Dead Letters

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Bones or something,” I finish. Good luck, Sparky. “Anyway, I don’t want to have a funeral without a death certificate. It would be unseemly,” I say, and the poor kid looks stricken. “Thank you, Officer, for answering my questions. You’ll keep me posted?”

  He bobs his head at me, clearly relieved that the conversation is over, and I turn to leave.

  “Ma’am?” he says tentatively as my hands reach for the door. I face him, one eyebrow raised. “There’s just one other thing that, uh—well, we’re still looking into one more thing.” He swallows. “It’s just that the barn doors were—well, they were chained shut. From the outside.”

  April 30, 2016 at 3:12 PM

  Dear Pouty, Crabby, Puerile Twin,

  And so we finish year two of your stubborn radio silence. Okay, Ava. I get it. I’ll do my time, keep on writing you, wait for you to shake off your huff. Let you have your temper tantrum so that you can save face. It’s fine, I don’t mind; I’ve always been less proud than you. I don’t mind admitting that I MISS YOU and that I’M GOING CRAZY WITHOUT YOU. Do you think that will soften your brittle crustacean shell? Will it weaken your resolve to maintain this transatlantic muteness? I don’t know. You were a soft touch when we were girls, but maybe you’ve toughened up, ensconced yourself in some sort of emotional fortress. I remember you crying pitifully when we saw a homeless man begging in Watkins Glen. He was a raggedy-ass specimen, too tan and wilted, with his cardboard sign entreating us to HELP because HE WAS A VETERAN. As though his life was inherently more valuable because he had the bad luck (or, even worse, the misguided desire) to end up in the military. Oh, but you were moved! You tugged our father’s hand, pleaded with your very best Tender Ava eyes, and he gave you ten dollars to hand to the man. A testament to both our father’s complete inability to deny you anything and his endless profligacy in all things financial. The man chews through cash the same way he devours imported cheese (the two behavior patterns may be related). You gave the old vet the ten bucks along with your tattered spare change. And later, when we went for ice cream and you had no money, I bought you one.

  But now you’ve seen something of the world, and perhaps you’re less fragile, more cynical. Maybe. I’d put money on not, though. Bet you’re still dropping euro coins into the hats of amputee hucksters who will unfold their hidden limbs at the end of the day and traipse off to the nearest bottle shop, living proof that the performance of suffering is worth money. A lesson our mother learned young. These days, however, it is a woefully unprofitable adventure, for her at least. I imagine the begging industry is still going strong. But Nadine seems to have run up against some empty coffers, and she’s not taking it all that well.

  I fear that Silenus may be going under, dearest Ava. I know it won’t be too surprising to you, but perversely, I hope it keeps you up at night. I certainly toss and turn a bit these long dark evenings, before giving in to temptation and chasing some of Nadine’s fancy tranqs (tranks? How would you spell it?) with a glass of Scotch. Then I sleep like the dead; I wouldn’t wake up if I caught on fire, lolz! Bad for my hepatic well-being, but it’s the only way I can get spreadsheets of collapsing finances out of my brain. I’m getting ready for the spring bloom (mind that moisture!), but I know that this year might be the last, that if this season doesn’t go well, we’re fucked. Not what you want to hear. Or maybe you don’t care.

  Your increasingly desperate twin,

  Z is for Zelda

  —

  I leave the cop station with a feeling that resembles vindication. I knew something was going on, knew there had to be. But what, Zaza? What could this possibly achieve? I drive too fast, which is obviously a terrible decision, since getting pulled over will mean more than a speeding ticket for me. But I’m racing, and before I realize I have made the decision to go there, I’m pulling down the driveway where Zelda keeps her battered Airstream. She has so many places to run to, when she’s running from our mother. But all within the confines of the family estate. Zelda holds her ground—I’m the one who flees.

  The trailer rests on a cobbled-together deck that Zelda built herself the summer we graduated high school. I could see her jaw growing tighter and tighter as that summer waned, and I, naïvely, thought she was nervous about starting college. We were both going to live at home, but I had gotten into Cornell and Zelda was headed to a community college in Ithaca; her grades the past two years had been appalling, and she hadn’t even bothered to apply to Cornell. I thought she was scared of growing up, that she wouldn’t be at home outside her circle of wild high school friends. But she was really afraid of losing her sway over me.

