Raveling (59 page)

“Hannah helped me.”

He was calling her Hannah. “Why don’t I remember?”

“Who would want to remember something like that? That was your defense mechanism.”

“And what about later, is she still, still in the house?”

“Pilot,” Eric told me, and now it was him shaking his head, “Fiona’s in the pool.”

I did remember. I remembered being the wolf boy. I remembered my fearful childhood as Pilot Airie—Airie the Fairy. I remembered
sitting at the back of all my classes, avoiding eye contact with other kids, walking as close to the wall as possible. And
college, and working in the bookstore, and writing sad screenplays, and all the rest. I also remembered looking out through
Eric’s eyes and that the world was beautiful that way. How was this possible? Was it love? I remembered lying on the grass
by the football field, arms wide open to the sky, thinking I was him.

Is that love?

“When I did it,” I told him now, “when I killed Fiona, I didn’t think I was the wolf boy.”

“No?”

“I thought I was you.”

This is the true nature of deception, to twist things around, persuade without persuasion—to complicate. It is too simple
to create a lie, to say you were in one place and not another, to deny a series of events. Because the truth is a tangle,
and you will get at it far more easily by raveling than by unraveling. So I sat slumped against the frozen wall of the tunnel
with my brother and allowed him to convince me, the truths and untruths threading themselves around our bodies, binding us
in such a complexity of yeses and nos and maybe-it-happened-that-ways that the actual truth seemed to become irrelevant, or
at least impossible. And then we rose and walked out, and we separated like two brothers—me toward the house, Eric in the
direction of his car—each without saying a word, each without saying anything or even gesturing his respective good-bye, knowing
we would be together again, that we were never really apart. The sunlight came
through the branches overhead in impossible shafts of dazzling yellow, and the air was so cold and clear there wasn’t a mote
of dust between the earth and sky. My hands were growing light. My chest expanded to capture more oxygen than seemed reasonable.
I stepped onto the lawn of my childhood home and noticed a light crust of frozen dew on the grass. It crackled slightly with
each step. The flagstones were frosted over, the whorling patterns of fractured ice like the iridescent visions of my boyhood
when I pressed my hands into my eyes.

“Pilot,” Katherine had said, “there’s a way out of this.”

I had remembered everything.

She had leaned toward me, using those green eyes—eyes like Fiona’s—to pull me in. “There’s a way.”

“What if I’m wrong?”

“Are you?”

In another lifetime I sat with my brother in the clearing of the woods and he showed me how to hold a joint between my finger
and my thumb, how to pull the smoke into my mouth and then inhale, trapping it in my lungs. He sat close to me and put his
hand on my back, tapping me there as I coughed. I didn’t want to stop coughing if it meant my brother was touching me.

“No,” I had said to Katherine, “I’m not.”

I stepped onto the frozen flagstones and looked at my mother’s garden, Fiona’s grave, the iced-over remains of the fall harvest
broken and twisted on the hardened, cracked earth. The sun was fully up now. When I imagined her in there she wasn’t below
six feet of earth, she was swimming, legs moving like a frog’s, sunlight flashing off the surface of the water. I saw the
garden and pool at the same time, a double vision, and I knew with a single clarity what had happened to my sister.

“Pilot, there’s a way out of this.”

I knew I had not killed her.

“What if I’m wrong?”

“Are you?”

I knew it was him.

When my mother and I came home from the vet that day, Halley wasn’t a comet anymore. But I had already envisioned a special
cat-size prosthesis for his missing leg, made of molded model airplane plastic and elastic straps, and now it was just a matter
of waiting until the wound healed. Once it did, I took Halley and his new leg to the junior high science fair that year and
then to the New York State Junior Scientist competition.

At the exhibition, I had to ask Dr. Herman for special kitty sedatives to keep Halley from running away. He was happy to oblige.

I won, naturally. The enormous cup is still in my old bedroom. My mother keeps it on the top shelf, above all my football
and swimming trophies. It’s just a large bowl with my name and the year inscribed on it, nothing special. But it was winning
that prize that made me realize my ambition in life. I’d already sensed it when I felt the hunting knife slicing through Halley’s
leg or when I removed part of a shrew’s brain and watched its little gray body twitching on my father’s workbench. Dr. Herman
had even come to the exhibition and explained that he had recommended putting Halley to sleep and that I had talked him out
of it.

In the end, of course, it didn’t work very well. Truthfully, Halley tore the elastic off with his teeth and limped into a
corner. He died a few years later of an enlarged heart—very common for cats.

When they announced that I had won, I walked up to the podium with Halley in my arms. The cat was so heavily sedated his
eyes were barely open. There was applause unlike any I’d ever heard on the football field, unlike any applause I could imagine.
There were even people who thanked me, actually hugging me, for saving Halley’s life. I realized I had to move up a notch,
try something braver.

And then Fiona.

And then our parents in separate bedrooms, and eventually in separate states.

