Raveling (53 page)

“Things are tense,” I said to Katherine. “Patricia is very upset.”

“What about the medication?”

“I’m off it.” I hadn’t taken anything since we had come back. My mind was clear as the hurricane-swept Florida sky.

“And do you know when you’re returning to New York?”

“The service is soon,” I told her. “As soon as they stop searching, we’ll set it up. I’ll be back the minute it’s over.”

“I have things to talk about with you,” Katherine said.

“Good.”

“I have ideas about what you remembered, about what—”

“Excellent,” I said. “What is it?”

Katherine sighed. “Pilot,” she began. “I can’t—”

“I want to know.”

“You told your father?”

“About what?”

“About how you think Eric—”

“I told him,” I said, “yes. I told him everything.”

“That you had the evidence.”

“He didn’t believe me.”

“You told him exactly what it was?”

“About the shoe and the knife, yes.”

“Pilot,” Katherine said gently, “I don’t want you to get upset, but I want you to ask yourself if you think it is possible
that your father, that it was him who might have—”

“Killed Fiona?”

She was silent for a full half minute. “It was a theory,” Katherine said. “According to Jerry Cleveland, it was, it was postulated
that it might have been your father, at the time, you know. The police—”

“Oh,” I said.

“—believed it was possible that he might have… You should think about it, anyway, about what you remember from that night,
if there was anything unusual about, about your father’s behavior, anything strange. If there was—”

“He was a different person.”

Katherine said, “I’m going to visit Bryce Telliman. Is that all right?”

“You are?”

“If nothing turns out from the Tunnel Man—”

“Oh shit,” I said. It was like a door opened up inside me and behind it I could see a face, the cloudy eyes under all that
hair. I had sat with him inside the tunnel, given him all the money in my pockets.

“What?” Katherine said.

“I remember talking to him. I remember trying to make him understand me.”

“Trying to—”

“Just trying to get the words out,” I said. “His name is Billy.”

I had been almost catatonic, like an animal in the last moment before giving itself up to a predator, its body exposed, its
mind cut off.

And then they found him. They found everything—the plane, his body.

Our mother wouldn’t come. She couldn’t see our father anyway, she said, so what difference did it make? She said it was Patricia
he had loved.

And since I had no response for that, I let it go.

Throughout the service I stood between Eric and Patricia and imagined my father killing Fiona. I thought of his hands around
her neck, squeezing the air out of her tiny body.

The service was conducted at a Presbyterian church Patricia had forced our father to attend every Easter and Christmas. One
after another, his friends, mostly old pilots, airplane mechanics, fishing-tackle-shop owners, stepped up to the podium and
said it was the way he wanted to go, old
Jim loved flying so much. They all talked about how he was still flying somewhere out there. They actually believed this.
But I saw in my mind our father’s body not flying, but floating, bloated beyond recognition, his eyes open to the sea floor.
Here were all of Patricia’s friends, too. These were the wives of pilots and hunters. These were women more at home in blue
denim than black nylon. Their sympathy was genuine, the expressions in their eyes far less maudlin, far more acknowledging
of the disappearance, the deliberateness of it.

Patricia wept steadily, and I found myself crying a little bit, too, the tears at first like surprises on my face. Eric stood
beside me, impassive. I remembered that he didn’t cry at the service for Fiona, either. I saw things with such clarity now
that I thought I could see the obfuscation itself, my life’s bizarre catastrophe playing out:

A girl disappeared, one brother accused the other, the father—guilty by action or the lack of it—follows the girl into the
void. It had a symmetry. Why else would he kill himself?

It was never suggested at the service that he committed suicide, of course, that he would have even considered taking his
own life. And the official police finding was Death by Misadventure.

I would leave Patricia here in Florida in the little cottage she had shared with him. More than likely, I would never see
her again. She’d send me cards on all the right holidays, and I would call her on the anniversary of his fading away, just
to make sure she was all right. Old soldiers never die, the saying goes. It’s the same for pilots. They don’t die, they only
get lost. Our mother had clouds in her eyes as long as I can remember. Perhaps that is what he saw in her, all those years
ago.

But there I go falling into the same trap as those old veterans.

Afterwards, Eric stood outside with his hands in his pockets and compared the weather to New York. “It isn’t frozen yet,”
he said. “It is colder, though, up there.”

It was already the Christmas season. I had completely lost track. I wore only a black sports coat and old black corduroys.
They were our father’s, in fact, everything somewhat too big.

“I’ve been worried about how you were taking this,” Eric said. “But I can see now that you’re all right.”

“I’ve been crying a lot,” I admitted.

“You always cried a lot.”

“I spoke to Katherine.”

“Katherine DeQuincey-Joy.” It was odd the way he said it, just repeating her name.

