Dead Letters(97)

I check the bathroom, where the bizarre array of prescription bottles is lined up along the edge of the medicine cabinet. I don’t recognize all of them; Nadine has fresh infantry in the battle against her own rotting brain. I scan the names. Next I go over to the bed and look at her pill dispenser—or, rather, her massive pill dispenser, divided into the seven days of the week, then further divided into the three meals of the day. I’ve been disbursing her meds from this container, which someone (presumably Zelda) stocked before the fire. Twenty-one compartments, all crammed with medications that she chokes down in tiny increments. The dispenser is nearly empty. I shake it, and there are only five compartments still filled with pills—through tomorrow. Fuck. Did I get that list of meds from Dr. Whitcross? What did I do with it? I sigh as I start to contemplate the task of hunting down all the pills, refilling prescriptions. It could take all afternoon. I drop to my hands and knees, hoping to find a list written out in the nightstand, but instead I come upon another dispenser, nearly full. I pick it up in surprise. It’s another week’s worth of medication. Has it been here all along?

I flip open the lid, expecting to see the rainbow jumble of pills that look too big for any human being to force down their throat, but that’s not what I find. In the first compartment, there are only eight familiar-looking pills, all with a distinctive V printed on them. The missing letter V. I take one out and hold it up. I know these pills. Zelda and I discovered them as college freshmen, when I had my wisdom teeth removed. It had been hellishly painful, and I walked out of the pharmacy clutching a slender tube of Vicodin. Zelda took half of them, and we spent a couple of days in a blissful state of painlessness, dreamily watching movies on the couch and occasionally giggling over my appearance, with my swollen chipmunk cheeks and dilated pupils. We managed to finagle two refills from the dentist before he cut us off, and Zelda promptly resolved to get her teeth out too. I imagine the dental records from that surgery were the ones she had bribed the coroner to use in order to falsely identify her body. I wonder if there is a way to tell Kayla Richardson’s mother not to wait up for her daughter without incriminating myself. Maybe Kayla is still out there, though. I remember that she works for the funeral home—maybe she’s helping? Maybe she and Zelda are hiding in someone’s off-grid yurt less than ten miles from here. Maybe someone else is dead in the barn, someone whose mother hasn’t missed them.

I toss a Vicodin into my mouth and crack open the next compartment in the drug dispenser. These are not Vicodin. They are the missing Xanax, of course, the ones I’d been looking for the second time I went to Zelda’s trailer. It had surprised me then that she didn’t have any. This must be what she meant. These were the missing drugs from her hidey-hole. It should have been painfully obvious, like looking into my mother’s fridge and finding only salads and fresh-cooked meals and not a single bottle of white wine or vodka stuffed deep into the freezer behind the ice-bitten peas. How could I not think of it? Of course, I did think of it, that second day in the trailer. My brain is sluggish. I am forgetful.

I cradle the dispenser in my lap, staring at the Vicodin and Xanax nestled next to each other, a cozy cocktail that could easily dispatch someone’s worldly concerns. This was obviously not supposed to be Nadine’s medication for tomorrow and the next few days. I flip open all twenty-one compartments and find only Vicodin and Xanax, alternating for the entire week. Something about this makes me very nervous, and I’m not quite sure why.

I open all the drawers of the nightstand, rummaging through them. Maybe there’s another dispenser and this is just the recreational one that helps keep Nadine and Zelda even-keeled. Instead, I find a bag of empty prescription bottles. I dump it out onto the floor. All prescribed to Zelda Antipova. Vicodin and Xanax, probably ten bottles altogether, dating back months. Different doctors have prescribed them, from as far away as Geneva. The last few are from Whitcross—the missing prescription pad. Why would she keep them all? And here, out in the open? Part of me knows, but I can’t quite let that thought gain traction. It’s something we’ve talked about before, but something I can’t really contemplate.

Only Zelda never did care for subtlety, and she’s not about to embrace it now. She refuses to run the risk of being misunderstood.





23


Well, sister mine,

Part of you knew this is where we would end up, that this was the whole point. We talked about it once, do you remember, when Mom first got sick? We even tried to bring it up with her, though that conversation went appallingly wrong. Ultimately, I think, she might have agreed to it, but around that time she was re-entrenching every time we suggested a bloody thing and was violently dismissive of anything either of us could think up. Gentle hints that she might want to eat some solid food or put on pants were met with full-on hysterics. She said I probably couldn’t be relied on to follow anything through, and she barely trusted me to do her laundry, let alone see her off gently into that good night. But you’re the good sister! Angelic, Accountable Ava! Always available to do the Right Thing. Until you weren’t. Until a lifetime of enacting your dutiful dharma collapsed beneath your overwhelming desire to just get the fuck outta Dodge and live your life. Which I understood. I did, Little A. I was pissed and hurt and felt abandoned, but boy oh boy did I get it. Who wouldn’t want to flee this moribund place? I give it back to you now. Waltz, you dark and jaded nymph, through these quiet gardens of excessive, balmy peace! Snort.