Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  We walked back out of the hangar, which was dark and oddly quiet, into the harsh Florida daylight. It was around four in the afternoon by then, and the sun shone with a brilliant glinting intensity off the windshields of the little airplanes out there. We got back inside Dad’s four-wheel drive, both of the doors closing with a solid click.

  “It’s a great-looking plane, Dad,” I said after a moment of just sitting there, after I realized I was supposed to say something. “Really cool. Beautiful.”

  He wore a look of disappointment that I could only think had something to do with my reaction. It hadn’t been inspired enough, I guessed. “Wait’ll we get it up in the air,” my father said. “Then you’ll see what I mean.” He started the engine. It was cold, but I rolled the window down anyway.

  A beige tablecloth, beige plates, beige candles flickering—Patricia had set the table beautifully, even romantically—a dinner for three. She poured us each a glass of sweet white wine. She had arranged little wedges of various cheeses on round crackers on a beige ceramic platter in the living room. She had an easy-listening station playing at low volume.

  “Your mother never knew how to live,” our father told me when we saw all of this. “It took Patricia to teach me how to enjoy life.”

  She came out of the kitchen, clearly happy to see us.

  “You didn’t have to go to all of the trouble,” I told her. “I feel like you’ve been working all—”

  “What else am I going to do?” she said. “There’s mushroom soup all ready, and just in case you didn’t catch anything—” she winked at me “—I made stuffed sole.”

  “Sole’s good,” our father said. He settled into the couch.

  “Stuffed sole,” I said, marveling.

  I felt like I should shower first. I went to the bathroom so I could at least wash my hands. In there, I looked at my face in the mirror and tried to see my father in it. He wasn’t there. I only saw Hannah. I saw my pupils dilating, as if I were looking out at the horizon.

  When I came out I smiled.

  The furniture here was nothing like the furniture we grew up with. Everything was wicker, for one thing, and very new. There were warm beige carpets on the floor. There were batik prints on the wall from exotic places. My father’s aerial photographs—pictures of sky, mostly, and of the ocean’s horizon—were framed and hung in squares of four above key pieces of furniture. There was a covered sunroom in the back the size of a living room. At the end of the sunroom was an outdoor hot tub. There was a fireplace. There were soft beige throw blankets draped everywhere.

  I remembered, suddenly, that I hadn’t taken my medication. I went to look for my backpack, but then I wondered how the chemicals would react with the wine. Fuck it, I thought. I decided to simply enjoy the wine. I looked around to see if any inanimate object had come alive. I listened to the dim lamps for any sign of voices. But there was nothing unusual. I’d take a double dose of the medication tomorrow, I told myself. I wouldn’t go insane again in a day.

  I tried to imagine our mother in this house. I tried to see her walking barefoot like Patricia across the earth-tone flooring to seat herself in one of these comfortably upholstered armchairs. It was impossible. Hannah could not exist in a place like this.

  “This is such a nice cottage,” I said to our father. “I’m sorry I never came here before.” I sat down on the cream-colored couch next to him.

  “It’s her place,” our father said. “I just live here.”

  Patricia had entered the living room from the kitchen again. She had long thin arms and shapely legs. She had dark, curly hair that hung around her face the way a much younger woman’s does. It was a new hairstyle for her, I realized. When she was younger, when our father first met her all those years ago, she must have been incredibly beautiful—sexy. She seemed always to be cringing a little bit, though, as if waiting for someone to scream at her. “Don’t listen to him,” Patricia said. “He has quite a lot of influence over this place. He just thinks decorating is for sissies, but he knows what he likes and he’s quite vocal about the things he doesn’t.”

  “You’ve been doing some decorating, Dad?” I teased. “Looking at fabric swatches, picking out window dressings?”

  My father snorted. “Anything on tonight?” He never liked being made fun of.

  “There’s a Hitchcock I haven’t seen before,” Patricia said.

  “Nah.” Then he turned to me, saying, “You don’t like Hitchcock, do you?”

  “Whatever you want to watch is fine.” I would probably go to sleep early anyway, I thought. I ate a cracker. I sipped the wine.

  “Anything else?”

  Patricia handed him the newspaper. “Why don’t you look?”

  I saw his eyes scanning the listings. “It’s Monday, and there’s football.” He winked at me.

  Patricia rolled her eyes. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t notice.”

  He laughed.

  “We don’t have to watch football,” I said.

  “He can’t stay up that late, anyway,” Patricia said. She slid down on the couch next to my father, putting her arms around him.

  “I’m getting old,” he said. “I can’t stay up late anymore, and then I’m up all night pissing, anyway, because my prostate is shot.”

  I tried to smile, but couldn’t.

  “When you get old,” he told me, “your prostate is the first thing to go.”

  “You’re getting better,” our father’s girlfriend said.

  “Old,” he said again. He looked at her. “Old is worse, not better.”

  “Then I’m old, too,” she said.

  I could hear a dog barking somewhere.

  I imagined our mother, truly old, talking in the dark of her bedroom to the ghost of her daughter.

  Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy pulled her VW Rabbit into a parking space in front of the East Meadow County Library and sat for a moment, the engine idling, asking herself if she really wanted to do this. What was the expression? Opening a whole new can of worms. She imagined twisting the can opener and the wiggling, squiggling mass of earthworms oozing out onto a clean kitchen counter. A person’s brain, she thought, did not look unlike a mass of worms. And it was her job, at least in a manner of speaking, to open her clients’ brains, unraveling the wiggling, squiggly, twisted mass of thoughts and emotions that made their lives—our lives—so complicated and unhappy. She turned the engine off and examined the building while she finished her already cold Styrofoam cup of lemon tea she had bought at the 7-Eleven on the way. The library was white, modern, with large two-story-high slits of glass to let light in. The little institution was encircled by trees, and the parking lot and patch of grass surrounding it hadn’t been swept or raked all season.

  Katherine opened the car door. It was a Sunday, and she wore old blue jeans and a soft gray sweater she’d had since college. She closed the car door solidly and walked across the leaf-strewn parking lot in the wet November air. It had been a mild winter so far. Some rain, but nothing very cold yet.

  This was a new library, built within the last five years. She wondered if they even had records of newspapers from twenty years ago. opening the glass doors, she saw across an expanse of gray institutional carpeting to the stacks of books—just metal shelves with wire dividers. It was early—the place had just opened at ten—but already the children’s nook was filled with toddlers and their young mothers, women Katherine’s age, women whose lives had gone as planned, women whose lives had had plans to begin with. She scanned the room for the periodicals. She hadn’t been in a public library for so long it was almost embarrassing, since graduate school, really. Behind the librarian’s desk was a double entrance marked Reference. She’d start there. She walked up to the long-haired man at the counter and asked, “Do you keep microfilm of old newspapers here?”

  “We have a complete record of the East Meadow Gazette,” he said, with a hint of apology in his voice. He was in his early twenties, with a blond beard and a soft voice. “
And we have the New York Times on computer via the Internet.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  “Sure thing,” he said. “Follow me.” The young man led Katherine through the double doors and into a white utilitarian room with rows of metal computer desks. “One of these days,” he said, “we’ll have everything on computer.” He laughed. “And then I won’t have a job anymore.” He indicated which desk she should take by pulling out a chair for her and gesturing. He must have been a waiter, Katherine thought. “I assume you’re starting with the Times?” he said. “May I ask what kind of thing you’re researching?”

  “I’m looking into a crime, one that was committed in East Meadow about twenty years ago.”

  He put his hands on his hips. “Was it a bad one? I mean, a famous one?”

  “It was an abduction, just a little girl.”

  “You’ll want the Gazette.” He pointed to the microfilm machine in the corner, which looked as if it had never been used. “I’m Edward, by the way. Do you know how it works?”

  Katherine shook her head.

  “Let me show you.” He pushed the plastic chair back under the computer desk and walked across the tile floor to the microfilm machine.

  She sat down.

  He showed her how to scan through the pages of the East Meadow Gazette, going all the way back to the year Fiona was taken, to the day of the last party at my parents’ house. There was no index, no search button, only her eyes. She moved steadily to Labor Day of that year and scanned more carefully forward from that point in time. It would be a couple of days, she thought, before reporters would have learned of the abduction. She slipped the film forward a few pages, and there it was.

  Girl Abducted From Foxwood Court, Reward Offered.

  The article said exactly what Katherine expected it to say, indicating only enough information to provide a description of Fiona (“a sandy-haired seven-year-old, freckled, with green eyes”) and little more.

  The police, it said, were investigating.

  Three days had passed since Fiona disappeared when this article was printed.

  Three days since the party.

  Katherine tried to imagine what each member of my family’s mental state must have been after three days of not knowing, of waiting while the police conducted their search. She considered my father, who worked frantically with the detective, trying so hard to remember another detail, anything that might lead them to his daughter. She imagined Hannah, who crumbled into a mass of tears and grief, not to awaken from it for several years. She imagined Eric taking over the household, the oldest child stepping in. She saw him at the kitchen counter preparing food, making my lunches, learning to thrive on the stress.

  She imagined me.

  Three days after my sister had disappeared, and Katherine imagined I would have been retreating. I would have been pretending to be the wolf boy by then, on my hands and knees, learning to crawl and growl. It was a common form of dissociation, actually, she thought, a typical childhood response to trauma, disappearing into fantasy, escaping into the realm of make-believe.

  It was true.

  And what if I was right—this thought had flickered across her mind more than once by now. What if my brother had killed Fiona? Disappearing into a fantasy may have been the result of a more practical concern.

  I may have been hiding, Katherine realized.

  I may have been afraid for my life.

  Before moving on, she scanned the article again, looking for any detail, any image or word that, twenty years later, would seem out of place. Fiona was “taken,” the article said. The girl was “last seen by the family around mid-evening.” She had “no history of running away.”

