Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  I went to his side and leaned onto his lap and looked up at his large muscly face—the face Eric would later grow into.

  “That’s a hell of a story, Jim,” one of the people standing around him said. “Too bad it isn’t true.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “It’s true,” I said. “It’s totally true.” I shook my head at these people.

  “I was only kidding, Pilot,” the man said. “Of course it’s true. Of course it is.”

  They all smiled at me like I was an idiot.

  “Are you hungry?”

  I nodded.

  “Go into the kitchen,” Dad said. “There’s all kinds of stuff in there. Just help yourself.”

  “Can I have another sip of your drink?”

  Hilarity all around.

  “Get out of here.”

  I weaseled my way through the party once more toward the kitchen, just off the sliding doors on the patio. Hannah was putting her arms around some man’s shoulders. He wore a white office shirt that was totally open, revealing his entire chest. They were dancing. It was only joking, I could tell. But it was dancing.

  “Mom?” I said.

  She kept dancing.

  “Mom?”

  She stopped. “What?”

  “I’m getting something to eat. Is that all right?”

  “Yes, it’s all right.” She shook her head in exasperation. “Get something for your sister, too,” she said. “Make sure Fiona gets something to eat, too. Okay?”

  I nodded and went into the kitchen.

  There were soda and liquor bottles on every counter. There were bags of potato chips and boxes of pretzels. There was a fondue pot, yellowy cheese bubbling over. There were raw slices of crisp vegetables. There were various dips. Some guy was dancing around and pouring all kinds of different drinks. He wore a blue shirt and tie, like he had come here directly from work. But there was a big spot on his shirt where he’d spilled something.

  “Are you Eric?” he asked.

  “I’m Pilot.”

  “A very interesting name. Can you fly?”

  “Someday I’ll fly. But now I’m too young.”

  “What can I get for you, young Pilot? A gin and tonic? A whiskey and soda?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  He eyed me with mock suspicion. “What do you mean? You don’t drink?” he said. “A drinking problem at your age?”

  “You’re an idiot,” I said.

  He just looked at me.

  I shrugged and left the room. Maybe I wasn’t so hungry. “Fiona?” I yelled. Where the heck was my sister?

  Often, if I found myself alone in the house, I’d go into Eric’s room, even though he had explicitly told me not to. I wanted to look at his trophies, which he kept in a tall bookcase our mother had painted sea-green. I’d run my fingers over the swimming ribbons and the gold statues of football players, their bodies caught in motion. I’d read again and again the certificates of achievement he’d received in the Thomas Edison Junior High School and the Albert Einstein High athletic departments. On the top shelf of the bookcase, all the way up, was the New York State Junior Scientist cup, a large silver bowl with his name, Eric Richard Airie, etched in scrolly letters. It was way too high for me to reach, of course, so I would pull Eric’s desk chair over and stand on it just so I could run my fingers along the silver rim. Someday I would have trophies like this, too, I told myself. I used to pretend that Eric would say those words: Someday, Pilot, you’ll have trophies like this, too.

  Upstairs in my room, I could hear my parents and their guests outside raising their voices. I could hear the sound of all those glasses being filled, of all those ice cubes rattling around inside them. Our mother had recently redecorated my bedroom with a racing-car motif, and everywhere were old-fashioned blue-and-white and red-and-white-striped race cars, the drivers hunched over the wheels, those funny egg-shaped helmets on their heads, the bold prime numbers—3, 5, 7—on their hoods. I lay down, curling up against the sound of all those voices rising into the air outside my open window, and I imagined myself in one of those race cars. All those voices became the sound of the engines gunning around the track, and I saw myself in one car and my brother in another, and we drove side by side, not trying to outrace each other, neither one of us trying to win, but going as fast as we could.

  When I woke up, the house was silent except for the clinking and clanking sounds of my parents collecting glasses and emptying ashtrays. It must’ve been three or four in the morning, before any light had crept into the sky at all—pitch black. All the windows and doors were still open, and a chill had invaded every room. It felt damp and there was a smell of wet towels. I sat up and listened for a bit, hearing my father muttering to my mother every now and then, and after a while I heard nothing, so I went downstairs.

  In the living room he sat with his legs far apart, his head down, his hands holding his face.

  “Dad?”

  He rubbed his hands roughly over his eyes and forehead.

  “Dad?”

  He groaned. “Go back to bed, Pilot.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s late,” he said. “It’s really, really late.”

  “I never ate anything,” I told him. “I’m really, really hungry.”

  “You’re hungry.” He said this flatly.

  I waited. I was still wearing my polyester Declaration of Independence shirt and the white jeans.

  “You want some cereal?”

  “Okay.”

  “So go get yourself some cereal.”

  “All right already.” I made a face at him, but it was probably too dim to see, so I walked into the kitchen. Hannah was in there, humming. “Was it a good party?” I asked.

