Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  “Yes.”

  “You could have told me then.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is no recovered memory.”

  “It’s just a regular memory,” I said.

  Cleveland nodded. “That’s good.”

  Behind him, the pregnant woman was approaching. She was beaming a look of pure joy in our direction. “Mr. Cleveland?” she said.

  “It’s Jerry.”

  “Jerry,” she said, “we’ll take it.”

  “That’s good,” he said again, only this time to her, and grinning hugely. “That’s outstanding.”

  Dawn Costello tore little strips off her napkin, creating a pile of white shreds on the red-checked tablecloth. Her lower lip trembled a bit. “No one ever spoke to me about it,” she was saying, “not from the police, at least, no one that was ever, you know, official.”

  Katherine stirred a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. The restaurant was closed, but loud, banging noises and rich garlicky smells came from the kitchen, the sound of saucepans hitting the stovetop, the smell of bread baking; a radio was tuned to a football game, crowds cheering, commentators announcing. “Well,” Katherine said, placing her spoon in the saucer, “can you remember much about that night now? I mean, I know it was a long—”

  “Like it was yesterday.” Dawn exhaled roughly. “Like it just happened.”

  Katherine picked up her cup. “Good. Tell me what you remember.” She took a sip.

  Dawn Costello had eyes like a deer, enormous and dark brown. She had olive skin and wavy, ash-colored hair. She had a way of smiling with her mouth, kind of sideways, when she talked, her lips everywhere. She had the manner of an animal that has been hit one too many times, Katherine thought. She struck Katherine immediately as a good person, no doubt a kind mother—she had four children—and a good friend. Dawn reminded Katherine of the abused women she had met so many times in her career. Everything, the whole story, she knew, was ready to spill out of her; she had only been waiting for someone to ask. “He was taking speed.”

  Katherine leaned forward. “Do you remember what kind?”

  “White Cross. It was everywhere in those days. I mean, everybody had it.”

  “Did you take it, too?”

  “Nah, I was too intimidated, and it made me too jittery. I just smoked a little pot, drank a little beer, you know.”

  “You were a cheerleader?”

  “Yeah.” Dawn shrugged, placing another bit of torn napkin onto the pile. “I was one of the good girls.” She smiled her sideways smile.

  “So Eric was on speed, and—”

  “Well, no, let me back up.” Dawn took a drink of her own coffee. “First we were at his house, in his bedroom,” she said. “We used to go there and make out, you know, on his bed. But then the party downstairs started getting really loud, and every now and then somebody would wander upstairs looking for the bathroom. You know how it is at parties.”

  Katherine nodded.

  “And then Eric started with the White Cross.”

  “Did he have any particular reason for taking it that night?”

  “He just wanted to have some fun, I guess, and that’s what he had.”

  “Did he take a lot of it?”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s how he did so well in everything. He was studying all the time and even in our freshman year he was the best running back in the history of Albert Einstein, you know. Eric took speed practically every day.”

  Katherine sipped her coffee. It was strong and hot. This would keep her up all night, she realized. “Did you have sex with him that day?”

  Dawn fluffed her little pile of napkin tearings. “I remember I, I gave him, you know…”

  “You gave him—”

  “I can’t say it.”

  “—a blow job?”

  She tore another bit of her napkin off. She made a small snorting noise. “Yeah.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that.” Katherine smiled reassuringly. “And then you went to the party.”

  Dawn said, “We went to Brian Kessler’s house.”

  “Were there a lot of people there?”

  “Everybody was there.”

  “All the popular kids,” Katherine said.

  “Yeah, I guess so.” She looked up. “All the popular kids.”

  “What happened next?”

  “We just… you know how kids are. We smoked pot. We drank beer. We listened to music. We made out.”

  It was another life, but Katherine remembered parties at a girlfriend’s mother’s apartment on the East Side, her sister Michele making out with two different boys in the same night. She remembered someone handing out yellow Valiums to all the girls. She remembered holding a cigarette in her fingers, that awkward feeling, knowing how foolish she looked. “Can you tell me anything about Eric’s mood? Was he different in any way? Was he agitated? Was he—”

  “He was, he was the same, I suppose. He was the same until—”

  “Until what?”

  “It wasn’t unusual.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  Dawn looked around the restaurant. She smiled that sideways, trembly smile. “Sometimes Eric would get kind of excited.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like he would get all pumped up about his future, start talking about being a doctor, how he was going to cure cancer, run for president…”

  “Interesting.”

