Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Raveling is a brilliant thriller about two brothers, their mother, and the sad fact of their little sister's unsolved disappearance twenty years earlier. One of the brothers, Pilot, has come back home to take care of his aging mother, but his own mental state has not been stable since his sister vanished. He is determined at last to find out the truth -- but for every step he takes nearer the facts of that long-ago night, the less he trusts reality. And by the time he finds one incontrovertible piece of evidence, even Pilot cannot be sure what it really means.

Release date: September 30, 2001

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 400

Sample

ORDINARILY AT THIS HOUR MY BROTHER, ERIC, would have been at his desk eating his usual Bavarian ham and brie on a wheat baguette, his cup of pumpkin soup, not too
hot, a brown pear, slightly ripe, more crisp than soft. Ordinarily, as I said. But today at lunch he stood in his sterile,
white-tiled, gleaming-steel-and-bright-fluorescent examining room with our mother, Hannah, who had been seeing ghosts. “I’ve
been seeing ghosts,” she complained. She had said it this morning, too, when Eric had come by our house to make coffee and
eggs, if I wanted them, as he had almost every day for several weeks now, to check on me, to make sure I wasn’t any more suicidal
than usual. Eric had told our mother to visit his office at lunchtime, that he would take a look.


This was their intimacy: her acknowledging his authority, Eric’s nonchalant acceptance of our mother’s acknowledgment. This
was the love between them.


“All right.” Eric laughed. “Mom’s nuts.”

She touched the crinkly paper that covered his green vinyl examining table, absently tearing it between her long, fragile,
blue-veined fingers. She was not even aware of this, her actions having become disconnected from her thoughts long ago. “It’s
like on television,” she said. “You know how on
television sometimes there’s an image, like, like Bugs Bunny or something, and right next to him there’s a ghost of that
image, like an entirely different Bugs Bunny?”


Her face was pale, more than usual. A blue-purple vein ran beneath the skin of her temple like a trickle of red wine.

“Sure,” my brother said, somewhat bemused.

“That’s what I’ve been seeing.” Almost imperceptibly, the vein in her temple pulsed. It had grown more prominent in recent years,
Eric noticed, her skin whiter, finer, more transparent.


She’d become ghostlike herself.

“You’re seeing double,” he said. “With televisions that’s called a double signal.” This was descriptive only, not a diagnosis.

And somewhat dismissive.

Our mother folded her arms. “Except, my young Dr. Airie, I know which image is real and which one isn’t.” She was proud, it
seemed, her thin lips set.


“Bugs Bunny isn’t real, Mom.”

She giggled, rolled her eyes. “Eric.”


“Are you seeing a double image right now?”

“Not now,” she said firmly. “Just sometimes.”

“Hmmm.” Eric, a doctor, my big brother, a fucking brain surgeon, wore a white lab coat. Beneath it, a pale blue cotton shirt
monogrammed with the initials ERA, the E slightly larger, for Eric Richard Airie. He also wore a deep blue tie—silk, of course—with
an elegant pattern of fleur-de-lis in gold thread. Hannah, his mother, our mother, wore a soft suede jacket, chocolate brown, a beige linen skirt, Italian leather boots. Outside, it was sweater weather,
early fall. Another Labor Day had come and gone. “That could be her eyes,” Eric suggested, as if speaking to another doctor
in the room, as if anyone else were listening. He walked to the wall,
turned off the lights, and removed a small black penlight from his lab-coat pocket. “Have you been to the optometrist, to,
uh, Dr. Carewater—isn’t that his name?” He aimed it directly into our mother’s pupils, one after the other, watching them
dilate, and on his face was a well-mannered look of medical concern.


She blinked. “I thought of that.” Hannah, a physical therapist, a hand specialist, would have known if it were her eyes. “My eyes are fine,” she insisted.
“A little myopia never caused this kind of trouble. Besides, it comes and it goes.” She repeated herself now, saying, “it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes,” turning the words into a song.


