O is for…obvious! Oh, you’ve figured out the game at last! Of course, I knew you might need some extra clues; close reading was never really one of your strong suits. Ornate as the whole thing may seem, I thought you might appreciate my final efforts to make you think, make you squirm, make you work a little harder than usual. Or maybe just force you to recognize that the whole world usually just bends over for you, that you are never truly challenged, and that it’s very good for you when someone puts you through your paces.
Oy, enough with the letters! Now that you’ve cottoned on, we can settle into a less rigorously structured way of communicating, right? Naturally, you’re probably tormented with guilt at the notion of poor, maligned Jason, possibly going down for a crime he clearly could not have committed. Are you tempted to saunter on down to the station, clear up all the confusion? I know you are; you have always been worshipful of rules. I trust and hope that you’ll be able to suppress your usual instincts, though, until we get to the end of the alphabet. Trust me, Jason has earned some time in the hot seat. Hopefully our underachieving police department will be able to uncover some crimes for which he is legitimately guilty (and, oh, they are legion!) and he’ll receive karmic retribution for being the irredeemable scumbag that he truly is. You mustn’t worry, Ava dear; I vetted my fall guy meticulously. I considered a sizable fistful of deserving candidates (wouldn’t you just love to see the short list?) and contemplated their qualifications very carefully before I settled on Mr. Jason Reynolds. If he goes down for this (and he definitely might; I’m not so terribly confident in the sleuthing capabilities of our uniformed officers), it will be no less than he deserves. Would that I could have framed him for something more heinous than the careless murder of a washed-out, lonely drug addict who had recently begun a downward spiral of recklessness and dissolution. He’s earned worse than he’ll get. And I don’t even know if there’s enough to make a murder stick, as they say.
Now, back to the mystery at hand. Since you’ve divined what we’re playing at, you’re no doubt thinking your way through the rest of the letters. Any guesses for what’s up next? Are you preempting, questioning, righteously second-guessing? Thinking ungenerous, vitriolic thoughts, wishing that your damned sister would bugger off and leave you be? Probably, yes. But you’re also having the time of your life. I’m pretty sure you’ll stumble across P soon enough, sister mine. You’re getting closer all the time.
Your Opaque, Obstreperous, Oh-so-clever Twin,
Z is for Zelda
P.S. Did you think I skipped N? Honestly, what do you take me for? N is for nasty. Used in a sentence: Ava and Wyatt did the nasty.
“Zelda!” I scream into the yard. “I know you’re fucking there!” No one answers, naturally. I hope the neighbors can’t hear me, far away as they are. I wander back inside to start my day, seething.
Obvious, indeed, I reflect. I have belatedly realized something else: Zelda is competing with me on my own turf. She is upstaging me in my own area of expertise. Like a fool, I haven’t thought of it until now, but she is taunting me with my own research. I’ve been working on OuLiPo and detective fiction, and here she has delivered me a charming locked-room mystery with flavors of Perec. Recycling narratives, playing with the genre—she always liked to say there were no new stories. She has adopted the form of a mystery, cast me as the detective, and set the whole plot in motion, all while forcing us to remain locked in the constrained repetition of the alphabet. I assume she was able to find something about my research project online and has set up this game as a special way to jeer at me. To beat me. To outthink me. To show me she is cleverer.
On the landing in front of my mother’s room, I lean my head against the door, the cool wood supporting my forehead. I turn the lock and let myself in. Nadine is groggy and bleary-eyed; no doubt she’s hungover, too, from her cocktail of meds and wine.
“No breakfast today, Zaza,” she mumbles. “I can’t eat. I’ve gained a pound and a half.”
I wonder if Zelda was silly enough to let her have access to a scale, or if this is pure guesswork and paranoia.
“It’s okay, Mom. This isn’t a beauty pageant. And your nightgowns will accommodate a much more significant weight gain,” I answer, leaning over to fluff her pillow.
“I won’t eat,” she says stubbornly, clenching her teeth and pursing her lips. I glance at the deep wrinkles around her puckered mouth and think that she looks so very old. Her vanity seems somehow to have sustained itself even as her body and her looks have decayed. Her beauty has rotted away in this bed, her mind collapsed. This is a terrible way to die.
“You have to eat. You’re too thin as it is.”
After getting her dressed, we make our feeble way down the stairs, both of us wobbly. I deposit my mother on the downstairs deck and rifle through the fridge. I know I have to drink something, to begin the slow journey out of hangover hell, but I don’t want to; the idea of swallowing anything seems preposterous. Finally, I find a coconut water squirreled away in the back of the fridge, and I sip on it delicately while I make my mother a smoothie. I use the full-fat yogurt Marlon has bought with satisfaction, and I add two heaping scoops of high-calorie almond butter. Outside on the deck, I hand over her breakfast without a word and perch on the arm of one of the Adirondack chairs, sipping the coconut water. Not only is Marlon no longer on the couch but the door to the guest room has been left open, the made bed clearly visible. Fuck knows where he and Opal have gone. At the moment, I feel nothing but relief that they are not here while Wyatt sleeps it off upstairs. I fret for a moment, wondering how I will get him out of the house. I don’t want to think about any of that. I want to be alone, in a dark room with Internet access, to watch movies all day and not think about myself, my life, my twin.
Feeling unsteady, I slide into the chair next to my mother, clutching my coconut water. I briefly consider getting up to fix myself a Bloody Mary or find a beer in the back of the fridge, just to keep myself going; I know that while it doesn’t sound appealing, it will make me feel better. Instead, I grit my teeth with something resembling resolve. I will not drink today. I can’t. I have to get myself under control, or this will all spiral quite unpleasantly, even more than it already has. I sip my water and look out at the lake. Its movement makes me nauseous. Closing my eyes unhappily, I let the sun warm my eyelids.
“Ava?” my mother says timidly next to me. I crack my eyelids reluctantly and look over at her sideways.
“What, Mom?”
“Ava, honey, are we in Cape Cod? I don’t recognize the beach.”
“No, we’re at Silenus, Mom. On Seneca Lake? The vineyard you built.”
“Oh. Is it…a good vineyard?”
“Yes,” I lie baldly. “It’s great. People come from all over the country to drink your wine.”
“Oh.” She looks around herself fretfully, as though she doesn’t quite believe me. I close my eyes again, and I almost nod off in the sunlight.
“Ava, honey?” Nadine says after a few minutes, jarring me back awake.
“What is it?”