Dead Letters

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Jesus, Marl, you’re not even a good liar. Your bookie has called three times today. You think I’m an idiot?”

  “No, Nadine, I think you’re a drunk. And not a nice one. A harping, bitching—”

  “You want to throw stones, from behind all that glass?”

  “At least I can see straight enough to hit something.”

  “Oh, please, what are you, twelve?”

  “No, I’m a grown-ass man who lives—”

  “Just stop! I can’t—”

  I would turn the dial of my iPod up and stare up at my bedroom ceiling, waiting for the sound of broken glass or a slammed door to signify that one or both of them had stormed off.

  Zelda was less affected by these scenes, or at least she seemed less desperate to flee them. She would even lurk at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping.

  “What’s a bookie?” she whispered to me, trying to piece together the clues of what was driving our parents apart, what exactly they were fighting about. Unfortunately, if she lurked too close, she was likely to be in the way of a hurried egress, usually Marlon’s. One time, she stood behind the living room door, her ear pressed to it, so that when Marlon slammed his way out of the room, the door caught her cheek. Even though I was upstairs, reading, I could hear after the smack of the door that terrifying lull before the cry, that silence of someone who has really been hurt. I flung my book aside and raced downstairs to find the three of them, Marlon pink-faced and standing before a screaming Nadine.

  “You don’t give a fuck who you hurt, not even your own children—”

  “Goddamnit, I didn’t mean to hurt her! She was just underfoot!” Marlon reached out for Zelda, who flinched from his touch and glared furiously at him, sobbing. “Zaza, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “I don’t care what you meant!” Zelda shrieked. “That is so not the point! What is the matter with you?” She glowered at Nadine with equal fury and ran for the deck, slipping out the screen door in tears. Marlon started to go after her, but I stopped him.

  “Leave her alone. She doesn’t want to be around you. Either of you.” I was shaking; normally I would do anything to avoid this sort of conflict, but the sound of Zelda’s wails had pushed me to the edge, and I was furious with both of my parents. Why couldn’t they just do this somewhere else and leave us out of it? I followed Zelda outside, heading down the hill, guessing which direction she had gone.

  She was sitting in the grass, not so far from the house and staring out at the lake. Her eyes were red and she was still sniffling, but she seemed more angry than hurt, which was a good sign. I so rarely saw her vulnerable. I sat next to her.

  “Let me see,” I said.

  “It’s fine,” she sniffed, then gave an ironic snort. “At school, they’ll think I’m being abused.”

  “You should tell them you are.” I giggled.

  “I wouldn’t know which of them to blame.” Zelda glanced back toward the house.

  “Good point.” I gently touched her cheekbone; it was already turning a purple-blue color. She flinched but let me carefully poke at it. “You’ll be fine. A bruise.”

  “They can’t go on like this.”

  “I know.”

  “What will we do?” Zelda asked, and for once, she sounded scared, unsure. She wasn’t looking at me. There was no sarcasm, no mockery in her voice. Which meant that it was my job to supply it.

  “Let’s run away. I’ll steal their credit cards, you pack a bag,” I said, nudging her.

  “They probably won’t even notice we’re gone.”

  “They’ll notice the money is gone, once they run out of wine.”

  Zelda snorted again. “Could take a while for that to happen,” she said, looking eloquently at our surroundings, at the grid of grapes that stretched across the hill.

  “Good—then maybe they won’t notice before we’re legal adults. Let’s do it.” I elbowed her again, and she finally turned her head to look at me.

  “Where will we go, brainiac?”

  “Hollywood! Let’s be starlets,” I answered.

  “Ha. Or we could go to Opal’s?”

  “And live in a retirement community?” I wrinkled my nose distastefully.

  “Yeah. Maybe not. I know: Paris!”

  “Not practical. We’re minors.”

  “Okay, let’s go live in the woods, then. I’ll be the huntress, and you can cook.”

  “You mean the national forest?” I asked, considering. It was a huge patch of completely empty land. It would take them forever to find us.

  “I’m really glad I’m not the only one here with them,” she said in a small voice.

