Dead Letters(75)

“Getting old is terrible,” she says flatly. “A true horror.”

“Nadine isn’t old. She’s just really sick,” I answer.

Opal shrugs, more cynical than I’ve ever seen her. “Does it matter?” she asks softly. We stare out at the fields, which are becoming clearer with every second. “Was she screaming ‘Nina’?” Opal finally says, breaking the silence.

“I think so. Her sister,” I explain.

“I know, sweetheart.” Opal turns her watery green eyes on me suddenly, catching me by surprise.

“She died of some sort of childhood illness, when they were little,” I explain. Opal squints closer at me, alert.

“Oh, darling. No, she didn’t.”

“What do you mean? It was, I don’t know, measles or something,” I answer.

“It was her parents, and your family curse,” she says blankly, and suddenly I have goose bumps. I don’t really want to hear more. “Patrick, your mother’s father. He was supposed to watch the girls at the beach. Maureen was a teetotaler, but there were days when she couldn’t get out of bed. Depression. Patrick drank a quart of whiskey and fell asleep on the beach in front of the house. It was hours before anyone realized what had happened, when they found Nadine shivering in the surf, calling her sister’s name.”

“What are you saying?”

“Your mother’s sister. She drowned. While Nadine watched.”

—

I walk around in the dewy grass, my toes freezing cold. The sun is almost up, casting that weird foreign light I associate with dawn. It’s a chilly light, not the warm, burnished sunlight of happy hour. Opal has gone back to bed, and Marlon is still in Nadine’s room, both of them presumably asleep. I prowl the front yard, thinking. Zelda is clearly suggesting that I go looking for more information about my mother’s disorder, but it’s not obvious what she has in mind. The Internet? A medical textbook? I sit down in a damp deck chair and stare out at the property, at the family kingdom. I doze off when the sun is finally up in the sky, drying off the grapevines and my stiff, wet toes.

The jangle of a new message awakens me hours later. I feel confused, thirsty, and too warm. It’s fully daylight now. I crack my neck stiffly and check my phone. Nico.


Ava, please call me. I thought I saw you at the café, but you left before I talk to you. I miss you so much I’m imagine you.



I close the message and stumble back toward the house. I’m vaguely indignant; I should be feeling better, considering how sober I was yesterday. A single glass of wine. Ish. A triumph.

The house is quiet, everyone still sequestered in their rooms. Last night’s disruption hangs over us; I can sense the palpable impression of disturbance. Someone has made coffee, though, a hint that routines are still being observed. I pour myself a cup and head upstairs. In my room, I grab my iPad and fluff my downy white comforter over myself. I don’t want anything to do with Zelda’s game right now. She doesn’t control me, not completely. I spend the rest of the day lost in finishing A Clash of Kings before plunging into A Storm of Swords. For the first time, I feel sorry for Cersei Lannister.

My iPad finally dies, at a fairly crucial moment in the third book, and my charger is nowhere to be found. I howl in frustration at this narrative blue balls. I know that I’m merely forestalling the moment when there will be no more books to read, when I’ll reach the end of the fifth book and will have to wait in agony for the sixth. And then the sixth will be finished, and the seventh, and the bottle will be dry forever. But right now, all I want is my next fix. I’m certain there will be a copy somewhere in this house.

I check my bookshelves first, then head immediately to Zelda’s, sure that she’ll have acquired a copy somewhere. Her bookcases are empty of all George R. R. Martin–related texts, but I wind up sucked into the disarray of her shelves, the buried treasure on every surface. I find an atrocious poem I wrote in fourth grade, folded into an origami crane. I have no idea who could have done this; Zelda didn’t have the patience or the dexterity for origami. I turn up Zelda’s “ghost series” (an art school project) in a carved wooden box: overexposed Polaroids of outdated technology (typewriters, gas-lit lamps, Marlon’s modish cellphone from the nineties). Zelda’s labored, handwritten alphabet from kindergarten. Each letter is messy and unfinished. I know my own sheet was obsessively completed, carefully imitated.

Surrounded by all these physical traces, I wonder what it will be like to go to kindergarten fifteen years from now. Whether kids will practice their letters on iPads instead of these lined papers, yellowed and curled and horrifically fragile. Maybe there will be a digital record of every single paper that people produce in their lifetime, a file for each grade. I wonder if this is what so terrifies people about digital technology, the idea that there will be a record of every moment, every mistake, every bad poem or carelessly carved-out letter. These scattered artifacts are just a tiny portion of our lives; what if I could flip through my tablet and find Zelda’s history, everything she’s ever done? What if the people you met could scan through your drawings from third grade, your U.S. history essays from eleventh grade, your college applications? I realize that this is already reality, that the ancient desktop in our house will have those papers, those applications, in addition to a startling number of our IM conversations from high school onward. I have a primal, irrational desire to destroy that computer. People must be terrified of losing all mystery. No one wants the complete picture, the whole story. It would leave no room for the fictions we need to tell ourselves about ourselves.