Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  “No, they aren’t out there right now.” I got up from the steps and went into the kitchen, closing the door softly behind me. “It’s just trees, bushes, the pool—the same old stuff.”

  She hated it when I called it the pool. It was the garden now. “Is it terribly overgrown?”

  “It’s not too bad.” She stood at the counter, her hand holding the edge like Fiona’s hand on the edge of the pool. “Do you want me to weed it out?”

  “Eric already said he would.”

  “Okay.”

  She brought her hand up to touch her face.

  “Are you all right, Mom?”

  “I thought I saw something, that’s all.”

  “Saw what?”

  “Just something.”

  In his black Jaguar, she asked, “Whatever happened to the red sneaker?” Eric drove. Katherine sat in the passenger’s seat with the groceries on her lap. “Eric?” She knew she shouldn’t be bringing it up. She couldn’t stop herself.

  He didn’t look at her. “It was turned over as evidence.” His voice was hardening. She could see his jaw muscles tighten.

  “Your family never got it back?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Only one of them was found?”

  “Only the one.”

  “Where did Pilot find it?”

  “Pilot found it on the first day that we, that we looked for her.” Eric rounded a corner without slowing, powering through. Katherine thought she felt the wheels slip, just slightly. “And he couldn’t really remember where, exactly, he was when he picked it up.” He reached for the radio dial. He touched it, but didn’t turn it on. “We never did find exactly where. At least, Pilot was never sure.”

  “Evidence?” Katherine said. “Evidence of a struggle, maybe, or that she was trying to leave a trail?”

  “Possibly. Fiona was very little. I doubt she was thinking about leaving a trail.”

  “He didn’t remember where he found it?”

  “It was a very confusing day, Katherine. Probably the most traumatic of his life.”

  “I can imagine.” She looked at him, saying, “That would have been important to know, wouldn’t it? I mean, if they had known exactly where, exactly—”

  “It didn’t matter. They went over every inch of those woods.”

  “I guess they must have.” She thought for a moment, biting her fingernail, tasting the blood. “Was he always so forgetful?”

  “Pilot?” Eric stopped at a light and looked at Katherine. “Pilot was always very forgetful,” he said, shaking his head. “Just like our mother.”

  My father kept walking to the window to look at the sky. Patricia, his girlfriend, watched him through the kitchen door. On television, Florida State was beating Nebraska. He’d sit on the couch for a few minutes, muttering at the game, then he’d get up again, hand in his pocket jiggling keys, leaning over one of the wicker chairs in the sunroom, his face to the glass. The sky was clear—clouds scattered like a few leaves on the lawn in early fall. Patricia leaned back from the sink and watched him at the window. “Jim,” she said finally, “what are you doing?” She turned off the tap.

  He said, “What?” even though he heard her.

  “Why do you keep going to the window?”

  “You know, on the weather channel they said something about the possibility of a storm. I just thought—”

  “It’s Pilot.”

  “—I’d look and see for myself.”

  “You’re worried about him.” She moved across the beige living room carpet toward my father. There had been a new message from Hannah.

  He look down, ashamed. “Yeah.”

  And my mother never called.

  Patricia spoke with her whole body, and the way she came closer to him, so openly, made him use his voice.

  “I keep thinking something’s really wrong with him,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Something I should do.”

  “Call him.”

  “Something I should say to him.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. She said, “Call him.”

  He looked at her. “It’s that easy.” It was a question.

  They stood together on the beach again, and this time it was night, and the clouds billowing up in the sky made the horizon turn black, and the last filtered light of the descending sun misted over the countryside behind them. “I was a terrible brother,” Eric was saying. “I wish I could have—”

  “Eric.” Katherine put a hand on his chest. The water was gentle right now, for some reason, the tide low.

  “I want to make it up to him.” My brother turned his face away dramatically. “I want to, to find a way to feel better,” he said, “some redemption. The things I used to say to him.” He closed his eyes.