  “Was it? Oh, I don’t know.” She touched the top of my head, her fingers wet from the sink.

  “I’m hungry.” I grabbed a handful of potato chips from a bowl on the counter. “Can I have a soda?”

  “I’m so tired,” Hannah said. “I’m just so tired. Have you seen your father? Did he go to bed?”

  “He’s in the living room.”

  “Did Eric come home yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you turn out the lights, dear?”

  I nodded again, and she walked out of the kitchen with the back of her hand to her forehead.

  For a while I ate the chips off the counter and drank a warm Coke. Then I went out to the living room again and saw that my father had disappeared. Good, I thought. I sat down on the couch where he had been sitting and rubbed my face the same way he had. Now my face was covered in potato chip grease. I lay down and rubbed my face against the rough blue material of the couch to get the grease off. Comfortable now, I stayed that way until I fell asleep again. On the couch that night, for the first time, I think, I dreamed I was the wolf boy in the woods, naked, running with a pack of dogs. In this dream the woods behind our house had grown larger and had swallowed the house. I was wild. In the dream I tore out the throat of another animal with my bare hands. I opened my eyes from this dream and saw Eric’s fourteen-year-old face only inches from mine.

  “You are such a fucking moron,” he was saying.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I’m going to drag you out into the woods by your feet,” he said, whispering. “I’m going to take an ice pick and push it through your hand, right through the middle, and then I’m going to push the ice pick into your ear—”

  “Eric.”

  “—just far enough so you can’t even hear yourself screaming out of that ear but you’re not dead yet, and then I’m going to pull it out and push it into your other ear.”

  “Please, Eric.”

  “And then I’m going to stick the ice pick into your eye.”

  “Please stop.”

  “And then your other eye.” At this, I squeezed my eyes shut, imagining my brother really had blinded me. I was trembling all over. “And then I’m going to leave you in the woods for a while
, and I’m going to watch you stumble around, all deaf and blind, screaming like an idiot, you fucking moron—”

  There was a crashing sound that came from the patio. I opened my eyes. Eric’s head turned.

  “What was that?” He got up and walked to the window.

  “What was it?”

  He slid open the patio doors and stepped through, turning on the porch light. I got up from the couch and followed him. The flagstones were covered with broken glass. “One of the pitchers fell off the table,” Eric said. There was wind in the treetops, a faraway rustling sound. There was a ripple on the surface of the pool. “Can you feel the winter?” he said. “It’s far away, but I can feel it.”

  And I knew just what he meant.

  The sky had gone gray, and the sun’s rays were spiking over the trees. It must have been six in the morning. There would be mixed clouds that day, and the tiniest chill would invade the air, the infant beginnings of a new season.

  It was coming.

  “I’m going back to my room,” I told Eric. “And by the way, you’re a jerk.” I walked upstairs. In the hallway, when I passed Fiona’s room, I noticed that her door was closed. It occurred to me that Fiona never slept with her door closed. She was still too little. She was still afraid of the dark. But I didn’t do anything about it. I simply went into my race-car bedroom, closed the door, closed the windows, put on my matching race-car pajamas, and crawled into bed.

  In one of the imaginary photographs of Fiona, she is standing in the center of my family for a group portrait. Her hands are folded together in front of her red velvet dress. A white satin ribbon is tied in a bow around her neck. Her eyes are wide open, and she is smiling like only little girls who are having their pictures taken can smile—full vanity and joy, a complete absence of self-consciousness. Her hair has been done, and it curls up at the ends, sweeping down her back the way it did in the days before she disappeared. Our father’s fingers rest lightly on her head. She is so little next to him that even with his arms fully extended he can only just touch the top of her head. The rest of my family sort of fades into the background in this imaginary picture. I am there wearing my Declaration of Independence shirt and white pants. Eric is splendid in a dark three-piece suit, hair feathered back. Our father, eyes blue as ice, stares ahead into the sky behind the photographer—who would that have been?—and our mother, unfocused, turns her head slightly away.

  Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy was in no hurry to arrive at the small, lightless enclosure overlooking a parking lot—a highway in the distance, a strip mall beyond the highway, quiet as the inside of a drawer—that was her new apartment. She had no furniture yet, anyway. She had no television, not even a radio. Mark had kept all those things, of course, claiming she’d come crawling back. He’d kept everything he could, even some of her clothing, old photographs of her parents and sister, and a baby blanket, for Christ’s sake, that her own grandmother had knitted. What did he want with that? Katherine had brought a few boxes of books and psychology journals, the answering machine, the clothes she could pack in one suitcase. And there were the things she had collected from her office in the city, things Mark had no access to. Then, when she found her new enclosure, the delivery guys had left her new mattress on the living room floor. And Katherine hadn’t had the energy, strength, or interest to put it up on its side and slide it into the bedroom.

  So her bedroom had become a closet, and the living room had become the room she lived in.

  Even though it didn’t feel much like living.

