Dead Letters

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “That’s not what her credit card bill says. Or, rather, I suppose it was Mom’s credit card. I doubt even a greedy credit card company would give Zelda a chance to dig herself in deeper.”

  Marlon glances at Nadine. “How did you find out about this, Ava?” he asks.

  “The cops. They thought she had come to see me a few months before she died. But if she went to Paris, she certainly didn’t visit me.”

  “But then why—?” Opal asks, her rumpled forehead rumpling even further in confusion.

  “I thought you might know, seeing how close you two were,” I say, hoping it stings. I want our grandmother to understand that Zelda was unknowable, that any intimacy you thought you shared with her was a fiction she graciously let you maintain. Opal says nothing, though. “Nadine?” I press. “You know anything about Zelda traipsing off to France?”

  “That ungrateful girl just took off, left us here to fend for ourselves,” she says waspishly. “I haven’t spoken to her since.”

  “Mom, that was me. I moved to France. Zelda went to Paris a few months ago. Do you remember that?”

  “Nonsense. Zelda has been here the whole time. What would she do in France?” Nadine waves imperiously and sucks down the rest of her drink. “A refill, Ava. Thank you.” I pour the lemonade into her glass but keep the gin next to me. Nadine lowers her sunglasses, looking from the pitcher to the bottle with an eloquent arch to her eyebrows.

  “We’re out of gin,” I say, moving the bottle onto the floor next to my foot.

  “Don’t be childish, Ava. Hand me the bottle.”

  “Sorry, Mom, doctor’s orders. You’ve got to take it easy.” If I’m having an off day, she can afford to slow down on her cirrhosis too. She glares at me, then shoves her half-finished plate of food toward the center of the table in a huff. I am forcibly reminded of Zelda at age six.

  “So no one knows a thing about Zelda taking off on a wee vacation?” I look around at my family and scrutinize their faces to see who might be lying. I bite delicately at my tuna sandwich. It smells good, but I definitely don’t want to throw it up later. Regurgitated fish. I think of penguins.

  “You’re sure? That she went?” Marlon asks.

  “That’s what the cops tell me. Thought I’d poke around and look for the bills here at the house, but God knows why they’d lie about it.” I shrug. I wonder if there’s any way to prove that Zelda actually went to Paris, and I realize that if she did, there would be a stamp in her passport. P for passport? I almost leap up from the table to go look for it, grabbing my plate and the bottle of gin as I head inside.

  “Are you finished, Ava?” Opal says disapprovingly, as though she’s expecting me to ask if I may be excused. As though I’m still a little girl.

  “Yes, thanks,” I call back. “Very yummy.” I leave my food on the counter, putting a paper towel over it—I might finish it later. Then I head upstairs to Zelda’s room.

  It’s nearly impossible to walk across her floor without stepping on anything, so I kick aside old pairs of boots, heaps of clothes, a bottle or two. I tug open the top drawer of an antique dresser and look with alarm at the stacks of papers nestled inside. The contact paper lining the drawer is peeling, and I resist the overwhelming impulse to pick at it. After rifling through the papers for a few minutes, I find what I’m looking for. Zelda titled the contents of this drawer “Important Documents, Official Affidavits, and Papers of Various Interest.” Report cards, love notes, parking tickets, business cards from restaurants, receipts of memorable activities—everything went into this drawer, a scrapbook of Zelda’s comings and goings.

  And her passport, tucked down a few layers, amid a handful of receipts. I recognize a card from a restaurant Nico and I sometimes go to, near my apartment. Flipping open her passport, I quickly locate the stamp from Charles de Gaulle Airport, neat and stark and dated from exactly three months ago. The passport is nearly blank, except for a stamp from a Canadian border crossing years ago. We had both gotten passports with the vague intention of going on a road trip to Mexico; we wanted to drive out and visit our father, then head down to Tijuana, get into trouble, learn the way of the Yaqui, buy drugs, bake like lizards in the sun. The whole thing had been Zelda’s idea, of course, and when one of my friends invited me along on a trip to Nantucket instead, I immediately bailed on my sister. The idea of traveling around Mexico with Zelda terrified me. In a huff, Zelda convinced someone to drive her to Toronto for the weekend. She hadn’t wanted the passport to go to waste.

