” Even as I said this, I realized how stupid it sounded.

My father cleared his throat. He began to reel his line in, very slowly, steadily, teasing it in the water the whole way.
“Do you like it here?” he asked.

“At the lake?”

“Florida.”

I looked around, as if I could see the whole state from this rowboat. “I like it.”

“You can stay as long as you want.” He looked at me directly. “You don’t have to go back in a month. If you want to, if you
want to, you can stay here forever.” He reached over to me, his hand coming toward my shoulder. The little rowboat swayed
a bit at the shifting of weight.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Think about it.” His hand was resting on my shoulder, lightly at first, then pressing down.

I turned my body just enough, just so he’d release me, then I began to pull my line in, as well. The little boat rocked in
the calm water. I thought I felt something tugging at my
line, but it turned out to be nothing. It was cold out here, but not so cold that we could see our own breathing in the air.

“Ghosts?” my father said abruptly.

“That’s what she calls them.”

“Of anyone in particular?”

I knew Hannah had been seeing Fiona, had seen her running around the backyard, had felt her little-girl breath on her neck
behind her in the kitchen. I had heard my mother call out to her. I had listened to her whispering to my sister through the
ventilation system.

I looked back at my father steadily. I said, “Fiona.”

He cast his line into the water. “We don’t know that she’s dead.” He wouldn’t look at me. “How can your mother be seeing the
ghost of someone who might not even be dead?”

“She’s dead.”

“Pilot.”

“Eric didn’t tell you?”

“Eric told me you were having trouble with it still, and I can see that now.”

I knew what Eric had told him. I knew everything. “I know what happened.” Around the lake I could sense the rustling of the
trees, their roots quietly reaching into the water, curling up through the black silt and rotting leaves at the bottom.

“About what?”

“Everything. Everything that happened that night.”

“Shit, Pilot. Your mother has—”

“I know what happened.”

His manner changed quickly. His teeth clenched together. He even closed his eyes. “What happened, son?”

“Eric killed her.”

Our father’s shoulders slumped down. “No,” he said. It meant he was disappointed in me. He wasn’t surprised, just let down.

“I found the evidence, Dad.”

“The shoe?” He was incredulous.

“Both of them,” I said. “Both shoes—and a knife.”

“This is all some kind of psychological bullshit,” my father said derisively. “This is not even—”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Have you talked to the therapist about this?”

“Yes.”

“What does she say?”

“She says I’m confused.”

“Listen to her.”

“I’m trying,” I said. “I really am. I want it to be confusion.” I wasn’t sure if I believed this, as I said it. But I thought
it would be good for him to hear.

Of course, we didn’t catch anything worth keeping. But my father had steaks in the cooler, and we set up a barbecue pit at
a roadside rest stop. From where we were I could see a public rest room down the road. Men lurked in the trees just beyond
it. My father, I believe, had no idea what was happening or even that anyone was there. We sat at the picnic table eating
our grilled steaks with raw tomatoes and onions.

“Next week,” he said, “the plane will be ready.”

“What’s wrong with it now?”

“Just getting a tune-up.”

I nodded.

“So,” Dad said, “do you want to go out to the islands?”

“The islands?”

“Off the coast there are hundreds of little islands—beautiful, perfect little places.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We can bring a tent, stay a few days.”

“Sounds great,” I said.

“There’s one in particular I’d like you to see.”

“An island?”

“It’s uncharted. I call it Nowhere Island.”

“Sounds really—”

“Of course, there’s no phone or anything. You think that would be all right for you?”

He was challenging me. He was challenging my resolve to remain sane. He thought it was a decision I had made, that I had chosen
to be crazy like this. “I can make it,” I said.

Dad took a huge bite of his steak. “How’s your meat?” he asked while chewing.

“Perfect,” I told him. “Excellent.”

“You always did like steak,” he said.

“We all did.”

“Your mother’s eyesight is bad?”

“It’s pretty bad,” I said. I watched the cars zooming by on the highway. Men moved in the shadows of the trees on the other
side. If my father knew about them, he didn’t let on. I laughed a little bit. “She likes to suffer. She likes to suffer silently.”

My father laughed at that.

At this moment my mother was speaking to my sister. She was asking Fiona to come inside, saying it was too cold out, and that
it was getting dark. Fiona’s ghost stopped at the edge of the lawn and turned her head. Her eyes seemed to ask for one more
minute, just one.

Please
, Hannah begged her daughter silently,
please, dear, come inside
.

Dad cleared his throat. “You know,” he said, “I want you to clear all this up, all this about Eric—killing Fiona—I want you
to clear it all up with your therapist first, all right? I mean—”

“You don’t believe me,” I said. “But it’s all right. I don’t always believe me, either.”