  That whole summer she toiled away on the elevated plywood deck, eyeing me warily as I sat in a ragged lawn chair doing my summer reading. She circled me like a predatory cat, and I was blissfully unaware of her prowling, happily absorbed as I was in my stack of books (and the carafe filled with spiked lemonade that we replenished lavishly throughout the day, growing more heavy-handed with the vodka as the sun drew lower in the sky). I was happy, elated, caught up in my academic fantasies, while Zelda was growing increasingly anxious to devise a scheme that would keep me caught up in her drama. And boy, did she achieve that, though I wouldn’t know it for several years.

  The door to the Airstream is ominously ajar. I slam the truck’s door and hop up the semi-sanded steps, an image flashing before me of Zelda with her orbital sander, cursing these steps. “Our fucking paterfamilias had to go and destroy the belt sander while he was wasted, and now I’m trying to sand the steps with this rinky-dink piece of shit.” She furiously lit a cigarette and stared malevolently at the off-kilter stairs. I looked up from Lolita and laughed at her, standing there in her cutoff shorts, engineer boots, and bikini top. Gypsy hair, wild corkscrews shooting off from her head, and her dark tan made her eyes look terrifying. I had slathered on coats of SPF 50 all summer long, and Zelda’s newly tawny skin successfully marked the two of us as distinct beings. That summer, we looked different. I washed my hair religiously, combing and straightening it so that it looked tame and silky, while Zelda’s raven hair was just short of dreadlocked glory. Her eyeliner was dark and messy, while I wore just a smidge of sedately hued eye shadow. All our lives, we had embraced our spooky similarity, opting for the same haircut, same makeup. Different clothes, always, but clothes can be swapped, inducing all kinds of Shakespearean identity mishaps. Not that summer, though. She had giggled right back at me and flopped onto the deck chair next to mine.

  “Fuck this foolishness,” she declared. “We’ll all just have to deal with the splinters and drag them around as reminders of benevolent neglect. Mine and Marlon’s both. How does it go, something something beam in the eye?”

  “You’re proposing that we all suffer through beams in our feet?”

  “If that’s what it takes!”

  “You’re drunk,” I point out.

  “Judge not lest…”

  “And you’re mixing your biblical references.”

  “Yes, but they all address hypocrisy. So there. Take that. Come swimming with me, please. You’re sweaty.”

  “Always telling me what I am,” I mock-complain.

  “No, I usually leave that to you, boss lady.” I let her tug me away from my book and we ran down to the dock, close in step, our feet moving in pace. I imagine that if you saw us from the side we would have looked like one body moving together. Fillies in dressage. Running with her, I felt whole, as though I was what I was meant to be. In the water, we splashed happily until Wyatt showed up with beverage reinforcements and joined us, to romp in a cozy haze of vodka. And happiness.

  I enter the Airstream and my breath is nearly sucked out of me. It smells so much like Zelda that it physically slams into me. I don’t think you’re dead, Zaza. But God, I’ve missed you. I’ve been pretending for the past two years that I can live without her, that I don’t miss her with a visceral, embodied ache, all the time. Pretending that what happened severs the phantom umbilical cord th
at has tethered us together for more than two decades. As I look around the trailer, every cranny of it steeped in Zelda, I realize that I’ve been fucking kidding myself. I want my sister so bad it hurts. And I realize, suddenly, that that’s what she’s been trying to do. This entire scheme—the fire, her supposed death—is a little show, a spectacle for my benefit. She’d had enough of my punishment, and this is her saying: You can’t ignore me, Ava, you can’t live without me. You can’t get away from Silenus, you can never leave ME.

  Scarves, fabric, textiles, prints cover all the walls. I can see at least three of Zelda’s colorful kimonos draped on various surfaces. The bed is rumpled, unmade, and I sit down on it, holding a pillow to my face, breathing in her scent. There’s a lump in my throat that I’m working very hard to dislodge. Maybe I’ve overreacted, these past two years. Could I have been blowing it out of proportion? It was a betrayal, yes. And what happened afterward doesn’t even bear dwelling on. But maybe…Then I realize that Zelda is manipulating me without having to say a single word, and I toss her pillow across the room in frustration.

