Raveling (3 page)

“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 branches and waited for a silence to arrive like a hearse at a funeral home.

There was a path somewhere that led to Sky Highway, and I remembered running along it full speed, my arms reaching
to touch the leaves of low hanging branches, my eyes closed, my head back. Where was it now? Early evening, the sun descended
a single notch. Maybe it was this way. I walked into the clearing beyond which, I thought, must be the highway. Why did everything
seem so unfamiliar? I could hear my own breathing, a dog panting. Along the junior high was another path that led to Sky Highway,
I remembered. I thought I heard other people, two voices in mid-discussion. Above, the sky had become chemical yellow, striped
with dark gray. I stopped to consider my position. Where the hell was I? The trees had become black, too, and I realized how
heavily I had been inhaling and exhaling. I had to be careful. I have a tendency to hyperventilate. Could I see my breath?
No. It was still too early in the season for that. Perhaps in the morning. I had moved off the path that led away from the
house and now, looking back, could not regain it. I imagined the woods had somehow subsumed the house. Sometimes, I thought,
these branches will lash out and swallow cars, houses, people. Had I been swallowed, too?