  I stare at the stamp for a few moments, confirmation that Zelda came looking for me very recently. For a truce? To convince me to come home? Did my sister want forgiveness or a new start? It feels eerie to think of her lurking on my street, steps away, and me not sensing a thing, maybe even passing her in the Metro. Maybe she watched me come and go, waiting for a good moment to intercept me. But if she traveled to Paris just to speak with me, she chickened out. Remained a silent ghost, lingering on the edges. Fucking hell.

  I toss the passport back into the mess of documents and start sifting through the papers in hopes of finding some clue about her motivation. God knows she couldn’t afford to take a holiday; she must have had a real reason. I find a receipt for the hotel she stayed in and a pile of Metro tickets, but I am still looking when the house phone rings.

  I jump, startled. I didn’t realize we still had a landline. It’s an unfamiliar noise, and my heart is beating quickly as I dash down the hall to answer it. Does the phone still live downstairs? I hear Opal’s voice, authoritatively answering questions, and I’m inexplicably annoyed. This isn’t her house.

  “What is it?” I holler down the stairs.

  “Your mother is late for her doctor’s appointment, apparently,” Opal hollers back. “It started fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Shit.” It’s her GP appointment, I’m pretty sure. I noticed it on the calendar in Zelda’s phone but promptly forgot. “I’ll take her. Just give me a minute to get dressed.”

  “Are you sure?” Opal calls. “Marlon could do it!” I imagine his expression at her offering his services and grin. I’m almost tempted to make him take her.

  “No, no! I’ll do it! I want to run some errands!” On impulse, I take another outfit from Zelda’s pile: colorful harem pants and a backless tank top. Dashing down the stairs, I pile my hair on top of my head, knotting it loosely, and grab the keys. “Mom, we’re late. We’ve got to take you to the doctor’s office.”

  “What?” Nadine says distantly.

  “Get in the car. Dr. Whitcross needs to see you.”

  “Dr. Whitcross?”

  Impatiently, I tug on her arm and help her stand up. “Don’t worry about it, just come on.” I lead her off the porch and around the side of the house, helping her up into the cab of the truck.

  I speed just a bit, turning off 414 onto Rock Cabin Road just as we hit the edge of Watkins Glen, then continuing farther south to Montour Falls.

  Fifteen minutes later, I screech into the parking lot of Dr. Whitcross’s office. We’re late, but hopefully they’ll still squeeze us in. I unload Nadine, and inside, a miserable-looking woman ushers us into an exam room. I think I went to high school with her; she strikes me as very familiar, but I can’t quite place her face. It’s not until she speaks that I realize who she is.

  “Sorry about your sister, Ava,” Carrie Brown mumbles. She’s gained about forty-five pounds since high school, and her once-bony cheeks are rounded and puffy. Under her shapeless pink nurse’s garb are a swaying belly and heavy thighs. Her hair is the same bleached shade that it was our senior year, when it was rumored that she got knocked up with Tommy Webster’s baby. I can’t remember if she ended up graduating or not, or having the baby or not. I can hardly ask now.

  “Thanks, uh, Carrie,” I say, deeply uncomfortable. I hate running into old classmates. We had nothing in common then, and even less now. “Will Dr. Whitcross be in soon? My mother can get a little temperamental….” Carrie’s expression has
hardened at my immediate dismissal of her friendly overture.

  “Oh, I know,” she says. It sounds like she really does. I wonder what Mom did the last time she was in here. “Okay,” she says after a long, uncomfortable pause. “See you around. Oh, yeah, he’ll be in in a second.” She glances at me as she walks out the door with an expression I just can’t read, as though she suspects me of being sneaky somehow, that she’s on to me. I waggle my fingers in farewell as she shuts the door.

  Seated on a stool, I lean back against the wall and flip through the magazines very thoughtfully provided on the table.

  “Hey, look, Mom! J. Lo has upper-arm jiggle.” I show her the gleefully captioned picture, a big red circle drawn around the purported area of wiggliness.

