The wheels touch down, and I look grimly toward the airport windows. I wonder if my father will actually show up to fetch me, as he has promised to do. I can already taste the sharp, acidic local Pinot Grigio that my mother keeps in the fridge, and I realize how badly I want it.
My father, Marlon, is entrenched outside the airport, napping on one of the benches. His straw fedora is pulled down over his eyes, and I have a feeling that he’s been here like this for a while. I nudge his feet to wake him, and his eyes open sloppily beneath the hat.
“Little A!” he coos, sitting upright. He’s wearing all linen, his shirt and pants elegantly rumpled. His sharp green eyes are not so sharp right now. I haven’t seen my father in more than two years, but he looks more or less the same. His dark hair is maybe lighter, the lines around his eyes a bit deeper, but he’s still the effortlessly debonair rake he has always been. And, as always, at the sight of his smile, I feel incredibly tempted to forgive him for his shortcomings, his abandonment. My mother spent a decade and a half forgiving this man, and she is not a forgiving person. I marvel at his magnetism and wish I had inherited that, instead of his green eyes and fondness for comestibles.
He leaps up as soon as his eyes focus on me, surprisingly buoyant for someone who has lost a child. But I know he will be chipper and all smiles, performing for me. Wanting to be liked. He’s about to scoop me up in a big hug when he seems to recollect himself, remembers how things are between us. He is still slender, though I can detect the beginnings of a paunch beneath the creamy linen shirt when I give him a slight, distant hug, encumbered by my carry-on. He squeezes me, tightly.
“Hi, Daddy. Glad you could make it.” I really do try not to inflect this with sarcasm, but it can’t be helped. He pretends not to notice. My father loathes conflict. Probably why he prefers his second family to his first.
“A, I’m so, so sorry. God, I can’t imagine…” He grabs my shoulders and peers intently at my face. I realize that I might cry, in spite of myself, and I gently shuck him off. His face is lined: the tragic patriarch, kingdom in ruins, daughter dead.
“I know, Dad. It’s…okay. Let’s head over the hill.” Old family joke. As in: “We’re all over the hill out in Hector.” Less funny now to be sure, and doubtless only to degrade with the years. Much like our family. “I’m sure Mom is…” I’m not quite sure how to finish the sentence. I’m sure Mom is a mess, I’m sure she’s already had at least one bottle of Pinot Grigio, given how late I am, I’m sure that there is going to be a scene of remarkable nastiness when Marlon turns up at the house. He makes a show of gallantly taking my suitcase from me and heads toward the parking lot. Effortlessly, he hoists the bag over his shoulder, an easy demonstration of masculinity.
“You didn’t bring much with you, A.”
“I packed in a hurry. Besides, I still have a bunch of stuff at the house. And I can always wear Zelda’s.”
He flinches visibly and refuses to meet my eyes. Nico balked, too, when I said this last night as I was flinging random clothes into my suitcase, while he perched in nervous concern on the edge of my bed, clearly worried for my sanity. I can see why it might be something of a faux pas to don my sister’s outlandish clothes and flit through the house looking just like her mere days after her death, an alarming corporeal poltergeist. But I always wear Zelda’s things. It would be a concession to her scheme if now I didn’t.
“Have you spoken to your mother?” Marlon asks.
“Briefly, on the phone last night. She was pretty disoriented, so I didn’t get much out of her.”
“Has she been doing…okay?”
“What, haven’t you called her?”
“I tried, Little A. She hung straight up on me.” He pauses. “Can’t say I blame her. Must be hell.”
“I don’t really know how she is, Dad. I don’t talk to her all that often. She’s been very…angry since I left for France, and Zelda said she has fewer and fewer good days.”
“Listen, kiddo, I’m…sorry that you have to deal with this. Her. It’s not fair. On top of everything…” Marlon seems unsure how to continue. This is as close as I will get to an apology from him. He’s very good at apologies. You realize only later that he has accepted responsibility for exactly nothing.