  There was a cloudy black-and-white picture of my sister in the corner of the article, more difficult to make out because of the heavy contrast in the microfilm. “The missing child, Fiona May Airie,” the caption said, “seven years old.” She counted the years for a moment, imagining all that time going by—a life. She spooled the microfilm forward, day by day, scanning the headlines as she went. An ad appeared, paid for by the newspaper, no doubt. It had a picture of Fiona, different from the one used in the article, more evident in the microfilm. It was a class picture of a second-grader, all big teeth and freckles. Our family had offered a reward for twenty thousand dollars, a great deal of money in those days. On the following day, a larger article appeared. It was the Sunday edition, the human-interest version. There were pictures of our whole family, with Fiona’s face circled and highlighted. It described the party, the night she disappeared. “At an ordinary Labor Day barbecue in Foxwood Court,” the copy began, “a little girl disappeared. She was a seven-year-old much loved by family and friends.” This article identified a “suspect,” a man seen talking with Fiona at the party by “one of the Airie boys,” a man who seemed to have disappeared around the same time she did. The article did not give the man’s name.

  What was the name Eric had told her? Katherine couldn’t remember. Had she written it down?

  The suspect had been brought in for questioning, it said. But nothing had been determined. A single piece of evidence had been located in the woods behind the Airie house. The article didn’t say what it was, but Katherine knew it was the red sneaker. It didn’t say that I had found it, either. It hardly mentioned Eric and me at all, except to list our names in the caption of the family photo. James Airie, our father, was a handsome man, Katherine thought—like Eric. He looked exactly like him, in fact. Our mother didn’t look that much different to Katherine then than she did now. Not as thick around the middle, perhaps. But she had the same cloudy eyes, the same faraway gaze.

  It was a look Katherine recognized in me.

  Finally, in another piece two days later, the paper identified the detective. It was the name Eric had given her. Detective Jerome Cleveland. He even sounded like a cop. “In comments to the press,” this little news item said, “Detective Cleveland indicated there have been advancements in the case but nothing definitive. ‘We have not yet resolved whether Fiona Airie was abducted and is presently alive somewhere or if she was killed.’”

  Katherine wondered if Fiona had been kept alive up to this point. Was she tortured before she was killed? There were cases of abduction, she knew, where the trauma actually led to a complete loss of memory. Fiona could be alive somewhere, not even aware of the first seven years of her life. It had happened before. But where would the little girl have been taken? And by whom?

  Behind her, Edward, the young librarian, stuck his head in the door. Katherine could see his reflection in the glass of the microfilm machine.

  “Everything going all right in there?”

  She realized now she’d been in here for more than an hour.

  “Perfectly,” Katherine said. “Thank you.”

  She moved forward in time again, going day by day through the weeks that followed. Only small items about the case appeared now. Katherine had to replace the scrolls of microfilm several times. Eventually, though, nearly a year from the day my sister was taken, an article announced that a memorial service was to be held in her honor. It wasn’t long after that, Katherine knew, that I had my first episode of psychosis. It was more likely a case of severe dissociation, she thought, probably misdiagnosed.

  I had forgotten how to speak. I had been discovered eating raw steak on the kitchen floor.

  Katherine pictured Hannah and my father, me and Eric, all of us standing at the front of the town Presbyterian church, our neighbors and the community behind us, the lawyers and dentists and insurance salesmen of East Meadow, their wives and children, and possibly even the person who abducted my sister.

  Eric stood on the flagstones by the filled-in pool and considered the things our mother had planted that summer—the rhubarb, red beets, parsnips, and russet potatoes. These were fall vegetables, food that should have been reaped and stored away for winter by now. The garden was overgrown, though, untended since Hannah’s blindness, and the vegetables
were rotting in the hardening earth. He sighed. He’d have to come out here himself one of these days and tear everything up before a frost came and made it impossible. He remembered the pool here before it had been filled in, the water in the summers, the light flashing across its surface, blue and gold. Across the lawn, next door, were the new neighbors. Their two girls—what were their names?—just six or seven years old, squealed and screeched as they ran around together playing some convoluted imaginary game. They’d sit quietly for a few moments and touch each other’s hair, and then they’d leap up, shrieking, their voices like whistles. It always startled Eric to hear children playing. Especially girls. It sounded to him like they were being hurt.

  Like someone was after them.

  Like what happened to Fiona. Only she didn’t scream, did she? Or someone would have heard.

  “What are they doing?” It was our mother’s voice behind him. Eric turned around and saw Hannah standing on the patio by the kitchen door. She wore her yellow robe and soft moccasins. Her gray-laced chestnut hair was in disarray.

  “What?”

  “Those girls, why are they screaming?”

  The two little girls actually stopped what they were doing for a moment and looked at Hannah. She was the crazy old lady next door, my brother thought—a fearful, timid thing, seldom seen.

  “They’re just playing, Mom.” Eric smiled in the girls’ direction. “Just playing.”

  “What are you doing out there?” It was an accusation.

  “I’m not doing anything.” He began to walk toward the house, his shoes making stiff sounds on the slate. “I’ll have to come out here and take care of this garden for you one of these days, that’s all.”

  “I haven’t been able to—”

  “I know, Mom,” he said, “it’s all right.”

  “—do anything around the house. I haven’t been—”