Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  “Is that common?”

  “It’s a bit unusual.”

  “What do you do for it?”

  “There are medications. The passage of time often helps with things like this.”

  “She’s still seeing ghosts, then, I take it?”

  “Says she is.”

  “Double of everything?”

  “Double.”

  Katherine shook her head back and forth in amazement, her face like an egg inside a basket of hair. “How did I get mixed up with you people?”

  “Weird, aren’t we?”

  “What an understatement.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “One year ago,” she said incredulously, “a couple of months ago, in fact, I was living with a lawyer in the city. I had a whole different job, a different man in my bed, different clients coming to my office, a different boss.”

  “Some things are better,” Eric said, “aren’t they?”

  His hand had found its way around her belly. His finger and palm felt large and warm to Katherine there, pressing lightly into her skin.

  “Yes.” She giggled. “Some things are much better.” She closed her eyes against the flickering yellow street lamp.

  Later, she looked at me for a long moment, her eyes revealing the formulation, I could tell, of a question she believed would be difficult for me to answer. “I think we should talk about—” she began, then stopped. She touched her eye, pushing something out of its corner. Then she started again, saying, “I wanted to ask you, Pilot, to ask if you can sort out your feelings and thoughts about your brother for a moment.” She put one hand flat on the yellow legal pad. The other was poised above it, holding her silvery pen. “Do you think you can do that for me?”

  I still had my shoelace, and now tiny pieces of it, little time-blackened shreds, were starting to come off in my hands. I picked and picked, tearing bits of the end off and dropping them onto my leg. After a minute of this, I’d brush the little tearings onto the floor. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “I’ll ask you some questions, that’s all, and you just answer me as honestly as you can.”

  Upstairs, Hannah listened, eyes clouded over. Cancer threaded its way through her optical cortex.

  I sat up on the old blue couch and registered its rough fabric from time to time with my hands. “I can try.”

  I can try. I felt like I had been saying this a lot lately.

  I had been saying it for years.

  “Can you tell me what, what happened when Fiona disappeared?” Katherine was looking directly at me. “I mean, if Eric did it, if Eric took her, can you tell me how he did it, precisely, and what happened, step by step, as you remember it?” She wore the gray suit and the green satin shirt. The suit was lined with silk. I knew, because I heard it rustling beneath the gray outer fabric. Her hair was messier than usual, lights and darks all mixed together. Today, it was colder outside. A wintry wind had arrived. Brown leaves swirled in the yard.

  “You know,” I said, “I feel much better. I feel much more animated.”

  “That’s good.” Katherine smiled. “That’s great, in fact.”

  “And you know,” I said, “there was a good side of Eric.”

  She leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

  In the living room, I sat up on my mother’s couch. I tore a little piece of the shoelace off and dropped it on my leg. Katherine watched me. I saw her register the shoelace. Still, she didn’t say anything about it. “I mean,” I went on, “I’m not saying that I don’t, that I don’t love my brother.” I took a deep breath. “He could be nice sometimes, and not just—well, you know, not just a bastard.”

  “How was he nice?”

  “This is going to sound weird,” I said. “But it really was a positive experience.”

  “Don’t worry about how weird it sounds right now. We’ll worry about that later. Besides, maybe it’s not so weird.”

  “He got me into grass, when I was eleven or twelve, I think. He turned me on to marijuana for the first time.”

  “Really?” She was smiling.

  “I was trying out for the football team,” I told Katherine, “the Thomas Edison Junior High School Chargers. I was terrible. And Eric would come to watch. Our father was flying somewhere, usually, and when Dad was home, you know, he was sleeping most of the time. So Eric came.” I laughed a little bit, my eyes closed. “I thought he just wanted to humiliate me, you know, see how pathetic I was. But he was, I don’t know, he was there with his girlfriend, with Dawn Costello.”

  “Dawn Costello.”

  I thought I saw something flicker across Katherine’s face.

  “Yeah,” I said. “She was beautiful, and he watched me get slaughtered. I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking. I was thinking, I guess, that because Eric had been the star running back for the Junior Chargers, then I’d be at least good enough to make the team, you know. He used to come for every practice. He’d come and watch from the bleachers. This was junior high, and Eric was already a high school senior, I think.”

  Katherine nodded.

  “Anyway, when they called out the names for the team, I wasn’t on there. I was missing from the list. My name was—”

  “You didn’t make it?”

  “No.”

  “Was that disappointing?”

  “I guess it was. I was crying, I remember, and I wouldn’t take my helmet off because I was afraid the other kids could see the tears on my face.”

  I stopped talking. I was looking at the little bits and pieces of the shoelace I had piled on my leg. I’d have to stop, I thought, or I’d tear the whole thing apart, and there would be nothing left.

  “Pilot?”

  “What?”

  “So what happened?”

  “Oh.” I looked up. “So I went and sat on the bleachers and waited for Eric. He almost always walked home with me. Thomas Edison Junior High, it’s just on the other side of the woods from here.” I pointed to the window. “And he said good-bye to Dawn, and then they—”

  “What happened to her?”

