Dead Letters

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  I note that he takes the empty bottle down with him to put in the recycling. Responsible Wyatt. Little things like that endear him to me. Zelda would have left empty bottles on the railing until they fell off, and then she would have let them accumulate in a jagged heap beneath the deck. Our mother would wait for the vanished servants of her childhood to come and collect her detritus and, failing that, would have raised holy hell until we picked them up. And Marlon? Marlon would disappear before anyone would think to accuse him of neglecting the task. I’m the only one who would take it downstairs to the recycling before getting a new bottle, I think bitterly. Me—and Wyatt.

  I’m wobbly crossing the room, but I’m not that drunk; I’ve been going slow tonight, and all the drinks have been spaced out. I’ll be okay for a couple more. Should definitely stop after this bottle. Probably. We’ll reassess afterward.

  I fumble open the door to my mother’s room and step inside. It’s stuffy in here, and I realize she has closed the window, knocking the fan onto the floor. I reopen it and turn the fan on. I use her bathroom and look at my face briefly in the halogen light. My kohl eyeliner is nearly gone, except for a messy smudge beneath my eyes, and I clean it off with a damp corner of the white washcloth hanging on the towel rack. Zelda always did that, and Nadine and I would fume at the half-moons of mascara that stained nearly all of our towels; it never totally came out in the wash. I reflect that there must be some sort of clever pun there, about our family and all the things that haven’t come out in the wash, but my mind is sluggish, and I give it up as a wasted exercise. One of my favorite things about alcohol is that it helps to silence the constant narration, the chatter of my brain. I dampen my neck and try to scrunch my messy curls into a more appealing look.

  My mind is swirling with everything that’s happened. Zelda has set everything up so neatly. She must have known that I would show up, that I would eventually cotton on—hell, she’s been leaving me clues the whole while, waiting for me to catch up. Does she want me to go to the cops, to spring Jason and tell them that she’s still alive? I’m reluctant to do that, because we haven’t gotten to the end of this game, clearly. I can only guess at what she has scheduled next. I should be angry, furious at her for jerking me, everyone around like this. And I am angry. I am seething with quiet fury at my sister, as I have seethed most of my life. But I realize with a twist of dismay that I’ve been missing this, missing her. Even though this has been emotionally draining and torturous, I’m happy to be playing a game with her. Because it means we haven’t lost each other.

  I almost trip on the doorjamb coming out of the bathroom, and I squint at it in the dark. Should fix that. Nadine will fall and break a hip. I’m about to walk out of the room when I turn and look at my sleeping mother. She’s perfectly still, breathing heavily, and I assume she has taken her pills. I’m overcome with an impulse I haven’t felt in years.

  With a glance at the door, I walk over to the bed and climb into it. Nadine doesn’t stir. I curl around her, realizing dully that my feet are filthy and might be staining her cream duvet; I scoot in closer anyway. She smells as she has always smelled, of her obscenely expensive La Mer moisturizing cream. I snort at the French homonym; the mother smells of the mother. Underneath the fragrance is a sharp, unfamiliar smell, though, and I wonder if it’s the scent of liver failure. We’ll clean up a little tomorrow, I swear to myself. Nadine’s nightgown is fresh and laundry-scented, and I reflect that Zelda must have done a load just before the barn burning, making sure there were clean nightgowns laid out for our mother. Planning everything carefully. I snuggle in for just another moment, relishing the deliciously foreign feeling of physical proximity with my mom. On an impulse, I kiss her neck before leaving the bed, then tidy the covers where I have rumpled them. I see a stain near the bottom of the comforter, and I realize my foot must be bleeding again. Shit. I have left a trace of my need.

  I close the door behind me, then hesitate before locking it. But lock it I do, and return to the deck, where Wyatt has already opened the next bottle of wine. I look at him, wondering if he saw me curled in bed with my mother on his way up the stairs, but he shows no sign of it.