  With his eyes closed, she thought, he looked like a statue. “Eric,” Katherine said. “Magical thinking. You’re smarter than this. You’re a brain surgeon, for Christ’s—”

  “I was really bad,” he said. “Abusive, there’s no other word for it.”

  “Do you have any idea how cruel my sister and I were to each other?”

  “Really?”

  “Terrible. Evil.”

  “Is that why you don’t speak with her anymore?”

  She looked at her fingers. “I guess it is, probably.”

  “But I was—”

  “No, Eric. You’re unfortunate, that’s all. Your brother has an illness. But you didn’t give it to him. No amount of sibling rivalry could have given him what he has. It’s chemical, completely biological.”

  “He thinks I killed our sister,” he said. There was something in his voice. There was something almost like crying in my brother’s voice.

  “Pilot is irrational, Eric.” Katherine touched him again. “He has all kinds of disordered, distorted thoughts.”

  “Katherine, I understand these things. It’s just, it’s just that I guess I’m irrational about it, too. I mean, it’s different when it’s your own family.”

  “You really are being irrational.”

  “I can feel bad, can’t I?”

  “You can.”

  “I wish I could help him.”

  “You’re helping him so much already.” Katherine held his hand. “You don’t even know.”

  “What wouldn’t you do for your sister?”

  “A lot,” Katherine said. She looked at the ocean. “There’s a great deal I haven’t done, as a matter of fact.”

  Katherine wore a black skirt, a black jacket. She wore a silver chain around her neck that held a mysteriously twisty Celtic symbol. She wore a look of concern. “I was asking you, Pilot,” she said, “last week I was asking if you could tell me what makes you feel, what makes you feel so strongly that Eric is responsible for Fiona’s, for Fiona disappearing. Do you remember?”

  I rubbed my eyes. I was sitting on the blue couch again, and the living room seemed to have gathered more magazines, knickknacks, and dust since last week. “The sneaker,” I said. “The red high-top. It was in his room.” I sipped my tea. Hannah, almost completely blind, had placed a pot and two delicate cups on the coffee table. Katherine and I had started the session by pouring ourselves jasmine tea.

  “But you found the sneaker in the woods.” Katherine was certain she’d caught me in a mistake of some kind. “I thought you found the—”

  “It was in Eric’s bedroom.” I shook my head. “I said I found it in the woods, that’s all. I lied.”

  “Pilot,” she began, “you—”

  “I lied, yes. All the time. For years. Constantly. About everything.”

  “Why did you lie? To protect Eric?”

  I nodded. “Something like that.”

  Katherine made a mark on her yellow legal pad. Her silvery pen made the slightest scratching sound when she wrote. Looking up, she asked, “Where in his bedroom did you find it?” Her face carried the slightest pain, something around the eyes, I thought. Something like disbelief.

&n
bsp; “Under his desk,” I said, “in Eric’s incredibly tidy, perfectly organized, everything-in-its-place bedroom under his desk, exactly where he must have put it.”

  Katherine sighed. She touched her hair. It was insane again today, crazier than me. “Okay,” she said, “so the sneaker was in Eric’s room, that’s what you remember. Does that mean he’s responsible? Does that necessarily mean that he killed her?”

  I looked at the ceiling. I knew our voices were carrying through the ventilation system up to my mother’s bedroom. I knew she was listening, facing the window, eyes closed. I used to sit by that grate myself and listen to the grown-up conversations coming from down here, the arguments about money, about our father’s next flight, about how he was never around, and later about who should have been watching her, watching Fiona that night, and why the hell did it have to happen to them. So now I whispered, “I found something else. I found something that I never told anyone about.”

  Katherine leaned forward, whispering, too. “What was it?”

  “I found a knife.”

  She leaned back, speaking aloud. “You found a knife.”

  “Inside one of the shoes.”

  Gently, Katherine cleared her throat. “Do you, do you still have it?”

