Raveling (47 page)

My father’s memories of Fiona, I believe, were even cloudier than mine. He remembered, mostly, her smell, the way her skin
felt when she was a baby, incredibly soft and velvety. He remembered how soft her hair was, too, how fair. He remembered the
week before her last Christmas when she was six, and the Barbie doll and Barbie house she’d wanted. Like me, my father remembered
her as a still image, the background barely shifting behind her. He saw a close-up of Fiona’s freckled, dimpled face. He recalled
the thin straps of her little red bathing suit on her sun-pink shoulders. He saw the light in her eyes from the flames of
the torches by the pool. My father remembered Fiona on that last night through a haze of drunkenness. He hadn’t been watching
his own children. He remembered, mostly, flirting with some stupid woman, what was her name? Doris Schott. He remembered
that he had made plans to meet her later on, at a hotel, and that the meeting had never taken place because Fiona was gone,
and after that nothing mattered at all. He remembered calling Doris from a pay phone on the side of Sky Highway, saying he
wouldn’t be coming, but he knew she understood. His daughter had disappeared for Christ’s sake.

Quite steadily, my father turned the plane, banking it just slightly against the coastal wind.

With some difficulty, Patricia and I managed to set up the tent. Mostly it was her telling me what to do, and me doing it
awkwardly. I had never been very good with my hands. Patricia had dark hair and skin that had been tanned so often in the
outdoors that it retained the permanent color of parchment. She had large, brown freckles across her collarbone. She had a
reddish nose and ears and cheeks. Her smile was warm. Her eyes were deep brown. “Your father usually starts the fire right
away,” she said. “It’s not a camp until there’s food.” She wore an old pair of blue jeans and a soft flannel shirt. She was
nothing like Hannah.

It occurred to me that Patricia and I had never been alone together before. “Do you want me to start a fire?” I asked her.
“Is that what you mean?”

“If you can,” she said.

“I can try,” I said. “I just hope I don’t set the entire island in flames.”

“Like
Lord of the Flies?
” she said laughing. “Don’t worry. We’ll put plenty of rocks and sand around you.”

“Just don’t call me Piggy.”

It was still before noon, early enough, and I felt normal. Things appeared normal, anyway. I knew my medication was in the
plane, and that the plane would not be back until later,
probably early evening. I had been taking less of the medication, cutting the tiny pills in half, as Katherine had indicated.
But I had yet to go an entire day. I kept checking the treeline around the little clearing. If I noticed it moving, if I thought
it was ready to reach out for me, then I’d know I was going crazy again.

Then I’d know.

Patricia and I gathered as much wood for the fire as we could hold in our arms. We found a patch of relatively dry driftwood
on the other side of the island and we carried it in two trips back to the little clearing. “I’ll bet he did this on purpose,”
Patricia said finally.

“Left the sleeping bags at home?”

She was nodding, arms folded, her feet resting on the woodpile. “Just so he could go flying by himself.”

“Sounds plausible.” I started to stack an arrangement of wood. We were encircled by the sea, by the island itself, by this
little clearing, I thought, and now I was making a fire in this circle of stones.

“He likes to be alone,” Patricia said, smiling apologetically. “Are you like that, too? You probably are.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I find myself alone pretty often.”

Her face softened. “He’s really worried about you. He probably doesn’t say it, but he cares about you a lot. He really—”

“Is there a newspaper or something? How do we get this started?”

“We have starter fluid.”

We had stacked the wood the way I imagined my father would have done. Patricia went to get the starter fluid and some matches.
When she returned, she handed them to me ceremoniously. “The man should do this.”

“Well, he isn’t here.” I doused the wood with the fluid,
then dropped a lit match on top of it. The whole thing exploded into flames. “Is that how he does it?”

“That’s the way it’s done.”

She was being condescending, I knew, treating me like a child. But for some reason I didn’t mind. I was probably acting like
one. I glanced at the treeline. From here we could see the ocean, and I wondered if my psychosis might cause me to fear the
water as well as the woods. The waves licked the shore. They receded. They came back. They went away again. I wasn’t afraid
of the waves in Santa Monica, I remembered, where I sat for hours—days, actually—on the beach, mesmerized by their repetition.
As a matter of fact, I had walked into them, hadn’t I, totally unafraid. But I wasn’t psychotic then, either, I told myself.
Just depressed. I felt jittery. I had brought some books—an old literature anthology, a science-fiction novel. But I had left
them in the seaplane, too.

Even though it was uncomfortably warm, Patricia and I sat by the fire until the wood began to burn evenly.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she said. “I can start cooking something, anything you—”

“No,” I told her. “I’m not hungry.” I hadn’t had anything but the coffee she had given me on the plane, but for some reason,
probably nervousness, I wasn’t hungry.

“Would you like to play cards?”

“Patricia, I’m having a bit of trouble concentrating right now,” I confessed.

“Are you—”

“I left my medication on the plane,” I said. “I mean, don’t worry about me or anything. I’ll be all right. It’s just that—”

“You’re a little nervous, I understand.”

I nodded, then I pushed a little stick deeper into the fire. Was the fire going to come alive somehow? I wondered.
Would it reach out for me the way I thought the woods had at home? There were so many possibilities for craziness here. The
sea, the fire, the wind, the earth.

All the elements.

“Let me know if you need anything or, or just want to lie down.”

“I’m all right. I think I am, anyway.” I played with the fire some more.

“He’ll be back soon.”

