Dead Letters

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  9

  To: zazazelda@gmail.com

  From: zazazelda@gmail.com

  Subject: Irritating, right?

  June 24, 2016 @ 3:00 PM

  Inimitable, Impeccable Ava,

  Having fun yet? I bet you are, in your heart of hearts. You always liked to pretend that you were above games, that you couldn’t stand manipulation, wheeling, dealing. Sordid political jousts for power. You mocked Wyatt in high school for his fondness for winning, for getting first place. Do you remember when he wanted to run for student council and you virtually forbade it? He was crushed, but he did everything you asked him to, as always. He was such a good, obedient boy. Until you left him and he thought you weren’t coming back.

  Have you caught on yet? Have you figured out what’s happening? You’re a sharp, clever girly, so it’s not impossible. But if I had to guess (and I have to, since I obviously can’t just pop up and ask you), I’d bet you’ve been too single-mindedly blotting out consciousness to have paid really close attention. But I’ve given you time to process and mope; from now on, you’ll have to focus harder and figure out what I’m up to. You’ll stumble across the rules of the game eventually, I’m confident. But here’s a nudge, to get you to the next step: What’s the thing you’ve always been the most afraid of?

  I know your thoughts have immediately leapt to that old juvenile fear, the titanesque sturgeon ruffling their extra-large gills along the bottom of our lake, and I recognize your yawning, primordial terror, I do. Remember when we went out in the rowboat with Dad? And he began spinning his tall tales? (Ever the fabricator, our pops!) This one involved something about industrial runoff from Cornell creating these marine dinosaurs that had developed a taste for human flesh. You wouldn’t even know they were beneath you and—bam! They’d nibble off your feet or maybe swallow you whole. Your face went totally pale, and you begged and begged us to paddle to shore. And then, laughing mischievously, Dad dumped you into the water, just picked you up by the torso and chucked you in. You screamed and screamed, splashing in terror, and Marlon almost relented because it looked like you might drown. You pulled it together, though, and you swam, furious and panicked, back to the rocky banks of safety, storming off to the house without a backward glance, looking like a miserable drowned rat. You refused to speak to us for nearly a week. Silence always was your favorite weapon. You never remembered that I swam after you.

  But, no, I don’t mean the sturgeon. What is the thing that you’ve feared and avoided your whole life long, that you’ve scampered away from at every opportunity? Another hint: I don’t think it’s coincidental that you’re irrationally afraid of a cold fish.

  When you figure it out, you’ll know where to look.

  Your inspired, innovative, indefatigable sister,

  Z is for Zelda

  —

  I roll out of Zelda’s bed feeling groggy, as well as deeply annoyed. Zelda’s trailer has turned into a sauna. I’m surprised she doesn’t have an air conditioner down here, though not entirely: Zelda loves extremes. I’ve napped for several hours, and my hangover is largely dissipated, though Zelda’s most recent communiqué has left me feeling nauseous and irritable. Goddamn her. I don’t want to play her fucking game. But it’s too late. I’m already all in, and she knows it. She understands that the reason I never played games is because I have to win. I am my mother’s child, and I can’t handle defeat. Zelda is fully aware that she’s enticed me to play, and now I can’t let it go until I’ve figured her out, found her, looked her in the eyes and told her that I know her BEST, that I GET HER. Which, of course, is how she will win too. Zelda never plays a game she’s not certain of winning.

  As kids, we were always wary of playing against each other, of competing; someone else was always on the opposing side. We refused to beat each other. For us, no card games or long rainy days filled with Monopoly or chess. Whenever there was a game of tag or capture the flag at a birthday party, we were always on the same team, and we would win. No matter what. Zelda once chipped a little girl’s tooth, refusing to be taken prisoner in capture the flag. During one obsessive summer, she got her hands on an old Nintendo and played The Legend of Zelda alone in her room—she was fascinated with the heroine who bore her name, and at some point she wanted all of us to call her Hylia. She wouldn’t let me near the game.

