I think about sitting with Zelda at the kitchen table, after Mom’s diagnosis, talking over our options. They were limited. Lewy body dementia is degenerative, incurable. We could let our mother descend deeper, lose more of herself until she basically forgot how to breathe. Or we could do something. Choose the ending now. Go to Oregon? Switzerland? We promised to keep it as an option, a possibility as Mom’s condition worsened. And it has worsened. Zelda has sweetened the pot, with the insurance policies, but we talked about it long before. Even Nadine had hinted at it, though she couldn’t ask us. She couldn’t admit to needing us, to being so vulnerable. And, of course, I did go to Oregon, though I think I never fully admitted that this could have been one of my reasons for fleeing to the West Coast and following Jordan home.
On the balcony, Marlon is now snoring mildly. I creep quietly around him and put the hat on Nadine’s head, looking at the skin on her neck and décolletage, to see if she’s sunburned yet. She seems okay. As I tug the hat over her disheveled hair, she reaches up and grabs my wrist, surprising me with the texture of her rippled fingertips, so wrinkled they feel waterlogged.
“What is it, Mom?”
“What? Oh, nothing. I just—thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“It’s nice of you. To look after me, these past few years. I know it’s not how you want to spend your life. But you’re so sweet, Ava. A good girl.”
I swallow hard, feeling around for the Vicodin in my neurochemicals. Not nearly stoned enough. Blindly, I make my way downstairs, homing instinctively on the wine cellar.
It is cool and musty below the house, and I feel a familiar frisson of pleasure at the way it smells down here, full of moisture and secrets and age. I walk along the wine racks, fondling the cool necks of the bottles. Something deeply interior flushes with pleasure at the sight of this abundance, and I contentedly stroke each glass curve, sensuously moving along the racks. I stop at a fifteen-year-old bottle of Meursault that Zelda and I stowed away in the cellar when we graduated high school, seven years ago; our father had mailed it as a gift, along with a bottle of Champagne that was meant to be drunk immediately. Zaza and I occasionally mused over when we would open the wine; what occasion would warrant it? When will it be most wonderful? I look at the label.
“I don’t care what your W is, Zaza. W is for wine,” I announce to the dusty flagons. I walk upstairs with the bottle cradled in my arms. It is covered with accumulated silt, and I know it will leave a trace on my dress. In the kitchen I pull down four wineglasses and hold their stems delicately between my fingers, dangling upside down, clinking together.
On the balcony, I nudge Marlon’s shoulder, and his eyes flutter open uncertainly.
“What is it?”
“Meursault,” I answer with a smile. “I thought it was time.” He stares blankly at me, then at the bottle, trying to place it. I can see the moment when he remembers on his face, which twitches, pained. “Zelda and I were never quite sure when to uncork it,” I explain. “I don’t think we should wait any longer.” I set down the glasses and methodically open the wine with the corkscrew that has been sitting on the deck railing since my evening of excess with Wyatt. I sniff the cork and pass it to Marlon. He shuts his eyes and breathes in the scents, then hands it to Nadine, who fondles it absently before breathing in its mysterious complexity. She looks like she might try to eat it, though, so I take it back.
“Is it cold enough?” Marlon asks in concern.
“I hope so. It was in the cellar. Should be around fifty degrees, if the cellar’s doing its job.”
Marlon grunts in response and reaches out to touch the bottle. We are like a trio of acolytes, all suddenly alert and respectful in the presence of this sacred liquid. I pour the wine evenly into the four glasses, the ochre substance sloshing toward the rim. We wordlessly claim our glasses; Nadine looks perkier and more coherent. We sit and sip, saying nothing, the fourth glass perched on the little table to warm in the sun.
24
EXpecting sunshine when I awake the next morning, I’m dismayed to see gray skies greet me instead. I look out at the ashes of the barn, which have long since cooled. Even the smell of burnt wood has dissipated, and I’m almost sad; it reminded me of bonfires, nights clustered around a flame while Zelda and I initiated mischief. I wonder if the whole heap will turn into a soggy mess if it rains. When it rains. I suppose we should do something about it. Clean it up, rake it over. Will we be able to grow grass on it ever again? How? I speculate briefly about the way one goes about such a thing and eventually realize that it is yet another task that will fall to the people who actually run this place, who grow the few grapes we manage to produce.