“Let’s not talk about it, Dad. I’d like to…just enjoy the sunshine.” We’ve reached the car, which he optimistically parked in the pickup and drop-off area. He has a ticket, which I’m sure he will not pay. This part of the world has yet to adopt the post-9/11 attitude typical to transit areas in the rest of the country, and airport security rather lackadaisically enforces its modest anti-terror protocol. In New York City, Marlon’s car would have been towed and he’d be in police custody by now. But here in Ithaca, just a ticket.
He has rented a flashy convertible, of course. My dad likes to travel in style, regardless of finances, seemliness, tact. He tends to think of any economic restriction as a dead-letter issue, a rule that does not apply to him.
“Nice ride,” I say. He grins mischievously as we load my bags and ourselves into the car and speed off. I hope he’s okay to drive. I haven’t driven in two years and don’t even have a driver’s license, but I might still be the better choice if he’s drunk. He seems reasonably coordinated, though, and once we’re on the other side of the city, we’ll coast along traffic-free dirt roads, kicking up dust and free to veer across the graded surface as much as we like. I relax as we speed down Route 13, Cayuga Lake on our right.
“So so so. Paris! How the hell is it, squirt?”
“About what you’d expect, Dad.” I shrug.
“C’mon, it’s one of the greatest cities in the world! That’s all you have to say about it?”
“It’s far away from Silenus. Even farther than California.”
He ignores the frosty tone in my voice. He is buoyant, but I can hear the strain in his throat as he tries to be cheerful for me. “Always so lighthearted, Little A,” he teases. “Levity, oy vey.” He whistles a tune as we drive through the city, the breeze ruffling his thick black hair, which isn’t curly like ours but, rather, wavy. When we learned that curly hair was a recessive gene, Zelda and I started speculating about our heritage. But there are too many other stamps of Marlon’s paternity on our genes, and we abandoned the possibility of filial mystery as an exercise in wishful thinking. The letters of our DNA signify our origins, even if they can’t inscribe our futures.
“What did you do while you were waiting for me?” I ask, though I know the answer. I’m wondering if he’ll lie.
“I stopped in to see some old friends, and we went out for a bite to eat.”
“Oh? Where did you go?”
“Uh, what’s that place downtown called? With the cheap margaritas?”
“Viva.”
“Yeah, very average Mexican food.” He grins. “But it’s the only place open between two P.M. and dinner in this one-horse town.”
“The only place with a bar, you mean,” I say, half-teasing.
He smiles again. “I’d forgotten how charmingly…sedate it is ’round these parts.” He signals with his blinker, and we ride silently for a moment or two.
“How is your ‘old friend,’ Dad?” I ask. He blinks. He’s a very good liar, and I can tell he’s considering whether to lie now. But I’m betting he’ll come clean. Because I’m older now. Because my twin sister just died. My twin sister, who, incidentally, inherited this particular talent for deception.
“Sharon, you mean?” he says.
“Who else?”
“She’s okay,” he says uncertainly. We’ve never had a real conversation about the woman he was fucking during my middle school years. I’ve wondered more than once whether he knows that Zelda and I knew. Our mother certainly did.
“That’s good. Do you still see her often?”
“No,” he says softly. “It’s been years.”
“And how is the third wife? Maria?”
“She’s well. The girls are well too. Six and eight
, if you can believe that! Scrappy little things. I’ll show you the pictures on my phone, later.” He pauses. “Blaze is a bit of a terror, and Bianca sometimes reminds me of you, when you were little. She’s so…neat.”
“Napa is treating you well, then?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty great! The vineyard’s doing really well—we were in Wine Spectator last month.” I know. We own a vineyard, too, and have had a subscription to Wine Spectator since 1995. Which he knows; he insisted on the subscription, and left us with the bill. “You should come out and visit, while you’re back in the States. I know Maria wants to see you girls.” We both flinch at his use of the present tense, the plural.
“Maybe. I need to get back to Paris kind of soon, though.”
“It’s summer, Little A! Live a bit! You never relax. Your studies can wait until fall, surely.” He nudges me with his elbow, annoyingly.
