Raveling (38 page)

“I’m sorry I didn’t come up,” Dad said.

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right. I was having all kinds of problems down here and I couldn’t get away.”

“What problems?”

Patricia laughed. “He was trapped off the coast on the little island, when you—” She stopped herself, then went on, saying,
“And he couldn’t leave, you know, because of the hurricane warnings.”

“How long were you out there?”

“Two weeks.”

“What did you eat?”

“Fish.” My father grinned hugely. “And I bagged a possum.”

“That’s disgusting.” I grimaced. “You didn’t eat it, did you?”

“He ate it.”

“I was hungry.” My father laughed and opened the car door of his sleek blue four-by-four off-road vehicle. “I was tired of
fish, too.”

I got in the back.

“You comfortable?” my father asked. “It’s a long drive home.”

“I’m fine.”

Patricia turned to look at me. She was concerned, I could tell. She was worried about my mental health. I gave her my sanest,
most rational look. I was glad my father had found her. She was kind, I had always known that. “I made sandwiches,” she said
smiling. “They’re in the cooler.” There was an old red
cooler beside me. “But if you don’t like them we can stop somewhere and get something else, anything you want.”

“Sandwiches are great,” I said. “I love sandwiches.”

Patricia held her smiling gaze on me a beat too long. It made me feel pathetic. I went to twist the shoelace around my finger,
but of course it wasn’t there.

My brother sat at his desk and neatly folded the waxy paper his sandwich had been wrapped in. Today it had been cream cheese
and olives on pumpernickel, a winter peach, and warm squash soup—although he hadn’t finished the soup. He thought of me arriving
in Florida. He imagined me getting off the plane, the long walk through the airport with my bag in my hand, finding our father
at baggage claim. Could he see that my hair was becoming long? Could he sense that if it weren’t for the bag I was carrying
my hands would float away? He dropped the remains of his lunch in the wastebasket. He got up from his black lacquer desk and
washed up, scrubbing his fingers. My brother closed his eyes and saw the Florida landscape slipping beneath the wheels of
our father’s four-wheel drive.

I rode back in memory to the fishing trips he took us on when we were kids. It was a Ford Gran Torino then. Fiona was a toddler,
and our mother would lay out the dusky-plaid picnic blanket in the shade somewhere near the edge of the trees. Fiona would
come down to the edge of the lake and clap her hands together, giggling and burbling. If anyone caught a fish, she’d dance,
her bright four-year-old face like a cartoon image of happiness. Only once did anyone actually hook a fish large enough to
keep. It was on our father’s line, of
course, a shimmering large-mouth bass sixteen inches long, dangling like an enormous shining locket on a pendant. It was
probably the biggest fish that little suburban lake could maintain. We always stopped at a deli on the way, and while we fished,
Mom assembled sandwiches from cold baloney, soft rolls, hot mustard. There were cool macaroni salad and thin slices of Swiss
cheese. I used to pretend not to know how to put a worm on the hook just so our father would show me again, just to have his
body curling over my body, just to see his fingers move like that and have his face so close to mine. I used to pretend that
our family lived in a cabin just behind the line of trees on the other side of the lake, on the other side of where Fiona
and our mother were.

Fishing, our father always said, is tranquillity interrupted by violence.

In the car, just now, he was saying, “I picked something up for you, Pilot. It’s behind you, in the way-back. Can you see
it?”

I turned around in his car. There was a brand-new fishing rod, red lacquered, in separate pieces, held together by a single
piece of orange tape. “A fishing rod,” I said.

“I figured you wouldn’t bring your old one.”

“I hadn’t even thought about it.” I took the rod onto my lap and turned it in my hands. “I was just thinking about when we’d
go to the lake, you know, when we were kids.” I thought he would be glad to hear that.

“That was nothing,” Dad said. “You just wait till you get your line in the water in a Florida lake.”

“It’s good fishing?” I felt like Hemingway saying that.

“You can’t lose.”

“Tranquillity interrupted by violence?”

