“What are you saying?”
“Your mother’s sister. She drowned. While Nadine watched.”
—
I walk around in the dewy grass, my toes freezing cold. The sun is almost up, casting that weird foreign light I associate with dawn. It’s a chilly light, not the warm, burnished sunlight of happy hour. Opal has gone back to bed, and Marlon is still in Nadine’s room, both of them presumably asleep. I prowl the front yard, thinking. Zelda is clearly suggesting that I go looking for more information about my mother’s disorder, but it’s not obvious what she has in mind. The Internet? A medical textbook? I sit down in a damp deck chair and stare out at the property, at the family kingdom. I doze off when the sun is finally up in the sky, drying off the grapevines and my stiff, wet toes.
The jangle of a new message awakens me hours later. I feel confused, thirsty, and too warm. It’s fully daylight now. I crack my neck stiffly and check my phone. Nico.
Ava, please call me. I thought I saw you at the café, but you left before I talk to you. I miss you so much I’m imagine you.
I close the message and stumble back toward the house. I’m vaguely indignant; I should be feeling better, considering how sober I was yesterday. A single glass of wine. Ish. A triumph.
The house is quiet, everyone still sequestered in their rooms. Last night’s disruption hangs over us; I can sense the palpable impression of disturbance. Someone has made coffee, though, a hint that routines are still being observed. I pour myself a cup and head upstairs. In my room, I grab my iPad and fluff my downy white comforter over myself. I don’t want anything to do with Zelda’s game right now. She doesn’t control me, not completely. I spend the rest of the day lost in finishing A Clash of Kings before plunging into A Storm of Swords. For the first time, I feel sorry for Cersei Lannister.
My iPad finally dies, at a fairly crucial moment in the third book, and my charger is nowhere to be found. I howl in frustration at this narrative blue balls. I know that I’m merely forestalling the moment when there will be no more books to read, when I’ll reach the end of the fifth book and will have to wait in agony for the sixth. And then the sixth will be finished, and the seventh, and the bottle will be dry forever. But right now, all I want is my next fix. I’m certain there will be a copy somewhere in this house.
I check my bookshelves first, then head immediately to Zelda’s, sure that she’ll have acquired a copy somewhere. Her bookcases are empty of all George R. R. Martin–related texts, but I wind up sucked into the disarray of her shelves, the buried treasure on every surface. I find an atrocious poem I wrote in fourth grade, folded into an origami crane. I have no idea who could have done this; Zelda didn’t have the patience or the dexterity for origami. I turn up Zelda’s “ghost series” (an art school project) in a carved wooden box: overexposed Polaroids of outdated technology (typewriters, gas-lit lamps, Marlon’s modish cellphone from the nineties). Zelda’s labored, handwritten alphabet from kindergarten. Each letter is messy and unfinished. I know my own sheet was obsessively completed, carefully imitated.
Surrounded by all these physical traces, I wonder what it will be like to go to kindergarten fifteen years from now. Whether kids will practice their letters on iPads instead of these lined papers, yellowed and curled and horrifically fragile. Maybe there will be a digital record of every single paper that people produce in their lifetime, a file for each grade. I wonder if this is what so terrifies people about digital technology, the idea that there will be a record of every moment, every mistake, every bad poem or carelessly carved-out letter. These scattered artifacts are just a tiny portion of our lives; what if I could flip through my tablet and find Zelda’s history, everything she’s ever done? What if the people you met could scan through your drawings from third grade, your U.S. history essays from eleventh grade, your college applications? I realize that this is already reality, that the ancient desktop in our house will have those papers, those applications, in addition to a startling number of our IM conversations from high school onward. I have a primal, irrational desire to destroy that computer. People must be terrified of losing all mystery. No one wants the complete picture, the whole story. It would leave no room for the fictions we need to tell ourselves about ourselves.
Amid this juvenilia, I find a portrait Zelda did of our family in sixth or seventh grade. She was gifted at mimesis, could cleverly capture strange, realist details. Ever the artist. This portrait is elaborate, colored with paint and pencil, the mediums blended together. A different story of our family. One of the four edges is jagged, evidence of having been torn. Marlon has been removed from the picture. Zelda, in an uncharacteristically childish gesture, tore him out shortly after he left. And effectively cut him out of her life. His betrayal was final for her, and while they were always civil, Zelda and Marlon were, in effect, done for when he walked out the door.
In the weeks and maybe months before he decamped, Marlon had barely been home, and every time our parents wound up in a room together, there was a verbal eruption. Nadine would bait him until he cracked, and nothing was more alarming to me than seeing Marlon’s other side, his dangerous side. We were so used to Nadine’s nastiness that we found her explosions unsurprising—in a way, her behavior reinforced consistency. Nothing to see here. But Marlon’s quick rage was unsettling, and whenever I heard the two of them start—usually in the kitchen, where they were both forced to venture regularly in order to refill their glasses—I would try to disappear. Outside, into a book, anything. I hated their catalogue of wrongdoings, the scripted recriminations.
“Jesus, Marl, you’re not even a good liar. Your bookie has called three times today. You think I’m an idiot?”
“No, Nadine, I think you’re a drunk. And not a nice one. A harping, bitching—”
“You want to throw stones, from behind all that glass?”
“At least I can see straight enough to hit something.”
“Oh, please, what are you, twelve?”
“No, I’m a grown-ass man who lives—”
“Just stop! I can’t—”
I would turn the dial of my iPod up and stare up at my bedroom ceiling, waiting for the sound of broken glass or a slammed door to signify that one or both of them had stormed off.