June 26, 9:30 PM: Drive to Two Goats and leave the letter labeled “T” taped to the windshield of Wyatt’s truck while Ava is inside—she’ll leave at 10, when the bar closes.
June 27 or 28: Watch Facebook for details about my memorial service. Show up about half an hour after it starts, go straight to Ava, and ask to speak to her alone. Give her the last letter, and leave her be while she reads it.
Make sure not to answer any phone calls or texts, and stay in the yurt on the other side of the national forest. Don’t go into town, don’t get seen, and definitely don’t talk to your brother, the loudmouthed twat. Thanks a mil, sweet Kay! See you on the flip side.
“So I did what she told me,” Kayla sighs as I finish skimming the precise document. “I guess I don’t know how to do anything else. That’s just how she is. When Zee says jump…”
“You’re not the only one up in the air. Don’t worry.”
“Wanna know what’s weird? I’m not. Worrying. Like, I still think it’s going to be fine. I trust that girl. Crazy, right?” Kayla smiles helplessly.
“It might be.”
“This is the last one,” she says, holding an envelope out to me. “I’m gonna go upstairs. She said to leave you be. She said you’d know where to find her, after you read it. And then you’d tell me what to do, where to meet her.”
I nod blankly, the feeling of wrongness intensifying. Kayla snakes around me to climb the staircase, leaving the letter in my hand. A simple white envelope, addressed with the letter Y and a single line in Latin: Nihil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio.
25
Young, yoked, and yearning Ava,
You yield yet? Are you tired of my yammering? Have you figured out yet what I have done? And, most pertinently: Why, why, why? Y is for (wh)y. Here you are, at the end, ready to know. Maybe you’ve begun to suspect what really happened out there in our yard. You realize that you’ve been overthinking this from the get-go. Too clever, sweet Ava, too willing to ascribe double meaning where there is none. Tell me (and be truthful): What was your first thought when you heard about the barn and my tragic immolation? Darling sister mine, I’m certain that it went something along the lines of “That’s exactly what Zelda would want.” And that’s where you should have stopped thinking. Because it is. Was.
Do you remember when Momma started to get sick? The problem is that we don’t really know when that happened. We know when we started to really notice. When she would take hours to drive home from town and look shiftily away when we asked where she had been, because she had no idea and had been driving lost around the lake. When she would start screaming that we had stolen all of her things, that we had locked them up somewhere in secret storage and were going to sell them off. When we would find her passed out somewhere utterly bizarre and she would have no idea how she got there.
But. She’d been passing out in unpredictable places since our childhood. How many times did we find her with a gin and tonic still propped upright in her floppy fingers? The absolute preoccupation of the drunk with protecting their next drink, even while unconscious. All those times she took the car and was gone for half a day, off drinking somewhere, or up to fuck knows what. Her deranged meltdowns that would end with accusations, paranoid ravings, sheer fury. Mom was never well, has never been well. We just started to notice it in her fifties.
Do you think about that a lot, Ava? I know I have, these last two years, without you here. While I watch her get worse, while she rots slowly in this house she has come to loathe, surrounded by people she barely recognizes, clinging to the one thing that has always comforted her. Her sole port in the storm of her brain chemistry. I think about whether she has transmitted it, whether those same chemicals are lurking, nascent, in my brain, in our brains. I’ve been thinking maybe they’ve already kicked in. Maybe they’ve been there all along, just like with Nadine. The disease is degenerative, eroding more and more essential brain function with every month, every year. But who’s to say it only starts with diagnosis? Presumably it’s been there, waiting and chewing away at your good bits for years, if not decades, before you haul yourself in to some beleaguered medical professional, who looks at you with pity and hands you a brochure. It’s manageable, they say. Treatable. We can make you comfortable. Of course, that’s assuming you have money, health insurance, resources. A family that will take care of you and sit with you in your slow, unseemly decline.
Which brings us here. I can only imagine where you are now. Did you hold the service in the big house or the tasting room? Maybe you rented a tent, outside on the lawn (though I can only assume that if you did this, it would have to be out of sight of the wreckage of the barn, for decency’s sake). My best guess is that as a family, you elected to hold the little ceremony as close to the alcohol as possible, so I’d bet on the tasting room. I’m right, aren’t I?
I’ve been gambling all along. Or, rather, when I arranged all of this, I made a giant leap, put it all on black, or however that saying goes. (Maybe if I’d lived longer, gambling would be one of my vices—like it is for our father—but my short life was only able to truly embrace the small handful of depravities for which I’m best known.) I had to guess what you would do, and when. The what was easier than the when, naturally. But I have a feeling I got it right. Because I know you, twin mine, deep down in the places you barely know yourself. I’ve got you pegged.