So here we are. The DNA testing will come back eventually, even though the dental records are conclusive. (Did you call my dentist? Were you trying to figure out if he had something to do with it? I hope you did, and found all the fun detours there. But perhaps learning about Whitcross provided you with enough explanation to satisfy your wish fulfillment, your projection.) You’ve looked everywhere to avoid recognizing the truth, my little sister, second-born but first-named. In that, you are like our mother. And our father. Escape is what you seek, by any means available. Maybe you drink until you’re unconscious, maybe you run away from the people you love, to the opposite coast or to Paris. Maybe you look for any truth other than the one you’ve got, filling in the holes with any fiction that’s at hand. I know that of all of us Antipovas, I have uncovered the most long-term solution to our desire for escape. It’s hard not to feel like I’ve won, though I’ll spare you any posthumous gloating.
Oh, Ava. It’s so bizarre to write this, knowing that I’ll be gone when you finally read it. Thinking of you holding these eerie sheaves in your shaky palms gives me pause, and I almost want to go through with the disappearing act that you’ve been so cleverly uncovering these past few days. This whole adventure has been quite exciting—so zany, in fact, that I pretty quickly forgot that its conclusion is just fucking morbid. Part of me wants to be waiting in your apartment in Paris when you read this. But Paris was never going to be far enough to escape. You know that.
The pills weren’t just another piece of the game, you know. I’ll be taking a few fistfuls after I finish writing this. Jason is coming over soon; I texted him on phone number two, which I left lying around in plain sight at the Airstream. Phone number one is tucked safely away for you to find, with Gmail Delay Send all set up, ready to go, with timed emails for you to receive over the next few days. Jason is a shithead, and I’m partly hoping he’ll go down for my “murder.” Kayla’s got her instructional packet, and she’ll nudge things along as you get to the bottom of my little puzzle, keep things from going off the rails too thoroughly. She’s a sweet kid, and I think she won’t fuck it up. I told her to kick the drugs. It’s a terrible habit. The truth is really going to bum her out—guess you’re holding the bag for that one too!
After Jason leaves, I’ll lock the barn doors with the chain and padlock from the outside. Then I’ll crawl around to the big window out back, where I’ve left the rope ladder dangling, and I’ll climb up into the hayloft. I’ll swallow down a bunch of pills with Champagne. (Not the shit we make—something nice, for my last bottle. Is it ridiculous that that thought, the notion of a Last Bottle of Wine, gives me more pause than anything else?) I’m hoping to be completely unconscious, if not dead, by the time the candle burns all the way down and ignites the hay, which is pretty thoroughly soaked in gasoline, as are the very timbers. And then I’m hoping to be dead of overdose or smoke inhalation by the time the fire spreads to my chair by the window, looking out onto the lake and the stars. If not, hopefully the Vicodin/Xanax/Champagne cocktail will take the edge off being burned alive. It certainly takes the edge off being alive. Saint Joan once again.
I knew you wouldn’t believe it. I knew you would need to turn it into a complex game, a competition that you could somehow win by puzzling it out. So I made you a little story. Sister darling, the stories we tell ourselves! Maybe because we were twins, we sought a way to differentiate, to oh so rigorously sketch out our borders. You needed to say, to speak the ways you were different. I’m Ava, I’m the ambitious one; that’s Zelda, she’s the messy one. As though you could determine your own story, secure the ending you wanted through obsessive narration. Do you remember smoking pot on the deck, before shit went so wrong? We lay there, on the gigantic Pendleton blanket that our mother loved and that I unapologetically stole from the house. She flipped her shit so thoroughly when she couldn’t find it, but we convinced her she was having one of her paranoid episodes. (See, see how even a simple object has a story in our family?) We lay there, looking at the sky and smoking some of that lovely lovely weed, and you insisted on talking, telling me the way you were, summarizing your selfness with amazement. You said: “I’ve always known what I’ve wanted, I’ve had a desire, Zaza, to get somewhere. I’ve been jealous of you, with your waywardness and your directionality-lessness”—here you giggled at yourself, your words, your lack of words—“but when it comes down to it, that’s how I have to be, and you have to be how you have to be. It’s like together we make up all of a whole person.” And I asked you about Wyatt, if you knew what you wanted from him. And you paused, and you nodded, and you said: “I want him to believe in the story of myself.”
And he does, dear sister! That’s the loveliest bit. Wyatt lacks the imagination that would permit him to conjure up a conflicting tale about you. He swallows the myth whole, happily.
But for me. For me, I won’t be happy with the story until I know what the ending is. Till I know how the sentence ends. The ending has been torturing me, and I can’t live with that uncertainty. I can write the ending myself, dab the finishing touches on. I’ve gotten here, to the last letter. I could go on, keep writing. I would prefer not to.
I thought of including the whole alphabet here, with descriptions of the nitty-gritty, how I chose each letter and how I made it happen. But in the end, I want you to sculpt that story yourself. I want there to be mystery, letters you wonder about and never find. You don’t get to have perfect resolution. Not all letters arrive at their destination.
I hope it’s been easier for you, because I don’t want you to suffer inordinately. A little, perhaps. That’s why I’ve left you Mom. Think of it as a punishment, a penance, a performance of propitiation. Atone for your sins and help ease her out of the shell she’s been living in. Maybe join her. I’ve stockpiled enough for both of you. Or not. Crawl into Wyatt’s arms. Turn over my cellphone to the police. Tell everyone what really happened.
Maybe you’ll hate me for doing this, for this merry little chase. I accept that. But I didn’t want to just leave you. I wanted to give you back a piece of yourself. Maybe the piece that I always had. That I was. Now it’s just you, and what you want. I entered the world before you, and now I’ve left it first. You’ve never had the chance to see the world without me. You’re free now, Ava. All the decisions you make from here on out are yours. I love you.
Here we are, at the end.
Z is for Zelda