Dead Letters(41)

“Grieving?” Nadine snorts. “For Zelda? The sister you abandoned?”

“The sister who died,” I say.

She snorts again. “You think so?” she says lightly.

I turn my head to look at her alertly. Does she know?

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“Come now, Ava. I know you’re na?ve and occasionally blind to reality, but you knew Zelda almost as well as I did.”

“Almost as well? We’re twins,” I hiss in annoyance, unsure why this challenge to my ultimate knowledge of Zelda wounds me like it does. Why should I care if Mom knew her better? Is it a bloody competition? But of course it is.

“Yes, but I grew both of you inside me. I gave you life,” she explains, draining her glass and imperiously gesturing for more. I fetch the bottle from the table and bring it to sit between us, refilling both of our empty glasses.

“Either way. What did you mean?”

“She’s not really dead, Ava. Gullible as you are, you must surely know that.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Come, now. It’s all a little too neat and perfect, isn’t it. Like one of Zelda’s games.”

I look at her in surprise. “You know, Mom,” I say, “for someone slowly falling apart from dementia, you’re surprisingly lucid.”

She laughs. “I’m not entirely gone yet. I know it comes and goes, but I still have good moments. Good days.” I nod, but I remember her reaction just a few minutes ago, her scared, vacant expression. “Anyway, I’ll have to be really out of it before I fail to recognize one of your sister’s schemes. She’s up to something.” Mom glances toward the cinders that sit where the barn once did.

“Yeah, I know,” I say softly. “Fuck knows what, though.”

“It’s for you,” Mom says simply. “All of her games, all of her plans—it was always about you. Zelda always needed an audience, and she was born with the one she preferred most. This…is about you. When you were little, she would make up stories for you, would spin these long tales. You would sit for hours, listening to her.”

We both stare out at the lake, silently sucking down Sauvignon Blanc. When my glass is empty, I stand up to go. I don’t know why Zelda sent me up here, whether what Nadine just said was the information she wanted me to have. Why would it matter, anyway? I’ve already suspected that this is somehow about me, about Zelda trying to suck me back in. Why would she need our mother to confirm it? And how could she depend on Nadine to actually be present enough to express it? I shake my head in annoyance. Maybe I’ve gotten the clue wrong: Intimacy with Nadine is harder than with anyone else, sure, and my mother is the person who called me out on it, but maybe Zelda means something else entirely.

“Ava, would you bring me another bottle?” Mom sounds almost plaintive, and I flinch at the soft, pleading edge in her voice. She’s asking nicely, instead of barking orders or intimidating me. I’m a sucker for that, as she must know, and I yield. I go downstairs and fetch another bottle of wine from the fridge. I’m about to snag one from my stash in the crisper, but notice some iffy local Rieslings lined in the door, already cold. I realize belatedly that Marlon must have restocked the fridge. Of course that would be the one domestic duty he would reliably take on. I bring the bottle upstairs and uncork it, using the opener I left on the table. After I refill Nadine’s glass, I impulsively plant a kiss on her forehead.

“Night, Mom. There’s a sleeping pill next to the bed if you need it.”

“In case the bottle doesn’t finish me off?” she asks with a sharp tone.

“Just…in case,” I say with a weary sigh.

“Put the corkscrew back, Ava,” she snaps, all the soft wheedling tones gone from her voice. “Your stuff is always all over the house, and I can’t live like that. If you’d just put things back where you got them from, you’d have them when you need them. You spend half your life looking for things.”

I grit my teeth in fury. How the fuck would she know what I’m like? I’m tempted to just walk out of the room. But I am not, in fact, the messy person my mother maintains I am. I fold my clothes when I take them off; I do the dishes as soon as I’ve finished using them. I’ve always done as our mother insisted, out of a sense of rightness. Zelda is the whirlwind who leaves destruction, clutter, mayhem in her wake. I pick up my wineglass from the floor and open the drawer to put the corkscrew back where I found it. I frown as I’m returning it. In the drawer is an envelope addressed to me in my sister’s handwriting. I glance over at my mother, unsure whether she knows that this has been here. Is she in cahoots with Zelda? But she doesn’t turn around or give any recognition that she knows what I’ve just found.

“I guess I’ll just go to bed, then,” I say, wondering if she’ll come clean or give any sign that she knows more than she’s telling.

“I don’t give a shit,” she snarls, her mood snapping. I know that it’s a symptom of the dementia, but it’s hard to remember that. She’s been unstable her whole life. I wonder, not for the first time, if the dementia has been a part of our lives all along. Maybe the disease gets diagnosed only after it reaches a certain degree of severity. Maybe she was sick during all of our childhood. Maybe there’s an organic, chemical reason why she treated us the way she did. Other than the alcohol, of course.