Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  “Terrible.”

  “Scum of the earth.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said. “Doctors aren’t known for being such nice guys.”

  She couldn’t let this go any further. She changed the subject. “I’ll be speaking to your brother tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure he’s in good hands.”

  “Well,” Katherine said, “it’s the medication that will have the greatest effect, as you know. I’ll just try to make sure he gets back to normal as quickly as—”

  “Pilot hasn’t been normal for a while. But thank you in advance for looking out for him.”

  “You’re a good brother, Eric.”

  “I’m not so sure Pilot would agree.”

  The kettle began to scream.

  “The water’s boiling,” Katherine said. “I have to go.”

  “My mother drinks tea,” Eric said from the car.

  “She does?”

  “Maybe Freud was right.”

  Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy stood in the kitchenette of her enclosure, the phone to her ear, naked, and felt the impulse to tell him, to describe herself to Eric—her uneven breasts, the hair sprouting from her nipple, the chewed nails. But she didn’t, only saying, “Good night, Eric.” And for some reason after she hung up the phone, she said it again, more clearly this time, to no one at all. “Good night, Eric Airie.”

  She would have to stop this, she told herself.

  There was another message on her machine, so Katherine pushed the button.

  Michele had been calling.

  Michele had been calling on and off for a couple of years now, but the messages were increasing lately, and growing longer, more frantic, month by month. Often when Katherine came home from work and saw the message light blinking, she’d listen, holding her finger a millimeter above the delete button. “Katherine,” her sister would say. “Katherine, it’s me, it’s Michele. I just wanted you to know that I’m doing great, that everything’s great, really great, and, and, and I’m probably going to get this new job at a, well, at this nice little bookstore. I thought you’d like that, right? I mean, how you love to read and everything. Anyway—” And if it became too much, Katherine pushed the delete button, a single depression of the middle finger saying, Fuck you, Michele—disappear.

  Sometimes, Katherine just listened to hear her sister’s voice, the desperation so far inside it, so much a part of it that it had retained a permanent quaver, a modulation like an uncertain stroke across the string of a cello. Sometimes Katherine deleted the message before she’d even heard it. She knew it was Michele, she told herself, by the way the message light on her answering machine blinked.

  My brother got into his vintage black Jaguar after seeing Katherine to her sapphire-blue VW Rabbit in the parking lot of the barbecue restaurant and waited, watching, while she pulled out onto the highway. He wondered how much wine she’d had before he arrived. Perhaps she shouldn’t be driving, he thought. A few moments later, he pulled out himself. He had a long drive ahead of him, but one he was accustomed to making. He put a disc into the Blaupunkt, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and he whistled along with it, the even measures of music filling the car’s interior.

  Eric liked Katherine. He liked her tangle of crazy hair. He liked her clear, freckled skin. He liked her green, anxious eyes. He especially liked the intelligence that beamed out of them, and, being Eric, my brother, he liked the idea of the challenge her eyes represented.

  He thought of our mother’s eyes, of the ghosts she’d been seeing, the double images and blurred outlines.

  Could it be cancer?

  He drove this way for a while, trying to relive each beat of his conversation with Katherine, considering the way she used her silverware, divining her socioeconomic background. He saw a strong father, middle class, an intellectual but unfulfilled mother. He saw Katherine’s girlhood head behind book after book, her eventual transcendence into graduate school, her yearning for independence.

  He smiled to himself.

  It doesn’t take a brain surgeon, he thought.

  The clock on his mahogany dashboard said five after eleven. He’d wait another few minutes, and then he would call. Just to check in, make sure she was all right. Tell her what a good time he had.

  Women like that.

  He whistled along with the music. He stared ahead at the highway, its gray asphalt rushing toward him, the yellow lines slipping under the tires like time. He gripped the wheel and accelerated, pushing his car from seventy, to eighty, to ninety miles an hour. He was alone out here. His radar detector, clipped beneath the dash, didn’t even blink. No police. He was free and clear. He turned off the music and picked up the phone, dialing information for the number.

  When Katherine’s machine answered, he was, at first, concerned. “Katherine,” he said. “It’s me, Eric. Are you home?”