“Okay.” Eric sucked his teeth. “It could just be that you’re crossing your eyes for some reason.” He walked to the wall and
flicked the lights back on. His sandwich was waiting at his desk. The pumpkin soup, was it getting cold? “Can you remember
when it happens? I mean, does it happen when you’re coming out of a dark room and into a bright one? Does it happen when you
wake up, after your eyes have been closed for a long time?” He was looking for information, clues that would lead to an explanation,
data upon which to configure a theory. He was rubbing his hands together. He was growing impatient, too, hungrier by the second.


“Let me think.”

They gave the examining room over to silence for a moment, and Eric looked at his clean, hairless fingers.

Hannah tore at the paper on the examining table. Then she said, “During the day. I’ll be thinking, thinking about something,
I suppose, and then I, and then I just realize that I’m seeing a ghost.”


“You just realize it.”

“It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve been seeing one.”


“Thinking about what, specifically?”


Our mother paused again, eyes unfocused, and then she made her characteristic statement. “Just lost, dear, just lost in my
thoughts.” She had abandoned the crinkly paper and was now stroking the suede of her new brown jacket, combing it in the direction
of the nap. When our mother wears something new, she beams, her face joyful—radiant as a young nun’s. “And there’s Pilot,”
she said softly, her expression dropping. “I’ve been thinking about your brother.”


I am Pilot.

I am Pilot James Airie, Eric’s brother, younger by five years, named after our father’s passion—he flew for the airlines—a
profession I have never even considered for myself.


Eric moved to the sink and pulled up his sleeves. Ever since he had gone to medical school, he washed his hands compulsively,
repeatedly, even at home. Ever since medical school, he had been aware of the risks, the bacteria and bacilli, the microbes
thriving just out of sight. “There’s always Pilot,” he agreed.


Once, there was Fiona, too. Fiona May Airie, our sister.

Our mother hummed. It was a song no one had ever heard before, one that she made up every time she hummed it. It was, I believe,
her way of trying to reassure Eric. She seemed always just on the verge of paying attention, her mind ready to wander away,
her gray-green eyes unfocused and hazy. Humming underscored this quality, and it made Eric crazy. It makes everyone crazy.


I know, because I do it, too.

“Are you disoriented?” Eric asked, his tone saying, Look at me, listen.


“Now?”

He sighed. “When you’re seeing these ghosts.”

“Disoriented?”

“I mean,” he laughed softly, “more than usual?”


She sang, “Don’t be cruel.”


“Seriously.”

“Disoriented,” our mother acknowledged. “Yes.”

“Tired?”

“Tired,” she admitted. “Yes, yes, that, too.”

“Are you sleeping?”

“Not so well.”

“Are you, have you been talking to Dad?”

“Your father is lost—”

“—in the wild blue yonder.” Eric narrowed his eyes. He had heard our mother say this a billion times. “I know,” he said. When
she spoke to our father, which was seldom, Hannah became lovesick, unfocused, a teenage girl pining for her boyfriend.


She hummed again, a slight smile on her lips.

“What about caffeine?”

“I only drink tea, dear, you know that.”

“No coffee?”

This was a stupid question, her face told him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Okay.” Eric dried his hands and threw the paper towel into the mesh chrome wastebasket in the corner.

Our mother’s hair, which was becoming gray, which until so very recently had been light chestnut, soft as mink, fell in uneven
curls around her elegant face. It was a feminine face, a doll’s face, all too easy to see hurt in. It is my face, too, a patient’s
face, a waiting-room face, transforming everyone who looks at it into a doctor. When I am alone, my face disappears, and I
have no face at all. In someone’s presence, especially Eric’s or my father’s, I am all face and no insides, I am a network
of tiny muscles and porcelain skin stretched over a surface of cartilage, bone, and teeth. She pushed her hair away.


“Can you try to worry less?”



Our mother laughed. “About Pilot?”


“About Pilot, about Dad.” He took a step toward her. “About everything.”

“I don’t worry about you.” She placed a hand on his cheek, her fingers cool. It was always disappointing to Eric, but this
is the temperature of women’s hands.


“Please?”

“I can try.” She sang, “I can try, I can try, I can try.”


“Next time you’re seeing the ghosts,” he said, “give me a call, describe them.” Eric took a deep breath. “But now I have a
patient coming, a real one.” He had food waiting—the sandwich, the soup—no doubt it had grown cold. “Not that you aren’t real,
Mom.”


