“You left me too.”
“I thought you would always be there. I think I thought I was testing you. Your…devotion,” I say, not without a trace of embarrassment. “I think in my head, I thought: I’ll leave, and not tell him where I am, and if he waits for me, I’ll know…”
“You expected me to come find you,” he says in sudden realization. “You were waiting for me to come and bring you back, to follow you.”
I bite my lip. He’s right, sadly enough. That winter, alone in my modest apartment near Napa, with nothing to do but drink and wait for spring, I fantasized about him knocking on my door, showing up outside the apartment or Marlon’s vineyard one day. Proving that he wanted me, just me. I am ashamed of it now, but I know that’s what I hoped for. Only no one came for me, not Wyatt, not Zelda, not my mother. My father stayed stubbornly on the periphery, never explicitly saying he wanted me far away but making it clear we weren’t going to be close. I had nothing left, so when winter loosed its grip, I took a plane back to New York. And found that Zelda and Wyatt had done just fine without me.
“I am sorry, Ava. I…didn’t know,” Wyatt says.
“No way you could have. It wasn’t like anything…really happened, exactly. Small betrayals.” That is what a lifetime of this family has amounted to. I swallow more wine, and it calms the lump in my throat. Wyatt leans over and puts his arm around my shoulders, wiping away a tear with his other hand. He pulls me roughly in for a hug, and I let him hold my head against his overdeveloped pectoral muscles, feeling comforted in spite of my old resentment. He strokes my shoulder blades clumsily, and I know he’s trying to soothe me. Inevitably, I tilt my head back and his eyes meet mine. Everything else is just instinct.
14
Not wanting to acknowledge consciousness in that desperate, dry-mouthed morning-after horror, I’m eventually forced to crack open my eyes. Jolted awake in suddenly sober distress, I blink owlishly and struggle to open my exhausted, quivering eyes, which are agonizingly dry, filched of liquid. Lately, one of my eyelids has begun twitching ominously. The next thing I do is reach for the phone. But there are no new missives from my deranged sister.
Wyatt is still in bed next to me, fast asleep, and my heart starts pounding in an entirely unhealthy fashion. I feel short of breath as the beats thump solidly through my rib cage. I swallow, my mouth dry and cottony from the red wine, and I know that if I look at my tongue in the mirror, it will be a dark purple, the telltale stain of the night before. Though I don’t need my tongue to bear evidence; I have one hundred and ninety pounds of moist, male flesh next to me as proof of last night’s indiscretions. I roll away from Wyatt, squeezing my eyes shut and wanting to cry, the fragility of an early hangover welling in my eyes. It seems, however, that I did all my crying last night; I remember with another swoop of despair the fat, wet tears spilling down my cheeks as I whined about my neglectful, absent father. I should quit drinking, I reflect. It’s not the first time I’ve had this thought.
My phone is lying on the sheets next to me, and my whole body clenches when it vibrates. I stare in mute dismay at the name displayed on the screen and push the decline icon with a wave of revulsion. At myself, mostly. But I can’t talk to Nico right now. Later, after I’ve marshaled my meager resources, I will call him back and summon the wherewithal to lie to him, tell him I love him, that I miss him. For now, though, I have to focus on getting out of bed.
I work myself up enough to slide out from my white sheets, and I grope around for something to cover myself with. I hate sleeping naked. It’s supposed to be sensuous and erotic to sleep with bare skin whispering against pristine sheets, but I have always hated it. I feel unprotected and unlike myself. I need the feeling of a shirt flat against my breasts and belly, of shorts clinging to my thighs and ass, concealing everything and staying close. When I sleep alone, I swaddle myself in the sheets, twining them around my feet and ankles. I have always wanted to be languorous and relaxed, to loll comfortably in a messy bed without a stitch on, but I manage to fall asleep in the buff only when I’m very drunk. Which I was last night, apparently. I slide the kimono over my naked body, but even this is not enough support. I tug on a long Lycra tank top from my suitcase, as well as some boy-shorts underwear, and put the kimono back on over them. The tight fabric makes me feel better, as it smooths out the lines of my body, concealing bulges and ripples beneath its stretchy sheath. With a quick glance to ensure that Wyatt is still sleeping, I scuttle out the door and downstairs, desperate for hydration.
Pausing in the hallway, I spare a thought for something other than my miserable physical state: Zelda’s game. She has led me as far as M and I have supplied her with the N, as was no doubt her intention. I feel some anxiety as I contemplate O.
Our grandmother, Opal, mailed us a Ouija board for our tenth birthday. We tore away at the packaging in frenzied anticipation. I immediately wanted to take the board and planchette for a spin, but Zelda gravely proclaimed that we had to wait until dark. Of course she was right. That evening, we crept upstairs, leaving Marlon and Nadine to snipe at each other below, oblivious and never suspecting that their offspring were about to raise the dead. Like all mediums and hucksters, we understood the importance of setting the scene: Locked in the bathroom, we draped a dark sheet to construct a gloomy tent, lit candles dangerously close to the fabric, and waited until we felt sufficiently steeped in the supernatural.
“Shh, you can feel the air getting colder,” Zelda whispered.
“I can’t feel it.”
“I guess you’re not as attuned to the other world as I am.”
I rolled my eyes, though secretly, I agreed.
“Give me your hands,” my sister whispered, and I complied. Our moist palms hovered over the cardboard plane, and in spite of my strong rationalist streak, my heart thumped a little. What if?
“Who should we call on?” I asked. “Grandpa Chuck?” We had never met our paternal grandfather, but Opal had let drop enough caustic commentary on her late ex-husband for us to be deeply curious about that roguish figure.
“What about…Aunt Nina?” Zelda said. I shivered. Nadine never spoke of her sister, and enough mystery and doom surrounded her death for me to instinctively shy away from the thought of summoning her into this house. But that, of course, is why Zelda wanted her. “They say children move more easily between the veils,” she uttered, fully in character.
“Isn’t it, I don’t know, a bad idea? To summon someone who died too early?”