  “To Dawn?”

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. She’s still here somewhere. She has a family.”

  Katherine nodded. “Okay, go on.”

  “So he said good-bye to Dawn and started walking home. And I followed him, wearing my stupid helmet the whole time because I was still crying, because I could never stop once I started. I was all hot under there, too, but I just followed him, and instead of taking the usual path, Eric walked into the woods, the deeper part of it.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of the woods when you were—”

  “No,” I laughed, “that came later. That’s only recent, that fear.” I paused for a moment. “Fiona was afraid of the woods,” I said. “Not me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt my face. I remembered the scratch that had been there. It was finally gone. How long had it been gone? “You’d think I would be afraid, right, the kind of kid I was?”

  She shrugged.

  “So we went into the woods,” I continued, “and Eric went to this clearing. It was one of those places, you know, where kids smoke pot and drink beer. Cigarette butts everywhere, bottle caps.”

  “Is it still there?”

  “The clearing? Yeah,” I said. “Of course it is. Kids still use it, I’m sure. Anyway, we sat down on this old piece of concrete pipe someone had left out there—”

  “Were you still wearing the helmet?”

  “I didn’t take it off for a while, because I was still crying, you know, always a crybaby, my father said.”

  “Go on.”

  “And Eric, he told me this story.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He was fourteen.” I pushed the balls of my hands into the sockets of my eyes. “And there was a kid in his class named Henry Addler. Henry wasn’t a big kid or anything, but he was unpredi
ctable, the kind of kid that could fly into a rage, you know, the kind of kid teachers are afraid of because he’s so crazy. Naturally, perhaps stupidly, Eric wasn’t afraid of Henry Addler at all. Eric was the smartest kid in class—and not a nerd, either. He was by far the best science student, and he was also the best athlete. Altogether that made him pretty much the most popular kid at Thomas Edison. Henry Addler was the most unreasonable kid. They were both superlatives, I guess, and that made them friends, or at least they had some weird kind of mutual respect.”

  “So what happened?” Katherine was interested, leaning forward.

  “Eric was doing homework for Henry, and in return Henry was stealing White Cross tablets from his mother’s medicine cabinet and giving them to Eric.”

  “Isn’t that an amphetamine?”

  “Yeah. Eric was really into speed. It helped him with sports.”

  “Go on,” Katherine said.

  “Anyway, all this time that Eric was telling me this story, I was sitting there with my helmet on and my face all hot because I was crying. And Eric was rolling this joint.”

  “Had you ever seen one before?”

  “I’d seen them, I think, but I had never smoked one. And I didn’t know Eric would show me how to smoke it that day. He was just telling me this story about Henry Addler and the White Cross.”

  “Finish the story,” Katherine said.

  I sighed. “What happened was, Eric gave Henry the wrong homework somehow. Not on purpose, he said, but something went wrong and Henry turned in his biology homework and got a big fat F. So Henry Addler didn’t say anything about it at first. At first he didn’t even tell Eric. What he did was give him a new kind of pill. He said his mother wasn’t taking White Cross anymore. Now she was taking something else. And he gave Eric four little yellow pills instead of the one white one he was used to.”

  “Yellow?” she said. “Were they—”

  “Valium,” I finished. “And he said Eric should take four of them to equal one White Cross.”

  “Did Eric take them?”

  “That’s what he told me. He took them right there, he said. He used to take speed in fifth period so he was super-athletic for after-school practice.”

  “He must have just passed out, right?”

  “Henry Addler pulled out his homework, the one that had the big fat F on it and showed it to Eric. He said, ‘You screwed me and now you’ve just taken poison and you’re going to die.’”

  “He said that?”

  “I don’t know what he really said. All I know is that Eric told me all this when I was sitting on the concrete pipe in the woods with him, and that’s when he handed me the joint.”

  “Did you take your helmet off?”

  “Yeah. I finally took it off,” I said, “and Eric showed me—he showed me how to inhale it. He told me how I wouldn’t really feel anything the first time but that I’d get used to it. I know it sounds weird but it was really… nice.”

  “But Eric must have panicked about the pills. I mean, didn’t he think he was going to die?”

  “He said he didn’t care if he died. He said he didn’t give a shit if he died. And then he said, then he said all he could think about was me.”

  Katherine was quiet. She was looking at her pen, which until now had been poised in midair above her yellow legal pad.

  “He said he didn’t give a shit about anybody else,” I continued, “about any of his friends or our stupid parents, that he just gave a shit about me, and he didn’t care if I didn’t make the football team. The football team, he told me, was all bullshit, and he said that Coach Parks was queer, anyway. And guys were always snapping towels at your ass in the locker room, and the whole school just resented you, anyway.”

  Katherine smiled. “He made you feel better about being rejected from the team.”

  I nodded. “Sometimes Eric could be nice.”

  “I guess all brothers can be nice to each other sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Even Eric.”

  “Do you think about that?”

  “About what?”

