Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  “There must be a storm coming,” Patricia said. She smiled reassuringly. “And he has to wait for it to pass, that’s all.”

  “He’d fly in a storm.”

  “No,” Patricia insisted. “No, because I ask him not to.”

  I didn’t see the sense in disagreeing. He would fly in a storm, though. My father always drove above the speed limit without his seat belt. He ran the lawn mower without the safety guard. He kept his handgun, the safety off, by his bed. He would fly in a storm if it suited him. And, as it was, the sky was only wind and cloud. There wasn’t any rain yet. At least not out here. “Maybe something’s wrong with the plane,” I said. “And that’s why he can’t come back.”

  “That’s possible,” said Patricia. She kept eyeing me, looking for signs of schizophrenia, I suppose, waiting for the craziness to start. I kept looking at the way she looked at me, trying to see if she was seeing a crazy person. The treeline remained where it was, however, and the ocean became only choppier in the wind.

  The sky stayed empty.

  I paced the circumference of the island, walking around and around at least ten times. Patricia began grilling the steaks we had brought for the evening. “If we wait too long,” she said, “the meat will spoil.”

  It was nine at night, completely dark.

  “Maybe he can’t come back until the morning,” I said again. I had said that a thousand times, I think.

  Then, for the first time, there was an admission that something might possibly be wrong: “I hope he’s all right.” Patricia smiled weakly.

  “Of course he is,” I told her, probably too quickly. “He’s fine. My father?” I tried to laugh, but it came out weird.

  We chewed our steaks in silence. It was a meal, we both knew, that my father would have enjoyed more.

  “There’s wine,” Patricia said.

  I only pointed to my head, indicating with a circle what could happen.

  She laughed. “You feel all right?” she said. “Are you feeling—”

  “Given the circumstances,” I told her, “I feel just fine.”

  Patricia walked around the fire, knelt beside me, and put her arm around my shoulder. “He never warns me,” she said.

  I looked at her questioningly.

  She said, “He just takes off sometimes, sometimes quite literally, in his plane, you know. I’ll wake up in the morning and he’s just, he’s just packing his things. I don’t know if he’s leaving me forever or if he’s coming back the next day.”

  “He wouldn’t leave you,” I said. “He would never—”

  “You don’t know that.”

  I didn’t know. It was true. But I said, “I know him well enough to know he would never leave you.”

  “He left your mother. And he tells me he’s going flying somewhere and I wait to see if he wants me to come and sometimes, you know, sometimes he doesn’t.” Patricia smiled. “And so I wait. I wait for him like an idiot, like we’ve been doing here all day. I mean, not doing anything but preparing things for when he gets home, making everything perfect, just for him. But not, you know, not doing anything for myself. I mean, nothing. Because his life is the life I’m living, you know what I mean? It’s his life, and I have to wait to see when and how I’ll be a part of it.”

  “I’ve always wanted to ask you,” I said, “what it was like before, before he left my mother and came to live with you.”

  “It was like this,” Patricia said. “It was a lot of pacing.”

  “That couldn’t have been fun.”

  “I always imagined your mother was doing the same thing in New York.”

  “She had things to occupy her.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “She wanted him to leave as much as he wanted to leave.” This wasn’t true, but I said it trying to make Patricia feel better.

  “I can’t imagine not loving him,” Patricia put her head against my shoulder. “Where the hell is he?”

  “It was different, it was different before.”

  “Before?”

  “Before Fiona.”

  “Oh,” Patricia said.

  “He was different.”

  She sat back on her heels now, asking, “How was he different?”

  “He was more, it was a little more about other people, you know. He wasn’t so—”

  “Insular?”

  “That’s a good word.” I laughed a little bit. “I was always so afraid of him, I was always feeling he was right about to beat me up.”

  “Did he ever—”

  “Oh, no,” I told Patricia, and this was the truth. “He never hit me or Eric or, or Fiona. Never. I just always thought he was about to.” There were no stars in the sky at all. It was completely black, covered in clouds. “I just thought it was everything he could do not to kill me.”

  “He loves you,” she said. “Did he ever tell you that?”

  I remembered that he had always signed my birthday cards that way. But I could never remember him saying it directly. “He must have,” I said. “I just don’t—”

  “It’s hard for him, you know,” Patricia said. She leaned forward, pushing a stick at the fire. “Probably the less he says something, the more he means it, you know what I mean?”

  “I do. I know what you mean,” I said. And I knew exactly what she meant, and I went ahead and let myself believe it, too.

  Can you love someone so much that their memories are yours? Sitting by the fire, I looked at my hands and I thought of Eric’s hands, so clean, and I remembered Fiona’s hands, how small they were, and delicate. And this was not my memory. It was my father’s. Can love lay claim like that? Can it blur life at the edges?