  “He would say you have to, you have to prove yourself, prove you have the guts, that he had to prove himself, and then he would just do something crazy.”

  “Something crazy.” This is what Katherine had been looking for. “Like what? Did he do anything crazy that night?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “What do you mean by doing something crazy?” Katherine put her hand on the table, and her bitten fingertips were clearly visible. “Can you give me an example?”

  Dawn pushed the hair out of her eyes. “What happened to your fingers?”

  “I bite my fingernails.”

  “I’ve never seen anything—”

  “It’s a problem, I know.” Katherine put her hand in her lap again. “But what did you mean when you said Eric would—”

  “One time he held his hand over a burner on a stove until his palm was all blisters, like in that movie… you know the one.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, later, after he got a driver’s license, he would take the car out at night, when it was completely dark, and he would turn the lights off and put his foot on the gas pedal.”

  “He couldn’t see anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Did you leave with Eric that night?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t keep up with him,” Dawn said. “He was all wild, you know, because of the speed, I guess, and whatever else, and then he left.”

  “On his own?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No, but I didn’t think he was going home.”

  “What time was it?”

  “I think it was still early, around eleven-thirty.”

  “Is there anything else about Eric that you can tell me, anything that might be—”

  Dawn put her hand out, stopping Katherine. “Okay,” she said, “but you have to promise never to tell anyone.”

  Katherine nodded.

  “Promise.”

  “I promise,” Katherine said.

  “I’ve never said this before, not to anyone.” Dawn looked around, and then lowered her voice, whispering, “Eric got me pregnant. It was a couple of years after his sister, after Fiona disappeared.”

  Katherine allowed a moment to pass, and then she said, “You had an abortion?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, Dawn.” Katherine reached across the table for Dawn’s hand.

>   Dawn flinched, pulling away. “I know, but—”

  “But what?”

  She finished tearing her napkin apart, and now she looked at her empty hands. “He didn’t want me to go to the doctor.”

  “But how did he—”

  “He wanted to do it himself.”

  “Did you let him?”

  She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

  Today it was mushroom soup, a tuna sandwich on coarse black bread, a tangerine. Eric laid out the wax paper his sandwich had come wrapped in across his desk and poured himself a glass of mineral water. “Dr. Airie,” Diane said through the intercom. “There’s someone here to see you.”

  Eric put his spoon down. “I don’t have an appointment now, do I?”

  “No,” his secretary said, “I think this is personal. Her name is Katherine DeQuincey… DeQuincey-Joy.”

  I was running. It was something I’d never done before, but I had these Nikes, blue and silver, and I was running—running around and around the track at the junior high. I didn’t care that there were kids out there either. I didn’t care who the hell saw me. My legs hurt and my chest felt like it was on fire, but I kept on running, sometimes for more than an hour. I’d stop eventually and put my palms on my knees and feel the cold air tearing through my body, the oxygen creating a barrage of new blood cells, my lungs exploding. I’d look up and see some junior high girls sitting on the bleachers, the dirty-blondes and brunettes of East Meadow, shivering in their gym clothes, and I knew all of their thoughts. I could read their jealousies and fears and desires through the air. I could sense emotions coming off their bodies in waves. With each aggressive heartbeat I could sense my brother, too, far away, his movements tracked in my consciousness like radar. If I closed my eyes I could see the world my mother was seeing—the dull flickering glow of the television, the sharp sun coming through the trees in back of the house, a cup and saucer on the floor at her feet. And my thoughts were Katherine’s, her sense of logic and loss, understanding and distrust, a bloody finger to her lips. So I’d start to run again, trying to get away from this omniscience, this sensitivity like raw skin. I’d circle the track one more time, trying to empty my mind, trying to make my thoughts my own. But I couldn’t seem to run fast enough.

  It was too sleek in here, Katherine thought, too futuristic, overly masculine, everything black or chrome. She said, “I’ll talk, and you just tell me if I’m wrong.” She was sitting across from Eric in the patient chair—small, modern, uncomfortable, with a stiff black leather seat and spindly silver arms and legs. She raised her eyebrows expectantly.

  Eric pushed his sandwich away and leaned back in his large black leather swivel, smiling slightly, as if amused, as if he’d been expecting this, like the villain in a James Bond movie. “All right, Katherine,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  She took a breath. “You wanted desperately to be a doctor,” she began. “All your life, growing up, you knew that’s what you wanted to be. So you practiced. You practiced on little bugs and then small animals, and then you even cut off the leg of your family cat—”

  “Halley the Comet.” Eric smiled. “Named by Pilot, in fact.”