And then I just studied, my head inside one textbook after another, for years and years. When I got to college I had few friends,
only one or two girlfriends. Mostly I studied, biology and pre-med, eventually to graduate summa cum laude. In medical school
it was even more studying, cramming vast amounts of information into my brain. And there were the neurology program at Columbia,
graduate work, starting my practice in East Meadow. What was it Katherine said?

Praised be the fall
. I’d heard that expression once before in an English class. But I don’t know when the fall came for me. It wasn’t when Fiona
disappeared. It was long before that. My fall came when I realized I could detach myself, could separate my sympathy into
its component parts. Even now, I can walk into the operating room, saw off the back of a human being’s skull, and perform
incredibly delicate operations on a person’s brain without feeling anything for them at all.

This is strength. This is what makes me more than just a good doctor. This is what allows me to perform.

To be a doctor is to continually test your resolve to suspend natural human sympathy. It is one thing to take apart a grasshopper
and still another to remove and examine the organs of a baby squirrel. It is quite something else to cut the leg off the beloved
family cat. Each notch up the great chain
of being toward human requires greater and greater detachment. Unlike most doctors, I came to this realization early in life,
and I asked myself, could I do it? Could I cut into a human body? Like my father had always encouraged me, I wanted to test
myself early in life, so when eventually I encountered the real thing, I’d be prepared.

Like Pilot, I loved her, too. Who wouldn’t love a little girl with blond hair and green eyes in a red bathing suit and red
sneakers? Who wouldn’t love that smile? I remember when she was born. I remember standing over her crib and seeing her green,
green eyes leap up at me in unmitigated delight. Of course I loved her. She was my sister.

That day—Christmas Day—I just kept driving, driving all the way to the beach house, stopping only once for gas. I felt better,
much better, knowing I had all the evidence with me, that Pilot was finally convinced, that I had a clear day—a clear life—ahead
of me. I only hoped that Pilot would forget about it again, let it slip behind him like the yellow lines on the road beneath
my Jag.

Pilot had slumped down against the side of the concrete tunnel when I told him, his body limp. He’d put his face in his hands.
He was remembering, I think. He was seeing it the way I described it. His fingers on the knife. The knife at her throat. He
was remembering himself as the wolf boy. There were new pathways forming along the synapse routes in his brain. There were
images coalescing, memories congealing. And even though I felt terrible telling him, it was the only way. He’d left me no
choice. “But she was my sister,” he kept saying. “Fiona was my sister.”

“
Our
sister,” I said. “I know.” I put the knife back in the plastic bag with the sneaker and placed the whole thing on the ground.
I was crouched down next to him, trembling with cold.

Outside, the sun was rising. A shaft of orange light
pierced the tunnel. This was what the Tunnel Man saw every morning, I thought. It was gorgeous.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Pilot said. “Why didn’t you help me remember?”

I said this as if I were ashamed: “We didn’t want you to.”

He sobbed into his hands. He wore a black overcoat, and layers and layers of sweaters beneath it. He had been out in this
cold waiting for me all night. The camera hung loosely around his neck.

“Have you been taking your medication?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not since the island.”

“Will you do me a favor, little brother? Will you please go home and take your fucking pills? Please?”

He nodded.

I helped him up.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

I walked with my brother through the tunnel, my hand on his shoulder, carrying the Wonderbread bag with the sneaker and knife
inside it, and I left him at the path that led to our mother’s house. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t even hesitate, just
separated smoothly into our opposite directions.

An hour and a half later, I was pulling into the long driveway of my beach house. I was getting out of the car with the same
Wonderbread bag in my hand and walking without stopping, without even closing the door, to the water. No one was around. The
wind and the sounds of the waves were blasting into my ears. Was it always this loud? I had no jacket, just that thin pink
shirt, monogrammed. My shoes slipped in the sand, failing to gather traction. When I got to the edge of the ocean, where the
waves licked the shore, I stepped in a few feet, the water rushing up around my shins, soaking my pants, and I didn’t give
a shit about the cold or ruining my Italian leather shoes. I looked up and down to
make sure no one was watching. I reached into the bag and took out the knife.

This was the blade that cut so cleanly through Halley’s leg, I thought. This was the way it felt in my hand.

In the daylight it seemed different. It had been years since I’d seen it, of course, but I didn’t remember the handle being
this sleekly black, and the blade seemed oddly shiny. I guessed it was just a well-made object. It wasn’t even the slightest
bit rusty after all those years. I got the heft of it, momentarily tossing it up, and then I threw it as far into the ocean
as I could, so far out I couldn’t even hear the splash. I still had an arm, I thought. I took the plastic bag with Fiona’s
shoe in it and I filled it with a handful of wet sand. I twisted the plastic around the shoe and whipped it, like the knife,
far out into the water. I knew it could come loose eventually and might even float back to the shore. But that didn’t matter
now. A single shoe, water-soaked, on a beach somewhere. The knife, I knew, would never resurface—not in this lifetime, anyway.