Dead Letters(54)

Wyatt thinks for a moment. “You like Paris, right? You’re happy there?”

“Of course! It’s Paris—what’s not to like?”

“I just…I’m glad you’re happy, Ava. After…everything.” He looks at me so earnestly that I almost burst out laughing. Oh, Wyatt.

“I’m sorry Zelda’s dragged you into all this,” I tell him. “But then, she was always trying to push things along with us, even from the very beginning.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember our first time?” I ask.

“How could I forget.” He raises an eyebrow suggestively.

“Well, Zelda’s the reason. I would have chickened out if not for her. But she sort of…nudged me. Not that I didn’t want it,” I add hastily, seeing his hurt expression. “What I mean is, she took the fall. She pretended to be me and went to the nurse, got sent home sick as me. But she got reported for cutting third period and had to spend a week in after-school detention.” I snort. “She said it was worth it, though. That another day of watching us ‘pant at each other’ would permanently put her off the whole idea of sexual attraction.”

“I never knew that,” Wyatt says. “She never told me.”

“Yeah, well. I guess you were always just caught in the cross fire.”

“I like to think it was more than that,” he says, sounding wounded.

“You know what I mean,” I reassure him, backpedaling.

“You mean that I was just a tool in the mind games you two play with each other. An innocent bystander.” His eyebrow lifts, challenging me.

“Well…” That is sort of what I meant. I never really thought Zelda cared about him for himself; I always imagined that she saw him as a way to hurt me, exact her revenge, get under my skin.

“Ava, that is bullshit. We had something long before Zelda was part of it. Stop pretending that you and I meant nothing!”

“You were always more to me. You were my only ally against…these people,” I say, gesturing toward my house, indicating my entire family. “Just with Zelda, I don’t know.”

“I’m not proud of it, Ava, but she and I did have a relationship.” He sounds strained, uncomfortable. “We got close while you were gone. It was hard for both of us, when you just…left.”

“I didn’t just ‘leave,’?” I spit out angrily. “I found you two in bed and spent months making a rational plan to get out of here. It was an eye-opener, that’s all.”

“That’s not all. That’s not all that happened,” he says. A precarious silence follows, and I turn my face away. He sighs. “I meant before, anyway. Before Zelda was even part of it. You just disappeared,” he says, and he still sounds hurt and angry, after all this time.

“I…had to go. I’d just finished this degree that committed me to staying here in Hector and running Silenus. Then Nadine was diagnosed. I was twenty-two years old, and I was freaking out a little. I…panicked.”

“So you just took off? Where did you go, Ava?”

I bite my lip and hide my face in my glass.

“Where were you that winter?” he asks again.

When I again don’t answer, he turns away. “You ran off with that guy from Cornell. Jordan. I knew it, that whole time, I effing knew it.”

“Jordan was gay, Wyatt,” I snap. All of my senior year at Cornell, Wyatt had been touchy and aggressive with Jordan, a friend of mine from my soil ecology class. He was a fine, upstanding guy from Oregon, into biking and hiking and surfing and other athletic, outdoorsy activities. He wanted to go home and start a vineyard near his family’s house, not far from Willamette. I’d liked him for his frank good-naturedness. And the fact that he knew no one in my family, never once compared me to Zelda or Nadine. He was bouncy and fun and uncomplicated, and his presence had driven Wyatt nuts. Even Zelda had started hinting that we were more than just study buddies.

“You left with him, though. He picked you up, in February, and you drove off with him,” Wyatt says, pouting. While I had graduated on time in May, Jordan had had several more credits to complete, and he’d stayed through the winter semester before getting his degree. I’d puttered around Silenus listlessly all that autumn, wondering what I had gotten myself into, realizing that I had merely acquiesced to my mother’s plans for me. I knew I was stuck, and I was flailing. Zelda had dropped out of the community college by this stage, and Nadine had been getting more and more unpredictable. When we finally took Mom to a specialist in January, we had all begun to suspect that it wasn’t just menopause that was making her moods erratic and her mind leaky. She was forgetting things nearly all the time and had had one or two episodes of hallucinations. At least, that we knew of. Her gait had became strange and off-kilter. You could have a conversation with her that she would be completely unable to remember five minutes later. Most staggering was her new tendency toward confabulation, a rather clinical description for making shit up. Not lying—she genuinely believed the stories she was telling.

Jordan stayed through winter break because I begged him not to leave me, promising hot toddies and long gossip sessions. He stayed until the end of January. But then he announced that he had gotten a winemaking internship in Willamette and he was leaving in ten days. I fretted, and paced, and stared out at the cold water of the lake, the frozen gray slopes, my future; the day before he left, I asked him if I could hitch a ride with him to the West Coast.