  Now, Katherine sat in her office instead, avoiding the drive home, putting off for a few more minutes her nightly visit to solitary confinement. She sat at her desk with her hands curled like shells and her fingernails, what was left of them, to her teeth. She touched her tongue to the tip of her index finger and tasted the raw skin.

  No, she told herself, flattening her hands onto the desk.

  No, she told herself again.

  She faced the door and forced the muscles of her mouth into a smile. She knew the very act of smiling, the deliberate contortion of the facial muscles, could activate the endorphins of contentment. She had faith in this notion, in fact. It just wasn’t working right now.

  There was a faint light seeping into the room, like filthy water filling up a pool. It was the sunset filtering through a smog-yellow sky over the highway. She looked at the pad of paper in front of her. She had spoken to my mother in the hospital. She had seen Eric. The only one left to talk to was me.

  Katherine had written each one of our names on a single line on the sheet of yellow legal paper, creating a column for each. There was our father, too—James Airie. But, of course, he wasn’t available. He had probably never been available, Katherine thought.

  A fucking airline pilot.

  Typical.

  Tomorrow she would try to speak with me, see if the medication had taken effect, if my thinking had become any more cogent. Typically, the response to Clozaril was nearly instantaneous. She wondered what would happen if she took it herself. Her brain would simply shut down, more than likely. Maybe she would try it someday. Maybe someday she’d have a psychotic episode all her own.

  The telephone rang, and she picked up after a single ring, saying, “Katherine DeQuincey-Joy.”

  “Katherine,” a voice said, “this is Dr.—I mean,” he said, “this is Eric.” He was stumbling, nervous. “This is Eric Airie.”

  “Oh, hello, Eric.” Katherine exhaled. “I was just thinking about—”

  “Listen,” Eric said quickly, “I’m not calling about, about my brother. I mean, I know you might think this is unprofessional, and if you do, I’ll totally forget about it and completely understand.”

  Unprofessional. “Okay.” She knew what he would say next. She could feel it coming like the drop in an elevator.

  “Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  When had it become so dark in the sky outside the office window? The light in the room was blue. This was unprofessional, and not just for Eric. It was more so, in fact, for Katherine. “Like, on a date?” She had to clarify.

  “No,” Eric said quickly, “I just—no. I mean, not like a date at all. It’s just that I’m trying to deal with this, with my family thing right now, you know, and I don’t especially want to go home, you know what I mean, or go out with someone I’d have to explain myself to, and you seemed like—well, you seemed like a solution. Does that make sense?”

  “Half social,” Katherine said, “half therapy.” She allowed a small laugh to come through.

  “You’re very understanding.”

  She looked at her hands. How would she hide them? “I’m also starving.” Should she be doing this at all? She had never met socially with a client before. But Eric wasn’t exactly a client, and he was a doctor.

  “You’re also very nice.”

  “I’ll have to put this on my time sheet.”

  “Have you—”

  “I haven’t spoken to your brother today. I’m waiting—”

  “—for the medication to take effect, I understand,” Eric finished. “Pilot’s still pretty irrational, I know. I was going to ask, have you tried that new barbecue place on the highway?”

  “No.”

  “Do you like ribs?”

  “I love them.” The muscles around Katherine’s mouth contoured into a smile, this time a real one. She wondered if Eric could tell.

  “Would you like to meet me there?” His voice wasn’t nervous anymore.

  “All right.” Jesus Christ, how easy was she?

  “Are you sure this is okay? I mean, if you think this is, if this is not right, or if you’re not comfortable—”

  “You’re not my client,” Katherine said, even though she knew something about it wasn’t right. “Your brother is. Besides, I’ve been here over a month and haven’t been out with anyone. And I love barbecue, and I’m really hungry.”

  “I’ll get us a table by the pit,” Eric joked.


  “Great.” Katherine looked at the yellow legal pad in front of her, the columns she’d made for each family member. She realized she hadn’t made one for the sister, Fiona, and the whole page was used up. “And you can talk about your brother as much as you’d like,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  My mother had been sitting for most of the day in the green vinyl chair beside my bed. I was too tired to speak, but I’d look up every now and then and her eyes, somewhat unfocused, would rise to meet mine. She didn’t read. She didn’t look at a magazine. She didn’t even knit. My mother simply sat at the side of my bed and watched my face. I knew she was seeing two of me, the image of my face separating in her vision just enough so my ephemeral double lay nearby. And if I seemed aware enough she would ask if I wanted anything. “Water? A soda? Something to eat, dear?”

  “You can go, Mom,” I said. “I’m fine now.”

  She shook her head. The room was dim, so the voices were kept behind the hallway door.

  “I’m really feeling much better,” I told her. I was sluggish, though. I felt like I’d been sprayed with still-hardening glue. All the joints of my body were turning to glass.

  “I’ll stay a little while longer.”

  “Mom,” I said. “Hannah.”