Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  It was a wet day, and warm, as though spring had come in January, and the ground was soft and easy to dig through. Hannah had called Nathan Tabor, a tax lawyer she had known for years, who had, in fact, been a good friend of my father’s. Detective Vettorello, arms folded, was presiding over the yard watching his team of police officers and forensics specialists shovel the earth out of the old swimming pool. It piled up on the lawn in large even slabs next to the rotten stalks of rhubarb that had been pulled out. Nathan Tabor paced back and forth across the flagstones, smoking a cigar. I was in my bedroom, watching all of this from the window. Eric had confessed, I guess, first to Katherine, and then to the police, that for a few years he had kept Fiona’s body in my father’s old wet suit that hung in the window of the garage, and then when Hannah had decided to fill in the pool, he had put her remains inside it, too, covering her with layers and layers of brown, mossy earth. And then came the vegetables my mother planted. Did the roots reach down to her? I wondered. Was there some comfort for my sister in the way that Hannah tended the garden? The police carved through the mud like archeologists, carefully removing it a foot at a time until someone yelled that he had found something, and then everyone went over to see if it was part of a child-size human skeleton.

  It was a beautiful day, at least. The sky was bright blue, the air warmer than it had been in months—humid, light-jacket weather. When I turned from the window I saw Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy standing in the hallway.

  “I let myself in,” she said. She was touching her lapel.

  I nodded. I hadn’t seen her in quite a while.

  “I thought you might like some, some company right now.”

  “Thanks.”

  She walked into my bedroom. She looked around at all the race cars on the wallpaper. She saw the piles of magazines and science-fiction novels I had stacked up around the bed. I felt my face get hot. For some reason, I was embarrassed for her to see me here. “Pilot,” she said warmly, “you were right. You were right about everything.”

  But I couldn’t say anything. I sat down and looked at the rust-colored rag carpet. I was wearing those old Converse All Stars, one of them with the lace missing. I felt my hands filling with helium. I saw Fiona, her body dripping wet, her skin all shiny, the daisy-patterned towel over her shoulders, the sun far, far behind her. “I don’t feel right,” I said finally. “I don’t feel normal.” I could have worn my Nikes, but I had decided not to today. “Katherine Jane DeQuincey-Joy, I’m not myself right now.”

  “You’re not crazy, Pilot,” Katherine said, and she almost put her hand on my shoulder. “No one would feel normal today. I don’t feel normal.” She sat beside me. “Anyway,” she said, “I wanted to apologize for, you know, for doubting you.”

  “I doubted me. Why shouldn’t you?” I shrugged. “Besides, the shoelace wasn’t even real. And I was wrong about a lot of things.”

  “Like my name.” She smiled.

  “Your name?”

  “My middle name is Marjorie, after my grandmother.”

  “It’s not Jane?”

  “Where did you get that?” She was almost laughing.

  “Where did I get anything?”

  “Were you just wrong about the shoelace?”

  “You know how some people tie a string around their finger to remember things?” I said. “That’s all it was. And then I started to believe it myself.”

  “You said you were omniscient.”

  “I was crazy, that’s all.”

  “Do you still—”

  I nodded, saying softly, “I’m trying not to, and I think it’s fading.”

  There was more shouting from the backyard. Someone was yelling, “I found something. Over here. I found—”

  “Do you want me to take you somewhere?” Katherine said. “Would you like to get out of here? Would you like to be somewhere—”

  “I’d like to see her.” I rose from the bed. I looked at Katherine. “Wouldn’t you like to see Fiona?”

  Today she wore faded jeans, a simple black blazer, a white T-shirt beneath. Around her neck was the silver chain, the Celtic symbol. She looked at me questioningly for a moment, and then she said, “Okay.” We walked downstairs together, and the chain made a slight rattling noise. When I looked at it, Katherine put a hand to her neck. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll take it off.”

  We were in the living room now. “I was just noticing it,” I said. “It’s nice, that’s all.” We walked through the dining room and through the sliding doors onto the mud-splattered flagstones. Detective Vettorello stood in a windbreaker with his arms folded over his chest. “You found her?” I said.

  He nodded.

  Nathan Tabor paced back and forth in front of the pool, puffing his cigar.

  “Can I see?”