Zelda’s memorial is scheduled for this morning. Marlon needs to get back to California, and after very little discussion, it was determined that no one would be coming from far away; we don’t have any real family, and Zelda never left here. It’s nicer to think about prosaic details than to wonder where Zelda is, what havoc she is currently wreaking. The last pair of letters briefly flash through my mind. I’m perfectly happy to dwell on what to dress Mom in and who will bring food. Marlon and I had a forty-minute conversation over what wine to serve. I lobbied for the sparkling, which I’m certain is what Zelda wants, but Marlon has opted for a lavish reserve Chardonnay and one of our older red blends. I wonder if he suspects that Silenus is on its last legs and he wants everyone’s final taste of the fruits of his long-ago labor to be the best we have. If the best is what he wants, however, I feel we should drink someone else’s wine.
I realize I’ve been staring out at the barn for twenty minutes before my head snaps up alertly. The Vicodin makes me very spacey, apparently. I’ve been swallowing them down at quite a pace since I discovered Zelda’s stash yesterday. I have resolutely not thought about the penance she has imposed.
In a little while, I peek in on Nadine, who is still asleep, and I climb listlessly back into bed. I can hear Opal muttering wearily to herself in the kitchen, raving quietly about Jesus, extolling his virtues in song; she’s probably organizing glasses and eliminating imaginary dust bunnies. We’re having the memorial at the tasting room, and it’s unlikely anyone will even come to the house, yet Opal is determinedly preparing the living room for exacting visitors who will presumably check behind the couch to see if dirt has accumulated there.
I heard Marlon pull out of the driveway early this morning. I wonder where he’s been going these last few days. A bar? To see his former mistress? Gambling? Part of me doesn’t expect him to come back. I’ll get a text from the airport right before he’s supposed to kick off the service, saying he’s really sorry, he just couldn’t bear it, he’s going to Montana to clear his mind for a while. Opal will shake her head in disappointment, but she will defend him, citing his wild, untamable nature. She will tell the story of how he sought out solitude as a young boy, the story we’ve all heard before, of when his father ran over the dog with the truck and shot the poor thing in the head in the backyard. Grandpa Will offered Marlon the gun, since it was his dog, but Marlon just shook his head and hopped on his bicycle. He was gone for nearly two days, and Opal has never been able to oblige him to say where he went. Opal always relates this story proudly, insistently, as though Marlon’s inability to face unpleasantness as a boy somehow excuses him for leaving us. If he doesn’t come back today, I will tell everyone that he was supposed to lead the service, apologize for his desertion, and uncork the wine. I will have nothing else to say.
I stare at my phone. All morning, I’ve been waiting for a message or phone call from Nico, but he hasn’t uttered a digital peep since he texted yesterday to say that he sat at the bar of Hôtel Victoires for four hours with nothing to report. He sounded grumpy and interrogatory, and he didn’t respond to my last text. I assumed he’d gone home to bed, but then I can’t help thinking he normally would have sent me a message once he was up. It’s already afternoon in Paris, and I’ve heard nothing.
Part of me
suspects that he’ll leave, too, that he’ll just never text me back. He’ll count himself lucky to have dodged a bullet—that crazy American—and he’ll marry one of the girls he went to university with, someone with two names, like Marie-Claire or Anne-Sophie. They’ll move closer to her parents in Lyon, and his kids will finish at the top of their lycée; one will go to the university Nico himself wanted to attend but didn’t quite have the grades for, and the other will move to the United States, maybe even to attend Cornell. He will have a strange memory of me then, though he won’t have thought about me in years, and he will wonder if I still live on the vineyard here. On impulse, he will fly in to visit his daughter and will track me down (on Facebook, if it still exists; on some other sort of uncanny digital avatar if not) and will appear, unannounced, on my doorstep, hoping to have a brief affair. He will have gone slightly soft in his middle, and he will have less hair. We will have fond, illicit sex, possibly in this very room, though more likely in my mother’s, where I will have been sleeping since I finally transitioned into her bedroom ten years before.