  It was a single moment, actually, pacing around the beach like the little prince, that I understood what had become of him. It was probably an irrational feeling, and one that later, looking back, justified the events that followed, the way people say they have premonitions of things but only after the fact. Our greatest theory was that he had been forced to land somewhere in the ocean between here and the coast, and that, floating out there, he had radioed for help, and soon there would be someone coming to rescue us. But then it became more and more clear to me what really had happened because I saw the blue of the sky for a brief, flickering second through my father’s eyes. I saw the sky from beneath the water, looking up, bubbles rising.

  “The coast guard checks for places like this routinely,” I told Patricia. “They fly over, making sure everything’s okay.”

  “I’ve never seen them do that.”

  “That’s what they do,” I reassured her. “I’ve read about it.”

  The feeling of being stranded, really alone on a desert island, was bizarrely liberating.

  My father had committed suicide, I knew this now.

  He was gone, and I could say anything. I could think anything.

  “You’re not like him,” Patricia said a few nights later. She began by kissing my neck, her face all tears and her hands all trembling. She pulled my sweater and T-shirt over my head.

  Then she sat up and pulled hers off, too.

  I couldn’t speak.

  She pressed herself against me. “You’re not crazy,” she said. “You aren’t crazy at all.” Patricia’s skin was against my skin, this woman my father had been with, had loved. She was between our ages, though, and she was letting it sink in, I believe, the realization that the man she had given up her life for, perhaps foolishly, was never coming back. She made love to me that night, every now and then saying, “You’re nothing like him, nothing like him at all.”

  What was I supposed to do? How would I push her away? Her life was over, she believed, and wanted to end it by doing something, by participating in something that the living do. I didn’t think it was wrong. I still don’t.

  And the hands I touched her with were his hands.

  And I looked at her with his eyes.

  And my body was his body.

  Patricia and I spoke the next morning as th
ough it had never happened, of course. And the entire next day, as well as the day after, and the following day when we were rescued by the coast guard, the day we returned to the cottage and saw the sleeping bags resting in the carport, and the day a couple of weeks later when I went back to New York, it was never spoken of. Like so many things that have happened to me, this event disappeared like a frozen moment, a photograph in memory, time receding away like a wave that never comes back.

  Maybe it’s time, and not the woods, that lashes out, steals you.

  She was patient, on top of me, rocking back and forth, guiding my hands—my father’s hands—to her hips. We moved like this for more than an hour, it seemed, just tensing and relaxing, her hips like those of a woman riding out, I guess, the last night of her life, the last time she would be in contact with the flesh of someone she had loved unconditionally for so long—his flesh. Imagine how she waited for him all those years, the not knowing, the knowing only a little bit. She knew about his children, about me and Eric. She knew about his tragedies, about Fiona, and could only wait for his plane to land in Atlanta when she lived there, working in the airport lounge, and for him to come see her, in the years before and just after Fiona disappeared.

  All that waiting.

  And I whispered to her with his voice.

  Only to be left waiting at the very end. Left waiting forever. I would never blame a person for any action they had taken on the night that kind of realization occurred. Besides, I felt, I think, the same thing my father felt for her, or would have felt, had he known. Patricia was beautiful and womanly in ways my mother could never be. There was some bending, a melting quality inside her, a softness.

  And I saw her with his eyes.

  It was a long day’s boat ride back to the mainland, and then we were taken to my father’s—to Patricia’s—cottage by van. I was to return home to New York immediately after the trip. But we decided, then, to have the memorial service for my father in Florida among his friends, all those flyboys and fishermen he liked to drink and watch sports with.

  And, of course, so Patricia could be there, too.

  If my father ever loved my mother—and I think he did, I know he did once—all that love disappeared with Fiona. It is the same love, not divided, but repeated whole again, that a man feels for his wife and his daughter. And when he had to give up his love for Fiona, he had to give up my mother, too. Naturally, Hannah had half-blamed him for Fiona’s disappearance. I didn’t know at the time that he had been a suspect in the case. I didn’t know anything, to tell the truth, but one simple thing.

  I had been off the medication now for seven days, and I was sane.

  In the cottage the next morning Patricia asked if I wanted her to call my mother. “No,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I would wait half the day, actually, and call Eric first and tell him that I wanted to tell her, that it should be me she heard it from.

  “Why you?” Eric wanted to know.

  “I was with him.” I was in the kitchen, half-expecting my father to walk in behind me at any moment and grab a beer from the refrigerator. “I saw him last. He said his last words to me.” This was special. This was something Eric didn’t have with our father.

  “What were they?”

  “He said if you wanted a good laugh, to think of him out there, flying with no pants.”

  Eric didn’t respond for a moment, and then he said, “What?”

  “He was kidding around.” I twisted the telephone cord in my fingers. Dad never kidded around with Eric. “And that’s what he said.” Only with me.

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “He didn’t plan it,” I said. “He must have made some last-minute decision.”

  “What are you saying?” Eric had something weird and sarcastic in his voice. “Are you saying there was some kind of Bermuda Triangle bullshit, that there was some mysterious—”

  “Eric,” I said, “I’m not saying anything like that. I’m saying it was some kind of—”

  “Pilot,” he said, “why would he do this?”