  I smiled. I twisted the shoelace around my finger, twisting and twisting.

  Katherine looked at me quizzically, her brow furrowed. “Pilot, if you really have a piece of evidence, a twenty-year-old piece of hard evidence in the disappearance of your own sister—”

  “And tell my mother that her boy, her favorite boy, the successful one, the good one, killed her only daughter when he was a teenager?”

  “Pilot.”

  I smiled, “Isn’t there a statute of limitations on that, anyway?”

  “Really, Pilot, do you have it? Do you have the knife?”

  “Not only do I have the knife,” I said, whispering again, “I have the other shoe, and the original Wonderbread bag I found them in.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  I pointed to the ceiling. “Hannah is listening.”

  “Pilot,” Katherine said, “why haven’t you done anything with these things all these years? Why haven’t you—”

  “I couldn’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was sane.”

  “Sane?”

  “You can only talk about these things if you’re crazy.”

  “Pilot.” She shook her head.

  “Have you heard of repression, Katherine?” I said. “Or did you miss that day of psychology class?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay. When did you remember these things?”

  “I remembered them all my life. It occurred to me to remember them out loud, though, right before I went crazy, Katherine.”

  “Are you implying something?”

  “Implying that a neurosurgeon may have access to psychotropic drugs that could, for instance, stimulate a psychotic episode in an already unstable and susceptible mind?”

  She suppressed a laugh, I could see it. “Pilot, that’s very, very implausible, what you are saying—”

  “Katherine, I’m serious.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I looked up. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t want to bring this evidence to the police?”

  “Are people required to testify against their own brothers?”

  “That’s a legal question,” she said. “I don’t know the answer.”

  “I’m not sure if I could.” I unraveled the shoelace, which had grown blacker and blacker, unfurling it from my finger. How long had I had this thing now? “How is Eric, by the way?” I said. “How was your weekend together? Was it romantic?”

  Katherine leaned forward and took a sip of her tea. It was probably cold. “Eric is fine,” she said. “Just fine. Have you spoken to him?”

  “Not directly.”

  Katherine cleared her throat once again. “Not directly,” she said, eyebrows raised.

  “Remember, Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy,” I told her, “I’m omniscient.”

  “Pilot,” she said, “do you really have these things?”

  “Really.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere…. I’m not sure exactly. I think they’re somewhere in the woods.” I rose from the couch. This session, as far as I was concerned, was over.

  “Pilot,” she said, “you have to tell me where—”

  “You should stop chewing your nails like that.” I went to the stairs. “You’re going to bleed to death if you’re not careful.”

  It was amazing to me how cold California could be on the beach at night. As cold as winter in the east, it seemed. I stayed out on the beach for a solid week, from one Wednesday to the next. I tried not to fall asleep, the fear keeping me up, the fatigue overwhelming me, my eyelids slipping from time to time, flickering open and shut. Sometimes I lay down on the sand. Sometimes I found a piece of grass by the Santa Monica Boulevard and propped my head against a palm tree and listened to the sound of the rushing waves on the one side and the sound of the car engines revving on the other. And then I called him. I called Eric. And two days later, immediately, in fact, he came out and found me. He took me to an expensive hotel, bought me some new clothes, flew me back business class to New York, delivered me to our mother. And then came a few weeks of padding around the house in my bathrobe, and then Hannah’s double vision, and the moment of clarity, or insanity, or whatever it was, and the clinic, and Katherine…

  Before, I had been in North Carolina, staying on after college. I had been sleeping with a married woman whose name was Jorie. I had been writing screenplays that nobody liked or wanted or even understood, stories about cold families, sibling rivalries, stories like mine, but with magic endings, miraculous recoveries, completions.

  Before, I had been a ghost, just like my mother said.