  Vettorello pointed to a group of police officers, covered in mud, carefully pulling out my sister’s skeleton, piece by piece, bone by bone. I saw that someone had placed a part of her skull on a white piece of paper at the pool’s edge. This is what all the yelling must have been about. A police photographer was taking pictures. Katherine was beside me, and when I turned to look at her she was pushing tears off her cheek. A policeman put another bone beside the bit of skull, and then another, and another. It would take all day, I could see that. It would go on like this for hours, the police finding the various parts of my sister’s body, cleaning them and placing them on the white pieces of paper on the flagstones.

  Vettorello looked at me. “How is your mother?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked back at the house. “She’s been in her room all day.”

  He and Katherine exchanged a look.

  “When can I see my brother?”

  “There’s nothing preventing that,” Vettorello said. “Unless his lawyer—” and then he stopped himself. “Well, there’s nothing preventing that.”

  I nodded, standing there for a moment. Then I left Katherine with Vettorello and went back upstairs. Instead of going to my room, I went into Eric’s, sitting on his old bed and looking at that case of trophies, the blue ribbons and silver cups. It was still in one of them, actually, Halley’s prosthesis. I could see it protruding from the top of an old swimming trophy—a piece of molded gray plastic in the shape of a cat’s rear lower leg, with a long piece of stretchy elastic attached. Halley had lived a few more years actually, learning to walk on three cat legs, but never leaving the house. He had died inside my mother’s closet, curled in a ball.

  Hannah touched her face. There was a throbbing behind her forehead. There was a pain forming, a pressure building in waves like a migraine. The cells divided and multiplied, the exponential increase of aberrant tissue curling like ivy around her optical nerve. She sat in her room and listened to the men pulling her daughter from the pool. She had done it herself so many times, holding Fiona’s slim wrists and lifting her wet body onto the flagstones. At that moment, I knew how many years and months and days and hours and minutes and seconds my mother had left to live. At that moment—and I would forget later, mercifully—I foresaw the instant of her departure, a tube in her arm, hair white and thin. Right now, though, Hannah closed her eyes. She did not want to see Fiona this way.

  There was a bright two glowing red and blinking on her answering machine, and Katherine erased the messages without listening. She kicked off her sneakers and lay down, arms out, on the mattress. The brown stain on the ceiling hadn’t changed. But at least it was warm in here. At least it wasn’t frigid anymore. She remembered that she hadn’t paid her rent this month. Or her electricity. She hadn’t done her laundry in so long she had been washing her underwear in the sink. There was no food in the refrigerator. Besides this mattress on the floor, there was no furniture, just those cardboard boxes stacked along the wall. She would have to get it together, she told herself. She would have to get a better place to begin with, and some new clothes, and some furniture. Maybe she should just move back into the city, she thought. What was the point of stayin
g? Still lying down, Katherine squirmed out of her black jacket. She was about to pull her jeans off when there was a knock on the door. She hadn’t ordered a pizza, and it certainly wasn’t Eric.

  “Yes,” she said loudly, “just a minute.”

  “Take your time, take your time.” It was an old voice, scratchy and warm.

  Katherine opened the door smiling. Cleveland stood there with his hands in his pockets, wearing a coat too heavy for this weather, a mismatched tie, plaid pants. “Come in,” she said. “Please, come in.” She looked around. “I’m sorry I don’t have anywhere for you to sit. I’ve been here almost half a year already and I haven’t—”

  “It’s all right,” Cleveland said. “I don’t need to sit. I won’t stay long, anyway.”

  “Would you like some water?”

  “No,” he said smiling. “No, no. I just, I just wanted to come out here and, you know, and in person, and thank you in person, that’s all.”

  “Thank me? Really—”

  He cleared his throat. “That’s a case that’s bothered me for many years, probably the worst case I had in all the time I was with the police.”

  “The person to thank, then, is Pilot Airie.”

  He nodded. “He lived with those memories all those years. That was the main thing.” Cleveland indicated the unopened cardboard boxes stacked in the corner. “You going somewhere?”

  Katherine laughed. “I never unpacked them to begin with.”

  “Not sure if you’re going to stay?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s a good enough place, East Meadow,” Cleveland said. “You’re from the city, though, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it’s not like the city.”

  Katherine sighed. “No,” she said.

  “What do you think made him do it now? I mean, that was twenty years Pilot went without saying anything.”

  “They’re brothers,” she said. “And they’re very close, in a way. I’m not sure if I could turn my sister in for—” she stopped herself. “Well, maybe I could. I don’t know.” She looked at the answering machine, which now said zero.