I shake off this elaborate yarn, telling myself I’m being absurd. He probably met up with some friends to drink at Le Tambour for the rest of the night and is lying in my bed, playing hooky, sleeping off a terrific hangover, and will call as soon as his head stops throbbing, maybe sometime later this afternoon. I realize that I’m again filling in the chinks with fantasies, stuffing the cracks of absence with stories. I have no idea where he is, or where my father is, or where Zelda is. Where the person who was my mother has vanished to. They are gone, and anything I can think up about them is a fiction.
I look through both Zelda’s closet and mine, trying to decide whether to be shocking (Zelda) or sedate (Ava). There’s some sort of South American gown in Zelda’s wardrobe that I find very tempting, but as I look at myself in the mirror, I realize I don’t want to be high-profile, dramatic. I want to blend in, disappear into everyone else. I’m too exhausted to be the missing half of our usual equation. I don’t know how to be without her. I am not me without her in contrast.
Eventually, I yank a terrifically boring black sheath with cap sleeves off the hanger in my room and pull it over my head. I straighten my hair and flick a mascara brush across my eyelashes a few times. For the last touch, I creep into my mother’s bedroom and borrow a string of pearls from her jewelry box.
“Momma.” I nudge Nadine. “Time to get up.” She rolls over onto her stomach, resolutely uninterested in cooperating. I think about all those years of waking up at six A.M. to go to school, about Nadine’s absolute impatience with any dithering. I don’t remember her ever asking us twice to get up and get dressed. “Nadine, I’m going to ask you exactly once to get up. The rest is up to you,” I say in a quiet, firm voice, mimicking her. I wonder if her own parents said that to her on slow mornings.
It works. She squints at me, clearly unhappy, but she does sit upright and toss off one of her blankets.
“Thank you,” I respond evenly. “It’s time to get dressed for the service. It’s at noon, and we have to bring a lot of stuff over to the tasting room.” Not that Nadine will be participating much, but at least she’ll be ready to go. I lead her to the bathroom, holding on to one of her thin, quivering wrists. I help her into the shower and sit her down on the chair there, realizing that this is the first time I have showered her since I’ve been home. Opal must have done it at some stage. At least, I hope it was Opal, rather than Marlon. Nadine would be mortified to have him see her naked this way.
She wants to wear a floral tea dress. The colors are relatively muted, and I realize I don’t give a shit which dress she ends up in. Let the woman wear whatever she wants to wear to her daughter’s memorial service. We’ll all be grateful if she has no idea what’s going on.
I lead Nadine downstairs, where Opal is still clanging around.
“Oh, good! I was worried I’d have to come up and snuggle you both out of bed!” she says cheerily. “Do you remember how I used to do that, A?” I do. I never cared for it. I can only assume that she wouldn’t think of trying it with Nadine.
“What can I do to help?”
“Well, you’re already in your nice dress, I don’t want you to muss it….” She clucks, looking me up and down. “You look very nice, Ava. Exactly…right.” She bobs her head in approval. She is clearly relieved not to have to contend with the Zelda specter of the last few days.
“Thanks.”
“You too, Nadine.” Nadine doesn’t answer, just shuffles toward the couch. “Have you taken your meds yet, Nadine?” Opal asks.
“Shit. I forgot to give them to her. Let me just…” I dash up the stairs before Opal can offer. The pill dispenser is sitting on her dresser. This is the last day of her real meds; after tonight, I will have to figure out what her medication regimen is. Or.
Downstairs, I hand Nadine her pills, and she looks at me expectantly, almost puppylike. I’m torn; I want to keep her quiet and encourage her to take her pills without a fuss, but it’s going to be a long day, and once she starts drinking, it will be tough to slow her down. I bring her a glass of tonic water with lime, hoping she won’t notice the absence of gin.