  But she picked up after a moment, and her voice revealed everything.

  I was moved from the squeaking vinyl couch in the lobby by a nurse with a wide, beautiful brown face and soft, warm hands. “Come with me, honey,” she said. “Come back to bed now and rest.” Her eyes were dead, though, clouded over like the sky outside the windows. I got up and followed her, my feet shuffling in slippers I couldn’t remember putting on. Later, in my room, I heard the voices in the light fixtures whispering, arguing, commenting, but I couldn’t quite make out exactly what they were saying anymore—they were just out of reach. I heard the long, thin branch of the tree outside tapping away at the glass. I heard the soft hum of the hospital itself. I could hear my mother all the way across the highway and the woods and the cul-de-sac. I could hear her voice. She was talking to herself, just softly, her feet crick-crick-cricking across the blue-and-white oriental, a cup of tea in her hands. From my hospital bed I could hear across the highway and beyond the woods and far out over the hills that lay past East Meadow to my brother in his car, the even measures of The Four Seasons playing on his car stereo, his fingers gripped tightly on the wheel. His thoughts were racing over the yellow lines quicker than his tires. I reached up to feel the scratch on my face. Was it fading? I felt the shoelace twisted around the middle of my right hand like a reminder. I tried to smile—tried to move my face at all—when an aide came and turned out the overhead, quieting the voices, dimming the room. I could feel my cheekbones hardening inside my face, the skull turning to porcelain, my teeth like glass. Somewhere down the hall, a man was saying, “Oh please, oh please, oh please.” There were long shadows cast across my body, and my body was too thin and too long and I was as brittle as a skeleton.

  The afternoon before the night of the party when Fiona disappeared forever, our mother was putting eye shadow on, green to match her eyes, in front of the gold-framed vanity mirror she kept in her dressing room. Fiona was standing behind her, hand on her shoulder, fascinated by every application of color.

  I wanted money. “Hey, Mom,” I said, standing in the doorway. “Can I have five bucks?”

  Our mother smiled through this question. “What for?”

  “I helped get the house ready for the party.”

  She kept smiling. “That wasn’t out of the kindness of your heart, my dear one?”

  “I helped, too,” Fiona put in.

  Dismissively, she said, “I know you did.”

  “All right then,” I bargained. “I’ll take four.”

  Our mother turned to face me, one eye made up, the other bare. “What happened to your allowance?”

  “Two dollars?” I said. “Two dollars is a joke. Lenny Haverston gets five.” Lenny Haverston lived up the street. He had everything.

  “Well, aren’t the Haverstons extravagant!” Our mother sprayed her hair, teased into a million specific and individual curls, and the little dressing room became that much more toxic.

  “Wow,” I said, “you look great.”

  Fiona said, “You’re beautiful, Mommy.”

  “Where’d you two learn that?” our mother asked. “From your fa
ther?”

  “Learn what?”

  “Flattery.”

  I tried again. “Three dollars?”

  Our mother sighed. “You can take two dollars out of my purse—if I have it.”

  “Can I?” Fiona said. “Can I, too?”

  “Fiona,” she said, and then she reneged. “All right.”

  “I’m nine and I get two and she’s seven and she gets two?”

  “That’s the way life is.” Our mother applied eye shadow to the forgotten eye, silvery green, fading to fox brown. She closed her lid and brushed the color on, and then dusted more powder onto the brush. All she wore was a slip and a bra, shimmery yellow. I could see her feet touching each other nervously beneath the vanity.

  “How many people are coming?” I asked.

  “We invited absolutely everybody,” our mother said. “Everyone on the planet, it seems.”

  “Everybody?” Fiona laughed.

  “Everybody.”

  “Even the pope?”

  “Even the pope.”

  “The president?” Fiona was giggling, her face contorted.

  “They did not invite the president,” I said. “God, Fiona, you’re so stupid.”

  “She knows that,” our mother said. “She’s just being silly.”

  “What about Donny Osmond?” Fiona asked. “Did you invite Donny Osmond, too?”

  “She invited your butt,” I said.