  Once, disastrously, we played Scrabble. We were in ninth grade. So certain was I of winning, with my clever, bookish brain, that I sat down in front of my sister with nary a qualm. I excelled at school, got fabulous grades and glowing reports from teachers, while Zelda terrorized them and turned in homework on a schedule that could only be described as capricious. Confident of my success, I agreed to a dangerous bet, certain that I wouldn’t have to honor it. Zelda played a lackadaisical first few words (harp, try, gasp) until I was lulled into complacency. She then swept back into the game with dazzling ease, tossing down big scorers (gherkins, blowzy, and, distressingly, za). I challenged this last word, which she had slapped on a double letter score, only to meet Zelda’s smug expression as she handed me the dictionary.

  “There’s no way you could have known this is a valid Scrabble word,” I pointed out, trying to get a handle on my rage. I was realizing just how effectively she had played me.

  “You thought I knew nothing about the game, little sis,” she said. “Always assuming I’m all loosey-goosey. But I’ve recently become a prodigy.” She leaned back in her chair and informed me that as the loser, I would have to buy weed from her extremely dodgy older friend and smoke a whole joint in the middle of the dining room while Nadine was upstairs. She wanted me to break the rules, which I always followed to the letter. I did, and was miserable. We never played Scrabble again.

  I honestly don’t know if Zelda would really have put us on opposing teams now. She’s been angry at me, that’s clear, but I still feel that we’re both working for the same objective, heading toward the same goal. Not knowing what that goal really is makes me nervous.

  Reluctantly, I turn my mind to her email, and what she wants me to think. She’s right: The first thing that leapt to mind when she asked what I feared most was those god-awful sturgeon. Wyatt told me later that they were a rural legend, that of course there weren’t actually any gigantic forty-foot fish slowly slicing their way through the dark waters of the lake, four hundred feet down. That they obviously never swam up to the surface to feed, that they weren’t attracted by the sound of human legs churning through the water. He said my dad had just been teasing me, like he always did, like dads do, trying to get a reaction. That he’d succeeded this time but I shouldn’t let him win by being terrified of the water. I knew that Wy was speaking good sense, but for a long time after that day, I wouldn’t go in over my head in the lake. Zelda’s right about another thing: I don’t remember her jumping in to rescue me. I remember watching later as she frolicked in the water, seal-like and almost too far from the shore to see. Unafraid and able to do something I was now too frightened to.

  I’ve never feared my mother, exactly. I knew from an early age that she was a formidable foe, and I had no desire to anger her. In fact, I eventually learned that I didn’t want to attract her attention at all. I was safer when she wasn’t watching me, when her notice was fixed on someone else. If she never noticed me sitting there, just out of sight, her sharp words would never be directed toward me, and her blind fury would be aimed elsewhere. Usually toward Zelda, who seemed rather to thrive on the rage, the cruel taunts, the endless harping. Zelda used our mother’s wrath as fuel; she held it inside her and unleashed it when she needed a blitzkrieg of her own. Zelda never avoided proximity to our mother; she sought it out. When she saw Nadine getting ratty, Zelda would provoke her, taunt her. As I shrank away from our mother, Zelda would go on the offensive. I always assumed it was her combative spirit, but maybe Zelda was trying to protect me, to attract Nadine’s rage so that I would be spared. And I learned to retreat, to avoid engaging anyone, because it always led to conflict.<
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  And so I know what Zelda wants me to say, to acknowledge: I am afraid of intimacy. I sit in her trailer, remembering the day I left for France. My bags were packed, waiting by the door. Nadine was more lucid back then, but stress made her worse, and for days she had been lashing out and disoriented. That day, she fumed around the house, ripe with the awareness that I was abandoning her, leaving her here, but unable to put her finger on why. She was livid and cranky, and my skin was crawling with the desperate need to get out, to get away. Zelda was lurking around the house, uncharacteristically quiet and docile. Manifesting guilt, or as close to it as she could come without ever experiencing guilt. Remorse, maybe. She had even offered to help me pack, a gesture I had greeted with a narrow glare and a hunching of the shoulders. My stomach had turned over when she had offered, and I’d wanted to cry, to tell her she just needed to apologize and repent and I would stay, that this was crazy. All I wanted was for us to look each other in the eyes and acknowledge that that evening after I found them should never have happened, that we couldn’t take it back but maybe we could forget it. But I couldn’t say the words, and she had said nothing more, just slunk off to the kitchen for a mimosa.