  “Halley the Comet,” she said, “so you could retro-fit a new leg on him and win the science trophy.”

  “With the exception of animal cruelty,” Eric said, “which most children are guilty of—especially boys—none of this means anything.”

  Katherine ignored him. “You’d been taking amphetamines to keep up with school and your heavy athletic schedule and all that partying, and that day the buildup was a little too much for you, wasn’t it? You went a little bit crazy.”

  Eric half-rolled his eyes, smiling.

  “It’s called amphetamine psychosis, Eric, but you know all about that. And remember, Dawn Costello saw you take the White Cross.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, that night you decided to practice a little bit of surgery. I would guess that you cut Fiona open with the old hunting knife, examined an organ or two, God knows what else. Did you open her skull, Eric? And then you hid her somewhere in the house. And when the search began the next day, you pretended nothing had happened, quite expertly, as a matter of fact. And no one suspected you at all—why would they?—until your brother found the Wonderbread bag under your desk. But he was just a nine-year-old kid, and then he claimed to have found the shoe in the woods, so you thought he was protecting you, right? So then everything was fine, wasn’t it? For years, in fact,” Katherine said, “everything was just fine. Something about having done that, having—”

  “—passed the test,” Eric said.

  “What?”

  “Something about having passed the test. It lets you do things other people can’t do,” he said. “When you push yourself.”

  Katherine nodded. “And then later it seemed that Pilot went crazy, pretending to be a dog in the woods, crawling around and growling, not having any friends, hardly ever washing his hair, no girlfriends, bad grades. He ceased to be a concern, it didn’t matter, because no one would believe a crazy kid like him anyway. And the truth was that he probably didn’t even remember what happened, or was too crazy to put it together.”

  Eric scratched his head. “This is interesting,” he said. “Go on.”

  “But then, for some strange reason, Pilot did remember. Or maybe he had never forgotten. In any event, you poisoned him, Eric, every day in his breakfast until he literally went over the edge. Did you want that? I’m not sure. Maybe Pilot became a little more crazy than you intended. Anyway, he wound up in the clinic, genuinely insane, claiming that twenty years ago you killed your little sister. But who would believe him, a paranoid schizophrenic? It’s just like an old movie. Who would take this paranoid, delusional misfit seriously?”

  “You, evidently.”

  “So you seduced me.”

  “I didn’t have to try very hard.”

  Katherine rubbed her face. She sighed. “But you had to get your hands on the evidence. You knew enough about forensics that you didn’t want to take any chances. And now, with DNA testing… So you went out of your way—way the hell out of your way. Eric, you even killed that poor man who lived in the tunnel.”

  Eric rolled his eyes. “This is ridiculous.”

  “And then your father killed himself. After all those years bearing the loss of his daughter and the disintegration of his family, probably blaming himself for—”

  “We don’t know that it was deliberate, what my father—”

  “No,” Katherine said, “I guess we’ll never know.”

  Eric shook his head. “And I wasn’t anywhere near them when it happened.”

  “But something made you remember the old broken concrete pipe. What was it, Eric?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You went into the woods, didn’t you, looking for the evidence? And there it was. A plastic bag with a little girl’s red sneaker and an old hunting knife. What made you think it was there?”

  Eric made the smallest noise, more of a snort than anything else. It was obviously intended to be a snort of incredulity, but it came out strangled.

  Katherine reached into her purse and dropped the snapshot onto Eric’s desk. It was of him, in the woods, his eyes red in the camera flash, his hand inside a Wonderbread bag.

  He momentarily closed his eyes. “Pilot gave you that?”

  Katherine reached into her purse again, pulling out an envelope. “And here’s what I gave Pilot.” She removed a stack of photographs, dropping them one by one on the desk. In the first one, Eric is standing up to his knees in the green-gray surf. In the following pictures he is throwing the shoe and the knife far into the water. He’s wearing dark blue trousers, a pink shirt. “These are video captures,” she said, “stills from a videotape.”

  “You followed me.”

  “I was already there.” Katherine smiled. “We knew that’s where you would go. We had a good idea about it, anyway.”

  “Just because I got rid of t
he evidence doesn’t mean it was for—”

  “Oh, yes,” Katherine said, “you explained all that to Pilot. That you were protecting him. That all those years ago you were hiding the evidence because he had done it, and he didn’t even know it, and you didn’t want him to get in trouble. But that’s bullshit, Eric.”

