Dead Letters(19)

“Something like that.” I texted him back: Ok, will dodge the rest of my classes. Be there in a bit. Zelda stared at me, trying to determine whether I was joking. “I’m serious. I’m going to go check on him.”

“The Ice Princess caves at last!” she cooed. “I sincerely thought Wyatt Darling would expire from blue balls before you ever allowed him to even hope.”

I couldn’t help smiling. True, I had been keeping Wyatt pretty solidly in the friend zone for years now, redirecting his amorous intentions just enough to prevent him from abandoning all optimism. But suddenly, I was tired of it. Tired of just being wanted. I wanted to want.

“Go, skedaddle, ye wee harlot!” Zelda shrieked.

“What about my classes?” I paused, already talking myself out of it.

“I’ll figure it out. Just scram, before you change your mind. God bless, that boy can finally wipe that hungry look off his face and we can all have a minute of peace.”

“Are you sure?”

“Completely! Go!” Zelda shoved me toward the parking lot, thrusting her recently acquired truck keys into my hands. “I’ll cover for you.” I broke into a silly grin and legged it out the front door of the high school.

I let myself in through the front door of the Darlings’ and climbed the stairs to his room. We had spent hours in that room, listening to music, talking, watching movies. Sometimes with Zelda, sometimes just the two of us. Wyatt was propped up on pillows in his bed, his bum leg elevated. He wore only his pajama bottoms, and I couldn’t help staring at his hard abdomen.

“Hi,” I said, lacking inspiration.

“Hi,” he answered softly. I went and stood next to the bed. I reached out and put my hand on his chest, and Wyatt closed his eyes and swallowed noticeably. I pulled my T-shirt over my head and unhooked my bra, so that I stood there in just my jeans.

“Oh, God. Ava,” Wyatt managed, and reached for me.

“No, you’re unwell. You’d better let me do the work,” I said, pushing him back and then unbuttoning my jeans.

Afterward, I lay on his chest, absently flicking his nipple with my fingernail.

“Careful, girl, or you’ll start something up again,” Wyatt said into my snarled hair.

“Maybe that’s what I have in mind.”

“Lord, you have to give me a minute to recover.” He laughed. “I’m a poor, sick man! I need sustenance.”

“Very well. I’m here to care for you, after all. Florence Nightingale, that’s me.” I rolled across his naked torso, slowly, and stood stark naked in his bedroom. I fished his sweatshirt off the floor and pulled it over my head. It came down nearly to my knees.

“You’re so beautiful,” Wyatt whispered. I twirled around and skipped out of the room to go forage for something downstairs, returning with some sort of homemade cheese (compliments of Dora, Wyatt’s mom) and cold beers. We spent the rest of the day in Wyatt’s bed, watching from beneath his blanket as the March sleet splattered the windows. Cozy, warm. And whole.

—

“I’ll put it back,” I say, pointing to the sweatshirt. “The cops said they were going to come back and search the trailer again. It might look weird if you remove, you know, evidence.”

Wyatt looks surprised. “Do they think there might be foul play?”

“Isn’t there always foul play, with Zelda?” I say wearily. He smiles his old lopsided smile, and it hurts me. I need him to leave. He hands me the sweatshirt wordlessly and bounds down the trailer steps. He unthinkingly skips the last step, which is too close to the ground and always makes for an awkward dismount if you don’t expect it. He’s climbed these stairs a few times before. Zelda fucked up the measurements and never went back to fix it. I’m the perfectionist, not Zelda. I hold the sweatshirt in my arms as Wyatt walks back toward his truck, parked next to Zelda’s. The trucks look like twins.

“Ava, you call me, okay? We’re not done talking.” It sounds almost like an order, chiding. That new note of judgment. I nod. I manage to wait until he has turned the truck around and driven off before I burst into frenzied, racking tears.

—

I sit on the steps of the trailer, going to pieces in a theatrical display that would make Zelda proud. I cried when I got my mother’s email, but in delicate, ladylike shudders, while Nico held me and rubbed my back like I was a sleeping cat. Those first tears were tears of dismay at my family: my demented mother, who chose to get ahold of me that way; my absent father, who should have been there; my lunatic sister, who was fucking with all of us. But now I cried out of guilt. Because I had left, twice now, and with disastrous effect both times. I cried because I had left Zelda stuck here, tethered to the vines and to our mother like some maiden sacrifice, while I had flounced across Paris, happily bumming Gauloises cigarettes all the while. I had left her with a failing vineyard and an ailing parent, and I had refused even to speak to her. Wyatt was right; she had needed me, and I’d been off having a hissy fit because she’d slept with someone I had. And what if I had now lost both of them?

I had always cared about possession; as a girl, I’d hoarded the few dolls and stuffed animals I owned (my mother thought most toys were tacky and amounted to bribery, and she felt that it demeaned her to have to bribe a five-year-old). I was obsessed with their being “mine.” I would stack them on my neatly made bed, and anyone who wanted to touch them would have to ask my permission, which I only occasionally granted. Zelda, on the other hand, barely cared. Our grandmother Opal gave us American Girl dolls when we were seven or eight; I chose Josefina, who was a recent addition to the American Girl family (a gesture of racial diversity after the dazzling whiteness of Kirsten, Samantha, and Molly), because she most closely resembled me and Zelda. Amazing how “vaguely Slavic” and “Mexican” looked the same in the American Girl universe. Zelda went for Addy, the escaped slave doll, whose story Zelda immediately replaced with that of “Amazon warrior queen.” When Zelda and Addy kidnapped Josefina during a tribal raid, I took every one of Zelda’s stuffed animals and brought them outside (I had seen my mother do this with our belongings countless times—leave a sweater on the floor, it ends up in the yard). I dug a hole in our front yard and buried them all in shallow graves under the sparse grass, a plushy cemetery.