Raveling (16 page)

“She’s afraid.”

“Is she a fearful girl?” Cleveland looked around the room, his eyes settling on each member of our family.

“No,” Dad said when Cleveland looked at him.

“Yes,” I said when he looked at me.

Hannah put her hand on my shoulder, which meant that Cleveland should ignore me, that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

“Okay,” Cleveland said. He made a note. “When you all saw her at the party last night, do you remember what she was doing,
was there anything unusual?”

“She’s a seven-year-old,” our mother said.

“I know that, ma’am, it’s just that I have to—”

“She was sitting on a man’s lap,” I broke in.

“What man?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He was blond. He had a mustache. He had a shiny shirt.”

“Why didn’t you say anything about this before?” my mother said.

“You saw him, too.”

“Who was he?”

My father’s eyes started to move quickly around the room. “Blond? With a mustache?”

Eric said, “Did he look weird?”

I shrugged. “I guess, weird,” I said. “Weird, I guess.”

My mother said, “Bryce.”

“Who?”

“Bryce Telliman. He’s a physical therapist, from the hospital.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Airie,” Cleveland said, “would it be possible for me to discuss this with you alone?”

Our father said, “You two go upstairs for a few minutes.”

Eric and I left the room and went to the foot of the stairs in the hallway. We stopped there so we could listen to what was
happening in the dining room. I could hear Cleveland’s voice, low and raspy.

“Where is she?” I whispered to Eric.

He looked at me with lasers. “She’s dead.”

I felt my face getting hot. “What do you mean?”

“That blond motherfucker physical therapist took her away from the party and he raped her and killed her, and
we’re going to find her body somewhere all horrible and hacked up into little pieces.”

I felt my eyes starting to burn.

“You’re lucky,” Eric said, “you’re just lucky that it didn’t happen to you. Because they like little boys better.”

Detective Cleveland had asked, “What did she look like?” and when he said that, I knew I would never see my sister again.

I see her in still pictures.

I remember Fiona in the mornings before she went to school. I remember her hand on the banister that led to the front door.
I can see her tiny seven-year-old fingers just touching it, so high up for her, the way her hair looked, the color of sand,
and her shiny white boots. I can see her hand clutching the brown bag lunch that she had packed herself the night before.

I can see Fiona’s red jacket with the pattern of little stars and flowers on it, her green corduroy pants.

All I really know about Fiona is here in these mental images. What can a nine-year-old boy know of his seven-year-old sister?
That she liked candy? That she had a million Barbie dolls but loved only one? That she hated guns? That she loved to watch
football? What is there to know about any seven-year-old? Fiona ate butterscotch pudding mix directly from the package. She
found documentary news programs mesmerizing. She hated animals, was afraid of cats and dogs, and mostly, she hated the woods,
and would never go in there alone.

I carry this picture inside my head now.

I see Fiona’s hand in another hand, a larger one. I see her
standing at the edge of her bed, and she is pulling this hand backwards, her head shaking no, she doesn’t want to go. Voices
are being carried over the water of the pool and into the house. A flash of light is glancing off the window. I can see that
her head is turned slightly toward the window, and that her eyes are desperate with fear. This is the picture I carry with
me in my head. This is the image I see whenever I close my eyes. She is wearing only her red bathing suit and her red high-tops,
floppy and untied on her feet. She has been told it will only be a little while, that they will be back soon, that there is
nothing at all to worry about, everything is fine, Fiona, everything is all right and will always be all right and there will
never be anything wrong or anyone to hurt you in your entire life.

“What did she look like?” Cleveland asked.

And I knew.

Our mother went to get a picture of Fiona that she kept on a small table in the living room. In those days, there were pictures
of all of us there. This one was a year old, and already Fiona had grown larger, her face broader, more coarse. “She’s older
than this now,” our mother said. It was a photograph Eric had taken in the backyard. It was just her face, a little girl’s
smiling, enormous, jagged-toothed face. It was framed in wood.

“Thank you,” Detective Cleveland said. “This will do just fine for now.” He opened the back of the frame and removed the picture
from the glass, peeling it away. “I’ve already got two patrol cars in the area keeping an eye out, and I’m going back to the
station right now with this picture so we can check things more thoroughly. I’m going to have to ask one of you to stay here
and call me if she turns up.” The detective got up and turned toward the door. “I’ll go ahead and let myself out.”