  Our mother had started her mimosas somewhat earlier, and I knew from her glassy eyes and gingery steps that Nadine was approaching the danger zone, the state between mildly and mindlessly drunk wherein she could marshal enough sobriety to do real damage but was uninhibited enough to not care how much damage was inflicted. Appearing in her room to say goodbye, I felt like she had scheduled her imbibing precisely so that she would be about four drinks in when I was walking out the door, her arsenal primed. She couldn’t always remember what year it was, but she had a warrior’s instinct that guided her even as her conscious mind deteriorated.

  The scene was unpleasant, and though Zelda tried to stay out of the way, she was drawn upstairs by the sounds of conflict, a moth to the flame. I didn’t put up much of a defense; I was too tired and heartsick, and I just wanted to retreat to the taxi that was waiting outside to take me to the airport. Mom raged, called me neglectful, ungrateful, cowardly. She said I was a nasty, spoiled little girl who was throwing her toys because she couldn’t have everything she wanted, and I wondered momentarily if Zelda had actually told her about Wyatt, about what had happened between the three of us. Mom said she wouldn’t give me a single penny for my foolish, infantile fantasy, that anyone who abandoned her responsibilities to go for a joy ride was shameful and selfish. And then, finally, she looked at me.

  “Ava, I’ve never said this to you, because I didn’t want to hurt you. But even as a child, there was something wrong with you. You didn’t want to be held, or touched, even when you were nursing. You’ve spent your whole life flinching away from real connection, and now, instead of dealing with how you feel, you’re flinching again. Your whole life, you’ve been a cold fish, running from intimacy.” She waved me away then and went to stand by the window, staring out at the lake and refusing to look back at me.

  “Bye, Mom,” I managed, and I retreated. In the hall, Zelda was watching me, her eyes shrewd and calculating. I knew she was thinking about whether she could deliver a final blow, if she could find one well-placed word that would break me completely, make me stay. I knew she could find it, if she thought hard enough. “Mercy, Zelda. Just let me go,” I said, looking into her eyes for the first time in months, since learning about Wyatt, since that spring night when we destroyed everything. I expected her to pounce, to read my weakness and lack of spirit and go for the kill, true predator that she was. But she didn’t. She said nothing, just nodded her head and followed me down the stairs. She picked up my suitcase and took it to the taxi, where the driver was waiting impatiently.

  “It costs more if you’re running late and I have to sit here,” he informed me.

  “Then you can’t possibly care how long it takes her to say goodbye. You’re getting paid,” Zelda snapped, manhandling my suitcase into the trunk. She looked at me, and for half a moment I thought we might actually hug. But I had never really hugged my sister; she had never hugged me. She knew I didn’t like to be touched. And we couldn’t ever touch again, not without that memory resurfacing. We just gazed at each other for a moment, and then I slid into the warm leather of the backseat. I put my earbuds in as the taxi pulled out of the driveway, and without looking back, I knew Zelda had gone into the house, and wasn’t watching me leave.

  —

  Remembering that scene makes my stomach clench with renewed frustration and helplessness. My mother had been right, of course: I was trying to get away from feelings, from my family. I feared intimacy, deep in my marrow. It was why I had held Wyatt at arm’s length all those years. Why my grandmother made me flinch. Why I had been so completely unable to forgive Zelda for calling my bluff: She was the only person I had ever shared true intimacy with, and she had used it against me in one of her games, trying to force my hand.

  I sigh, knowing where she wants me to go. I put another caftan on, and it clings to my humid flesh. I wipe the fragile skin under my eyes with a forceful scoop of my index fingers, trying to clean myself up. Outside, I leave the truck parked in front of the trailer, and I walk up the hill, heading to the house and our mother’s bedroom, wondering what Zelda has left for me there.

