Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  PRAISE FOR RAVELING

  “Peter Moore Smith’s debut thriller grabs and won’t let go…. RAVELING knits up quickly to a compelling story of familial love and trauma, the complexities of the mind, and an evil that is stunning in its perfect, familiar invisibility.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Compelling… a complex debut that will challenge readers.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Fascinating and suspenseful… challenging.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Original and complex, RAVELING holds you long after the final page.”

  —David Baldacci

  “Hypnotically the strands of the family tragedy interweave toward a resolution that’s satisfying on both a narrative and moral level.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Harrowing… vivid writing… [a] superb debut.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “A triumph of voice, a remarkably subtle, nuanced, and virtuosic performance.”

  —Esquire

  “A fantastic psychological thriller that never eases up on the tension throttle.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Superb…. RAVELING is that rare thing, a truly beautifully written thriller, infused with both heart and horror…. Inventive, intricate, and always engrossing… excellent stuff.”

  —Detroit News

  “Exceptional… a wonderfully simple, engaging, and well-written story.”

  —Library Journal

  “A terrific debut… captivating… complex and accomplished.”

  —Denver Post

  “A haunting blend of mystery and magic realism… a challenging thriller.”

  —Booklist

  “The perfect psychological mystery in the tradition of a grand Hitchcock thriller…. The creepiest tension-filled whodunit this side of Sir Alfred to hit the shelves in years.”

  —Planet Weekly

  “A genuinely gripping and eloquent debut novel… beautifully written and captivating.”

  —BookPage

  “A classy suspense debut… stylish, substantive, and savvy.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 2000 by Peter Moore Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Definitions from the DSM-IV are reprinted with permission from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. Copyright 1994 American Psychiatric Association.

  Warner Vision is a registered trademark of Warner Books, Inc.

  Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2599-3

  Contents

  Praise for Raveling

  Copyright

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Brigette, like crazy

  ORDINARILY AT THIS HOUR MY BROTHER, ERIC, would have been at his desk eating his usual Bavarian ham and brie on a wheat baguette, his cup of pumpkin soup, not too hot, a brown pear, slightly ripe, more crisp than soft. Ordinarily, as I said. But today at lunch he stood in his sterile, white-tiled, gleaming-steel-and-bright-fluorescent examining room with our mother, Hannah, who had been seeing ghosts. “I’ve been seeing ghosts,” she complained. She had said it this morning, too, when Eric had come by our house to make coffee and eggs, if I wanted them, as he had almost every day for several weeks now, to check on me, to make sure I wasn’t any more suicidal than usual. Eric had told our mother to visit his office at lunchtime, that he would take a look.

  This was their intimacy: her acknowledging his authority, Eric’s nonchalant acceptance of our mother’s acknowledgment. This was the love between them.

  “All right.” Eric laughed. “Mom’s nuts.”

  She touched the crinkly paper that covered his green vinyl examining table, absently tearing it between her long, fragile, blue-veined fingers. She was not even aware of this, her actions having become disconnected from her thoughts long ago. “It’s like on television,” she said. “You know how on television sometimes there’s an image, like, like Bugs Bunny or something, and right next to him there’s a ghost of that image, like an entirely different Bugs Bunny?”

  Her face was pale, more than usual. A blue-purple vein ran beneath the skin of her temple like a trickle of red wine.

  “Sure,” my brother said, somewhat bemused.

  “That’s what I’ve been seeing.” Almost imperceptibly, the vein in her temple pulsed. It had grown more prominent in recent years, Eric noticed, her skin whiter, finer, more transparent.

  She’d become ghostlike herself.

  “You’re seeing double,” he said. “With televisions that’s called a double signal.” This was descriptive only, not a diagnosis.

  And somewhat dismissive.

  Our mother folded her arms. “Except, my young Dr. Airie, I know which image is real and which one isn’t.” She was proud, it seemed, her thin lips set.

  “Bugs Bunny isn’t real, Mom.”

  She giggled, rolled her eyes. “Eric.”

  “Are you seeing a double image right now?”

  “Not now,” she said firmly. “Just sometimes.”

  “Hmmm.” Eric, a doctor, my big brother, a fucking brain surgeon, wore a white lab coat. Beneath it, a pale blue cotton shirt monogrammed with the initials ERA, the E slightly larger, for Eric Richard Airie. He also wore a deep blue tie—silk, of course—with an elegant pattern of fleur-de-lis in gold thread. Hannah, his mother, our mother, wore a soft suede jacket, chocolate brown, a beige linen skirt, Italian leather boots. Outside, it was sweater weather, early fall. Another Labor Day had come and gone. “That could be her eyes,” Eric suggested, as if speaking to another doctor in the room, as if anyone else were listening. He walked to the wall, turned off the lights, and removed a small black penlight from his lab-coat pocket. “Have you been to the optometrist, to, uh, Dr. Carewater—isn’t that his name?” He aimed it directly into our mother’s pupils, one after the other, watching them dilate, and on his face was a well-mannered look of medical concern.