  “Any new notes?” I ask. Wyatt shakes his head and hands me a glass. Pinot Noir. I read the label and realize it’s one of Marlon’s wines, from California. I didn’t know we had any of his recent vintages. Once, I had jokingly, obscurely implied that his new Zinfandel was not up to scratch, an insinuation that was met with quick and excessive anger. I take a sip, and it’s not bad; he’s clearly learned a thing or two. It’s certainly better than anything Silenus produces. But of course it is: Marlon upgraded. He snagged a better vineyard, a better location, a better wife. And presumably better daughters. We were the first attempt. Repeat as needed. I look at the wreckage of the barn.

  “So what do you think is next?” Wyatt wonders aloud, trying to look away from the burn site.

  “Well, N usually comes after M, right?” I giggle.

  He smiles. “What do you think it stands for?”

  “Nadine? Necrophilia?” I shrug. “Zelda wouldn’t like it if we tried to get ahead of her. It might ruin her momentum.” I don’t mention the email I sent my sister.

  “You’re right. She doesn’t want anyone to be smarter than her, ever.”

  “She’s always got to be the clever one,” I agree. “She would probably sabotage any attempts to shortcut her little game. And we know where it’s going to end up, in any case.”

  “Z is for Zelda?” Wyatt guesses.

  “Starts with me, ends with her. I’m sure she’ll lead us on a merry chase. I say we relax and enjoy it.”

  “Cheers, Zelda.” Wyatt raises his glass in the barn’s direction, openly acknowledging the blackened structure for the first time. I snort, nearly inhaling my wine. “You having fun yet, Ava?”

  “Yeah, a regular vacation from my tedious life in Paris.” I wave him off.

  Wyatt thinks for a moment. “You like Paris, right? You’re happy there?”

  “Of course! It’s Paris—what’s not to like?”

  “I just…I’m glad you’re happy, Ava. After…everything.” He looks at me so earnestly that I almost burst out laughing. Oh, Wyatt.

  “I’m sorry Zelda’s dragged you into all this,” I tell him. “But then, she was always trying to push things along with us, even from the very beginning.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You remember our first time?” I ask.

  “How could I forget.” He raises an eyebrow suggestively.

  “Well, Zelda’s the reason. I would have chickened out if not for her. But she sort of…nudged me. Not that I didn’t want it,” I add hastily, seeing his hurt expression. “What I mean is, she took the fall. She pretended to be me and went to the nurse, got sent home sick as me. But she got reported for cutting third period and had to spend a week in after-school detention.” I snort. “She said it was worth it, though. That another day of watching us ‘pant at each other’ would permanently put her off the whole idea of sexual attraction.”

  “I never knew that,” Wyatt says. “She never told me.”

  “Yeah, well. I guess you were always just caught in the cross fire.”

  “I like to think it was more than that,” he says, sounding wounded.

  “You know what I mean,” I reassure him, backpedaling.

  “You mean that I was just a tool in the mind games you two play with each other. An innocent bystander.” His eyebrow lifts, challenging me.

  “Well…” That is sort of what I meant. I never really thought Zelda cared about him for himself; I always imagined that she saw him as a way to hurt me, exact her revenge, get under my skin.

  “Ava, that is bullshit. We had something long before Zelda was part of it. Stop pretending that you and I meant nothing!”

  “You were always more to me. You were my only ally against…these people,” I say, gesturing toward my house, indicating my entire family. “Just with Zelda, I don’t
know.”

  “I’m not proud of it, Ava, but she and I did have a relationship.” He sounds strained, uncomfortable. “We got close while you were gone. It was hard for both of us, when you just…left.”

  “I didn’t just ‘leave,’ ” I spit out angrily. “I found you two in bed and spent months making a rational plan to get out of here. It was an eye-opener, that’s all.”

  “That’s not all. That’s not all that happened,” he says. A precarious silence follows, and I turn my face away. He sighs. “I meant before, anyway. Before Zelda was even part of it. You just disappeared,” he says, and he still sounds hurt and angry, after all this time.

  “I…had to go. I’d just finished this degree that committed me to staying here in Hector and running Silenus. Then Nadine was diagnosed. I was twenty-two years old, and I was freaking out a little. I…panicked.”

  “So you just took off? Where did you go, Ava?”

  I bite my lip and hide my face in my glass.

  “Where were you that winter?” he asks again.