My father laughed, remembering what he used to say. “All violence,” he said. “Nothing but violence.”

I said, “Great,” and then I realized my voice may not have sounded as enthusiastic as I wanted it to.

“You don’t have to fish if you don’t want to.” Patricia had removed her seat belt so she could sit sideways in the car, her
back against the door, facing us. I pictured the door opening, her body falling back onto the highway.

“Absolutely,” our father said. “You don’t have to do anything. I just thought that you might—”

“I’d love to fish,” I broke in. “I really would. It’s just what I needed.” I could see him smiling even though I was looking
at the back of his head. I could see his eyes beaming at me in the rearview mirror. I could see the relief on Patricia’s face,
who could see his face directly, who was living directly under the influence of his face, and I could see the reflection of
his smile in hers.

“Excellent,” my father said. He drove for a while, and then he said, “Superb.” We drove in the glow of his approval for several
miles on this Florida highway, and then he turned onto an exit. He also turned the radio on. “They play country music down
here,” he said.

“Your father likes country music.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “He’s entitled.” I never much liked that kind of music. It always seemed too simple to me, like
a sound track to a movie in which you can see the ending coming a mile away.

If my life was a movie, the sound track, I thought, would be like
Jaws
, a single heartbeat beating louder and faster, fear and its quick release, stupid and insistent.

When anyone caught anything, or even if they just thought they did, Fiona would rush down to the edge of the lake, and our
mother would follow behind her by a few paces, bending
over, her hands out just in case she had to catch her, just to make sure nothing happened, to make sure she didn’t fall in.
I was fairly little myself, only six years old, I think, too little to cast the line out on my own. But I remember Eric swinging
his rod back and casting his.

I remember how beautiful he was, how graceful his body.

And when our parents weren’t looking, he would threaten me with the hook, come after me, saying he’d gut me like a bluegill.

My father’s radio played Loretta Lynn, and the Florida suburbs that led eventually to the airport swished by my window in
a flurry of fence white and brick red and lawn green. When we got to their cottage, I knew, our father would ask what it was
like in the clinic, did they treat me all right, did they restrain me at all, tie me to the bed? I would tell him that it
was fine, that it was like a vacation in many ways. And I would consider telling him exactly what had put me in there, but
I would hold back. Today, I would hold back. I had to plan the moment, had to break it to him just right. “And when you were
in the woods,” he would ask me, “what was going through your head? What were you doing out there for three days?”

“I was thinking a million different things,” I would tell him. “And I didn’t know which ones were right and which were crazy.
And I can’t really remember a lot of it.”

“Were you afraid?” he would ask.

And I would tell him that I had never experienced such fear, which was not a lie. And I would tell him that I was thinking
fondly of him, which was one.

I remember Fiona as a still photograph. I remember the green grass behind her, the shadows of saplings crossing her body.
I
remember the garish yellow dandelions in her hair. I remember the baby smile turning up the corners of her pink mouth, that
slight but permanent upward curving. I remember the deep dimple in her right cheek (I have one, too). I remember the little
red shoes she wore—always red—the pink-and-blue floral dress. In the background are trees, a blue-black rippling lake, a cobalt-bright
sky covered unevenly with lacy clouds. I remember Fiona’s hands held together in front of her, caught midclap, captured in
that split second of baby joy. I can see our red-and-black-plaid picnic blanket behind our little sister spread out on the
grass. I can see our mother sitting on that blanket, unfocused in the lens, her chestnut hair in an early 1970s twist, long
curls dangling beside her ears, a short yellow dress. The details are there. In these photographs of Fiona that I carry in
my head, there is always her face in center focus. There is always her smile. My sister’s smile.

“Did you talk to him?” I asked.

“Did I—”

“Did you speak to Eric?”

We were in a borrowed rowboat far out in a Florida lake, me and my father, our lines in the water, our poles propped against
our knees. “I spoke to him,” our father said, nodding. His face told me that he knew what was coming, that he had been prepared
for this conversation.