Nadine sits impassively across from me, watching the festive cruise boat come closer and closer to us. I flail and scream until my body finally seems unable to continue its spastic convulsions. I speak to her, to my other self, mumbling to her between screams. After a while, the sheer physical effort of this grief makes me go limp. I feel dead. Maybe I am the dead twin. It is fully dark now, eerie out here on the water by ourselves. The pills still sit in the hull, rattling whenever I shuffle my feet. The boat is still afloat, but I can feel water pooling near my curled toes. I know the horror of loss. It’s unspeakable; I have learned something that can’t be said. Another secret gift from my sister. Nadine leans over dreamily and pats my knee. She is almost smiling. I wipe fluids from my face, my abused eyelids inflated to hood my vision.
“Mom,” I say to her.
“Yes?” she asks.
“What do you want to do, Mom?”
“This is nice, just like this.” She tilts her head back and looks at the stars, grinning. It’s been a long time since I saw her smile like that. “This is just fine.”
“Mom, do you know what I’m asking?” I insist. “I need to know what you want to do. I need you to decide.”
“I’m through with decisions.”
“I need you to make one more. Please.” I don’t want to beg her, but I will. She leans toward me, and I see that her eyes are twitching crazily, her head bobbing. I wait for her to speak. But instead of answering me, she suddenly goes taut, and she makes a strange choking noise that is not part of her usual repertoire.
“Mom? Are you okay?” I reach over for her, but her body is suddenly rigid and flailing. Her convulsive movements nearly fling her from the rowboat, and I grab her arms in terror, rolling her to the leaky boards. In a blind panic, I start rowing for shore. As we reach the shallows, the cruise boat skates by us barely thirty feet away, and the wake splashes over the side of our vessel. In three feet of water, the rowboat is swamped, and the bow goes under the black water. I reach for Nadine, who is still seizing, and I tug her to shore before her head goes under. Her body is light, and I haul her up the beach; it seems like I barely even have to exert myself to get her up onto the cooling rocks. My cellphone is with the bag of pills, nestling into the smooth pebbles three feet below the dark water.
—
Zelda didn’t know the truth of the family curse, and in a twist of true irony, her terror of it is what killed her. Nadine’s autopsy saved my life, and maybe could have saved Zelda’s. Our mother’s official cause of death wasn’t overdose. I never disbursed Zelda’s cocktail; maybe I never would have. I didn’t let her sink into the waters of our lake. But my choices killed Nadine just the same. By the time I made it up to the house, I was wheezing and scarcely able to breathe. I expected to find my father, but Marlon had left without saying goodbye, caught his flight back to the West Coast and brought his mother with him. He had left us after all, again. The house was dark and lonely, and I dialed 911 with shaking fingers before running back down to where my mother lay, flopping about like a fish. The seizure, likely brought on by the stress of the memorial service, left her in a coma. She was unconscious for two days before she died of pancreatitis and congestive heart failure. Cause of death: Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. An uncommon form of dementia caused by a thiamine deficiency, usually brought on by alcoholism and malnutrition. Most likely genetic, written out in the letters of our DNA. Not dementia with Lewy bodies or early-onset Alzheimer’s. Nadine had been misdiagnosed, and maybe she would have survived if she’d been treated with intravenous thiamine. The doctors had gotten the story wrong.
As had I, so certain had I been that Zelda was alive, that I would metaphysically intuit it if she was truly dead. Wrong again, Ava.
Zelda’s terror of inheriting our mother’s disease was certainly legitimate, but the disease that scared her so much was the wrong one. Our disease was treatable. All we had to do was quit drinking and eat properly. Take our thiamine. All those fabulous letters too. W, S, K, G.
I sat in the hospital for two days, staring catatonically at the fluorescent lamps, knowing that I could have prevented this. If I hadn’t left, I might have taken Nadine to a doctor who could have caught it. Later, I even found a brochure on Wernicke-Korsakoff in the pile of glossy sheets we had accumulated over the years. I could have noticed the ataxia, which might have alerted us to the erroneous diagnosis. If I hadn’t been so taken in by Zelda’s abecedarian story, her construct. But when I got that last letter, in a quick instant, in a jiffy, all my bitterly maintained hopes were vaporized, incinerated on the smoldering pyre of my sister’s enduring and exceptional cruelty. I took her at her word, saw her as the architect of the story and not as one of its flawed players.
