Dead Letters(100)

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 H?tel 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.