Raveling (7 page)

Her hair was as insane as I was. Blond and black at the same time, it fell in curling, twisting spirals across her shoulders,
almost to the middle of her back. The rest of her was tastefully disheveled in wrinkled gray wool pants, a satiny shirt. Her
eyes, like Fiona’s, were green. But this woman’s eyes were brighter, more focused than any I’d ever seen—wide and, at the
same time, sharp. “Pilot Airie,” she said, and her voice was in performance mode, overtly professional, “my name is Katherine
DeQuincey-Joy.” Her shirt, pale green, open at the collar, revealed a gold chain and an antique locket with a Celtic design
on it. She had a birthmark on her collarbone, a mole, like someone had pricked her skin with a needle and a tiny globule of
blood had formed there and hardened, and then it turned black.

Or were Fiona’s eyes blue? I panicked to remember.

Green. Yes, gray-
green
.

I touched my face and felt the scratch across my cheek. I wondered if I looked tough or pathetic. “Hello,” I said. I decided
on pathetic. I was sitting up now, although I felt impossibly bewildered.

“I am a psychologist with the clinic, Pilot. I met your mother in the hallway just a few minutes ago, and she told me what
happened.” Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy spoke slowly, deliberately, her eyes like twin televisions broadcasting concern.

I said, “My mother doesn’t know what happened.”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “Just for a few minutes to see how you’re doing. Is that okay?”

“Oh, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I echoed her formality,
“I do not believe at this moment in time that I am doing so well, as a matter of fact.” The voices inside the light fixture
erupted into a riot of conversation. I had just given them a fresh supply of ammunition. I had made an
admission
. Thankfully, they had not yet decided how I should be done away with.

“Really?” she said.

I nodded.

I knew that, somehow, Eric’s would be the deciding vote, that he was in charge. Perhaps his communication gear was faulty.
Perhaps he was out of range, trying to get through. Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy had a long neck, and beneath the pale green
fabric of her shirt I could see the shape of her body, her skin-colored lace bra—practical yet elegant. She said, “Why do
you say that, Pilot?”

“Can you turn out the light?” I asked. “I can’t hear you.”

She furrowed her brow. “If I turn out the light, you can hear me better?” She gave me an expectant look, eyes expanding, as
if to suspend logic, as if to give me credit for an explanation that was clearly nuts.

Then she looked at my hand, at the shoelace I had twisted around and around my aching middle finger.

“Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I wanted to know, “are we far enough away from the woods?”

“You’re safe,” she said. “You’re very, very safe here. I promise. No one can hurt you. And you can just call me Katherine,
if you like. Or Kate.”

“You’d be surprised, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I said. “They lash out, the trees and the branches, and before you know
it—”

“What does, Pilot?” She leaned toward me, hands almost touching the hospital blanket. “What lashes out?”

“The woods.”

She paused. Could she be electronic, too? Could Eric
have sent her? “Do you hear anything, Pilot? Do you hear voices talking when they’re not really there?”

“I hear arguments,” I admitted. “But they
are
there.” I knew what she was getting at. I had trouble getting at it myself. They weren’t there. But they
were
. Both things were true.

“What kind of arguments?”

“In the light fixtures. About what to do with me,” I said, “my execution and disposal.”

“Who is arguing?”

I begged her slowly: “I asked you, please, if you could please turn out the light, please.”

Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy backed away from the bed. “I’m sorry.” Her fingers found the light switch.

Instantly the room went dim. “Thank you.” The murmuring of voices quieted without their electric lifeline, their wires and
diodes, receptors and interceptors.

“Would you like to stay here for a while, Pilot?”

“Am I out of the woods?”

“Are you speaking metaphorically?”

I smiled. I would have to explain this. “Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy, imagine,” I said. “Katherine, please, imagine a tunnel,
a man in the tunnel like an amoeba—”

“Okay.”

“—and the way it moves through the solution to a problem—” Fuck, I thought. I was losing my place.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“—the way it swallows its pride, taking them inside, an intelligence the size of an ocean, and catching—”

“Would you like to stay here, Pilot?” she asked again, smiling. “Stay here at the clinic for a little while, and we’ll make
sure you’re safe, until you feel better?”

I couldn’t breathe. I touched the scratch on my face. My middle finger, wrapped tightly by the shoelace, throbbed painfully.
“I think that would be good.”

Katherine put her hand, her thin, cool, smooth hand—could this be electronic? no—on mine and squeezed it lightly, just lightly.
Like a mother. Or an old girlfriend.

“I think that would be really, really good,” I said.

Like regret.

She smelled like lemons.

When I closed my eyes I saw Fiona’s face like a prairie. My sister’s eyes like twin moons on an alien horizon. Her chin was
a bluff to climb over. My memory of her was a fading map of a terrain I was no longer familiar with. Everything was different
now.

I missed her so much.

Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy was hiding her hands beneath her desk because she had chewed her nails down to nothing—
beyond
nothing—and there was a bright halo of blood around each one of her fingertips. “I’m really glad you could come,” she was
saying. “I know how busy you must be, and—”

“I’ll make time for this,” Eric broke in. “Whenever you need me, just call, and I’ll make myself available.” His hands were
beautiful, Katherine noticed, the nails the perfect shape for a man, clear, with no trace of white, not dull but not shining.
Dramatically, he said, “This is my brother.” She didn’t know that Eric checked his fingernails each morning in his chrome-and-black
bathroom, holding a pair of silver clippers above a polished wastebasket.