“I’m already gone.” Our mother touched her jacket, stroking the nap of the suede downward, as though petting a cat. “Thank
you, honey.” She gave my brother a swift kiss and clutched his hands, squeezing his fingers in a motherly way that means something
about holding on, about not letting go, about regret.


Only mothers can do this, I’ve noticed. Or old girlfriends.

Eric watched her leave the room, her voluminous beige linen skirt sweeping the sterile air behind her. I imagine that he washed
his hands once more because she had touched them and that he looked up to see his own movie-star, brain-surgeon face in the
mirror above the sink.




I was looking in the mirror, too, staring and staring at my empty, empty face, when I decided that my brother would simply
have to kill me.




Behind the house, the house we grew up in—or didn’t, depending on how it’s viewed—was a flagstone patio that led
to an old, kidney-shaped, in-ground swimming pool. Years ago, before Fiona disappeared, we used this pool constantly, swimming
in it every summer day. When he wasn’t flying, our father lay in a deck chair beside it, his feet up, the Times spread over his chest, snoring through a smile. Our mother would bring out a tray of iced tea, a round slice of lemon over
the lip of each glass—something she’d seen in House Beautiful, probably—and place it at the pool’s edge. We could swim up, all of us kids, and take our drinks. Usually our father’s had
whiskey in it, too, and sometimes I would steal a sip and feel that strange stinging on my tongue, the delicious numbness
that followed.


Later, after Fiona disappeared, after the yard had been allowed to go fallow, and the pool had been emptied, and the weeds
had grown into it and made cracks in the concrete, my mother had it filled in with earth.


A truck arrived one day, and the backyard of our house was transformed.

She mowed, tended, planted, groomed.

When the pool was filled, our mother kept a garden there, growing yellow and orange marigolds around the perimeter to keep
the bugs away. She planted the vegetables of her New England girlhood. She grew carrots and potatoes, beets, radishes and
parsnips, string beans and turnips. For the past several years she had even been growing rhubarb. And now, this year, early
fall, tall pink and green stalks rose, their broad, purple leaves waving hello to the house.


Hello from the past.

When she came home from Eric’s office that day, our mother was not seeing ghosts, I believe, because she was making a rhubarb
pie. Not that anyone ever ate these pies our mother made. They had a strange, rubbery flavor, I’d always thought, like a sweetened
bicycle tire. But she remembered being a little girl in Massachusetts, picking rhubarb and
bringing it home to our great-aunt Jenny, who would wash the stalks and make a cone out of a page of newspaper. She’d put
sugar in the cone, and little Hannah would dip the stalks into it, skipping merrily back to the woods. I always imagined her
bounding along, her reddish hair all crazy against a flushed face, an October wind fierce inside her pink girl ears. When
I imagine our mother’s childhood it is the nineteenth century, even though she was born during the Second World War, and she
wears a cape like Little Red Riding Hood.


Sometimes I imagine Fiona that way, too.

The past all blurs together.

My own past, Hannah’s, my brother’s. Memory’s soft focus.



When I was a boy, I liked to hide in the woods behind our house in East Meadow, pretending to be the wolf boy. Alone, the
English language forgotten, I’d growl, crawling through leaves. Once, a year or so before the pool was filled in, a year or
so after Fiona disappeared, I sneaked into the house on a Sunday afternoon and removed a steak from the refrigerator. I snarled
and tore at it with my teeth, right there on the kitchen floor. It felt slimy and tasted like blood. “Pilot,” our mother said.
She stood behind me. I was eleven, on my hands and knees, a raw piece of meat in my mouth, on the kitchen floor, suddenly
made aware of my actual identity—and disappointed by it, of course. “We were going to have that for dinner.”


“It’s still good,” I said, my face hot.

Eric appeared next to her. “Jesus Christ, Pilot, what the hell are you doing?”

I am the wolf boy, I wanted to say. I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands.


“He’s pretending to be a dog.”

But today, in that same kitchen, Hannah had made a
rhubarb pie, and when I came downstairs in my old blue bathrobe, I could smell it, sweet and woodsy, filling the house. “Did
you see Eric?” I asked.