  “He didn’t—”

  “Are you taking your medication?”

  “Yes,” I lied again.

  “Good.” Then Eric said, “He was afraid of people finding out.”

  “Yes,” I said, “about you.”

  “I can’t talk about this now.” My brother hung up.

  Our mother was in her chair by the window when the nurse Eric had hired—her name was Thalia—handed her the telephone. I said, “Mom, Dad’s—”

  “I know,” she said. “Fiona told me.”

  “Mom,” I said again, “it’s Pilot.”

  “I know,” she said, laughing. “I know who you are, you’re my own boy, aren’t you? Wouldn’t I know my—”

  “He, he disappeared in his plane,” I said. “He was flying back to get some things, and he, he never made it to the mainland. They haven’t found him.”

  Was I crying?

  “Your father loves to fly,” she said.

  “Are you understanding this, Mom?”

  “Fiona’s out in the yard,” she said. “I can hear her. Can you hear her, Pilot? She’s playing with the girls next door. They’re about the same age.” Through the kitchen window the light was changing, clouds rushing in front of the sun. I touched my face.

  Tears.

  “… How is she?” I asked, giving in. “How is Fiona?”

  “She comes and she goes,” Hannah said, tearful now. I could hear her voice breaking as if under the weight of something. “Sometimes I see her, sometimes she, she whispers to me or comes into the room and puts her head on my lap, and looks up at me…”

  “Mom,” I said. And then softly, “Hannah.”

  “Sometimes I know she isn’t there…”

  “Mom,” I said.

  “… isn’t really there.”

  “Dad’s missing.”

  “I understand. Your father’s missing, I understand.”

  “They’ve been searching for days,” I said, “and they think, they think that his plane went down.” I was standing in my father’s cottage, in Patricia’s beige-and-white kitchen, tracing my finger across the strawberry-shaped magnets on the refrigerator door. And Hannah was sobbing. My mother, our mother, Eric’s and Fiona’s and mine, she was crying. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Does Eric know?”

  “He knows.”

  “And Patricia?”

  “She’s here,” I said. “I’m with her now, in Florida, at their cottage.”

  “Oh, yes,” my mother said. “Oh, yes.”

  I waited before saying, again, softly, “Mom?”

  “I loved him, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “He left me.”

  I watched the light passing in front of the window.

  “He didn’t love me… not the way I loved him. He never—”

  “He loved you,” I told her. “Hannah, he really did.”

  Patricia was behind me. She put her hand on my shoulder. I turned, though, moving away.

  “He was… he blamed me… for…”

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t blame you. He never—”

  “He wanted something… wanted someone… different,” she said, and I knew that was true. “I could never be with someone else…. Only him, only your father.” And I knew that was also true. She sobbed heavily, saying, “I loved him so much,” as if this had never occurred to her before, as if she’d never said it out loud. And I could hear the nurse, could hear Thalia in the background asking if everything was all right. “Pilot,” Hannah said finally, “are you coming home?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  “What would have made him happy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What would he have wanted?”

  I turned to Patricia. “There’s a will,” I said. “He thought of everything. He planned everything.”

  Patricia was nodding.

  “You’re like me,” our mother said, �
��aren’t you, my Pilot, stronger than you seem?”

  “I’m better now, Mom.”

  She said, “I know you are.”

  “I’m sane,” I said, the light in the kitchen turning gray, then white, then gray again.

  “Come home.”

  Our mother called him flyboy because he had been a fighter pilot. My father had flown experimental jets in the air force just before the Vietnam War. Luck and circumstance had prevented him from seeing any action, thankfully, and he’d spent his last tour of duty at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He had loved flying, however, the way some people love religion, and immediately upon his discharge went back to flight school, as so many ex-pilots did in those days, learning to operate those big jumbo jets for the airlines. It was either that, he’d always bragged, or become an astronaut, and “I may be stupid,” he said, “but I’m not crazy. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” So, most of his career, my father was an airline pilot, traveling great distances in the world. He’d been to every continent, nearly every country, all the major cities. He had flown through every kind of bad weather, every possible condition, every type of storm. Therefore—and what I have been leading to is this—I doubt very much the wind, which was blowing strong in the early evening off the coast of Florida that day, was a major contributing factor. I do not believe the mild storm that seemed to come up out of nowhere that afternoon—out of the blue, the expression goes—blowing our hair around a bit, making the canvas of the tent in the clearing flutter, making the fire burn low, made any difference at all.

  My mother, her eyesight deteriorating, was alone the first time she saw the apparition of her daughter running across the backyard. Alone up there in the sky, perhaps my father saw one, too. Maybe he saw Fiona’s face shaded inside a cloud, and he directed his plane toward her in a moment of absentminded craziness. It sounds ridiculous, I know. But it is even more ridiculous to say that he ran out of gas or that his instruments failed or that he was blown away by a strong wind. It is too easy, for one, because there was no message from him, no Mayday signal over his radio asking for help or even saying good-bye. There was nothing. His last words to me were, “think of me out there, flying with no pants.”