“Right. So, we have to get these casseroles and things over to the tasting room. I don’t know whether to heat them up and then bring them, because they’ll be cold….Or maybe we should heat them during the service and bring them over right after?” Opal is staring helplessly at the countertops covered in Pyrex dishes wrapped in tinfoil, literally wringing her hands. I have a grim suspicion that our neighbor Betsy is responsible for most of these. Casseroles. Jesus. What happened to the catering? I discuss the minutiae with my grandmother, letting her micromanage.
Twenty minutes later, I find myself feeling thoroughly ridiculous, driving the tractor in my mother’s pearls and Zelda’s farm boots. I’m panting and sweaty by the time I’ve unloaded several armfuls of our neighbor’s goodwill and dragged them up the steps to the tasting room’s kitchen. It’s going to be a hot day, and I can already smell my own sweat. My hair has probably turned frizzy and disheveled, and I imagine my makeup has collapsed as well. People will be arriving in an hour, and I still haven’t brought over the tablecloths, candles, photos of Zelda….The wine hasn’t been brought up from the cellar, the dishes need to be unracked from the dishwasher. I wonder if the tasting room is supposed to open today—indeed, whether the tasting room is ever open. Did Zelda pour sips for tipsy tourists?
Taking a deep breath, I head back down to the tractor, making a list of everything that needs to be done in order of importance. Where the fuck is Marlon? Just one other person would make all the difference, and I’m stuck with an eighty-year-old busybody and a senile sixty-year-old who is likely to wander into the lake and drown. I add this to the list of things for which to upbraid Zelda when she finally reappears. I wouldn’t put it past her to make an entrance during her funeral, the unforgivable maniac. It would rather undermine her devious scheme, though. Fuming at her silently, I realize how on edge I’ve felt all day—I’m nervous but also excited. We’re nearing the end of the alphabet. Maybe today I will get to see my sister. The commingling of joy and relief I will feel at the sight of her, the smell of her.
As I drive the tractor back toward the big house, a battered station wagon pulls into our driveway, and I feel a surge of panic. That can’t be guests, can it? But as the car crunches to a halt, Wyatt steps out of the backseat, and I almost leap off the tractor to run to him. His parents emerge from their ancient Volvo and wave to me.
“Hi, guys,” I call, dismounting from the tractor and sprinting up the hill toward them. My cheeks are flushed, and sweat is trickling down the small of my back.
“Ava! We came early to help,” Wyatt says.
“Put us to work!” Dora says.
I almost cry with relief. “Christ, thank you. I thought this whole fucking thing was going to fall apart.”
Steve laughs uproariously at my tone, and I realize they’ve prob
ably never heard me swear before. With a wild upwelling of hope, I wonder if I can change, if they could learn to like me.
“How about the wine?” Wyatt prompts. “Have you already brought it up from the cellar?”
“Nope. I’ll come over with you and show you which cases we want. Um, Dora…” I pause, uncomfortable at the thought of ordering her around, but she looks capable and keen to help out. “There are some tablecloths and decorations for the tasting room inside. Maybe you and Steve can load them in your car and bring them over? My grandmother is inside, and she can show you what needs to come.”
“Got it.” Dora salutes me semiseriously and disappears inside. I gesture to Wyatt, and we head back over to the tasting room.
“Things under control here?” he asks, looking closely at me in concern. “You doing okay?”
“Oh, you know,” I breathe shakily. “I’ll be fine. Nervous that Zelda is going to pop up at some point.” Wyatt says nothing. “Or that someone will show up to arrest me.” This possibility has had me more than a little concerned.
Wyatt grunts. “Any more notes?” he asks gruffly.
“Not yet. That has me on edge too,” I add. “Oh, by the way: I got U wrong. The letter, I mean,” I correct myself swiftly. “It wasn’t unlocked. It was underneath. The deck.”
“Carefully constructed,” Wyatt says. I nod and recount how I found V and X, Vicodin and Xanax. I don’t tell him what Zelda wants me to do with them, what I’ve been mulling over.
“What do you think W is?” he asks.
“Maybe it’s for Wyatt,” I answer, stopping at the entrance to the tasting room and draping my arms around his neck to give him a kiss. I don’t want to talk about Zelda’s game anymore; I suspect that if I allow myself to feel anything at all, I will collapse into a weepy hot mess.
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