Dead Letters(70)

“Listen, Grandma, I’m beat, and I have to get Nadine something to eat, get her ready for dinner, you know,” I say, and move away, not waiting for her to release me. Her hands paw at the space where my body was.

“Of course, of course, I’ll be fine down here. Don’t worry about me. I don’t mind being alone.” She waves me off.

“I’ll be back down in a bit.”

Upstairs, Nadine is in her bed, mumbling something. Her palsied hands are shaking, and her head is bobbling more than usual.

“When I was little, I used to go crabbing, you know,” she informs me absently, tapping on her knee as though making an important point.

“Oh, yeah?” This conversation seems encouraging. My mother has never talked much about her life.

“With my mother. I used to go crabbing. There was a marsh, near our house. We would go out at low tide.”

“What was she like, Grandma Maureen?” I ask. She died before we were born, and I know virtually nothing about her, except that she didn’t drink.

“Oh, she was uptight. She could be a real cunty tight-ass.” My eyes widen at my mother’s language, and I almost burst out laughing. “She grew up poor, outside Boston, and both her parents were drunks. Momma was desperate to get away from all that. She married rich, though maybe stupidly.”

“Why is that? Was Grandpa Patrick…not a good guy?” I ask hungrily.

She snorts. “He was a controlling, raging drunk, exactly like her father. He sang beautifully, but he was just filled with anger. It didn’t take her long to figure out she’d made a mistake, but Irish Catholics don’t get divorces.” She laughs bitterly, acknowledging her own marital status. “You missed out on the worst years, though. Once you left, they were just miserable.”

“What—I never met them, Mom.”

“Nonsense. After you died, Daddy just disappeared. He was drunk every night, almost never came home anymore, and Momma just…turned off. She did the laundry and cooked meals, but she was just empty.” Oh, Christ. Mom thinks I’m her dead sister. Maybe that’s what she meant in the car, when she called me dead—she thought I was Nina, not Zelda. Nadine was eight when it happened, and Nina was ten, I think. She almost never spoke of her, but Marlon had explained this to me and Zelda one night when Mom had wept on the couch for close to an hour, drunkenly moaning “Nina” the whole while. He said that she had always felt like her life, and her parents’ lives, would never have turned into what they had if Nina had lived. “You were just the light of the family. Precocious, chatty. Fun, above all. Mother and I were always a bit serious. But you. You.” She gazes at me fondly. “Everyone loved you.”

“And then I died?”

“And then you died. And I knew whenever Momma took me down to the beach in the evenings, she was thinking about you. You’d think they would both have wanted to get away from that spot….” From what I understood, Mom’s childhood home had been spacious if not quite opulent, close to the water on the tip of Cape Cod. Grandpa Patrick was a successful real estate broker, Maureen the diligent, red-knuckled housewife. Grandpa was a gambler, not unlike my father. There was a photograph of the house, a sweet bungalow facing the ocean. As a child, it had seemed positively idyllic to me. But Nadine had sold it the second her mother died, clearly desperate to get rid of it.

“Is that why you sold the house?” I ask.

“Of course,” she answers. “It was haunted, you know. Once someone has died, they stay put.” I can’t help thinking of the barn, of the bones in the wreckage. “There are spiders, all over the walls,” Nadine adds conversationally, and I leap up, nearly upsetting the tray of leftovers I brought from downstairs and have set down on the nightstand. I look around in a panic, but of course there is nothing.

“Jesus, Mom.” She seems not so much upset by the hallucinated spiders as intrigued, and she waves her hands around as though counting them. “Okay,” I say, “time for meds and dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” she replies, dismissing me. As usual. Has she ever admitted to being hungry, to needing something?

“You still have to eat something. You’re not supposed to take the meds on an empty stomach.”

“Oh, fuck my meds,” she snaps. “I’m not sick. I won’t take them.”

“Then no wine.”

“I don’t see any wine,” she says with a raised eyebrow.

Puffing in annoyance, I trundle back downstairs and bring her up a bottle.

“Meds first.” We go through the tedious process of swallowing the pills from the dispenser that lives by her bed. When she is done, I pour her a measure of Chablis and try to convince her to eat. I’m exhausted with this routine already, with its dull repetition. Again and again, day after day. And I’ve been home for only a few days—what must Zelda have learned of boredom? When she’s done, I help her get undressed for bed, though she changes her mind halfway through and decides she should be getting dressed, and she tries to do her hair and put on makeup. Eventually, the promise of more wine convinces her to submit to her bedtime routine. When I finally get her tucked in, the sun has long since set. I’m planning to leave her to her fussing for the rest of the night, but the way she looks at me as I’m walking toward the door is so full of pure need that I pause.