She only hummed.

“What did he say?”

“He said not to worry—not to worry, not to worry, not to worry.”


I sat down at the kitchen table while she took the pie out of the oven.

“I made a pie,” she announced.

“I can see that.” I was insane, by the way. I had moved back home at the age of twenty-nine. I had been rescued by Eric, in
fact, found on the beach in California, out of money, suicidal, experiencing one senseless epiphany after another.


“It’s not ready to eat yet,” my mother warned. “Still too hot.”

The theme of her kitchen was the teapot, and on the tablecloth was a cheerful pattern of fat ones, all yellow. I traced the
outline of one of these yellow teapots with my finger and examined the pie she had placed in front of me, the crust underdone,
and I asked, “Are you seeing any ghosts?”


She had a mean streak sometimes. She said, “Just you.”



Recently, I’d been feeling my hands and feet grow light and I was afraid that if I moved, I’d float away, carried up into
the air the way a child’s body floats to the surface of a pool when she’s pretending—


“But I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”

Hannah put a hand over her mouth and left the room.

—pretending that she has drowned.



Sometimes, in the woods, as the wolf boy, on my hands and knees, stalking a rabbit or a mouse or a squirrel, pretending,
I would stop, and in a moment of embarrassed self-consciousness I could not remember who I was—Pilot or Eric. More accurately,
I couldn’t remember who I was supposed to be. I knew I wasn’t really the wolf boy. I knew that I was only a boy, a human being,
who belonged to the house with the white-painted brick walls on the other side of the trees, past the open, overgrown lawn,
behind the empty, unused, cracked pool and the buckling flagstones.


I am the wolf boy, I wanted to say. I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands.




That day in the kitchen, the scent of my mother’s rhubarb pie strong in the air, the crust all melty and underdone, there
was a dead-on collision of forgetfulness and memory. I found myself looking through the eyes of the wolf boy again. How long
had it been?


That day, our mother saw double, but I saw one thing.



One thing, twenty years old, clear for a fraction of an instant.



Later, I was on the phone with my brother.

“Is there anything wrong with her?” I wanted to know.

“It’s too early to tell,” Eric said. “I’m not sure.”

I suddenly realized that I was standing in the living room. I said, “You’re the brainiac. I thought you understood these things.”

His voice was dismissive, as usual. “It could be anything,” he said. “It’s probably just stress.”

“Stress.”

“Things bother her.”


Our mother’s living room had become cluttered. Mismatched pillows and throw blankets, decorator styles and patterns merged
recklessly—plaids with paisleys, stripes with florals. “I guess so.” I couldn’t remember walking into this room. I remembered
how it used to be so tasteful, a page from a magazine.


“And what about you?”

“What about me?” I looked at the phone. Suddenly it was black. I had never noticed that this telephone was black. It had a
rotary dial, too. I didn’t remember dialing it. I looked at my finger. What fucking year was this?


“Pilot,” my brother said. “Stop humming.”

“I really don’t know, Eric. Things are weird. I’m compelled to tell you the truth,” I said, “and things aren’t exactly right.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“And besides, we’re talking about Hannah.”

He exhaled. “I hate it when you call her that.”

“It’s her name.”


“She’s our mother.”


“Anyway,” I said, “what about her?”

“I don’t know, Pilot. It’s probably nothing.”

Hannah, at that moment, was driving home from the cavernous housewares discount store that had replaced the old Kmart on Sky
Highway. It was called Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Whenever she came home from Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Hannah spoke reverently of
it, in a hushed voice, marveling at the selections of toaster ovens and bath towels. She was leaning down to reach an old
Joan Baez tape that lay on the floor of her cream-colored early seventies Mercedes sports car, and when she looked back up
she saw two entirely distinct Sky Highways. I knew this because at that moment, at that very second, in fact, I heard a soft
beep inside the telephone line.



“There’s another call,” I told Eric. “Hold on.” I pressed the plastic hang-up button on this old, black, rotary-dial telephone
that I had never seen before in my life, and I said into it, “Hello?”


“Pilot.” It was Hannah on her cellular. I could tell something was wrong.