  She blinked. “I thought of that.” Hannah, a physical therapist, a hand specialist, would have known if it were her eyes. “My eyes are fine,” she insisted. “A little myopia never caused this kind of trouble. Besides, it comes and it goes.” She repeated herself now, saying, “it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes,” turning the words into a song.

  “Okay.” Eric sucked his teeth. “It could just be that you’re crossing your eyes for some reason.” He walked to the wall and flicked the lights back on. His sandwich was waiting at his desk. The pumpkin soup, was it getting cold? “Can you remember when it happens? I mean, does it happen when you’re coming out of a dark room and into a bright one? Does it happen when you wake up, after your eyes have been closed for a long time?” He was looking for information, clues that would lead to an explanation, data upon which to configure a theory. He was rubbing his hands together. He was growing impatient, too, hungrier by the second.

  “Let me think.”

  They gave the examining room over to silence for a moment, and Eric looked at his clean, hair
less fingers.

  Hannah tore at the paper on the examining table. Then she said, “During the day. I’ll be thinking, thinking about something, I suppose, and then I, and then I just realize that I’m seeing a ghost.”

  “You just realize it.”

  “It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve been seeing one.”

  “Thinking about what, specifically?”

  Our mother paused again, eyes unfocused, and then she made her characteristic statement. “Just lost, dear, just lost in my thoughts.” She had abandoned the crinkly paper and was now stroking the suede of her new brown jacket, combing it in the direction of the nap. When our mother wears something new, she beams, her face joyful—radiant as a young nun’s. “And there’s Pilot,” she said softly, her expression dropping. “I’ve been thinking about your brother.”

  I am Pilot.

  I am Pilot James Airie, Eric’s brother, younger by five years, named after our father’s passion—he flew for the airlines—a profession I have never even considered for myself.

  Eric moved to the sink and pulled up his sleeves. Ever since he had gone to medical school, he washed his hands compulsively, repeatedly, even at home. Ever since medical school, he had been aware of the risks, the bacteria and bacilli, the microbes thriving just out of sight. “There’s always Pilot,” he agreed.

  Once, there was Fiona, too. Fiona May Airie, our sister.

  Our mother hummed. It was a song no one had ever heard before, one that she made up every time she hummed it. It was, I believe, her way of trying to reassure Eric. She seemed always just on the verge of paying attention, her mind ready to wander away, her gray-green eyes unfocused and hazy. Humming underscored this quality, and it made Eric crazy. It makes everyone crazy.

  I know, because I do it, too.

  “Are you disoriented?” Eric asked, his tone saying, Look at me, listen.

  “Now?”

  He sighed. “When you’re seeing these ghosts.”

  “Disoriented?”

  “I mean,” he laughed softly, “more than usual?”

  She sang, “Don’t be cruel.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Disoriented,” our mother acknowledged. “Yes.”

  “Tired?”

  “Tired,” she admitted. “Yes, yes, that, too.”

  “Are you sleeping?”

  “Not so well.”

  “Are you, have you been talking to Dad?”

  “Your father is lost—”

  “—in the wild blue yonder.” Eric narrowed his eyes. He had heard our mother say this a billion times. “I know,” he said. When she spoke to our father, which was seldom, Hannah became lovesick, unfocused, a teenage girl pining for her boyfriend.

  She hummed again, a slight smile on her lips.

  “What about caffeine?”

  “I only drink tea, dear, you know that.”

  “No coffee?”

  This was a stupid question, her face told him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Okay.” Eric dried his hands and threw the paper towel into the mesh chrome wastebasket in the corner.

  Our mother’s hair, which was becoming gray, which until so very recently had been light chestnut, soft as mink, fell in uneven curls around her elegant face. It was a feminine face, a doll’s face, all too easy to see hurt in. It is my face, too, a patient’s face, a waiting-room face, transforming everyone who looks at it into a doctor. When I am alone, my face disappears, and I have no face at all. In someone’s presence, especially Eric’s or my father’s, I am all face and no insides, I am a network of tiny muscles and porcelain skin stretched over a surface of cartilage, bone, and teeth. She pushed her hair away.

  “Can you try to worry less?”

  Our mother laughed. “About Pilot?”

  “About Pilot, about Dad.” He took a step toward her. “About everything.”

  “I don’t worry about you.” She placed a hand on his cheek, her fingers cool. It was always disappointing to Eric, but this is the temperature of women’s hands.

  “Please?”

  “I can try.” She sang, “I can try, I can try, I can try.”

  “Next time you’re seeing the ghosts,” he said, “give me a call, describe them.” Eric took a deep breath. “But now I have a patient coming, a real one.” He had food waiting—the sandwich, the soup—no doubt it had grown cold. “Not that you aren’t real, Mom.”