  When I again don’t answer, he turns away. “You ran off with that guy from Cornell. Jordan. I knew it, that whole time, I effing knew it.”

  “Jordan was gay, Wyatt,” I snap. All of my senior year at Cornell, Wyatt had been touchy and aggressive with Jordan, a friend of mine from my soil ecology class. He was a fine, upstanding guy from Oregon, into biking and hiking and surfing and other athletic, outdoorsy activities. He wanted to go home and start a vineyard near his family’s house, not far from Willamette. I’d liked him for his frank good-naturedness. And the fact that he knew no one in my family, never once compared me to Zelda or Nadine. He was bouncy and fun and uncomplicated, and his presence had driven Wyatt nuts. Even Zelda had started hinting that we were more than just study buddies.

  “You left with him, though. He picked you up, in February, and you drove off with him,” Wyatt says, pouting. While I had graduated on time in May, Jordan had had several more credits to complete, and he’d stayed through the winter semester before getting his degree. I’d puttered around Silenus listlessly all that autumn, wondering what I had gotten myself into, realizing that I had merely acquiesced to my mother’s plans for me. I knew I was stuck, and I was flailing. Zelda had dropped out of the community college by this stage, and Nadine had been getting more and more unpredictable. When we finally took Mom to a specialist in January, we had all begun to suspect that it wasn’t just menopause that was making her moods erratic and her mind leaky. She was forgetting things nearly all the time and had had one or two episodes of hallucinations. At least, that we knew of. Her gait had became strange and off-kilter. You could have a conversation with her that she would be completely unable to remember five minutes later. Most staggering was her new tendency toward confabulation, a rather clinical description for making shit up. Not lying—she genuinely believed the stories she was telling.

  Jordan stayed through winter break because I begged him not to leave me, promising hot toddies and long gossip sessions. He stayed until the end of January. But then he announced that he had gotten a winemaking internship in Willamette and he was leaving in ten days. I fretted, and paced, and stared out at the cold water of the lake, the frozen gray slopes, my future; the day before he left, I asked him if I could hitch a ride with him to the West Coast.

  “He drove me to Oregon, and I stayed with his family for a couple weeks. They were nice, and I was having a minor identity crisis. Jordan was…very kind.” He had been; he had barely batted an eye when I’d told him I didn’t know what I was going to do next, and he had put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room and told me to settle in. I sip at my glass of Pinot Noir, so similar to the glass of wine Jordan handed me in the guest room of his parents’ home while telling me to figure my shit out and take my time. I feel choked up at the memory. “I stayed with them for as long as I felt like I could, and then I realized what I was doing on the West Coast. I took the bus down to California to see my dad.”

  “Oh,” Wyatt says. “You weren’t…”

  “Fucking my gay friend from college all that time? Nope. I was…” I take a deep breath, feeling achingly sad. “I was naïvely begging my father to give me a way out. I—fuck, I’m humiliated even now.” I worry that I’m going to start crying. The wine is clearly getting to me. I’m not usually a weepy drunk.

  “You wanted a job,” Wyatt guesses.

  “I asked him to let me work on his vineyard for a bit. An internship maybe, or just some entry-level gig. I told him I didn’t want to get in his way or affect his new life; I just needed some space from Zelda and Mom. I was qualified. Overqualified. He let me stay for a while, and I didn’t work up the courage to come out and ask him for the job until I’d been there a few weeks.”

  “But he said no.”

  “Obviously. He seemed embarrassed by the whole thing, remorseful. Like he really wanted to help me out but he just…couldn’t. I got the impression that his new wife had told him she didn’t want me around, and it was her money, her vineyard.”

  —

  We had awkwardly faced each other across a table at a café in town. I clutched the diner mug filled with coffee I couldn’t bring myself to drink and tried to explain.

  “It’s not like it would be charity, Dad. I’m qualified to do this.”

  “I know that, Little A! I know you’d be a competitive candidate even if we were doing an open hiring. It’s just that we’re not really looking for anyone right now—”

  “I’m happy to start as an apprentice winemaker. Even a pourer in the tasting room.”