“What is it?”

“I’ve pulled over.”

“Where are you?”

“Right in front of the turnpike.”

“Is it the car?” It was a false question. I knew it wasn’t the car.

“It’s me,” my mother said. “I’m seeing ghosts. I’m seeing a whole ghost Sky Highway. There’s a ghost Mobil station on the
ghost corner. There’s a ghost dashboard right in front of me, a ghost steering wheel, everything. I don’t think I should drive
home.”


“I’ll come get you.”

“Pilot,” our mother said. “No.” I waited for what I knew she would say. “Pilot, I just left a message for Eric. He can—”

“I’m on the other line with him right now, which is why he’s not answering.” Which is why you resorted to calling me, I thought.
“But Mom, I can handle this.”


“Pilot, just—”

I cut her off. “Eric?” I said. “That’s Hannah on the other line. I have to go.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’ll be fine,” I told him. “I have to go.”

I was struck by the weirdness of things. I asked myself if failure can become insanity. For some reason I thought I heard
people having a conversation upstairs, even though I knew no one was home. They were saying my name. I put on some old running
sneakers I found in the hallway closet. I
hadn’t worn this particular pair of Converse low-tops since high school, which was more than ten years ago. One of the laces
came undone, slipped through the metal eyelets and into my hand. It was just an old shoelace—worn, blackened from time, frayed
at one end. But millions of thoughts flickered across my mind like moths against a patio light. A shoelace. I didn’t have
time to tie this stupid shoe. I was off to rescue our mother, Hannah, who sat helpless, seeing ghosts, in her Mercedes by
the highway.




Eric opened the door to his office and asked his secretary, “Diane, did my mother call?”

“She’s on line two,” Diane said. “She’s holding.”

He went back to his desk and clicked a button on his telephone, which was blinking red. “Mom?”

Our mother was on the line. “What did Pilot tell you?” She sat in her Mercedes, the light fading from the sky, seeing double.

“Nothing,” Eric answered. “Just that he had to go, and then he hung up.”

“I’m seeing ghosts, so I pulled over.” She sighed. “I tried to call you, Eric, but you were, you were with a patient or something,
so I called Pilot instead and he said he’d come get me, but—”


“But there’s no car for him to drive. He’s so fucking stupid. How’s he going to—”

“I guess he’ll walk, that’s all, and don’t call him stupid.”

“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Eric said. “He is stupid. Where the hell are you, anyway?”


“Right in front of the turnpike, across from the Mobil station.”

“He’ll walk through the woods, I guess.”


Her voice was resigned. “I guess so.”


They imagined me, the two of them. They saw me leaving the house through the kitchen door. They saw my black Converse All
Stars caking with mud as I stepped off the patio into the backyard. Did they imagine the feeling I had of the Earth separating
from itself, its tectonic plates shifting deep beneath the forest floor, adjusting under the layers of leaves, mulch, dirt,
and limestone? Of the trees encroaching, preparing to swallow me the way one paramecium absorbs another?


“Will you come and get me, Eric?” our mother asked. “Please?”

Did they know that things had become transparent again, clear as a blue sky seen through blue water? That I could actually
see the cancer forming like a tulip bulb on the base of my mother’s optical nerve? I could look through the trees all the way
to the highway, through her car, and through her hair and skin and cartilage and bone into the folds of tissue around her
eyes, to see the muscles dilating, the tendrils of nerves and vessels of blood, and the radical cells dividing there, and
dividing again, a tumor the size of the dot over a letter i. Eric had removed his lab coat and was slipping his dark gray suit jacket on, the telephone handset wedged precariously between
his neck and shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said, and then he repeated a phrase our mother had used earlier that day. “I’m already
gone.”




The woods behind our parents’ house were wide and tall and stretched all the way to the highway. Along the back of our yard
the trees were deciduous—oak, maple, birch—whose leaves would drop in the fall to create a blanket of brown and gold through
which, in childhood, I would crawl, breathing deeply the dry, acrid, wonderful smell. As these woods grew closer and closer
to Sky Highway, however, the trees became
pine, and their needles remained green—seemed, in fact, to grow greener—as the bleak winter wore on. There were clearings
here as familiar to me as my childhood bedroom. There were trees I had climbed so often I thought of them as furniture. I
remembered particular saplings that had become full grown. I could pinpoint in the woods of my memory exactly where certain
bushes had gathered, where a nest of brown-feathered thrushes had lived, where a bees’ nest hummed and quivered on a high
branch.