  “Pilot.”

  “She invited your butt,” Fiona shot back.

  I laughed derisively.

  “Mom,” Fiona pleaded.

  Our mother unscrewed a tube of lipstick. “Kiss me, you two.” She put her arms out, reaching for us. “Because once the lipstick goes on, there’s no more kissing.”

  At the party were the Tischmans from next door. There were the Johnsons and the Brookses and the Daniers. There were the Joneses and the Browns and the Classens and the Haverstons. There were more. There were people who came to the party and left early. There were people from the neighborhood, from our father’s airline, from our mother’s hospital. There were four bachelors, including Paul Davidson, Karl Fuchs, Arnold Desmond, and Howard Rice. Equally, according to my mother’s plans, there were four single women—Celia Oblena, Sherry Meyerson, Tricia Caulder, and Lacy Klugman, our mother’s best friend, a divorcée. There were people who came uninvited, like Bryce Telliman, the man with the blond hair. There were people at the party whom our parents hardly knew. There were introductions. There were chance meetings, new acquaintances, old arguments. There were romantic trysts, stolen kisses, secret encounters. There was grab-ass.

  That night I wandered through the party stealing sips, the different flavors weird on my tongue, from people’s drinks. The women leaned down to speak to me in silly, high-pitched tones, and I took the opportunity to look down their shirts. The men collared me and spoke in gruff, overly friendly voices, slapping me on the shoulders. I smiled back at these grown-ups, wondering who the hell some of them were, recognizing others as the parents of children I knew from school.

  Many of these people wanted to know who I was.

  “Pilot,” I’d say.

  “Are you the proprietor of this establishment?” one especially tall woman asked me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Hey, little guy,” one man said to me. “Would you happen to know where I might go to the bathroom?”

  “In the pool,” I said.

  “A real wiseguy,” I overheard someone say about me.

  “Just like his father.”

  “Pilot,” some man said. I didn’t recognize him. “Pilot.” He was rotund, with a gray-and-black beard. “Why don’t you run and grab me another ice-cold can of beer?” He smiled. “Would you do that for an old friend?”

  I studied this man. He wore a blue, gold-buttoned jacket, even though it was very warm out. “No.”

  “Don’t you remember me?” he said. “I met you about—well, about five years ago. How old are you now, Pilot?”

  “Nine,” I said.

  “That would make you about four in those days. And that would make me about forty-four back then.” He laughed drunkenly. “So how about it, Pilot? An ice-cold one?”

  I said I would, but by the time I reached the kitchen, I had experienced so much additional confusion I couldn’t bear the idea of making my way back out.

  Plus, I didn’t like the way he kept repeating my name.

  And our father was standing in the kitchen doorway. “How’re ya holdin’ up there, my boy?” he said.

  I nodded, saying, “I’m fine.” He only said my boy when he’d been drinking.

  Our father put a hand directly on top of my head. He cupped his ear to someone at the party. “Ice?”

  “Ice!” someone shouted back. “Yes! More ice!”

  He turned to look at me. “Shit,” he said. “I’m not sure if we have any more ice.”

  “There’s ice,” I said. I saw it in the sink behind him. “There’s plenty of ice.”

  He was drunk. And probably for the first time in my life, I understood what that meant. I didn’t know where it would lead. I only knew that he wasn’t himself right now, that my real father wouldn’t return until the morning.

  He had placed torches all around the pool, and now, the night having completely taken over the yard, they illuminated the faces of our party guests like actors in stage lights. Their smiles lit up strangely, surrealistically, and there was so much talking I could no longer distinguish one individual voice from the next, except that every now and then I thought I heard my name being mentioned somewhere in the vast conversation. I began to feel they were talking about me secretly, knowing they could speak freely about me because I couldn’t hear them above the din. I stood at the kitchen doorway like that for a long time, my father looming above me, just listening to the number of times my name was mentioned. Were they pointing, too? Were they laughing? People moved in and out of the kitchen door, moving past me like I wasn’t even there. I caught glimpses of Fiona every now and then, flirting with the blond man with the mustache. Sometimes he would pick her up, and she would put her arms around him, and whisper into his ear. Was it about me? She still wore her red bathing suit and red sneakers. What was she saying?