“Thank you,” our father said.

“Does this happen often?” Hannah broke in.

“What’s that?”

“Do little, do children disappear like this very often around here?”

“Not so often, Mrs. Airie, and when they do they always turn up, you know—they were off playing somewhere or fell asleep or
something and they didn’t know what time it was. It’s possible that she wandered into another neighborhood and got lost. Don’t
you worry too much. I know this is nerve-racking, but we’ll find her.”

Our mother nodded. Detective Cleveland backed out the door.

I ran upstairs and took one of her shoes from inside the plastic Wonderbread bag and put it under my shirt. Then I ran out
the kitchen door, across the yard, and across the tree line. I already had that still image in my head, her hand in someone
else’s. I walked into the trees, following the sound of voices.

I heard them high in the treetops, first as just a whispering of my name. And as I moved slowly beyond the tree line, I came
to understand the voices were arguing about me. I followed them. I’d lose them at times and have to step through the soft
forest earth concentrating with my ears. I followed paths I had never seen before. I knew these woods perfectly, but suddenly
it was as if I had never been in them before. I could hear the voices now, moving ahead of me through the trees, ducking around
branches, fighting together in the leaves. They couldn’t decide on me. They had already made a determination, I thought. And
when they led me into the dark thicket of underbrush into a tangle of branches, I followed. And when they led me under a fallen
log and through a drainage ditch, I followed. And when they ordered me out into a clearing of tall grasses and stinging nettles,
I walked out and placed Fiona’s red shoe upright and perfect in the
middle of a patch of nothing, and the voices announced something important to me by rising into a cacophony of shrill screams
and indecisiveness.

This was my sister’s shoe in the middle of the woods, where she would never come by herself, where she couldn’t be dragged
in kicking and screaming. I saw her, her small hand in the larger one, her head turned toward the window, that look in her
eyes—

I still see it.

This is the story I have been telling myself:

It was as if it had been placed there—a red canvas high-top rimmed with white rubber. I knelt down beside it. Detective Cleveland,
I understood, would regard this as an important clue. I knew the voices wanted me to hide it, bury it somewhere beneath a
fallen log, throw it away, bring it back to the house and pretend I had never seen it, evidence of her arrival in these woods,
proof of the existence of her seven-year-old foot stepping on the wet, black earth like an astronaut onto the moon, holding
the hand, no doubt, of the person who would kill her. And when the voices ordered me to hide the shoe, I became defiant. And
when the voices said in a flurry of contention that they would get me, I set my teeth together in a straight line. And they
told me that this would happen to me, that I would be led out here into the middle of these woods one day myself and live
through my sister’s experience, and I knew that I had to deliver this shoe to Detective Cleveland.

Light left me and I started to run. I ran through the underbrush and felt, as I would years later, the stinging of the tree
branches across my face. I knew the uncertainty of each
placement of my feet in the darkness, but I ran, full out, my arms wide, Fiona’s shoe in my hand, and I think I was screaming.
And when I exited into what I thought was the yard of my parents’ house, I was somewhere I had never been before. There was
a house so white in the suburban dark that it was hard to see. There was a pool so blue in the torchlight I thought it was
filled with broken glass.

It would have to be drained.

I held the shoe and as I called out I realized that I had lost the English language. I moved toward this place. This was my
house but it was entirely unfamiliar. All the lights had been turned on. The torches from the party were lit. I could not
speak. There was a woman on the flagstones, her arms out to me. I saw that it was Hannah, my mother, I saw that it was her
but at the same time I understood that it was not her.

“There is no time for this, Pilot.”

As I stepped across the flagstones I held the shoe out to her.

“What is it?” she said.

I moved forward.

“What do you have?”

And when I handed her my sister’s shoe, her voice became shrill in the dark air above the house, a strange house, an alien
place. I had become a wolf boy, and among these humans I was destined to be misunderstood.

“Where did you find this, Pilot?”

I was dumb.

“Pilot, where was this? Where did you find this?”

She took the shoe from my hands.

“Pilot, if you don’t tell me right now where—”

“What is it, Hannah?” My father came out of the kitchen door.

“He found Fiona’s shoe, her shoe.”