  The pillow takes out a lamp on its way, and I lean my head back, annoyed, unsure why I’ve come to the trailer after all. Just to feel close to Zelda? No, to figure out what game she’s playing. We’re playing. Who on earth is Jason? And the locked barn doors? I suspect her of staging everything, but why let the police think it’s murder? If she was going to fake her own death, she’d only be making everything more complicated by leaving clues suggesting that it was not accidental. Why risk alerting the cops that all is not as it seems? My recent fixation on Poe immediately makes me think: locked-room mystery. As though she knows how this would tantalize me.

  I get up and pad around the trailer, looking at Zelda’s artifacts. A bizarre ceramic sculpture here, a spent candle toppled onto its side next to a pile of sketch notebooks carelessly scattered on the table. Good way to start a fire. The trailer is cluttered with years of Zelda’s accumulated disarray. I pick up a dish full of sad-looking apples and chuck them into the garbage. I’m straightening stacks of books and moving glasses to the kitchen sink before I even realize what I’m doing. Tidying up after Zelda, like always. I stop in exasperation and almost storm out of the Airstream, fed up with myself and with my sister, filled with that itchy combination of fatigue and anxiety that my entire family produces in me. An allergic reaction for which antihistamines can do nothing. I want a drink.

  But as I prepare to walk out the door, I pause and look in Zelda’s favorite “secret place.” Our whole lives, she’s been obsessed with secrets, and as a girl, she liked to squirrel away notes, money, tiny treasures in hiding places all over the vineyard. I double back to the bed and lean down along the side. The carpet is loose in this corner, and I peel it back, revealing a small hole. Zelda systematically used these secret places after the first time our mother called the cops on her and she got busted, at fifteen, with a dime bag in her pocket and a quarter ounce in her bedroom (one hundred hours of community service, probation). I remember her fishing a baggie of pills out of this corner during my first semester of college. She always told me that I knew where all her secret places were, that I was the only one who knew all of them. I believed her for years.

  My fingers curve around something cold and rectangular, and I pull an iPhone out of the hole. Zelda’s real phone. I wonder briefly what phone the cops found. What she intended them to find. The battery is low—it’s probably been in there for at least two days—but I can still turn it on. Password protected. I try her old PIN for her bank cards; she used to have only one PIN for everything, because she claimed she couldn’t be bothered to buy into some paranoid fantasy that there were people out to thieve her identity or scoop the twenty-three dollars from her savings account. It doesn’t work.

  I’m busy frowning at the screen, thinking, when I hear someone pull up outside. I stand up and peer out from the mismatched curtains. I know that truck. My mouth dries up and my heart is suddenly clamoring to get out of my chest. I can’t tear myself away as the door swings open and a familiar body stretches out from the driver’s seat, unfurling long legs. I walk numbly to the Airstream’s door, realizing that it’s here, the conversation I have resolutely avoided for two years. It’s going to happen. I’m tempted to hide, to evade, but I’m in a fucking trailer with exactly three feet of room to maneuver, and I know it’s time. I slide the phone into my pocket, and I swing the door open, trying desperately to look composed.

  “Hey there, Wyatt.” His face freezes, and his whole body tenses at the sight of me in the doorway. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  4

  May 20, 2016 at 11:38 PM

  Dear Disapproving, Uptight Twat of a Sister,

  Fine. You want me to talk about it, confess? I can do that. It seems my self-flagellation is a prerequisite to your speaking to me, so here goes. I have our mother’s blood. I am ready to be a martyr.

  Wyatt loved you. Since tenth grade, at least. I think he started doodling your combined names in his notebooks around then, embarking on his wholesome fantasy of your blissed-out heterosexual future. Ava Antipova no longer, now Ava Darling. Literally. Wyatt’s last name has always been too good to be true; first name, too, for that matter. I know he lusted after your pristine purity, your clean button-downs and tailored jeans, your fitted-waist striped gowns that are crying out (still) for a clambake in Cape Cod. That’s the sort of thing they do in Cape Cod, right? I’ve never been, as you know; I only have the apocryphal tidbits you regaled me with after the vacation you took with that unbelievably white girl after sophomore year, to the beaches that spawned our mother. Wyatt always admired your clean, restrained prettiness, how your hair was always tidy, how you always wear that delicate smirk on your face, like you’re busy cleverly narrating everything. All the things other people find infuriating about you, Wyatt loved. But you can keep a man at arm’s length for only so long, Ava dear, before you run the risk of him straying. Sounds like something Grandma Opal would say, right?