Patricia and I waited, sitting on the sandy ground, toying with bits of wood. I got up from time to time to walk through the
little forest to the other side. I circumnavigated the beach. The sun moved in its natural arc from the sky’s highest point
to the west. A wind rose from the east, blowing across the little island, causing the leaves of the trees to shiver and rustle.
I wondered, had to wonder, if I was imagining it.

In the woods behind my mother’s house, Katherine moved slowly, a step at a time, trying to think like a psychotic. Where would
I have put the evidence? she asked herself. She had never been out here before. In fact, she had hardly been inside any forest.
She certainly had never been in one like this: a suburban strip of deciduous maples and oaks, on one side the highway, on
the other a cul-de-sac of houses. The season was nearly over now, the leaves all descended and crackling, frozen underfoot.
It was winter, to be truthful, and the cold moved through the tree trunks like a million slippery eels gliding around water
weeds at the speed of wind. Katherine tried to remember the way I had described these woods to her. She knew that when I was
at the hospital I had imagined the trees creeping forward, moving toward me almost
imperceptibly. I thought they would swallow me, lash out across the expanse of asphalt highway and draw me inside the way
an amoeba swallows its food. She knew how I had pretended to be the wolf boy when I was little, free of language, untouched
by humans. Is that what I was afraid of? she thought. That I’d be swallowed by the woods and become the wolf boy again?

Katherine asked herself this: where would a wolf boy hide a plastic bag of evidence?

It was an absurd question.

Near my mother’s house she found the path and stepped along it gingerly, trying not to disturb anything or make a noise. She
had the strange feeling that she could be discovered out here and get in trouble. Then, just beyond a thicket of bushes, she
saw a clearing. In the distance, she could hear the highway, the hiss of tires, the whir of engines. She imagined our boyhoods
taking place in these woods, Eric’s and mine. Eric’s first kisses with girls. My first joint with Eric. There in front of
her was the broken concrete pipe. Was this the same one? It had to be. Around it, cigarette butts and crushed beer cans littered
the earth. Katherine looked inside the hollow, but there was nothing in it besides some old, disintegrating
Penthouse
magazines. She sat down on the pipe for a moment and put her hands on her knees. There seemed to be a stillness enfolding
her, a quiet like the inside of a trunk. Beyond the highway sounds was something quieter. It was the sound of the branches
moving in the wind. It was the sound of winter birds fluttering high up and of leaves settling. It was a single, simple pulse
in her ears. It was a stillness Katherine could understand going crazy in.

And now it was broken—Katherine was almost thankful—by a pair of girls’ voices. Up ahead, two junior high girls laughed their
way into the clearing and, seeing Katherine
there, stopped talking. They moved past her, heads down, one of them muttering a faint, “Hello.” One was blond and thin,
the other a brunette and heavier, wearing far too much makeup. Katherine only smiled, remembering her own dreadful junior
high experience. Then she had a thought. She got up and called after them.

“Excuse me!” Her voice felt loud and awkward. “Excuse me!”

The girls stopped. They turned around and looked at her, astonished.

“Excuse me,” Katherine said again. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

One of them, the dark-haired one, looked frightened. “Sure,” she said. “Okay.”

“Do you come through these woods often?”

“Sometimes,” the blond one said, more boldly.

The other only shrugged.

“Do you live around here?”

“We live on Willow Road,” the brunette said. She spoke as if confessing.

“Do you walk through here every day?”

“Almost,” the frightened one said.

The other said, “Not
every
day.”

“Did you ever see a man hanging around in here? Sandy-brown hair, about twenty-five, thirty years old, around two or three
months ago?”

“The Airie guy?”

“You know him?” Katherine said.

The one who had been silent was now bold. “He’s the one who went crazy, right? My mother told me.”

Neighborhood gossip, Katherine thought. She said, “I’m his psychologist.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh my God, did he do something wrong?”

“No,” Katherine said. “No, nothing like that. I was just wondering if you ever saw him in the woods, and if you did, what
part of the woods you saw him in, where he might have hung out.”

“He used to just walk around, really. I figured he was harmless.”

“Didn’t they find him out by the highway?”

“Do kids hang out by the highway?” Katherine asked.

“Certain kids do,” the brunette said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Katherine wasn’t sure, but she nodded anyway.

“There’s a tunnel under the highway,” the blond one said. “I would never go in there. But some girls go in there all the time.”

“I see.”

“Edwina Carlson goes in there.”

“Who’s she?” Katherine said.

“Just a girl.”

“Can you tell me which way the tunnel is?”

“Just walk straight to the highway,” the blond one said, “and then walk in the direction of the shopping plaza.”

“Are you really going to go there?” the brunette said.

“Why not?”

“Be careful.”

“And look out for the Tunnel Man.”

She walked away from the two girls cautiously, a little frightened now. But then she chided herself, how stupid it was to
let a couple of teenagers scare her like that. What could possibly be so scary in the tunnel under the highway? That’s where
the bad kids go, Katherine said to herself, the pot smokers and the girls who allow boys to touch them under their clothes.
She remembered secret places in Central Park when she was in high school, the nervous laughing
inside a thicket of bushes, tremulous hands groping around beneath her shirt, how a boy could lose his breath by just touching
the rough material of her bra. The wind was stronger now, bracing, the afternoon wearing away. Following the path the girls
had been walking, Katherine found the highway and began to travel north, the sounds of late afternoon traffic whipping by
over the embankment to her right. It was nearing rush hour.