  The view from the woods was of the yellow torches flashing gold light off the surface of the water in the pool. It was of the faces of the people at this party rising up in flashes of light, too, frozen as if in a strobe. It was of glittering drinks with shining ice cubes rattling inside the shimmering glasses. The view from the woods was of women in stylish, shining dresses, men in dark shorts and Hawaiian shirts. It was of blue jeans on the younger people and summer suits on the older ones. It was of a crowd of people surrounding a small backyard pool, a party on flagstones, a surfeit of lawn chairs. It was of two children, one nine, one seven, squirming through this crowd of adults, the adults leaning toward them from time to time, hands on their knees, pretending, with great hilarity and laughter, that these children—this little boy and girl—were the hosts.

  I moved closer, imperceptible to the people in the backyard, creeping fern by fern, millimeter by millimeter, toward the house. I was the earth rolling beneath the lawn, unfurling like a blanket.

  The party continued, and I advanced silently, one-billionth of an inch at a time, closer and closer.

  Someone had put “Light My Fire” on the stereo.

  “—so anyway, Hannah,” I heard someone saying to my mother, “I was just coming off Sky Highway, turning my steering wheel when I felt this terrible pain, this shooting pain in my hand, and I was wondering, wondering just what—”

  “It could be arthritis.”

  “She certainly isn’t old enough for—”

  “—ain’t seen nothing yet, Dave. Let me tell you—”

  “—been trapping animals out there, and he caught the family cat by accident, can you believe—”

  “Can I help you with something, some drinks, perhaps?”
<
br />   “—along came the train, and when I got on, all I could think about was Marcia and how I just wanted to get back to her.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, that was a long, long time ago.”

  “Eric did, or was it Pilot?”

  “—cute, aren’t you, just fantastically adorable, little—”

  “—about your other son, Jim, don’t you have—”

  “—was, flying on fumes, practically, no fucking idea in the world if I was even in the right vicinity, the Vietcong shooting at me, snipers everywhere, and when I saw that clearing, I—”

  “—get me another one—”

  “—all my favorite songs—”

  “—just went straight for it, I mean, you don’t see that kind of thing in the jungle over there, not very often, and not where I was flying—”

  “—tells this story every time he drinks, it’s embarrassing—”

  “—love her—”

  “—are you disagreeing?”

  “—no, sir—”

  “I swear to God I thought you said disappearing.”

  “What?”

  “—in that part of the world it’s all vegetation, all jungle, climbing vines, mangroves, weird swamps, and those people live like it’s a thousand years ago, ten thousand—”

  “Do they really eat bugs?”

  “—had too much, I think—”

  “It’s the same story every time he drinks.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, all right? I happen to think it’s an entertaining story, and I happen to be drinking sometimes when other people are around, so if you don’t mind—”

  “—think it’s a wonderful story, really, I—”

  “—hell is he, anyway?”

  “Excuse me, you said, but are you disappearing with me?”

  “Oh my God, that is so hilarious.”

  “—like you’ve got a girlfriend. She’s not bothering you, is—”

  In the woods was a stillness derived from this view of the party. In the woods out here behind our parents’ house was a quiet that only a short but infinite distance enables. There was a darkness in these woods in contrast to the brightness of the faces lighting up in the torchlight. There was a rustling in the treetops. As always, there was wind in the leaves. There was unrest. There was an almost imperceptible chill arriving through the trunks and black bark of the trees that came up from somewhere deep in the ground, some great source of coldness that rose inexorably this time of year. From the woods a voice would rise off the top of the party and take on a life of its own. A flicker of light would bank off a bough. A shriek of laughter would pierce through the branches, a strain of music wafting in like perfume, and in here it would sound exactly like someone was screaming, but at such a low volume that it was almost impossible to hear. I saw a man step into the woods, a man with long blond hair, a man who was thin and young, silhouetted against the dark trees. He put his hand on a trunk, and let his head drop. I could see his chest heaving as if he were crying or, I thought, as if he were about to be sick.