  The door finally opens, but instead of the pink-faced old man who has been our family doctor since I was a girl, a young, somewhat attractive man walks into the room. Slightly built, he’s wearing thick-framed glasses and has a very twee haircut. He stops short as he looks up at us and promptly drops the files he was holding. He turns beet-colored and bends down to collect them. I’m tempted to help, but I don’t get up. Flustered, the young doctor sets the disordered stack of papers on the exam table.

  “You must be Ava,” he says, offering his hand with visible discomfort.

  “Ava Antipova. I’m sorry, I was expecting Dr. Whitcross….”

  “I’m Dr. Whitcross. The second. I mean, not actually with roman numerals after my name. I’m Stu. Stuart Whitcross. My father is the other Dr. Whitcross. This is his practice.” The man stumbles over his words as he tries to explain.

  “Okay,” I say, not especially interested. “So…you’re my mom’s doctor now?”

  “I’ve been seeing her for several months. My father is mostly retired at this point, and I just moved back here from Potsdam.”

  “That’s up in the Adirondacks, right? Basically Canada?”

  He nods, some of the fuchsia receding from his face, leaving telltale blotches on his neck and jaw. I have no idea why he is so rattled.

  “So, I’m just going to give her a basic checkup. Blood pressure, heart rate. And I’d like to get her weight; she’s had some weight loss in the past that we need to keep an eye on. How are we today, Nadine?” he says, shifting over to my mother, who is seated on the exam table. Nadine is still staring vacantly off at the wall, and she doesn’t answer.

  “She’s had some good moments, but it really comes and goes.”

  “The early-onset form can be tough like that. She’s probably been living with the disease much longer than we’ve been treating it—it’s just now getting unmanageable.”

  “Zelda and I used to speculate about that,” I say with a snort. “She was never the most stable person.”

  The younger Dr. Whitcross twitches at the mention of Zelda as he continues his examination. He guides a reluctant Nadine to the scale, an action that seems to make her skittish. I sympathize—no one likes to be weighed. Unsure what to do with myself, I fiddle with my phone. Nico has sent a text: Hope u r OK, I think about you ;). I stare at it guiltily and don’t write back.

  “She’s been generally disoriented?” Stu says, interrupting my self-flagellation.

  “She wanders off, gets confused about who is who. Although when you have twins, that seems fair. I think the whole Zelda thing has her thrown. You’ve heard…?”

  He ignores my question. “You’re giving her her meds?”

  “Whatever is in the pill dispenser. While I’m here, actually, you should probably give me a schedule of what she’s supposed to get. I’ve just been making her take whatever is set out in that plastic case, but it will only last to Monday.”

  He nods again, making a note in the chart. “And alcohol?”

  “I’d love some.” I grin. He doesn’t smile back.

  “How much has she been drinking.” It’s not really spoken as a question.

  “Too much. She gets uncooperative without it, and I figured these are exceptional circumstances.”

  “She really shouldn’t be drinking at all,” he chides.

  “Yes, Doctor,” I say, nodding along. He looks up, his head cocked to the side. “What?” I ask.

  “It’s just…you’re very like your sister,” he says slowly, maintaining eye contact for too long.

  “You knew Zelda—ooooh.” The pieces click into place: the way he’s been eyeing me, how strangely he’s behaving, the way he cringes whenever Zelda is mentioned. “You were fucking my sister. I should have guessed earlier.”

  He looks stricken and glances uncomfortably at Nadine, but she seems not to have heard. “We were, uh, seeing each other, yes.”

  “Isn’t that, like, unethical? Dating patients?”

  “She wasn’t a patient. We did meet here, but she called me on my cell and asked if I wanted to get a drink with her. It was entirely aboveboard,” he sniffs defensively.

  This guy does not seem like Zelda’s type. That Jason prick made sense to me, because of Zelda’s perverse desire for danger and mayhem, but Stu Whitcross is about as far from enticing as a man can be.

  “Indeed,” I say unsympathetically. “Well, you must be very sad.”

  “It’s been a bit of a shock, yes.”

  I notice that there’s a drop of sweat on his upper lip and a patchy scruff below his chin where he missed a spot shaving. I can’t imagine Zelda sitting across from him at a table, sipping a glass of wine and making polite conversation with him. I didn’t really know her, I think suddenly. If she wasn’t always a stranger, she became one. The thought makes me unspeakably sad, and I am swamped with sudden despair, the kind that swoops in after a bout of drinking and settles over your neurochemicals like an impermeable sheath.

