Zoe

Zoe is the surviving twin of Zach Marconi, and her story turns on the difference between keeping a dead brother in memory and remaining imprisoned by the manner of his death. After years of anger at Zach for leaving her with grief she could not resolve, Zoe comes to understand that choosing life need not mean abandoning him: he can remain beside her in memory as she resumes a future of her own.

Identity and Background

Zoe is the daughter of Heather Marconi and Napoleon Marconi and Zach’s twin sister. When Frances asks her brother’s name, Zoe says it is Zach; even the sound of the name feels odd and painful in her mouth. She hears a roar in her ears and feels close to fainting. The twins’ names, she remarks, are very cutesy, but the lightness of the joke cannot disguise the bodily force of saying his name aloud.

Their shared birthday has become a wound as well as a marker of their closeness. When Frances observes that being twins means Zoe’s birthday is only days away, Zoe takes lavender from a vase and shreds it between her fingers. Technically, it is still her birthday, but she no longer celebrates on that day: she has changed it. The small, destructive gesture makes visible what the explanation leaves understated. The calendar keeps bringing the twins together, while Zoe has tried to separate her own life from the date they once shared.

January carries a second, more severe association. Zoe tells the other guests that she and her father came to Tranquillum House because they cannot bear to be at home that month: it is when Zach hanged himself. Her disclosure places the retreat within the family’s effort to survive an anniversary that turns the home itself into a reminder of the death.

Grief and the Family’s Loss

The account of Zach’s death is shaped by the different memories held within the family. Napoleon has examined the day repeatedly, as if investigating a homicide, replaying his thumb reaching for the phone’s snooze button and imagining the alternative in which he gets out of bed. But it was Heather who found Zach. Napoleon remembers her scream and his own run up the stairs as if it lasted a lifetime. Zoe’s grief belongs to the same family catastrophe, but her particular burden is the unfinished relationship of a twin left behind.

At the retreat, Zoe witnesses a break in her father’s accustomed behavior. Napoleon refuses to lie down and put on his headphones, contrary to the rules, and Zoe finds it funny and exhilarating: it is the first time in her life she has seen him break a rule. She presses each fingertip to her thumbs while Masha tries to persuade him to lie down and Heather protests. The scene briefly lets Zoe see her father outside his familiar role, even as the family remains caught between the retreat’s authority and its rules.

Later, when Napoleon is in darkness, Zoe answers from the other side of the room, assuring him that she is there. Her brief words establish her physical presence beside her parents amid the disorientation of the session. The family’s grief is not identical, but it has kept them oriented toward one another as they face the loss of Zach.

Anger, Memory, and Reconciliation

Zoe’s account of her anger is direct: she had felt that Zach did it on purpose to make her feel bad forever, and could not forgive him. She understood his death as the cruelest thing he had done to her. Her resentment does not diminish her love; it shows how the survivor’s pain can turn an irreversible loss into an accusation addressed to the person who is gone.

After the retreat’s psychedelic experience, Zoe tells Frances that it felt as if she and Zach had talked again. Frances responds that she too felt she had spoken with dead loved ones, including her friend Gillian and her father, and that the experience had seemed more vivid than a dream. Zoe asks whether perhaps they really saw them. The exchange leaves the experience open to uncertainty, but its emotional consequence is clear: Zoe can imagine contact without having to prove what happened.

When the effects begin to fade, the walls no longer seem to breathe and the colours recede. Zoe feels as if she is sobering up, like someone leaving a stuffy room for the night air. The return to ordinary perception does not cancel what she has felt. Rather, the shift from visionary intensity to clarity gives her a way to carry the encounter beyond the altered state, as a changed understanding rather than a permanent hallucination.

Relationships and a Continuing Bond

Frances becomes a confidante to Zoe, meeting her disclosure with sympathy rather than an instruction to stop feeling responsible. Frances recognizes that denying Zoe’s regret would also deny her loss. She wants to embrace her, but settles for putting a hand on her shoulder. Zoe’s conversation with Frances gives her grief a witness: she can speak about anger, forgiveness, and the possibility of a conversation with Zach without having those feelings reduced to a simple lesson.

Zoe also offers Frances a kindness that matters to the older woman. When Frances asks whether Zoe liked her book, Zoe lies and says that she did, although she thinks it is painfully sentimental. Frances’s pleasure at the apparent praise shows how much Zoe’s opinion means to her. The relationship is not confined to Zoe receiving comfort; she can also protect someone else’s feelings, even through a tactful untruth.

The imagined voice of Zach remains part of Zoe’s inner world. He teasingly comments on Frances’s book, while Zoe understands that he will stay with her as she finishes university, travels, finds work, marries, and grows old. The imagined companionship does not reverse his choice or erase death. It allows Zoe to keep a bond with her twin while distinguishing his death from the life she can still choose.

Return to Life

The novel’s later view of Zoe measures change through ordinary commitments rather than a declaration that grief is over. She has a new part-time job and seems busy and distracted with her university course. Napoleon keeps a careful eye on her, but she is doing well. About a week after the family returns from Tranquillum House, he hears her singing off-key in the shower, a sound he has not heard for three years.

The singing is small, unceremonious, and therefore telling. It does not show that Zoe has forgotten Zach, nor does the text suggest that the family’s sorrow has vanished. Instead, it marks the return of a sound absent since his death, alongside the work and study that are again taking up space in her days. Zoe’s future can include both the brother she carries in memory and a life that continues beyond the January in which he died.