  “But now we’ll never know if it’s bullshit,” Eric said. “Because even if you find the shoe and the knife, there won’t be any way to test them, they’ll be completely—”

  “Eric,” Katherine said, laughing, “you may be a brain surgeon, but you’re not that smart.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What makes you think that stuff you threw in the ocean was the real evidence?”

  When he came for me, I knew him. When he came for me, I was in my bed, the flannel covers pulled tightly up to my chin even though it was warm. I had my eyes closed, but I wasn’t asleep. I had been listening to the grown-ups downstairs, the sounds of the ice cubes clinking in their glasses, the arguments between the men, the secrets whispered among the women. What were they saying? I had heard the sounds of the party slipping away, bit by bit, until there was nothing but the wind in the treetops and the faraway rushing sound of the highway, the wheels on concrete. I heard him say my name. I heard him say it was time to get up, and when I opened my eyes I saw him, saw his face, large and perfectly chiseled. I knew it wasn’t time to get up, and I said that it was pure bullshit. So he said that he had a surprise for me, that’s why it was time. I took his hand and he said I should put my swimsuit on again. I told him I didn’t want to go swimming. But he said to just put it on anyway. It was hanging on the end of my bed, on the bedpost, and I had been thinking of it as a red flag and my bed was a boat floating out in the ocean somewhere, lost. I took off my pink-and-yellow pajamas and made him turn around and not look at me, and I got into the swimsuit. It was still damp and cold from swimming, but not too bad. I put my red sneakers on that I had kicked off onto the floor under the bed. I asked what we were doing now, were we going swimming? And he said we were going downstairs to the garage. And I said, why? And he said it was a surprise, he couldn’t tell me. It was important that I be completely quiet, though, he said, and not wake anyone up. It was very important. If I wasn’t completely quiet, he told me, there would be no surprise. So I stayed quiet, troubled even by the loudness of my breathing, afraid even to put my foot down on the carpet. It was so dark in the house, we couldn’t see anything. And we stumbled over some things that were in the hall that led to the stairs. We went down through the living room and into the dining room, and, passing the family room, we saw our brother sleeping on the couch, his hand over his face, his chest heaving up and down violently just to get a breath. He slept like an animal, like Halley the Comet. Then we went through the kitchen—the whole time he was holding my hand tightly, more tightly than he’d ever held it, I thought, like he was afraid—and through to the garage. There was light in here, but just a little bit, coming from a flashlight that rested on the workbench. My brother said to close my eyes, and I did, and I could feel him moving behind me. And then really fast he put something over my mouth. It was tape, sticky and tight. He pulled it all the way around my head, around and around, and my hair got caught in it. I tried to scream—I was screaming—but there wasn’t any sound coming out, and I started to choke and cough, so I stopped screaming and concentrated on just getting some air in through my nose. I wasn’t crying yet, but I was on the verge of crying. I could feel the water coming up to my eyes, rising up inside me. I tried to go to the door but he pulled me back by the arm, hard, jerking me back into him. He made me stand very still, his leg trapping my face against the workbench while he wrapped the tape around my wrists, around and around, so I couldn’t move my arms at all. And then he picked me up, lifted me onto the workbench. I tried to kick him, thrashing my legs around, but he was too strong, and he got my legs down and he taped them together, too, twirling the tape around and around my ankles. I could only look at him now. In the light of the flashlight I could only try to seek out his eyes and get him to feel bad enough with my eyes to let me go. But he wouldn’t look at me. I was going to run upstairs the minute he set my legs free and tell our mother, but then he wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t look at my eyes. He kept walking back and forth, walking back and forth in front of the workbench, saying, you can do this, repeating over and over, you can do this you can do this, this is something, something you can do, do this, do this. Do this, do this, this this this. And then he finally stopped pacing and he came to me and I tried to make a sound. He turned me over, and now my chin was on the surface of the workbench. I could feel him behind me pulling off my shoes, and I heard one of them dropping onto the floor. He was still saying, you can do this, you can do this. I saw his hands flash in front of my face and I felt the string, the shoelace, around my neck. I felt it pulling tighter and tighter, cutting into my skin. I felt it cutting off the air, felt the veins in my neck straining and exploding against the string that he was pulling into me, into my skin. I tried to get oxygen. I opened my mouth inside the tape and I tried to