  “Me too.” I leaned my head on her shoulder for a moment, looking out at the water and feeling my sister’s fear, anxiety. “If we start now, we can make it to the forest before dark. It’s only a few miles.”

  “Are you serious about this?” Zelda asked, a wicked, excited glint in her eyes. “I mean, I’m totally game if you are.”

  “It was my idea!” I stood and raced up to the house, Zelda following close at my heels. As ever.

  I’ll never know how far we were prepared to take it, if we would have escaped from this house, this family. Made our way out to Hollywood and started anew, just us two. But when we got back up to the house, it was Marlon who was packing a suitcase and fleeing west before the sun slipped below the shore across the lake. Leaving the three of us.

  I realize it’s nearly dinnertime and I haven’t eaten all day. The sky is hazy and blank. I stand up and stretch. I’m sliding the incomplete alphabet worksheets back onto the shelf when my hands fumble across a brown folder tucked snugly at an angle between the books. I pull it out and open it up.

  19

  Staring at the scribbled scrap of paper for long minutes, I feel an unhappy click of recognition, a sick sense of foreboding. It’s a checklist of sorts, a catalogue of ailments. Memory loss, disorientation, difficulty reading, vocabulary loss, poor judgment, changes in mood or personality, hallucination, changes in blood pressure. I know this checklist well; I’ve seen it written in the comforting pastel fonts of informational brochures, pressed soothingly into the palms of terrified family members, the smooth, waxy paper wicking away the fearful sweat that dampens the hands of those in the waiting room. I’ve read through this list on Wikipedia and in doctors’ offices, Zelda silently looking over my shoulder, our lips pursed and heads nodding in grim, synchronized recognition. This is an inventory of symptoms for early-onset dementia with Lewy bodies. The disease our mother was diagnosed with two years ago. I remember Zelda carrying this folder around while we were trying to piece together what was happening to Nadine. But now, on its cover, Zelda has printed “SYMPTOMS.” The S’s at the beginning and the end of the word have been underlined. Unwittingly, unwillingly, I have found the letter S, even as I tried to ignore it. I realize I have unconsciously gone looking in Zelda’s paperwork, just as she suggested.

  Zelda’s handwriting is loopy and discombobulated, and I squint at it. She’s circled “poor judgment” and “hallucination.” Below, she has scrawled: consult? Too young! I flip through the stack of papers, and then I start reading more closely.

  Here I find an invoice for a neurologist in Ithaca. I recognize his name, because we dragged Nadine in three years ago, when we were desperately trying to figure out what was going on with her, why she would wake us up in the middle of the night with nightmares, why she couldn’t remember who any of our neighbors were. She had gone begrudgingly, muttering profanities the whole way, but we had seen the glimmer of acknowledgment in her eyes, the nearly imperceptible awareness that things were not quite right with her. She had concealed her terror beneath the usual flinty disavowals and biting comments, but Zelda and I had felt the fear radiating off her as we drove into town, sandwiched into the pickup truck. She had stormed out of the appointment when she was presented with a mental acuity test, and we were unable to coax her back in for a consult until weeks later, after she had
nearly lost three fingers to frostbite, wandering our driveway in the middle of winter and clueless about how she had gotten there. By that point, her diagnosis had hardly required an expert.

  The patient’s name on this invoice, however, is not Nadine O’Connor but Zelda Antipova. Three months ago, my sister drove into Ithaca for an appointment with Dr. Felix Laurent, for which she paid four hundred dollars, in cash. The appointment wasn’t covered by her health insurance, or she didn’t want a paper trail. I realize I likely don’t have insurance, here in the States. She hadn’t mentioned this appointment in any of the wordy and elaborate emails she’d sent, emails that documented the minutiae of life on Silenus, her every worry and thought, spewed forth in Zeldaesque excessive prose.

  The last page in the file finally makes me realize that this is not the folder we compiled for Nadine but a different diagnostic collection. Zelda has obsessively written down a list of times and dates, with accompanying notations.

  Friday, February 19: Woke up in hallway, unsure how I got there. Unable to remember the previous day for nearly an hour.