  “Will there be a funeral?” Dr. Whitcross asks.

  “I imagine there will be, yeah. But I guess we’re waiting on the murder investigation.”

  He starts. “Yes, I’d heard—I mean, there was some discussion that the police might be—well, I’m just really shocked, is all.”

  “Aren’t we all. But Nadine seems to be holding up pretty well,” I say cheerily, patting my mother’s knee. It is sharp and bony, and it feels unhealthy. “Of course, she has the benefit of thinking that I’m Zelda half the time, so no wonder she’s not reeling quite like the rest of us. Have you finished your checkup, Doctor?”

  “Yes, and I’ll have a nurse print you out the medication schedule. Your mom seems like she’s doing fine, considering…” He pauses. “You will let me know if there’s to be a service?”

  “Of course, of course. I’m sure I can find your phone number.” I’m pretty sure he’ll be in Zelda’s phone.

  “Well, here’s my card, just in case. I’m, uh, really sorry for your loss.”

  “I’m sorry too, buddy.” I stand up and, absurdly, shake his hand. “C’mon, Mom,” I say, waving at Nadine. She doesn’t stand up or acknowledge me, so I pull on her thin arm. It feels like it could snap between my fingers. Her dismount from the table is ungainly, and I steady her before she falls off the small stool beneath her feet. Dr. Whitcross—Stu—holds the door open for us and ushers us out. He seems like he’ll be glad to get us out of the building.

  “Just stop at the front desk for the med sheet.” He points and turns around. I wave in amusement at his white-coated back. Really, Zelda? Him? I pull Nadine along and collect the paperwork. There’s a new prescription for me to pick up. Thankfully, I don’t bump into Carrie Brown again, and there don’t seem to be any other Watkins Glen graduates hard at work. We finally escape back to the truck. Inside the cab, I look through Zelda’s contacts. There he is. Stuey. Very cute, Zelda. I scroll back through her messages, but she has deleted almost the entire history. There’s only one exchange between them.

  —Are we all set? All clear on the scenario, dear Dr. Whitcross?

  —Yes, my sweet zany Zelda.

  I gag. Christ, she must really have been stringing him along. And what could she have meant? I desperately hope this is
not some creepy sex game, but with Zelda, one never knows. I look at the time and date of the messages: 8:07 P.M. on the night of the fire. Did they see each other that night? A slight niggling of unease stirs as I remember the locked chains on the barn doors. Was Whitcross there? An image of his shaking hands and his skittering eyes crosses my mind. Suddenly, I want to get away from the whole building.

  I feel like an idiot, though, for not having looked for any messages from that night sooner. If I had any sense, it would have been the first thing I checked. But I was too busy worrying about Wyatt and Zelda and getting worked up into some jealous froth.

  I pull out and head up the highway, toward Watkins Glen. I wonder if I’ll be making it through today without a drink. Glancing over at Nadine, I frown. I’m grateful for her uncharacteristic quiet submission, but it is rather disconcerting.

  “You okay, Mom?”

  Nadine says nothing, and I reach over for her hand. She jerks her fingers away from mine when I try to give her a squeeze, and she hunches toward the truck door, sliding away from me. I look back and forth between her and the road, concerned. “Momma, what is it? Does something hurt?” I reach for her shoulder, and when I brush it, she yelps.

  “Don’t touch me,” she snarls. “Get back.” She swats at my outstretched hand, and I instinctively recoil. Another tantrum. Always the same. What they don’t tell you about dementia is how repetitive it is, how that shock of incomprehension and fear returns again and again. And how it hurts all the same, each time.

  “Mom, what is it?” I repeat.

  “Get away. You don’t belong here. You’re dead.”

  “It’s me, Ava,” I plead, suddenly desperate. “I’m not dead. Zelda—”

  “You’re dead. You’re a dead thing, you’re not alive. Don’t touch me.” She has curled into a tight ball and is looking straight through the windshield, refusing to make eye contact. Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I drive north along the lake, wondering if she’s right.

  —

  Inside the big house, I call out for Marlon, but there is no answer. Opal’s door is shut tight. Nadine immediately flees to her room without my help.