I’m convinced that Zelda had Wernicke’s encephalopathy, the precursor to the full-blown syndrome. The doctors told me it was possible but unlikely, due to her age. But Zelda was always precocious. A common symptom is impaired decision making.
I never called Nico back. Frankly, though, I simply wasn’t able to explain it to him, to think of anything other than my own pain. I hope he forgives me, but I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t. Another pawn in Zelda’s game. Though I was the one to use him, not Zelda. I’m trying to learn to take responsibility. Another fiction, perhaps.
Wyatt arrived at the hospital within an hour of Nadine’s admission, and he waited for me—“Whether you want me or not,” as he said. He was stubborn, and I was feeling a lot less so; I allowed myself to curl up in his arms in the harsh fluorescence of the hospital’s family area. He held me while I went thoroughly to pieces again and again, each time with an intensity that felt terminal. He fed me M&M’s from the vending machine. He even called Marlon, the ever-absent M, and succeeded in conveying his disappointment at my father’s hasty departure with an uncharacteristic display of snark. We talked, mostly about Zelda, and he managed, in his naïve way, to help me see what she had tried so hard to give me.
“Ava, she was trying to show you that you can live without her, that you can be as many versions of yourself as you need to be. She gave you yourself, and herself too.”
“Maybe.”
“I was thinking. Do you think she meant for you to know that she went to Paris?” he asked me.
“I’m pretty sure she wanted me to think that’s where she’d disappeared to,” I said, puzzled.
“But the first time—did she mean for you to know she had already been?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice gruff. The waiting room was stark and empty, and the M&M’s had made me queasy.
“I think she went to say goodbye to you without really saying goodbye to you,” Wyatt said, stroking my dirty hair and kissing my forehead. Another thing left unsaid. I let him rock me while I wept brokenly, again.
Zelda and I had been cannibalizing each other for such a long time that it’s still difficult not to gnaw hungrily on my own portion, but maybe I will get used to the bounty. Certainly my newly augmented dimensions gesture to a healthier appetite.
Nadine’s body was wheeled off to be sliced open and then rendered into ash. I put her bottle-shaped urn straight into the wine rack in the kitchen, where it sat (I like to think contentedly) for several months. Eventually, Wyatt convinced me how pathological this seemed, and was, and I saw his point. There are enough ghosts here. Not the least of which is my own face, staring at me with Zelda’s. Wyatt helped me scatter Nadine with Zelda, in the black skeleton of the barn, the dead letters of their DNA spiraling together. Waiting. After we finished, he put his hands over my belly, kissed it, and promised both of us that we did not have to repeat the past.
Wyatt is a generous human, and he believes that Zelda’s final game was a kindness to me. Over the last few months, I’ve come to agree, though I’m still so furious with her that it wakes me in the night. I think that while I can nearly understand what she was trying to say to me, I will never fully comprehend it. There are still missing pieces. It’s maddeningly painful not to be able
to speak with the dead. But maybe what Zelda was trying to tell me is that it’s nearly as difficult to speak with the living.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Molly Atlas, who has believed in this book from the first read; to my editor, Kara Cesare, for her enthusiasm, insight, and patience; to everyone at Random House who helped usher the manuscript from Word doc into an actual printed book—Bonnie Thompson, Loren Noveck, and all the other folks who toiled on behalf of the novel; to everyone at ICM and Curtis Brown—Felicity Blunt, Roxane Edouard; and everyone who read the book and offered up suggestions along the way.
Thanks to my sister, Emily, for believing me when I said that Ava and Zelda have nothing to do with us; to my mom, Peggy, and my dad, Mike, for encouraging my lifelong literary obsession; to my mother- and father-in-law, Elbert and Marinda, who caught some foolish medical errors in the manuscript and have been keen readers since the early days; to the folks at Brooklyn Winery and to Katy Koken at Bloomer Creek Vineyard, for answering wine questions. Thanks be to early readers: Geoff Gilbert, Dan Gunn, Lauren Steyn, Chris Honey, Seamus Vasey, Katy Schoedel, Joanna Cerro.
And the last thanks go to Jan Steyn, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to write this book—my first reader, my favorite reader.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAITE DOLAN-LEACH is a writer and literary translator. She was born in the Finger Lakes and is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the American University in Paris. Dead Letters is her first novel.
caitedolanleach.com
Facebook.com/caitedolanleachauthor
Instagram: @caitedolanleach
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