“Okay,” Wyatt says grimly. “The Darling house it is.” He swings the truck back onto the road and keeps heading up 414. I settle into the seat. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been to the Darlings’. Strangely, I find the prospect comforting. I pull my phone out and send Nico a text, asking for a favor. I’ve nearly figured Zelda out; I just need a few more scraps of information.
It’s late, but it’s not so late that Wyatt’s parents are asleep when we get there. The lights are on in their big bungalow, nuzzled back into the woods, up a long driveway. They don’t have a lake view from their land, but they do have thick groves of conifers and an impression of abiding coziness, tucked back from the road. A nest. They were the sort of people who put solar panels on their roof in the seventies, who have been growing organic vegetables their whole lives. I glance at Wyatt as we park the truck, to see if he looks apprehensive. Neither of us wants a repeat of the unpleasant scene the last time I was here.
Wyatt’s parents had disagreed quite strongly with me on whether Wyatt should follow me to Cornell or accept a scholarship to Northwestern. His parents wanted him to get away from Watkins Glen, to explore. Subtext: Fuck someone less uptight. Possibly with dreadlocks. And a penis. Break some rules. They looked at me and they saw my mother, Cape Cod, the pristine world of white conservative Democrats who spent their lives grimly peering out of their floor-to-ceiling windows and suffocating behind their bourgeois pretensions. They could imagine, as I could, Wyatt proposing to me with some moderately expensive conflict diamond, our organized and efficient wedding on the shores of Seneca Lake. We would make our own decorations, and the bridesmaids would wear matching navy blue dresses, tasteful and flattering. We would have two kids, possibly move to Ithaca. I would drink the way my mother did, and Wyatt would be the sort of man who wore khaki pants and drank beer from cans on the weekend while mowing the lawn with a kid on his lap. We would care deeply about how our living room was decorated, and we would invite Dora and Steve over on Sunday afternoons to play with the kids. Dora would occasionally feel the absurd impulse to wear pearls, although she didn’t own any real ones, a feeling she would repress and wave off with an amused flutter of the hand, but it would somehow return to her when she was sipping port from Waterford glasses at our big dining room table. Steve would refrain from smoking pot on the days he came over to our house, because it would make him feel wiggy to stand on our white carpet while baked out of his mind.
As Wyatt opens the door for me, I wonder if they have shaken off the ghost of that possible future, as I have. None of that will happen now; they dodged the bullet. I have no doubt they smiled in shocked pleasure when Wyatt mumbled to them that I was moving to Paris. We hadn’t been speaking then, but I’m sure he eventually answered their questions about where I had gone. And I’m equally sure that they lit up a celebratory spliff at the news, toasting their son’s newly recovered future.
There is music playing in the living room, and a sense of festivity hangs in their warmly lit wooden house. The rustic beams reflect the golden light of candles and domestic content. Whereas Nadine’s house is all clean modern angles, hard surfaces, and glittering glass, the Darlings’ house is cluttered corners, stacks of paperbacks, mismatched rugs, the mysterious scents of herbs (weed and sage, mostly) wafting through the rafters. I have always treated them coolly, concealing how desperately envious I was of their silly, cheerful home life. I wanted what they had; I had no desire to replicate my parents’ life or my mother’s fantasy of connubial and familial bliss. I always wanted to say, I’m not a threat to you! I want to learn how to do this, to leave the pillows scattered on the floor for three days, to drink out of smudged, mismatched glasses. To unclench. But all they saw was my hostile face, carefully sketched in neat eyeliner, swatches of blush, tidy dresses with reasonable necklines, thin ankles displayed in delicate, impractical flats. Or maybe that’s what I wanted them to see.
Dora and Steve are sprawled on the couch, their legs laced together and Janis Joplin crowing on their record player. They glance up in stoned surprise when we enter.
“Wyatt!” Dora says, standing. She looks the same as ever: dark hair flat and volumeless, her face without makeup, a formless dress made out of that ubiquitous yoga material highlighting rather than concealing her squarish, lumpy figure. This is a woman who doesn’t, hasn’t, will not diet, who does not and never will apply expensive cream to her jawline. She smells of patchouli and tomato sauce. I am bowled over when she gives me a hug, a real genuine snuggle hug. “Ava. Christ. I’m so very sorry about your sister.” She pulls back and looks at my face, searching for me in the familiar bone structure of my sister. She has grown accustomed to Zelda, and I am an interloper wearing her body. She squeezes my wrists affectionately, and I try to smile.
“Thanks,” I manage. Steve has joined his wife, and he, too, gives me a hug, as well as a peck on the cheek. I smell his sour breath and the scent of primo marijuana that lingers in his bearish beard. His hairline has receded since the last time I was here, and his potbelly is more pronounced beneath his loud Hawaiian shirt. “Hi, Steve.”
“Ava. You poor thing. Cosmic injustice.” He pats me on the shoulder, with Dora still holding one of my wrists, and I am claustrophobically aware of how close they are. The Darlings are touchers. I take a step backward, unable to help myself.
“Can I just—can I get myself a glass of water?” I say, already moving toward the sink. As I face the cabinets and reach for the cleanest glass in sight, I scan the counters for any open bottles of anything. Wyatt’s parents drink, but not the way mine do. They are happy drinkers, the sort of people who can leave a bottle of wine unfinished, out in the open for a day or two. They tend to be high most of the time, so they’re not into purely sober living, but they don’t spend their days in the dereliction of the addicted, with the relentless anxiety that there will never, in all the world, be enough. I fill a glass from the tap. They don’t have a filter installed on the faucet like Nadine does, which means their tap water tastes a little iffy.
“Want something to drink, bunny?” Steve asks me, and I catch both Dora and Wyatt glancing from me to each other. I wonder if Zelda has been especially slushy while she’s here, or if I was messier than I remember during that last year at home. I wonder how long it took before Steve was calling Zelda “bunny.” He’s never called me that before.