I enter the Airstream and my breath is nearly sucked out of me. It smells so much like Zelda that it physically slams into me. I don’t think you’re dead, Zaza. But God, I’ve missed you. I’ve been pretending for the past two years that I can live without her, that I don’t miss her with a visceral, embodied ache, all the time. Pretending that what happened severs the phantom umbilical cord that has tethered us together for more than two decades. As I look around the trailer, every cranny of it steeped in Zelda, I realize that I’ve been fucking kidding myself. I want my sister so bad it hurts. And I realize, suddenly, that that’s what she’s been trying to do. This entire scheme—the fire, her supposed death—is a little show, a spectacle for my benefit. She’d had enough of my punishment, and this is her saying: You can’t ignore me, Ava, you can’t live without me. You can’t get away from Silenus, you can never leave ME.
Scarves, fabric, textiles, prints cover all the walls. I can see at least three of Zelda’s colorful kimonos draped on various surfaces. The bed is rumpled, unmade, and I sit down on it, holding a pillow to my face, breathing in her scent. There’s a lump in my throat that I’m working very hard to dislodge. Maybe I’ve overreacted, these past two years. Could I have been blowing it out of proportion? It was a betrayal, yes. And what happened afterward doesn’t even bear dwelling on. But maybe…Then I realize that Zelda is manipulating me without having to say a single word, and I toss her pillow across the room in frustration.
The pillow takes out a lamp on its way, and I lean my head back, annoyed, unsure why I’ve come to the trailer after all. Just to feel close to Zelda? No, to figure out what game she’s playing. We’re playing. Who on earth is Jason? And the locked barn doors? I suspect her of staging everything, but why let the police think it’s murder? If she was going to fake her own death, she’d only be making everything more complicated by leaving clues suggesting that it was not accidental. Why risk alerting the cops that all is not as it seems? My recent fixation on Poe immediately makes me think: locked-room mystery. As though she knows how this would tantalize me.
I get up and pad around the trailer, looking at Zelda’s artifacts. A bizarre ceramic sculpture here, a spent candle toppled onto its side next to a pile of sketch notebooks carelessly scattered on the table. Good way to start a fire. The trailer is cluttered with years of Zelda’s accumulated disarray. I pick up a dish full of sad-looking apples and chuck them into the garbage. I’m straightening stacks of books and moving glasses to the kitchen sink before I even realize what I’m doing. Tidying up after Zelda, like always. I stop in exasperation and almost storm out of the Airstream, fed up with myself and with my sister, filled with that itchy combination of fatigue and anxiety that my entire family produces in me. An allergic reaction for which antihistamines can do nothing. I want a drink.
But as I prepare to walk out the door, I pause and look in Zelda’s favorite “secret place.” Our whole lives, she’s been obsessed with secrets, and as a girl, she liked to squirrel away notes, money, tiny treasures in hiding places all over the vineyard. I double back to the bed and lean down along the side. The carpet is loose in this corner, and I peel it back, revealing a small hole. Zelda systematically used these secret places after the first time our mother called the cops on her and she got busted, at fifteen, with a dime bag in her pocket and a quarter ounce in her bedroom (one hundred hours of community service, probation). I remember her fishing a baggie of pills out of this corner during my first semester of college. She always told me that I knew where all her secret places were, that I was the only one who knew all of them. I believed her for years.
My fingers curve around something cold and rectangular, and I pull an iPhone out of the hole. Zelda’s real phone. I wonder briefly what phone the cops found. What she intended them to find. The battery is low—it’s probably been in there for at least two days—but I can still turn it on. Password protected. I try her old PIN for her bank cards; she used to have only one PIN for everything, because she claimed she couldn’t be bothered to buy into some paranoid fantasy that there were people out to thieve her identity or scoop the twenty-three dollars from her savings account. It doesn’t work.
I’m busy frowning at the screen, thinking, when I hear someone pull up outside. I stand up and peer out from the mismatched curtains. I know that truck. My mouth dries up and my heart is suddenly clamoring to get out of my chest. I can’t tear myself away as the door swings open and a familiar body stretches out from the driver’s seat, unfurling long legs. I walk numbly to the Airstream’s door, realizing that it’s here, the conversation I have resolutely avoided for two years. It’s going to happen. I’m tempted to hide, to evade, but I’m in a fucking trailer with exactly three feet of room to maneuver, and I know it’s time. I slide the phone into my pocket, and I swing the door open, trying desperately to look composed.
“Hey there, Wyatt.” His face freezes, and his whole body tenses at the sight of me in the doorway. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
4
May 20, 2016 at 11:38 PM
Dear Disapproving, Uptight Twat of a Sister,
Fine. You want me to talk about it, confess? I can do that. It seems my self-flagellation is a prerequisite to your speaking to me, so here goes. I have our mother’s blood. I am ready to be a martyr.
Wyatt loved you. Since tenth grade, at least. I think he started doodling your combined names in his notebooks around then, embarking on his wholesome fantasy of your blissed-out heterosexual future. Ava Antipova no longer, now Ava Darling. Literally. Wyatt’s last name has always been too good to be true; first name, too, for that matter. I know he lusted after your pristine purity, your clean button-downs and tailored jeans, your fitted-waist striped gowns that are crying out (still) for a clambake in Cape Cod. That’s the sort of thing they do in Cape Cod, right? I’ve never been, as you know; I only have the apocryphal tidbits you regaled me with after the vacation you took with that unbelievably white girl after sophomore year, to the beaches that spawned our mother. Wyatt always admired your clean, restrained prettiness, how your hair was always tidy, how you always wear that delicate smirk on your face, like you’re busy cleverly narrating everything. All the things other people find infuriating about you, Wyatt loved. But you can keep a man at arm’s length for only so long, Ava dear, before you run the risk of him straying. Sounds like something Grandma Opal would say, right?