Katherine nodded. “So I don’t have to tell you what Pilot is experiencing, what he’s—”

“It’s all too familiar.” Eric’s face was perfectly tanned, she
noticed, with wide cheekbones, and blue, blue eyes. His figure was athletic, finished. His pose, however, was concerned,
even distressed.

“Dr. Lennox’s initial diagnosis,” she began, “is, is that Pilot has some form of schizophrenia, whether it’s schizoaffective
disorder or—” Eric closed his eyes, face upturned. “But naturally we would rather believe,” she rushed to say, “that this
is a response to trauma of some kind, whether real or imagined, rather than”—she cleared her throat—“well, rather than late-onset
adult schizophrenia, which I don’t have to tell you is more—”

“—degenerative,” my brother finished.

“Dr. Lennox said your mother indicated that Pilot has had other episodes?”

Eric leaned forward, his long, perfectly manicured fingers touching each other habitually. Was he aware of this habit? “Pilot
has always been psychologically—I don’t know—
fragile
. He had an episode when he was very young,” he said. “Around eleven. But we had always chalked that up to an event.”

“An event?”

“When we were children our little sister disappeared.”

Katherine was silent, her eyes wide.

“It was very traumatic, and Pilot suffered—” Eric seemed about to describe something more specific, but then he said, “Well,
he suffered.”

“What was that particular episode like?”

He looked away. “It wasn’t like this one, really. It was more about being dissociative. He was down on all fours, snarling
and growling like a dog, pretending he couldn’t understand English. He was getting lost in a game of make-believe, I guess.”

I am the wolf boy
, I wanted to say.
I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands
.

“Were there any particular symptoms of schizophrenia then?” Katherine asked. “I mean, that you can see from your medical
perspective now?”

Eric ran his tongue across his teeth. “Pilot was not always very coherent in those days, and he was always drawn to the woods.”
His eyes flickered toward the window. “I guess the early signs of psychosis were present.”

Katherine couldn’t help but turn and look out there, too. The sky was darkening, the blue growing deeper. “May I ask what
happened to your sister?”

“We never found her.”

“She was abducted?”

“Children are abducted every day.” My brother looked at Katherine directly for the first time, it seemed. “And not all of
them are recovered.” His head was cocked at a slight angle now. “Just buy a carton of milk.”

“Of course.” She made her eyes soften, using them to reassure. “The only reason I’m asking is that, is that I’m wondering
if Pilot felt somehow responsible.” She kept her eyes on him, waiting for Eric to break the gaze. “About your sister, that
is, which might explain the dissociative—”

“We all felt responsible.” Eric kept staring back. “But that was—” his entire tone changing “—that was twenty years ago.”

“Have there ever been any other episodes?”

“Not really. Not like this.”

“Any other traumas?”

It was a game now, their eyes playing truth or dare. He finally looked away. “Pilot has always been shaky, you know, psychologically
speaking. He’s never had many friends. He’s had a fair amount of trouble in school, bad grades, truancy, a lot of depression.
He was living in North Carolina until recently—”

“How recently?”

“Just six or seven months ago, and then he went to Los Angeles. He told our mother that he was in negotiations to sell a screenplay,
but what we found out later was that he was just living on the beach in Santa Monica. Are you familiar with the area?”

“Not really.”

“There’s a lot of homelessness out there. Anyway, I had to go out and retrieve him, and ever since then he’s been living at
home.”

“Was there any psychotic behavior on the beach?”

“He was drinking a lot, I think, and smoking grass.” Eric shook his head as though ashamed. “Maybe other drugs. I didn’t notice
any deeply unusual behavior. I mean, beyond—”

“Has he had problems with substance abuse, with alcohol?”

“Some problems,” my brother said as if he knew. “No serious addictions, I think. But yes, some problems over the years. More
with drugs than drinking.”

Katherine allowed a moment to pass, artificially shifting a few pieces of paper around on her desk. She wanted Eric to know
that she doubted him, that she didn’t believe he had all the answers. “I’m trying to put a finger,” she said finally, “on
something environmental, a concern, a stressor, perhaps, anything that might have triggered this, this reaction.” She narrowed
her eyes, asking, “Is everything in your family okay?”

Too quickly, he said, “Yes.”

“Your father, he’s deceased?”

“My father? Oh no.” My brother flashed a loud smile. “Far from it. Our parents are divorced, that’s all. Dad lives in Florida.”
He laughed brightly, an intense
ha
, more like a bark. “He’s retired, but he’s—well, he’s not dead.”

“Could there have been—”

“Pilot and I have almost no contact with our father. Our
parents divorced a couple of years after Fiona, after our sister, disappeared. They don’t talk much, and when they do—”

“I see.”

He looked out the window.

“What time of year did your sister—”

“Labor Day.”

“That was two weeks ago.”

“Yes.”

“The woods behind your mother’s house—”

“They picked over every inch of them looking for her, or for any clue, any piece of evidence. All they found was one of her
sneakers.”

Katherine nodded. “When I was talking to him,” she said, “it sounded like he was afraid the woods were going to swallow him,
perhaps like Fiona?”