“You thought I knew nothing about the game, little sis,” she said. “Always assuming I’m all loosey-goosey. But I’ve recently become a prodigy.” She leaned back in her chair and informed me that as the loser, I would have to buy weed from her extremely dodgy older friend and smoke a whole joint in the middle of the dining room while Nadine was upstairs. She wanted me to break the rules, which I always followed to the letter. I did, and was miserable. We never played Scrabble again.
I honestly don’t know if Zelda would really have put us on opposing teams now. She’s been angry at me, that’s clear, but I still feel that we’re both working for the same objective, heading toward the same goal. Not knowing what that goal really is makes me nervous.
Reluctantly, I turn my mind to her email, and what she wants me to think. She’s right: The first thing that leapt to mind when she asked what I feared most was those god-awful sturgeon. Wyatt told me later that they were a rural legend, that of course there weren’t actually any gigantic forty-foot fish slowly slicing their way through the dark waters of the lake, four hundred feet down. That they obviously never swam up to the surface to feed, that they weren’t attracted by the sound of human legs churning through the water. He said my dad had just been teasing me, like he always did, like dads do, trying to get a reaction. That he’d succeeded this time but I shouldn’t let him win by being terrified of the water. I knew that Wy was speaking good sense, but for a long time after that day, I wouldn’t go in over my head in the lake. Zelda’s right about another thing: I don’t remember her jumping in to rescue me. I remember watching later as she frolicked in the water, seal-like and almost too far from the shore to see. Unafraid and able to do something I was now too frightened to.
I’ve never feared my mother, exactly. I knew from an early age that she was a formidable foe, and I had no desire to anger her. In fact, I eventually learned that I didn’t want to attract her attention at all. I was safer when she wasn’t watching me, when her notice was fixed on someone else. If she never noticed me sitting there, just out of sight, her sharp words would never be directed toward me, and her blind fury would be aimed elsewhere. Usually toward Zelda, who seemed rather to thrive on the rage, the cruel taunts, the endless harping. Zelda used our mother’s wrath as fuel; she held it inside her and unleashed it when she needed a blitzkrieg of her own. Zelda never avoided proximity to our mother; she sought it out. When she saw Nadine getting ratty, Zelda would provoke her, taunt her. As I shrank away from our mother, Zelda would go on the offensive. I always assumed it was her combative spirit, but maybe Zelda was trying to protect me, to attract Nadine’s rage so that I would be spared. And I learned to retreat, to avoid engaging anyone, because it always led to conflict.
And so I know what Zelda wants me to say, to acknowledge: I am afraid of intimacy. I sit in her trailer, remembering the day I left for France. My bags were packed, waiting by the door. Nadine was more lucid back then, but stress made her worse, and for days she had been lashing out and disoriented. That day, she fumed around the house, ripe with the awareness that I was abandoning her, leaving her here, but unable to put her finger on why. She was livid and cranky, and my skin was crawling with the desperate need to get out, to get away. Zelda was lurking around the house, uncharacteristically quiet and docile. Manifesting guilt, or as close to it as she could come without ever experiencing guilt. Remorse, maybe. She had even offered to help me pack, a gesture I had greeted with a narrow glare and a hunching of the shoulders. My stomach had turned over when she had offered, and I’d wanted to cry, to tell her she just needed to apologize and repent and I would stay, that this was crazy. All I wanted was for us to look each other in the eyes and acknowledge that that evening after I found them should never have happened, that we couldn’t take it back but maybe we could forget it. But I couldn’t say the words, and she had said nothing more, just slunk off to the kitchen for a mimosa.
Our mother had started her mimosas somewhat earlier, and I knew from her glassy eyes and gingery steps that Nadine was approaching the danger zone, the state between mildly and mindlessly drunk wherein she could marshal enough sobriety to do real damage but was uninhibited enough to not care how much damage was inflicted. Appearing in her room to say goodbye, I felt like she had scheduled her imbibing precisely so that she would be about four drinks in when I was walking out the door, her arsenal primed. She couldn’t always remember what year it was, but she had a warrior’s instinct that guided her even as her conscious mind deteriorated.
The scene was unpleasant, and though Zelda tried to stay out of the way, she was drawn upstairs by the sounds of conflict, a moth to the flame. I didn’t put up much of a defense; I was too tired and heartsick, and I just wanted to retreat to the taxi that was waiting outside to take me to the airport. Mom raged, called me neglectful, ungrateful, cowardly. She said I was a nasty, spoiled little girl who was throwing her toys because she couldn’t have everything she wanted, and I wondered momentarily if Zelda had actually told her about Wyatt, about what had happened between the three of us. Mom said she wouldn’t give me a single penny for my foolish, infantile fantasy, that anyone who abandoned her responsibilities to go for a joy ride was shameful and selfish. And then, finally, she looked at me.
“Ava, I’ve never said this to you, because I didn’t want to hurt you. But even as a child, there was something wrong with you. You didn’t want to be held, or touched, even when you were nursing. You’ve spent your whole life flinching away from real connection, and now, instead of dealing with how you feel, you’re flinching again. Your whole life, you’ve been a cold fish, running from intimacy.” She waved me away then and went to stand by the window, staring out at the lake and refusing to look back at me.
“Bye, Mom,” I managed, and I retreated. In the hall, Zelda was watching me, her eyes shrewd and calculating. I knew she was thinking about whether she could deliver a final blow, if she could find one well-placed word that would break me completely, make me stay. I knew she could find it, if she thought hard enough. “Mercy, Zelda. Just let me go,” I said, looking into her eyes for the first time in months, since learning about Wyatt, since that spring night when we destroyed everything. I expected her to pounce, to read my weakness and lack of spirit and go for the kill, true predator that she was. But she didn’t. She said nothing, just nodded her head and followed me down the stairs. She picked up my suitcase and took it to the taxi, where the driver was waiting impatiently.