  10

  Just entering the house is a relief after the temperature outdoors, but it’s muggy, even downstairs. Marlon is nowhere to be seen, nor is Opal, and I wonder what they’re getting up to. I’m briefly annoyed that they’ve left Mom alone in the house, but I decide that this is probably just a case of introjection. I’ve internalized her accusations that I’ve abandoned her, neglected my duties, and the whole time I spent in France I’d been feeling the guilt. It’s supposed to be me here, holding down the fort, being responsible, being sensible. Me, with my practical, easily justified B.A. from the Ag school, major in viticulture and enology, conscientiously maintaining the quaint family enterprise while Zelda screwed around, while my father sucked down excellent Pinot Noir in California, while my mother lost her mind. But I took off for Paris, of all the irresponsible places. I broke the rules, and now I’m being punished.

  My phone starts vibrating inside the fringed bag I’ve borrowed from Zelda’s trailer, and I claw it open in a panic, hoping, fearing, certain that it’s Zelda, that she’s somehow been watching me and knows that I’m headed upstairs to my mother’s room. But Zelda’s phone is black, shiny, and lifeless, just a cool piece of glass and metal in my hand, radiating my sister’s presence like an alien doppelgänger. I realize with a slight lag that it’s my own phone ringing, and I set Zelda’s down on the counter.

  It’s Nico. I jump with a guilty start, realizing how thoroughly he’s been pushed out of my mind. This man, whom I wake up next to nearly every day, whom I’ve said I love, has been eclipsed by just a few days with the Antipovas. And by Wyatt, a nasty little voice suggests, and I think it sounds like Zelda. I dither with my finger above the answer icon. I don’t want to answer the phone, I realize. But that’s the old me. Not the Paris me.

  “Nico, salut!”

  “Ava, is that you?” Nico says in his thick French accent. I love that accent. It sounds like a caricature. Even though I’m capable enough in French for us to communicate well, I always prefer to speak English with Nico, to hear his silly Gallic pronunciations. A cruel part of me has occasionally wondered if I like having the upper hand linguistically, if what I enjoy is actually being able to supply tricky vocabulary terms and to correct grammatical slips. Growing up between hyperverbal Zelda and sharp-tongued Nadine has made me hungry for linguistic supremacy in any arena. But who doesn’t like to be on top of the conversation? To win?

  “Yes. It’s so good to hear your voice.”

  “I thought you would call when you debarked the plane, but I didn’t hear….” There is a tiny hint of recrimination in this, and I realize that I had promised to call on my arrival. It was one of the last things I said after kissing him on the bro
w, while he lay sleepily on the foldout couch in my tiny apartment.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry! Things have been a little disorganized here—I’ve really had my hands full.”

  “I thought that. Are you all right?”

  “I’m…yeah, I’m okay. It’s all a little crazy at the moment, but I’m trying to get a handle on what needs to be done.”

  “Your sister…she is…?” Nico trails off delicately.

  “Well, there’s still some official confusion—the cops have to confirm everything,” I say vaguely. I can hardly tell him that I think Zelda is alive and well, laughing at all the mayhem she’s created from a safe distance. I would sound crazy.

  “And your father? He came for you?”

  “Yeah, he picked me up. He’s…the same as ever,” I answer with a shake of my head.

  “Your mom? How is she?”

  “Just okay, I think. She’s been really disoriented. Thinks I’m Zelda half the time.”

  “That…must be difficult,” Nico says after a pause. I realize I’m making him do all the conversational work; I’ve clammed up and am now just politely responding to questions. I hate the phone.

  “It must be really late there—are you okay?” I ask, trying to redeem myself.

  “Oh, not so late. I had a few glasses of wine after work,” he says. I can hear a smile in his voice.

  “Tell me where you went,” I say eagerly. I want to be back in Paris, meeting him at one of our cafés for an Armagnac.

  “We went to Le Compas. Your favorite,” he says, still smiling. I groan in envy.

  “Oh, c’mon! You’re forbidden to go without me!” I immediately regret this; I’ve never given him rules before, never consciously tried to control his comings and goings. I’m not the same Ava there; I’ve changed. But he doesn’t seem to notice. He just chuckles.