  “I’m already gone.” Our mother touched her jacket, stroking the nap of the suede downward, as though petting a cat. “Thank you, honey.” She gave my brother a swift kiss and clutched his hands, squeezing his fingers in a motherly way that means something about holding on, about not letting go, about regret.

  Only mothers can do this, I’ve noticed. Or old girlfriends.

  Eric watched her leave the room, her voluminous beige linen skirt sweeping the sterile air behind her. I imagine that he washed his hands once more because she had touched them and that he looked up to see his own movie-star, brain-surgeon face in the mirror above the sink.

  I was looking in the mirror, too, staring and staring at my empty, empty face, when I decided that my brother would simply have to kill me.

  Behind the house, the house we grew up in—or didn’t, depending on how it’s viewed—was a flagstone patio that led to an old, kidney-shaped, in-ground swimming pool. Years ago, before Fiona disappeared, we used this pool constantly, swimming in it every summer day. When he wasn’t flying, our father lay in a deck chair beside it, his feet up, the Times spread over his chest, snoring through a smile. Our mother would bring out a tray of iced tea, a round slice of lemon over the lip of each glass—something she’d seen in House Beautiful, probably—and place it at the pool’s edge. We could swim up, all of us kids, and take our drinks. Usually our father’s had whiskey in it, too, and sometimes I would steal a sip and feel that strange stinging on my tongue, the delicious numbness that followed.

  Later, after Fiona disappeared, after the yard had been allowed to go fallow, and the pool had been emptied, and the weeds had grown into it and made cracks in the concrete, my mother had it filled in with earth.

  A truck arrived one day, and the backyard of our house was transformed.

  She mowed, tended, planted, groomed.

  When the pool was filled, our mother kept a garden there, growing yellow and orange marigolds around the perimeter to keep the bugs away. She planted the vegetables of her New England girlhood. She grew carrots and potatoes, beets, radishes and parsnips, string beans and turnips. For the past several years she had even been growing rhubarb. And now, this year, early fall, tall pink and green stalks rose, their broad, purple leaves waving hello to the house.

  Hello from the past.

  When she came home from Eric’s office that day, our mother was not seeing ghosts, I believe, because she was making a rhubarb pie. Not that anyone ever ate these pies our mother made. They had a strange, rubbery flavor, I’d always thought, like a sweetened bicycle tire. But she remembered being a little girl in Massachusetts, picking rhubarb and bringing it home to our great-aunt Jenny, who would wash the stalks and make a cone out of a page of newspaper. She’d put sugar in the cone, and little Hannah would dip the stalks into it, skipping merrily back to the woods. I always imagined her bounding along, her reddish hair all crazy against a flushed face, an October wind fierce inside her pink girl ears. When I imagine our mother’s childhood it is the nineteenth century, even though she was born during the Second World War, and she wears a cape like Little Red Riding Hood.

  Sometimes I imagine Fiona that way, too.

  The past all blurs together.

  My own past, Hannah’s, my brother’s. Memory’s soft focus.

  When I was a boy, I liked to hide in the woods behind our house in East Meadow, pretending to be the wolf boy. Alone, the English language forgotten, I’d growl, crawling through leaves. Once, a year or so before the pool was filled in, a year or so after Fiona disappeared, I sneaked into the house on a Sunday aft
ernoon and removed a steak from the refrigerator. I snarled and tore at it with my teeth, right there on the kitchen floor. It felt slimy and tasted like blood. “Pilot,” our mother said. She stood behind me. I was eleven, on my hands and knees, a raw piece of meat in my mouth, on the kitchen floor, suddenly made aware of my actual identity—and disappointed by it, of course. “We were going to have that for dinner.”

  “It’s still good,” I said, my face hot.

  Eric appeared next to her. “Jesus Christ, Pilot, what the hell are you doing?”

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

  “He’s pretending to be a dog.”

  But today, in that same kitchen, Hannah had made a rhubarb pie, and when I came downstairs in my old blue bathrobe, I could smell it, sweet and woodsy, filling the house. “Did you see Eric?” I asked.

  She only hummed.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said not to worry—not to worry, not to worry, not to worry.”

  I sat down at the kitchen table while she took the pie out of the oven.

  “I made a pie,” she announced.

  “I can see that.” I was insane, by the way. I had moved back home at the age of twenty-nine. I had been rescued by Eric, in fact, found on the beach in California, out of money, suicidal, experiencing one senseless epiphany after another.

  “It’s not ready to eat yet,” my mother warned. “Still too hot.”

  The theme of her kitchen was the teapot, and on the tablecloth was a cheerful pattern of fat ones, all yellow. I traced the outline of one of these yellow teapots with my finger and examined the pie she had placed in front of me, the crust underdone, and I asked, “Are you seeing any ghosts?”

  She had a mean streak sometimes. She said, “Just you.”

  Recently, I’d been feeling my hands and feet grow light and I was afraid that if I moved, I’d float away, carried up into the air the way a child’s body floats to the surface of a pool when she’s pretending—