  Let me sketch out a narrative for you, since I know how you love them, crave them, cook them up. I’m the one with a useless (half) degree in The Arts, but you, with your practical, analytical brain, always need to know how we got where we are. So how does this sound?

  Boy and Girl go to the same hick high school. Boy is tall and strapping, bright for these parts. Not much money, but from a sweet, wholesome family who all LOVE EACH OTHER. Girl is pretty, smart as a whip, and desperate to erase her own family’s insanity, to transition to more sedate familial pastures. Boy is fairly smitten with Girl; strangely, Boy can sense the intense vulnerability that lurks behind all that careful togetherness. He sees the fragile underself that Girl tries desperately to mask with her control. Girl clearly likes Boy, BUT: Girl has gigantic stick up her ass, and Girl (due to a number of actually very reasonable justifications resulting from a traumatic upbringing with an emotionally withholding psychopath—I mean Mom, not me or Dad, ha ha) is unable to tolerate any sort of emotional vulnerability at all. So, she keeps Boy close for years, permitting certain liberties, *ahem*, but maintaining a strict emotional distance. A psychological moat. She strings Boy along in this infuriating fashion for some time. Years, like, seven of them. Boy is a good sport, but Boy is a boy, and Boy eventually weakens when Girl disappears for a few months without alerting anyone where she has gone. Girl is generally presumed to have absconded with Another Man.

  Which is when Boy, primed by years of loving someone who is unable to love, turns to Other Girl, who happens to resemble Girl quite a bit. They could almost be copies of each other. Boy sees in Other Girl some of the same vulnerability, mirrored in Other Girl through a startling level of recklessness and disregard. Boy starts drinking a bit more than usual (he is finally over twenty-one now, after all, legally allowed to indulge) and spends time with Other Girl. Other Girl knows this is dangerous, but Other Girl is also lonely, and feels abandoned and slightly pissed off and/or vengeful. She knows Girl will co
me home eventually, but in the meantime, out of lonely desperation, she entertains a fantasy that Boy likes her for herself, and that she, Other Girl, might have an actual CONNECTION WITH A PERSON, a person who is not her identical twin. In short, she kids herself. Tells herself lies. Cooks up a story of her own.

  Boy pines for Girl, as he has since the tenth grade, and then, one night, there is wine and equinoctial skinny-dipping and human nature, and Boy and Other Girl find themselves in an…uncomfortable situation. They can’t take it back, though, and both are beginning to doubt that Girl cares for either of them one whit. It has been a long, sexually tense winter of uncertainty. So Boy spends the rest of the spring in Other Girl’s trailer. And Girl finds this out in the worst way possible when she returns home unannounced. A confrontation occurs, and shit goes even more horribly wrong, if that’s possible, and a few things happen that might be considered irreversible, but which are really just the result of a lot of pent-up libidinous energy and the immoderation of youth. Everyone regrets what happened immediately, deeply, but Girl wigs out (rather disproportionately, in Other Girl’s humble opinion). Girl then impulsively storms off to Paris to get a PhD, something she was only vaguely threatening to do before the whole fiasco, and she skips town in a huff, without a word to Boy or to Other Girl, with whom she shares, like, one hundred percent of her DNA. Wanting to preserve the air of tortured mystery, like all wounded young people.

  That sound right, Ava? I’m not trying to deflect blame or imply that you forced us into it. I’m pretty sure I could make that case, but I know that would infuriate you, so I won’t bother. You loved him, in your way, but your way was so damned cold. You let him pretend, played along just enough, but you never thought it was real. I remember how you used to talk about him, how undecided you were: “He’s sweet, and just right in so many ways, but sometimes I look at him and think I wouldn’t mind if he disappeared forever.” Remember saying that? You said he was paper-thin, and you projected a story onto him, to make the whole thing palatable. It was a game for you. Once, cruelly, you said: “If he had been born to different parents, he would probably be a Republican.” Absolute condemnation.