  But out on the beach none of that mattered. I had gone out there, ostensibly, to sell my screenplays, and I had been calling Jorie, telling her I was staying at the most expensive hotel in Beverly Hills, that I had even gotten an agent. I had made up these wonderful scenarios for her, these elaborately beautiful lies. She swallowed them all. But the real truth was, I was walking up and down the Santa Monica beach every day, my skin pink from the sun and my eyes red from lack of sleep, spending what remaining money I had on hot dogs, greasy french fries, sodas, and grass. I met a girl out there named Selena, and when she wasn’t too drunk she’d sit by me on the sand at night. I wasn’t hearing voices yet, only hers, which was real. I wasn’t imagining electronic surveillance devices in every seagull that flew by. All of that came later, after I got back to New York.

  I only wanted to sit out there and watch the waves with Selena.

  “Where are you from?” Selena said.

  I told her I was from North Carolina.

  “You don’t have an accent.”

  “Where are you from?” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “Texas… Corpus Christi, Texas.” She had a long drawl and, on top of that, a raspy, alcoholic voice. “I drink way too much for my own good,” she told me. “I know that.” It was the world’s greatest understatement. “But I’m a nice person, and no one has ever been able to explain to me what good will come of it if I quit the drinking.” The drinking. She looked at me, then, as though I could explain it to her, or that I should try.

  I shrugged. “Maybe none,” I said. “Maybe no good at all.”

  “Out here you’re either into drugs or drinking, or both, or you’re crazy,” she said. “I ain’t seen you drinking or shooting up.”

  I laughed, reading her implication.

  She had blond hair and small breasts and a stocky build. She had fine little stubby hands, brown with dirt, blackened under the nails. She had an infected gash on the inside of her left calf, which she tended to by tearing little bits of her own skin away from it, keeping it raw and bloody, making sure it would nev
er heal. In the daytime I’d try to find a nice piece of shade somewhere beneath one of the trees that lined the parking lots. And when the sun went down enough I’d pace up and down in front of the water, getting my pants wet up to the knees, daring myself to walk in. Each night was different. Each night was the same. Each night after it became dark and cold, so surprisingly cold for California, I would find a new place, away from the other homeless people, and try to get some rest without sleeping. It wasn’t easy. After a few days of this I think I did begin to hallucinate, not from the craziness—because I wasn’t crazy yet—but from the fatigue and lack of food. And each night Selena found me. She was the only person who never heard me tell a lie, I guess because she didn’t matter.

  I was standing in the water up to my waist, the salt waves splashing over my chest. The sun was dissolving into the water far away to the west like an enormous tablet of vitamin C. To the left, the Ferris wheel of the Santa Monica pier spun itself in delirious, stupid circles. Kids were laughing somewhere behind me. What if I walked out there, I thought. What if I stepped, one foot at a time, into the ocean, my eyes closed? I could hear a group of children behind me, a family flying kites, a bunch of friends packing up their beach towels for the day, ordinary fucking human beings. I knew that beyond this ocean the world dropped away to nothingness. Columbus was wrong, I knew this. The world was flat, and after a time at sea you’d come to the edge, where the water spilled like a waterfall into pure space. I considered, for the first time seriously, killing myself. I thought of Fiona just then, and I remembered where I had placed the sneaker and the knife.

  I remembered. I remembered with the clarity of an all-blue, football-stadium sky. I remembered looking under Eric’s desk that day. I remembered seeing the plastic bag and pulling it out, seeing inside it the sneakers, the knife all bloody wrapped up in there. I remembered the smell of the blood. I remembered removing the bag to my own room and stashing it temporarily under the covers of my bed. I remembered the fake search after that, going from house to house throughout the neighborhood, pretending to find the one red shoe in the woods. I remembered all of it. I remembered our father cursing and our mother’s lower lip trembling and how steady Eric’s nerves were and the look he gave me when I presented the sneaker to our parents. I may not be the most credible of human beings. I may even be crazy on many levels. But this is what I remembered that day on the beach in Santa Monica, up to my legs in the water, up to my neck in my life.