Dead Letters(66)

“You okay, Mom?”

Nadine says nothing, and I reach over for her hand. She jerks her fingers away from mine when I try to give her a squeeze, and she hunches toward the truck door, sliding away from me. I look back and forth between her and the road, concerned. “Momma, what is it? Does something hurt?” I reach for her shoulder, and when I brush it, she yelps.

“Don’t touch me,” she snarls. “Get back.” She swats at my outstretched hand, and I instinctively recoil. Another tantrum. Always the same. What they don’t tell you about dementia is how repetitive it is, how that shock of incomprehension and fear returns again and again. And how it hurts all the same, each time.

“Mom, what is it?” I repeat.

“Get away. You don’t belong here. You’re dead.”

“It’s me, Ava,” I plead, suddenly desperate. “I’m not dead. Zelda—”

“You’re dead. You’re a dead thing, you’re not alive. Don’t touch me.” She has curled into a tight ball and is looking straight through the windshield, refusing to make eye contact. Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I drive north along the lake, wondering if she’s right.

—

Inside the big house, I call out for Marlon, but there is no answer. Opal’s door is shut tight. Nadine immediately flees to her room without my help.

I wander outside through the open deck door. It’s a hot, sunny day, and I shut my eyes, feeling the warmth on my skin, the heated wood from the deck reaching up to my toes in splintered fragments. Giving in to a sudden impulse, I dash upstairs and change into a bathing suit and a sarong snatched from Zelda’s lair. I grab Nadine’s big sun hat and sunglasses, a bottle of water, and head down to the lake in my bare feet.

It’s a bit of a walk to the water, all the way along the long tractor trail from the vineyard to our waterfront. We have a dock and a rudimentary pavilion down by the lake, and we used to keep a rowboat and a kayak down there as well. I wonder if they’ll still be there. The grass is alive with insects, and my nose fills with the scent of home. Churned dirt, cold water, and, somewhere nearby, a field of alfalfa.

As I approach the dock, I see Marlon, stretched out seal-like. The dock looks rickety and not wholly safe. Marlon has opted for the secure sturdiness of the rocks along the water. This is probably sensible. He appears thin and fit, a California tan bronzing his skin. There’s a glass next to him, and a partly empty bottle is bobbing cheerfully in the lapping waves at his feet, glinting in the sun. He sits up when he hears the stones shifting underneath my feet. Used to wearing shoes, my soles hurt as I walk on the tiny rocks, and I pick my way carefully to where he is lying.

“Wine?” he offers pleasantly. I hesitate. I said I would take a day off, that I’d give my liver a chance to regenerate. But I’ve had a fucking brutal day so far. Just one glass, I decide. Marlon hands me a plastic cup and points to the open bottle cooling in the chilly water of the lake. I help myself to the rest and sit down next to him on the rocks. We stare silently out at the flat blue water. It is perfectly quiet, without even the buglike whine of motorboats or Jet Skis. Far on the other side of the lake, a big sailboat is coasting north, toward Geneva. “I’ve really missed this,” Marlon says softly. “This…place.” I nod. That will be as close as he’ll ever come to saying that he’s missed us.

“It’s beautiful,” I agree. It is, but there is something dark underneath those waters. There is something wrong here; I’ve always felt it.

“I could never stay, though. Something…” he echoes, as though I’ve spoken aloud.

“We Antipovas have restless feet,” I say, trying to let him off the hook. I’ve been furious with him for so long, have wanted to hear him excuse himself for disappearing and leaving us with Nadine, but suddenly, I don’t want the burden of absolving him. Let him seek his own redemption, from someone else in a better mood. I drink down my glass of wine and stand up. “I’m going to go swim,” I announce. “Hot day.” I shuck off my sarong and stick a toe into the cold, deep water. I glance toward the dock; we used to launch ourselves into the water from its edge, and it is a much easier point of entry to the lake, but I’m reluctant to venture out onto the decayed structure. I imagine that I can see it swaying in concert with the slight stirrings of the lake’s surface.

“Have you started swimming again?” he asks.

“No thanks to you,” I snap, filled with fury at the amused tone of his voice.

I don’t turn around. I plow farther into the water. The bottom is sharp and rocky, and my feet protest, but I move as quickly as I can without tumbling over. Making inelegant progress, I proceed unsteadily. The water is fucking freezing. When I’m waist-deep, I reluctantly lower myself all the way in, submerging my head. I’m instantly sobered by the chill. I kick underwater, stroking along without surfacing as long as I can. I pop up only when I start to panic, when my brain is begging for oxygen and it is all I can think about. I gasp, sucking in air and blinking water out of my eyes. I can no longer touch the bottom, and there is a thick skein of seaweed wrapped around my ankle. I flap around nervously, trying to shake loose from it. A thick barrier of subaquatic foliage separates the shore from the darker blue waters farther out into the lake, even this early in the summer, and I paddle hard to escape the waving tendrils that seek my belly and thighs. Mostly, I try not to think about huge, prehistoric fish sucking through the silt of the lake beneath me. I breaststroke out into the lake, breathing hard and forcing myself to be rational, to let the cold numb me to old terrors. The shore grows smaller behind me, and I stretch out muscles that haven’t been used in years. When I finally look back at the shore, I can see my father dozing on the bank, seeming far away and abstract, as ever. I roll onto my back and float and stare up at the pinkening sky and let myself dissolve into the freezing calm of the lake.