lift my nostrils, but there was nothing. And my heart was pounding inside my body. And the blood was rushing into my ears, like my ears were pressed against the highway, listening up close to the sound of wheels on concrete. And my lungs went empty. And my whole body relaxed. I was in the pool, and it was the middle of the summer, just me and Mom in the house. I was pretending that I had drowned, my body relaxing, floating up up up. I was pretending, just letting my body float there, rising up to the surface, holding my breath. Fiona, my mother called. Stop that. She was calling from the kitchen door. She had the radio on in the kitchen. They were playing the news, the talk talk talk of the news announcer going on and on, it seemed, and never saying anything. I was just pretending to be dead, just pretending I wasn’t dead, really, just letting my body go all slack, to fool my mother, my arms rising to the surface, my body rolling over. Fiona, she said. I could hear her, that faraway echoing sound that voices make through the water. I could hear her saying, Fiona, Fiona. And I wanted to stay in, but I couldn’t hold my breath anymore. And when I looked up I felt the back of my head being opened, the saw blade against my bone. Fiona, she said. I looked up. She was standing in the kitchen door, saying, Don’t scare me like that, sweetheart. His fingers were reaching into my body, reaching in. She came out and stood at the edge of the pool. I went to the edge and put my hands on the flagstones, pulling myself out of the water. His hands were reaching in, so far in. Do you want anything to eat yet? she asked. I’m not hungry, I told her. The sun was warm, and I was standing now. She wrapped the towel around my shoulders, my favorite one, the one with the big white and yellow daisies all loopy and car-toony across it. Put your sneakers on, she said. If you’re going to walk around the yard I want you to put your sneakers on. I was standing now in my sneakers, one lace tied, the other gone, water dripping off my swimming suit, and his fingers were reaching in, pulling my skin away from my body, pulling the muscles away from the bone, pulling the organs out from the inside of me. The sun was bright yellow. As I played in the yard I could see my mother walking back and forth in the kitchen, I could see her head moving by the window, her whole body by the door. She went in and out of the laundry room, her arms full of warm, clean clothes. Sometimes I ran upstairs and found her sitting in the chair by the radio, the soft voices talk talk talking. I would stand behind her and put my chin on her shoulder and tell her things about my day, tell her about how I was so afraid of the woods, the way they were going to lash out and take me, but that I was staying far away, that I was safe in the yard, that I would never leave her. She just said, Fiona, oh, Fiona, that’s right, never leave, never leave me again. I felt the shoe slipping away from my foot, dropping onto the floor. I was out in the yard playing, careful not to fall on the grass, or I was swimming, or standing on the flagstones, my body dripping water, the towel around me, covered in daisies. Put your shoes on, dear, my mother was sayin
g. I don’t want you playing in the yard without shoes. I saw her moving back and forth in the kitchen, her head through the window, her body through the door, back and forth with the clean laundry in her arms. I whispered into her ear. I heard her calling me from the water. Fiona, she said. Don’t scare me like that. Don’t scare me. But when I looked up, I felt the shoelace slipping away from my neck and the back of my head being opened, felt my skin peeling away, the saw blade cutting through the bone, his fingers reaching in, reaching in. I hung on to the lip of the pool, afraid to let go. Daddy, I said. Daddy’s sleeping, he told me. He wore his aviator glasses and I couldn’t see his eyes. He had a newspaper spread over his chest. There was a glass of iced tea resting on the flagstone beside him. Daddy, I said again. Yes? he asked. What is it? I didn’t know. At the party, I said, thinking of something, of something to ask him, anything, just to talk, at the party will there be a lot of people? We invited everyone, he said. Can I stay up late? You can stay up a little bit late, he said. How much is a little bit? I could see clouds reflected in his sunglasses. He reached for his tea and removed the circle of lemon that was curled over the edge of the glass. I held on to the edge of the pool. We’ll see, he said. Through the window I could see her, my mother, her head moving by, and then her body by the door. She’d look out every now and then to check if we were okay, did we need anything? And the woods encircled us, and even though I was afraid they would come too close and swallow us, I watched them, because I knew that soon my brothers would be walking through, stepping out of the trees and across the grass and the flagstones to the pool the way the astronauts walked onto the moon. How much, Daddy, I said, waiting for my brothers to come out of the woods, how much is a little bit late? He smiled, his mouth so wide and so handsome, like a movie star, his sunglasses full of clouds and blue sky, saying, We’ll see, sweetheart. We’ll see.