  “Oh, kiddo, that would be throwing your talents away. You’re too good for that!” His phone had rung, and he glanced down at it anxiously. I assumed it was Bianca, who was very precocious with the cellphone. Or his newest wife. “Listen, can we maybe talk about this some other time? If you want to stay out here, I know this great place where you can crash. I’ll get you a deal on the rent….”

  —

  “You told him about Nadine?” Wyatt asks.

  “Of course. I was pathetic. I told him she was sick, that Zelda was crazy, that Hector was claustrophobic and I didn’t know if I could live there. I was desperate not to go home, so I humbled myself. I wanted him to take me in, rescue me, but he…he rented me an apartment fifteen miles away.” I finally crack, a fat tear spilling down my face. “He didn’t even want me in the house. It was like I contaminated his picture-perfect family. The New Antipovas. His current wife wasn’t a drunk, his new daughters were normal….It’s like I was a reminder of his guilt, of the balance he didn’t settle here, in Hector.” I sniff, crying. I realize I’m monologuing, performing like I do when I’m drunk. But I’m not drunk; I’m fine.

  “Oh, Ava. You reached out. And he rejected you,” Wyatt says softly, stroking my arm. “You kept yourself so self-contained, for years, and that was the first time…” I nod miserably, more tears tumbling from my eyelids. It feels good. “Zelda didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t tell her. I just…disappeared. And left her. With Mom.”

  “You left me too.”

  “I thought you would always be there. I think I thought I was testing you. Your…devotion,” I say, not without a trace of embarrassment. “I think in my head, I thought: I’ll leave, and not tell him where I am, and if he waits for me, I’ll know…”

  “You expected me to come find you,” he says in sudden realization. “You were waiting for me to come and bring you back, to follow you.”

  I bite my lip. He’s right, sadly enough. That winter, alone in my modest apartment near Napa, with nothing to do but drink and wait for spring, I fantasized about him knocking on my door, showing up outside the apartment or Marlon’s vineyard one day. Proving that he wanted me, just me. I am ashamed of it now, but I know that’s what I hoped for. Only no one came for me, not Wyatt, not Zelda, not my mother. My father stayed stubbornly on the periphery, never explicitly saying he wanted me far away but making it clear we weren’t going to be
close. I had nothing left, so when winter loosed its grip, I took a plane back to New York. And found that Zelda and Wyatt had done just fine without me.

  “I am sorry, Ava. I…didn’t know,” Wyatt says.

  “No way you could have. It wasn’t like anything…really happened, exactly. Small betrayals.” That is what a lifetime of this family has amounted to. I swallow more wine, and it calms the lump in my throat. Wyatt leans over and puts his arm around my shoulders, wiping away a tear with his other hand. He pulls me roughly in for a hug, and I let him hold my head against his overdeveloped pectoral muscles, feeling comforted in spite of my old resentment. He strokes my shoulder blades clumsily, and I know he’s trying to soothe me. Inevitably, I tilt my head back and his eyes meet mine. Everything else is just instinct.

  14

  Not wanting to acknowledge consciousness in that desperate, dry-mouthed morning-after horror, I’m eventually forced to crack open my eyes. Jolted awake in suddenly sober distress, I blink owlishly and struggle to open my exhausted, quivering eyes, which are agonizingly dry, filched of liquid. Lately, one of my eyelids has begun twitching ominously. The next thing I do is reach for the phone. But there are no new missives from my deranged sister.

  Wyatt is still in bed next to me, fast asleep, and my heart starts pounding in an entirely unhealthy fashion. I feel short of breath as the beats thump solidly through my rib cage. I swallow, my mouth dry and cottony from the red wine, and I know that if I look at my tongue in the mirror, it will be a dark purple, the telltale stain of the night before. Though I don’t need my tongue to bear evidence; I have one hundred and ninety pounds of moist, male flesh next to me as proof of last night’s indiscretions. I roll away from Wyatt, squeezing my eyes shut and wanting to cry, the fragility of an early hangover welling in my eyes. It seems, however, that I did all my crying last night; I remember with another swoop of despair the fat, wet tears spilling down my cheeks as I whined about my neglectful, absent father. I should quit drinking, I reflect. It’s not the first time I’ve had this thought.