  “About that moment, when he said that to you?”

  “It’s all I think about,” I confessed. “After Fiona,” I said, “he’s all I ever thought about.”

  He would take me to the movies sometimes, and in the theater he’d put a huge bag of popcorn between us.

  For years he bought me comic books.

  When he learned to drive, Eric took me everywhere, like a chauffeur.

  When I was thirteen and wanted an electric guitar, our parents wouldn’t buy me one. But Eric did. It was a Hohner Telecaster copy with a leopard-print pick guard and silver pickups. He even got me some lessons. This guitar still sits in a corner of my room. I haven’t touched it in years. I remember the first time I touched it, though, my fingers awkward on the strings. “You’ll be a rock star,” he told me. “Just remember me when you’re famous.”

  “So what happened to Henry Addler?” Katherine asked.

  Eric’s face went slack. “Henry—”

  “The boy who gave you the yellow Valiums and said they were poison.” She knew she was breaking her confidentiality agreement with me, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to know the rest of the story. There was a curiosity inside her.

  “Pilot told you about that?” Eric was almost laughing, shaking his head, hands on the table in front of him.

  “It’s quite a story.”

  He had come by her office at noon that day to take her to an unplanned lunch, and now the two of them were sitting inside the brightly lit Subway Sandwich at the Crestview Shopping Plaza on Sky Highway. Katherine had forty-five minutes, and she wanted to know.

  Eric sighed. “I took the yellow pills, the Valiums, and Henry told me—” he started to laugh “—told me that he’d poisoned me.”

  “That’s what Pilot said.” Katherine smiled. “You must have been terrified.” She brought her sandwich to her mouth, turkey and lettuce, but decided not to take a bite. She held it there while Eric spoke, then put it down and sipped her Seven-Up instead. The booths here were full of businessmen from the nearby office park. They all wore the same gray suits, the same wine-red ties. They all brought their sandwiches to their mouths at the same time, chewing in unison.

  “I thought if I could make myself throw up,” Eric said, “I would be all right.” Today he wore a deep blue shirt beneath a dark brown suit. Armani, Katherine guessed. His tie was brown, too, just a shade lighter.

  “Did you?” She finally took a bite and immediately wished she could spit it out.

  “I couldn’t,” Eric said. “I couldn’t make myself throw up for some reason.” He looked at his own sandwich now, a ham and Swiss. “I’ve never really been able to do that. I guess I had no future as a bulimic.”

  “Obviously.” Katherine swallowed.

  “And by that time,” said Eric, “the Valiums were starting to have their effect on me.” He swirled his fingers in front of his face.

  “You were getting bleary?”

  “Everywhere I looked all the colors were running together. It was like I was seeing through a fish-eye lens. You know how it feels.” He bit into his sandwich again, chewing slowly.

  “Sounds like one of those government antidrug films they showed us in high school.”

  He nodded, swallowing. “That’s exactly what it was like.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I went to my coach and told him that Henry Addler gave me some weird pills.”

  “You could tell your coach something like that?”

  “Coach Parks. He was terrific.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, and he knew right off the bat what they were. In those days all the suburban housewives were taking those yellow and blue Valiums. He knew just what I had taken, and he also knew they weren’t going to kill me.”

  “So he didn’t take you to a doctor?”

  “Nah,” Eric said, “I only would have gotten in tr
ouble, and then I wouldn’t have been able to play for a couple of games.” My brother laughed. “He needed me, so he let me sleep it off in his office.”

  Katherine didn’t really want this sandwich, she decided. It happened to her often when she ordered lunch, especially lately. She was hungry, but she couldn’t eat. “You put a different spin on it when you told Pilot the same story.”

  Eric swallowed, then sipped some of his large Coke through a straw. He wrinkled his brow. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Katherine said, “that you told him you were afraid you were going to die, and that your only thought was of losing him.”

  Eric took a long sip. Afterwards, he rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “That was a long time ago,” he said finally. “I don’t remember what I told Pilot. I said I was a bad brother. What do you—”

  “Pilot remembers it as something nice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something nice.” Katherine shook her head. “You told him that story and gave him his first joint after he didn’t make it onto the Junior Chargers.”

  “His first joint.” Eric looked down, examining his hands. “Out in the woods, right? After his practice.”

  “You thought only of losing him, you said.” Katherine brought her eyes up from her Seven-Up to meet his.

  My brother kept looking at his hands.

  “You weren’t such a bad brother,” she said. “Even Pilot doesn’t remember you as being a bad brother all of the time.” His eyes were such a bright color, Katherine thought, an amazing blue. And his clothes were so incredibly clean. She wondered if he dry-cleaned his suits each time he wore them.

  “So things are going all right with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Katherine said. “We just started. It’s hard to tell. It could take a little while.”

  “Has he said anything about our mother?”

  “What do you mean, about—”

  “About her eyes?”

  “No,” Katherine said. “Why?”

  “They’re getting worse.” He pushed his ham and Swiss away and leaned back in the booth, hands behind his head.