Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach
From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.
—Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual
Un dessein si funeste, s’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.
Atreus might not stoop to such a gruesome plot, but Thyestes sure would.
—Crébillon, Atrée et Thyeste, quoted by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Purloined Letter”
1
A born creator of myths, my sister always liked to tell the story of how we were misnamed. She was proud of it, as though she, as a tiny blue infant, had bent kismet to her will and appropriated the name that was supposed to be mine. My parents were trying to be clever (before they lost the ability to be anything other than utterly miserable), and our names were meant to be part of our self-constructed, quirky family mythology. A to Z, Ava and Zelda. The first-born would be A for Ava, and the second-born would be Z for Zelda, and together we would be the whole alphabet for my deluded and briefly optimistic parents, both of whom were located unimpressively in the middle: M for Marlon and N for Nadine. My father was himself named for a film star, and with his usual shortsighted narcissism he sought to create some sort of large-looming legacy for his burgeoning small family. Burgeon we would not.
Born second, I was destined for the end of the alphabet. But my sister was Zelda from her first screaming breath, wild and indomitable until her final immolation. A careless nurse handed my father the babies in the wrong order, so that his second-born was indelicately plopped into his arms first, and I was christened Ava. I say “christened” purely as a casual description; my mother would have thoroughly lost her shit had any question of formal baptism been raised. My parents were good pagans, even if they weren’t much good at anything else.
Clearly delighted with this strange twist, my father insisted that we keep our misnomers; he said that the family Antipova would turn even the alphabet on its head. My mother, predictably, lay surly and despairing in her bed, counting down the seconds until her first gin and tonic in eight months. Even now, I can’t really blame her.
—
The seatbelt light dings, and I unbuckle in order to root around in my bag for my iPad. I’ve read the email so many times I have it memorized, but I still feel a compulsion to stare at the words on the shimmering screen.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
June 21, 2016 at 3:04 AM
Ava, honestly the whole point of you having a cellphone is so that I can call you in an emergency. Whicf this is. If you’d pick up your goddamn phone, I wouldnt have to tell you by EMAIL that your sister is dead. There was some type of fire following one your sisters drunken binges, and apparently, she didnt make it out. If you leave paris tomorrow, you might make it time for the service.
I can’t really tell whether the misspellings are because a) Mom is drunk, b) she never really learned to type (“I’m not a fucking secretary. I didn’t become a feminist so I could end up tapping out correspondence”), or c) the dementia is affecting her orthography. My money is on all three. I’ve never seen Nadine Antipova, née O’Connor, greet any kind of news, either good or bad, without a quart of gin in the wings. The death of a daughter, especially that of her preferred daughter, has probably rattled even her. My guess is that she was already three sheets to the wind when they told her, and she wasn’t able to get through to me on my cell because she either couldn’t remember the number or misdialed it. She would have had to toddle upstairs to the decrepit old MacBook gathering dust on what used to be my father’s desk. She would have lowered herself into the rickety office chair and squinted at the glare of the screen. After several frustrating minutes and false starts (and probably another slug of gin), she would have located Firefox and found her way to Gmail, if she didn’t try her old and defunct Hotmail account first. She probably would have sworn viciously at the screen when asked for her password. Nadine would consider the computer’s request for her to remember a specific detail as personally malicious, a couched taunt regarding her slipping faculties.
She would have tried to type something in, and the password would have been pre-populated, because Zelda had, in her own inconsistent and careless way, tried to make our mother’s grim life a little easier. And then, drunk, aggravated, angry, and frightened, my mother wrote me a bitchy email to tell me that my twin sister had burned to death. And if that’s how she told me, I can only imagine how my father found out.
My first thought on reading the letter was that Zelda would have appreciated that death: This was exactly how she would have chosen it. It was a fitting end for someone named after Mrs. Fitzgerald, who died, raving, when a fire destroyed the sanatorium where she had been locked away for a good chunk of her life. How Bertha Rochester dies, in rather similar circumstances. As children, we played Joan of Arc, and Zelda built elaborate pyres for straw dolls decorated as the teenage martyr (Zelda was Joan; I was always cast as the nefarious English inquisitors). Death by fire was the right death for visionaries and madwomen, and Zelda was both. My dark double.