  Wednesday, April 20: Jason asked where I got a cut on my hand and I told him from the tractor. He looked at me strangely and said that it had actually come from a broken wineglass and I had instructed him to ask me about it later. Confabulation?

  Saturday, May 7: Woke Kayla up close to dawn because I was flailing in bed. I had been dreaming that I was tearing every single vine out of Silenus and eating them. REM. Been trying to wash the taste of dirt out of my mouth all day.

  Sunday, May 8: Woke Stu(pid) up by kicking him and talking in my sleep. I dreamt I was racing Ava, running down to the lakefront. Idiot said it was a nightmare, didn’t even mention REM. Started taking low dose of Nadine’s clonazepam, which Wikipedia says is a reliable treatment. Don’t want him to find out. Though Christ knows he’s unlikely to catch on to anything unless I tattoo it on the inside of my thighs. Stole a handful of prescription notes from him, in case I need refills.

  I pace around her bedroom, nearly tripping over a bundle of saris that are knotted into a strange nest on her floor. It seems unlikely that she would have told our mother or father. Or even Opal. I can’t imagine Zelda confessing this level of vulnerability to anyone. In fact, I’m not sure I was intended to find this little bundle. There haven’t been any clues to lead me here, and the envelope was just crammed onto a bookshelf.

  I try to convince myself that Wyatt might know something about Zelda’s fears, but I realize I’m considering this because I want to call him, not because I believe that he might have answers. And part of me is hurt that he hasn’t called me.

  Plus, I would be lying to myself if I denied that one of the loudest, most insistent thoughts careening through my mind as I wade through Zelda’s room is: What about me? If Zelda suspected that she might have the same disease our mother does, isn’t it likely that I do too? As identical twins, we are much more likely to carry the same genetic flaws. If Zelda’s brain contains the time bomb that is Lewy body dementia, a gift from our mother, then there’s a high probability that mine does. I scan my memory for any indication, any symptom. But, of course, I’ve experienced nearly all of these sensations and radical failures to perform cognitively simple tasks. I’m a drinker. Waking up from a shitty night’s sleep, hallucinating bugs crawling across my eyelids, hunting down words through a hungover haze and lunging clumsily for basic vocabulary: These are all a part of my reality. I’ve woken up not remembering the past ten hours; I’ve had violent and unpredictable mood swings. It just goes with the territory of an abused liver. Surely Zelda was able to recognize that too. Of course, that’s not how paranoia works, though. We have both lived in fear of becoming our mother for so long that any evidence that it might be chemically taking place would naturally be met with deep pessimism and a sense that the worst has finally happened.

  I’m tempted to fling myself into Marlon’s rental car and drive to the city, to masquerade as Zelda and try to get my hands on her medical records, see if any kind of diagnosis was made. But surely there’s some sort of communication between hospitals; surely if someone’s remains, however paltry, pop up at the coroner’s, alarm bells go off when they show up for a doctor’s appointment twenty miles away. I imagine it working like an airport, where death functions like the ultimate no-fly list. But maybe that’s an Orwellian fantasy. Maybe the doctors in Ithaca have no idea that Zelda is (supposedly) dead.

  A phone vibrates in my pocket, and I burrow frantically to see which one is ringing. It’s my own. I answer in a tizzy, jolted out of a strange numbness by whoever is calling me. It’s Wyatt.

  “Ava?” He sounds tentative, as though he might be crossing some hard-and-fast line of politeness but feels he must do it anyway. His manners are so much nicer than mine.

  “Hi, Wyatt.”

  “Hi. Listen, I wanted to let you know about something. We discussed it the other night. You were saying you weren’t so convinced that Zelda was really dead, and you wanted to know who was, well, found—”

  “Who the hell got barbecued in the barn,” I finish impatiently. I realize the moment after I’ve interrupted that he’s repeating our conversation for my benefit. He’s worried that I won’t remember all the details of what we discussed, and he’s retracing our conversational footsteps so that I won’t be humiliated. Sweet Wyatt. I am so far beyond humiliation. But am I maybe being paranoid? That’s another symptom. “Which seems a pertinent question,” I add.