I nod. “Sort of, I guess. I’m working on my dissertation now, though, so I’m busy. I’m interested in the intersection of Edgar Allan Poe and the OuLiPo movement, their shared emphasis on formal constraint—”
“Poe never struck me as particularly restrained,” Marlon interrupts, presumably thinking himself to be clever.
“Not restraint. Constraint. Specifically, I’m interested in lipograms and pangrams. I’ve got a theory that while both are obviously important for OuLiPo texts, they might appear unconsciously in Poe’s works. So far I’ve focused mainly on alliteration and repetition, and because Poe’s work is explicitly invested in the unconscious—”
“A pangram—that’s like ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’?” Marlon interjects. I expect he’s trying to impress me.
“That’s the idea. So far I’ve been working on this one essay he wrote on poetry—”
“It sounds really erudite, Little A, and I can’t wait to talk about it more. But can’t you take a break? It’s summer, and, well, your sister…”
I capitulate. Marlon is not remotely interested in what I spend my days thinking about.
“Yeah, well, Zelda was the relaxed one. I was the responsible one.”
“You still are, sweetie,” he says, trying to be comforting.
“No, I’m the only one now.” I suddenly feel like my mother, nastily baiting this man into feeling like shit. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m just not…sure…” I trail off, watching in the mirror as Ithaca disappears behind us and we head up the highway on the other side of the lake.
“It’s okay, kiddo. You say whatever you have to.” He pats my knee. I realize that since greeting me, my father hasn’t looked at me once. As if he can’t. I root in my oversized bag for my sunglasses and put them on, in case I start to cry. But as I gaze out at the dazzling spray of too-green leaves and the shimmering water, I suspect that I’m not going to.
2
Brutally jet-lagged and insufficiently buoyed by Bloody Marys, I can’t keep my eyes open and doze off somewhere on the dirt roads that will take us across the narrow, rugged span between the lakes, and I wake up just as we hit the top of the hill overlooking Seneca. The view is spectacular, with the sun about to set on the west side, and my breath catches a little, as it does every single time I make this drive. This is the longest I’ve been away from home: twenty-one months. I glance over at Marlon, and though he has his sunglasses on, I think he’s been crying. Weeping, even. I’m startled and distressed by this—his charming, fun-loving façade so rarely cracks, and when it does, I feel as though my world is being unmade. Maybe Marlon knows this, because as he sees me waking up, he instantly transforms, flashing me one of his brilliant, toothy smiles. I know that he loved living here, loved our subpar vineyard. Even loved my mother and us girls. But his love for us is tempered by years of discord and cruelty, whereas the love he feels for this modest patch of ground is unadulterated. I smile back at him, because in spite of myself, I’ve missed it too.
The car skates over the dirt roads as we descend lower and lower, closer to the lakefront. There are fields of grapes all around us, and the pleasant hum of billions of insects thrums in whirring cadence. The temperature drops suddenly in mysterious swaths of air, and goosebumps ripple on my forearms and thighs as we whip through them, warm cold warm. I can smell cold water.
Silenus Vineyard is up on the hill, with acres of vines stretching out below the tasting room, which is fronted by a rustic deck looking out at the water, scattered with a few picturesque barrels for ambience. It doesn’t have much of a yield, and the wine is barely mediocre, even for the Finger Lakes.
I peer as closely as I can at the grapes as we drive by to see what Zelda has been up to in the last twenty-one months. It’s hard for me to imagine my unpredictable and self-indulgent sister tilling the land like a good farmer, but she’s managed to keep the place from total destitution, basically on her own. I wonder if he has been here, if he has been living in the Airstream trailer with her, if he is the one who organizes the spring trellising and the autumn harvest. I have to assume so; Zelda has never cared much for schedules, and I can easily picture her frittering away all of May and June drinking Pimm’s cocktails on the deck and swearing that she’ll move the catch wires tomorrow. Unless she really commits to doing something, and then she is an unholy terror. A terrier. I know I will have to see him soon, maybe today, and I squirm, thinking of what I’ll say.
My father clears his throat awkwardly.