“Are you still seeing her?”

He looked at the sky, which was blue and ignorantly bright. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

I said, “She’s looking into things.”

“Yeah.”

“She has a theory.” I wanted to be cautious, but at the same time I wanted an ally, and his opinion. “She thinks Dad, thinks
he did something—” I was whispering now “—something to Fiona.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She thinks that’s why he—”

“Did you say anything to him?”

“I told him the truth.” I had to look away.

“You wouldn’t know the fucking truth,” Eric said, “if it fell on you.”

“Eric,” I said, my head shaking, my hands trembling, “I’m sane now.”

“Pilot—”

“I need to know what you think about that.”

My brother turned to me, the look of righteous conviction in his eyes I remembered from childhood, and in a way it frightened
me and in a way it consoled me. “It’s what everyone always thought all along, you idiot.”

I shook my head.

He laughed. “Pilot, you are so crazy. You have no idea how crazy you are.”

“Katherine believes me.”

“Katherine is looking for the reason you’re crazy. Katherine is nurture. I am nature. Do you understand?”

“There’s no such thing as crazy,” I said. “You’re a fucking neurosurgeon, you should—”

“Then there’s no such thing as you, little brother.”

“Then there’s no such thing as an old rusty knife with dried blood still on it and a red sneaker, either.”

“You don’t have those things.”

I had been standing at the door, shaking the hands of these old pilots and mechanics. I only smiled at Eric now. I had been
crying for so long, and now I smiled. I had been crying, I thought, all my life. “Yes, I do.”

“Where?”

“Where is the last place, Eric, that you would look?”

“Do you want to disgrace our father’s memory? What is the point of this, Pilot?”

“But what if he—”

“He took his own life, for Christ’s sake. You don’t think that’s enough proof?”

I wasn’t sure about the truth anymore. But I was sure about what I had done with the evidence. “Eric,” I said, “where is the
last place you would look?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Pilot?”

I said, “You tell me.”

The same day, but colder, a Saturday afternoon, the woods rustled and strained against a wind that came off the highway from
the north. The thin branches of the trees were black as Chinese calligraphy against the too-blue winter sky. Katherine hugged
herself, not dressed for this in a light jacket and jeans. Three days earlier the weather had been completely different. Katherine
had always loved winter in the city. Out here in the suburbs, though, there was no comfort in it. She moved steadily along
the path that followed the highway toward the concrete tube where the Tunnel Man lived. Would he remember her? She thought
he was less crazy than his act indicated. He would remember her. The real question was, did he have the evidence? One seven-year-old
girl’s red drugstore sneaker, one hunting knife, both of these things gone in memory twenty years, fingerprints intact.

Katherine prayed those fingerprints belonged to my father.

She saw the tunnel up ahead of her, its mouth dark, water trickling like drool out into a puddle, bigger now than it had been
three days ago. It had been raining that day. Did he know she was coming? Could he hear her walking down the path? When she
rounded the corner and stood in front of the pool of filthy, cold water, she saw through the tube all the way to the highway
island’s daylight on the other side. Where the Tunnel Man’s house had been was now only scattered debris, pieces of wood,
a couple of crumpled, soggy blankets. There was a large piece of blue plastic sheeting stuck in the flow of the water.

“Hello?” Katherine said. It was a stupid thing to say, she thought. Clearly, no one was there.

Clearly, the Tunnel Man had left.

She trod across the edges of the pool and, her feet dry this time, stepped into the tunnel. It echoed, of course, announcing
her aloneness. She found the plastic sheets and pulled them
back. Underneath was an old shopping cart, a wet pile of rags and packing blankets. There was a smell emanating from it that
was almost sweet, like an orchard of rotting apples. There were odd bits and pieces of things left behind. A few books, a
Bible, some Stephen King novels, a
Metropolitan Home
magazine. He had taken off, Katherine realized. He had gone. Had he left the evidence? No, he was probably using the knife,
gutting road-kill raccoons and roasting them over a fire. Katherine pulled the edge of the wet packing blanket back, and beneath
it, the Tunnel Man’s face was clearly visible, eyes closed as if sleeping. His skin was made whiter, cleaner, actually, by
the water washing over it. The dead man’s image was presented to Katherine with the same banality as any inanimate object
in the tunnel. She pulled the wet blanket back more and saw that he was fully dressed, his body deep in the mire of junk and
dead leaves and garbage that flowed through. There were empty bottles all around him. He had killed himself by drinking, Katherine
thought. She wondered if she should say anything to the police. What would be the point? Then she imagined those girls from
the junior high discovering the body. She could hear them shrieking. No, she would report it. She’d call that Vettorello guy.
He would help.