  “I think so. Zelda’s nuts, but I never thought she was homicidally nuts. Well, I did some calling around, and you remember that guy who was screaming his head off? Kyle Richardson?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, I finally got ahold of his mother a little while ago. She said her daughter, Kayla, has been missing for almost six days. She just called it in to the cops a few hours ago. Apparently, she’s been keeping irregular hours ever since she started dating your sister.”

  “What?”

  “I said—”

  “I heard what you said. Jesus. What does she look like, this girl?”

  “Curly blond hair, pretty skinny,” Wyatt says. “And, apparently, she just stopped showing up at her job.” He takes a beat. “At the funeral home.”

  “Really?” My mind races. Is that significant? That could be how Zelda is pulling this off. “I want to talk to the brother,” I say.

  “He’s been on a bender for a few days, I guess. You could probably tell, the other night. Maybe not the most stable. He was close to Kayla.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Where you can find everybody else this time of the evening: at the brewery. Least that’s what his mom says.”

  I tap my feet on the floor, thoughtfully. Technically, I could probably walk to the brewery, which is just a few miles from here. God knows I’ve walked home from there, after closing the place out and being either too drunk to drive home or the only person left standing in the parking lot. I don’t want to ask Wyatt for favors; it makes me feel needy, incapable. But I’m not sure I trust myself to spend time at the brewery and remain in any state to drive home.

  While I’m deliberating, Wyatt makes it simple: “Need a ride? I was just headed out there.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That’d be good. I was just trying to decide whether or not to take the tractor up there.”

  Wyatt laughs. “That’d be a sight. I’d like a picture of that, make sure all your cosmopolitan friends in Paris get to see it.”

  I snort, imagining Nico smiling over a picture of me driving the tractor to the bar. This causes a narrow band to squeeze my rib cage, constricting my breath and making me skitter away from the thought.

  “Ten minutes?” Wyatt asks, and I bob my head, even though I’m on the phone and he can’t see. When we were teenagers, we played a guessing game, trying to imagine what the other was doing. At some point, this inevitably turned kinky. Talking late into the night, slowly unbuttoning pajamas and feeling the tension build thro
ugh the phone lines.

  “See you in ten.” I hang up the phone and skip around the room with light feet, presumably still channeling my former self. With a giggle, I stoop down to change into one of Zelda’s costumes, then pause, bent in a half downward dog, about to root through her bazaar of fabric. I don’t want to dress like Zelda right now.

  I cross the hall, into my white room, and look at my suitcase, neatly stowed at the foot of my bed. I haven’t unpacked anything but have refolded each garment and nestled it back into this wheeled caravan, refusing my clothes even temporary accommodations on the racks of my childhood. But I realize I don’t want to wear any of my clothes from Paris, either; few things would look more out of place than one of my slinky Zadig & Voltaire tops, all subtle sequins (I didn’t think such a thing existed until I moved to Paris) and charcoal grays. I turn to my old closet.

  I try on a handful of old, larger dresses, from my old, larger days. Absently, I swish around in the spacious gowns, feeling them hang off my bones. With a sudden flush of shame, I realize what I’m doing and pull the last dress over my head, not bothering to unzip it.

  I realize that I will likely be late now, as Wyatt is an on-time kind of guy. But he can wait for me downstairs. I snag a snug dress with a flared skirt, striped with thick swaths of navy blue and white; this dress is not loose, and I have to bend my elbows creatively to get the zipper all the way up my back. That is a skill I didn’t have to learn until I moved away from my sister, who always fastened me in. I smooth the dress over my hips and look critically at myself in the mirror. It fits as it did in my senior year of high school. A small miracle. I took something of a gamble in yanking out such a formfitting garment; if I hadn’t succeeded in getting the zipper up, I might very well have spent the rest of the night clinging to cold ceramic. I dab on some red lipstick and try to smooth my coarse curls. I wish I had an hour to straighten and tame them, like I used to in high school. I settle for pinning back the frizziest, most uncooperative pieces.