“You know, it’s the weirdest thing,” he begins. “I think I must be losing it.” He pauses. “It’s just that while I was at the bar…” He shakes his head, his waves of hair bouncing fetchingly. He doesn’t go on.
“What?” I prompt.
“It’s silly.”
“What is?”
“I thought I saw your sister.” I keep my face as blank as possible. “Or you, of course. But she walked like Zelda. I don’t know, all loose.” Marlon chuckles at himself. “Ridiculous, right?”
“Grief does funny things to your head,” I answer, trying to betray nothing. Did Zelda intend for him to see her? Is she in Ithaca? Or California? I lean back in the seat, thinking about my sister. Thinking about whether she would even bother to toy with Marlon. After he left, it was almost like he stopped existing for her. Whereas I pined.
Dad pulls into the long, steep driveway that leads to the tasting room and the house snuggled next door. Nadine and Marlon built the house after they built the tasting room and the new cellar, solidifying what the real priorities were going to be. A place to drink, then a place to live. My mother, with her exacting, nitpicky taste, designed the house with an architect friend from the city, and each window, molding, and corner mirrors her love of right angles, modernism, abstraction. It is not a warm, cozy house. And next to the house is the barn.
The blackened shell of that barn appears as Dad crunches into the gravel parking area. The view is partly obscured by the house, but I can see charred timber poking up from the ground. I catch a glimpse of yellow tape cordoning off a large chunk of our lawn. A police car is parked near the rubble, and someone official is rootling around the periphery, looking fiercely intent and professional. My hands suddenly start to tremble and I don’t want to get out of the car. Zelda, what the fuck did you do?
Dad wordlessly takes both of our suitcases from the trunk, and I realize in a vague panic that he’s planning to stay here, under the same roof as Mom. He seems shaken, and I’m actually relieved to see his equanimity at least a little disrupted. His first-born child is, after all, presumably smoking in the wreckage of the barn he built himself, that one achingly long summer when my mother couldn’t bear his presence in the house. Her house. Dad is resolutely not looking at the barn as we go inside. Or at me.
“Mom?” I call uncertainly, trying to guess where she’ll be. The sun is setting, and I wonder whether she will have gone ahead and eaten without us. I don’t know if Betsy, our lumpy, matronly neighbor, will still be here; I called her after I got off the phone with my mother and asked if she could go over to the house, ma
ke sure Mom had some food and didn’t stumble down the stairs. Betsy was all comforting murmurs and practical country clearheadedness on the phone; she knew of course, had seen the fire from her house, just a mile away. She’d already been over and had just come home to pick up a frozen casserole when I called. She wanted to tell me the whole story, but I had been desperate to get off the phone, to slink into bed with Nico and let him mumble to me in his accented English.
“Betsy?” I call.
“Upstairs!” someone, presumably Betsy, answers. Dad sets the suitcases down by the door and looks around skittishly. I can see him summing up what has changed in this house. The medical-looking banister railing. The locks on certain cabinets in the kitchen. My mother’s favorite print, a Barnett Newman reproduction that used to hang in the hallway, gone. Zelda, in a blind fury, tore it down and threw it into the lake during a particularly violent argument, before the dementia was diagnosed, while Mom’s moods were still inexplicably abrupt. I can tell that Marlon does not want to go upstairs.
“I’m, uh, gonna look around for a minute, use the bathroom. I’ll bring us up a bottle and some glasses in a minute,” he says uncomfortably, scuttling away from the staircase and my mother’s silent, spiderlike presence upstairs. “Maybe it would be a good idea to warn her that I’m here, kiddo. She, uh, might not be all that happy to see me.”
I nod. I know he’ll go straight to the liquor cabinet once I’m out of sight, but he’ll be disappointed to find a combination lock barring his entry. Zelda informed me in one of her chatty emails, with a gleefully vindictive tone, that she installed it after my mother nearly OD’d on Scotch last year. Apparently, Nadine forgot that she had already been drinking wine and popping sedatives all day and almost boxed her liver with a bottle of Glenmorangie. Marlon will just have to rustle up something with a lower alcohol content from the fridge.
Dead Letters Page 2