“No, I’m the only one now.” I suddenly feel like my mother, nastily baiting this man into feeling like shit. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m just not…sure…” I trail off, watching in the mirror as Ithaca disappears behind us and we head up the highway on the other side of the lake.
“It’s okay, kiddo. You say whatever you have to.” He pats my knee. I realize that since greeting me, my father hasn’t looked at me once. As if he can’t. I root in my oversized bag for my sunglasses and put them on, in case I start to cry. But as I gaze out at the dazzling spray of too-green leaves and the shimmering water, I suspect that I’m not going to.
2
Brutally jet-lagged and insufficiently buoyed by Bloody Marys, I can’t keep my eyes open and doze off somewhere on the dirt roads that will take us across the narrow, rugged span between the lakes, and I wake up just as we hit the top of the hill overlooking Seneca. The view is spectacular, with the sun about to set on the west side, and my breath catches a little, as it does every single time I make this drive. This is the longest I’ve been away from home: twenty-one months. I glance over at Marlon, and though he has his sunglasses on, I think he’s been crying. Weeping, even. I’m startled and distressed by this—his charming, fun-loving fa?ade so rarely cracks, and when it does, I feel as though my world is being unmade. Maybe Marlon knows this, because as he sees me waking up, he instantly transforms, flashing me one of his brilliant, toothy smiles. I know that he loved living here, loved our subpar vineyard. Even loved my mother and us girls. But his love for us is tempered by years of discord and cruelty, whereas the love he feels for this modest patch of ground is unadulterated. I smile back at him, because in spite of myself, I’ve missed it too.
The car skates over the dirt roads as we descend lower and lower, closer to the lakefront. There are fields of grapes all around us, and the pleasant hum of billions of insects thrums in whirring cadence. The temperature drops suddenly in mysterious swaths of air, and goosebumps ripple on my forearms and thighs as we whip through them, warm cold warm. I can smell cold water.
Silenus Vineyard is up on the hill, with acres of vines stretching out below the tasting room, which is fronted by a rustic deck looking out at the water, scattered with a few picturesque barrels for ambience. It doesn’t have much of a yield, and the wine is barely mediocre, even for the Finger Lakes.
I peer as closely as I can at the grapes as we drive by to see what Zelda has been up to in the last twenty-one months. It’s hard for me to imagine my unpredictable and self-indulgent sister tilling the land like a good farmer, but she’s managed to keep the place from total destitution, basically on her own. I wonder if he has been here, if he has been living in the Airstream trailer with her, if he is the one who organizes the spring trellising and the autumn harvest. I have to assume so; Zelda has never cared much for schedules, and I can easily picture her frittering away all of May and June drinking Pimm’s cocktails on the deck and swearing that she’ll move the catch wires tomorrow. Unless she really commits to doing something, and then she is an unholy terror. A terrier. I know I will have to see him soon, maybe today, and I squirm, thinking of what I’ll say.
My father clears his throat awkwardly.
“You know, it’s the weirdest thing,” he begins. “I think I must be losing it.” He pauses. “It’s just that while I was at the bar…” He shakes his head, his waves of hair bouncing fetchingly. He doesn’t go on.
“What?” I prompt.
“It’s silly.”
“What is?”
“I thought I saw your sister.” I keep my face as blank as possible. “Or you, of course. But she walked like Zelda. I don’t know, all loose.” Marlon chuckles at himself. “Ridiculous, right?”
“Grief does funny things to your head,” I answer, trying to betray nothing. Did Zelda intend for him to see her? Is she in Ithaca? Or California? I lean back in the seat, thinking about my sister. Thinking about whether she would even bother to toy with Marlon. After he left, it was almost like he stopped existing for her. Whereas I pined.
Dad pulls into the long, steep driveway that leads to the tasting room and the house snuggled next door. Nadine and Marlon built the house after they built the tasting room and the new cellar, solidifying what the real priorities were going to be. A place to drink, then a place to live. My mother, with her exacting, nitpicky taste, designed the house with an architect friend from the city, and each window, molding, and corner mirrors her love of right angles, modernism, abstraction. It is not a warm, cozy house. And next to the house is the barn.
The blackened shell of that barn appears as Dad crunches into the gravel parking area. The view is partly obscured by the house, but I can see charred timber poking up from the ground. I catch a glimpse of yellow tape cordoning off a large chunk of our lawn. A police car is parked near the rubble, and someone official is rootling around the periphery, looking fiercely intent and professional. My hands suddenly start to tremble and I don’t want to get out of the car. Zelda, what the fuck did you do?
Dad wordlessly takes both of our suitcases from the trunk, and I realize in a vague panic that he’s planning to stay here, under the same roof as Mom. He seems shaken, and I’m actually relieved to see his equanimity at least a little disrupted. His first-born child is, after all, presumably smoking in the wreckage of the barn he built himself, that one achingly long summer when my mother couldn’t bear his presence in the house. Her house. Dad is resolutely not looking at the barn as we go inside. Or at me.
“Mom?” I call uncertainly, trying to guess where she’ll be. The sun is setting, and I wonder whether she will have gone ahead and eaten without us. I don’t know if Betsy, our lumpy, matronly neighbor, will still be here; I called her after I got off the phone with my mother and asked if she could go over to the house, make sure Mom had some food and didn’t stumble down the stairs. Betsy was all comforting murmurs and practical country clearheadedness on the phone; she knew of course, had seen the fire from her house, just a mile away. She’d already been over and had just come home to pick up a frozen casserole when I called. She wanted to tell me the whole story, but I had been desperate to get off the phone, to slink into bed with Nico and let him mumble to me in his accented English.
“Betsy?” I call.