“It’s not that I don’t
believe
you,” Dad said. “I mean, I’m
sure you
think
that’s what happened. But you know, Pilot, you can’t always trust your own brain, you know what I mean?”

“Dad,” I said, “I’ve lied to you my whole life, and for the first time I can trust my—”

“There are a lot of things that happen when you’re a kid that get all twisted and distorted in your mind when you get older.
You can’t—” He stopped talking.

“Can’t what?” I asked.

“You can’t just accuse your own brother like that.”

“I have proof.”

“Just do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Just talk it all through with your therapist.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

He was dropping the dirty dishes into the cooler now. Later, he would simply leave it all for Patricia to clean. “Good,” he
said. I would help her, standing in the kitchen, the two of us.

“I won’t talk to you about it anymore,” I said.

“I think that’s a good idea, too.”

“I don’t mean to upset anyone.”

“Pilot,” he said, “I know you’re having a hard time. I know you are. Don’t feel bad about that. I’ve read about these things.
It’s not you, I know, it’s just some chemical thing that went wrong in your head or something, something that got out of whack,
that’s all.”

Out of whack. “I hope you’re right.”

In the trees on the other side of the highway, there were men moving further into the dark. I imagined them reaching out for
each other, their rough beards scratching against each other’s faces. I saw them slipping further in. I looked at our father’s
innocent face. I wished so much that I had inherited that face, and not Eric.

On the highway were cars carrying sailboats on trailers. Seafood restaurants, boat dealerships, and bait shops lined the
sandy roadside. The Atlantic Ocean roared nearby, just a mile or so away. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the pulsing
of its waves against the shore in the near distance. I could smell the salt in the air, stronger here, and the wind on my
face was much softer than it had been. We pulled off, eventually, stopping in the parking lot of an enormous airfield.

We had stopped to say hello to the plane.

No one seemed to notice the two of us walking across the expanse of weed-broken asphalt, and we entered the hangar with only
a nod from a passing mechanic in a bright orange jumpsuit.

“Jim,” he said.

Dad just wanted to touch it, I think, and wanted me to touch it, too. He believed it was a therapeutic act.

For me. For him. For the plane.

“Touch it, Pilot,” he encouraged. “Go ahead.”

It was the kind that lands in the water, a Cessna or Piper Cub or something, with little boatlike runners instead of wheels
for the landing gear. At the moment, however, it was inside this dimly lit cavern of sheet metal, its front panel opened up
to reveal the mechanical engine. Dad peered in, an educated look of concern on his face, masking, I thought, his true face
of confusion.

Inside this hangar were at least a dozen other single-engine planes of similar sizes, and outside on the small airfield I
had noticed another twenty or so, all of them in various stages of repair, all of them red and white or blue and white or
yellow and white. Our father’s plane, one of the smaller ones, had three red stripes running down the length of the body and
across the underside of the wings. It had a
serial number painted in red on the fuselage. It had two seats in the front and a tiny area in the back for supplies and
storage. I supposed another person or two could fit back there as well, but it would be a tight squeeze. The inside was beige,
like a car. This was the first time I had seen his plane outside of a picture. Every year, Patricia and our father sent us
a Christmas photograph of the two of them standing next to it. It was always decorated with an evergreen wreath, and it was
always taken from a new angle. Usually, Patricia penned in some joke like,
Merry Xmas from your father and his girlfriend! (And from Patricia, too.)

Touching it, I said, “It’s pretty great, Dad.” Its fiberglass coat was not as smooth as I thought it would be. My hands were
blackening with soot. It needed to be cleaned, I realized.

He ran his hand along the fuselage.

“Flying’s one of the easiest things in the world,” my father said. “I could teach you.”

I wondered if a person diagnosed with schizophrenia was allowed to pilot an airplane. I imagined answering the questionnaire.

Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?

Long ago, Eric had taken flying lessons. But he stopped when Hannah begged him to. And then Dad left us anyway, and it didn’t
seem to matter anymore. I had always thought I would learn to fly because of my name at the very least.

We walked back out of the hangar, which was dark and oddly quiet, into the harsh Florida daylight. It was around four in the
afternoon by then, and the sun shone with a brilliant glinting intensity off the windshields of the little airplanes out there.
We got back inside Dad’s four-wheel drive, both of the doors closing with a solid click.

“It’s a great-looking plane, Dad,” I said after a moment of just sitting there, after I realized I was supposed to say something.
“Really cool. Beautiful.”

He wore a look of disappointment that I could only think had something to do with my reaction. It hadn’t been inspired enough,
I guessed. “Wait’ll we get it up in the air,” my father said. “Then you’ll see what I mean.” He started the engine. It was
cold, but I rolled the window down anyway.