I walked toward the highway.

I twisted and untwisted the shoelace, the one that had come undone in my hand, around and around my middle finger.

Winter was coming.

In the winter the woods were cold and empty, and the snow covered the ground like a white sheet of paper, and the shadows
of the trees crossed the snow like black marks of ink. I’d crunch through the hard crust of ice and stand, shivering. Always
there was the roaring sound of the highway in the distance, and always there was the sound of the wind in the trees. If I
stayed out here long enough, I learned, I became numb, numb to the cold and more. For a time I could sit on that old broken
concrete pipe in the clearing and listen to the cars on the highway and hear the high-pitched whistle of the wind in the treetops
and the low falling of snow dropping from the branches and not feel a thing, become the wolf boy, my emotions too simple for
language or memory.


Black-feathered ravens lit on the branches high above and called out to each other obnoxiously, like teenage boys.

The wolf boy—Pilot, Eric, whoever.

These woods in spring thawed quickly, it seemed, messily. The floor became mud, and the melting of the snow created oozing
black mulch, especially along the path that led to Thomas Edison, the junior high school Eric and I had attended. The tops
of the trees were the first to green, naturally,
and as the warm light reached the ground, there soon sprouted one million fingers of fern, all beckoning seductively in the
breeze.


The summer filled the woods with bugs, flies that buzzed and gnats that shot at my ears, with crawling things that scurried
under rocks and burrowed through the dirt and droppings of shit. Squirrels chased each other around tree trunks, fat as my
mother’s teapots, gorging themselves on acorns. I would emerge from these woods in the summer covered with tiny red welts,
bites of every variety, bee stings and scratches.


One of those summers I discovered a nest of tiny green snakes, as bright as tubes of neon in a beer commercial, beneath an
overturned rock. They swarmed and wriggled grotesquely, each one a miniature of its full-grown future.


They would not change, I realized then, except to become larger.

I had not changed, I realized now, except to become larger.

Over the course of the next week or two, I dropped crickets and other bugs into this snake nest, and I watched the tiny green
vipers or whatever they were attack and swallow the insects, their whispery little tongues sliding in and out of their mouths.


I stopped for a moment, listening for the highway in the distance.

When our father was a boy he trapped mink and muskrats, then sold their pelts to Sears and Roebuck. He had kept his traps
in an old box in the garage. The same summer, the summer I found the snakes, Eric discovered our father’s old animal traps
and set them, one by one, throughout the woods. He caught rabbits, squirrels, an adolescent raccoon, and, according to him,
Halley the Comet, our family cat.


That was the year before Fiona disappeared.


And then came the year we lost her.


And the year after.

I was the wolf boy that year, and one afternoon I approached an empty trap and saw the scrap of meat, coagulated and raw,
that Eric had placed in it. I moved my face toward it gingerly, just, as I believed, an animal—a real wolf—would do.


I backed away, though, wary.

In the fall I rejoiced at the pyrotechnics of death in these woods. The reds and golds, the explosions of leaves falling like
slow-motion fireworks. In these woods death calls such beautiful attention to itself. It cascades in gorgeousness, opulent
with colors. In people, death simply washes our color away, turning us blue and gray.


But Eric had lied about Halley the Comet. He had sliced our cat’s leg off with a hunting knife—

Today, it was fall. I started walking again.

—a knife our father had given him. It was sleek, leather-sheathed, with a silver inlay of a rhinoceros embedded in the handle,
and razor sharp.




While Hannah waited by the highway, I walked through layers of stiff, wiry branches that dragged against my wind-breaker and
snapped back against my face. I had known these woods so well when I was the wolf boy. I had crept through the underbrush
and had buried myself in the dry, brown leaves, leaves that made a crackling sound like the paper on Eric’s examining table.
As a boy, I had climbed into these branche