by M. L. Rio
“She doesn’t mean it,” James said.
I frowned behind my fingers. “Is that meant to be comforting or critical?”
“It’s not meant to be anything,” he said. “Don’t be angry with me, Oliver, I can’t take it right now.”
I exhaled and lifted my hands off my face. “I’m sorry. I’m not angry. I’m just … I don’t know. Drained.”
“We should sleep.”
“Well. We can try.”
We lay down—I on one couch, James on the other—but didn’t bother trying to find sheets or proper pillows. I smashed a decorative bolster under my head and pulled a throw blanket down over my legs. On the other couch, James did the same, pausing to finish his brandy and what was left of Meredith’s. When he was settled, I turned out the lamp on the table behind me, but the room was still saturated with firelight. The flames had shrunk to small buds of yellow, flickering between the logs.
As I watched the wood blacken and crumble and collapse, my lungs constricted, refused to take in sufficient air. How swiftly, how suddenly everything had gone wrong. Where did it even begin? Not with Meredith and me, I told myself, but months earlier—with Caesar? Macbeth? It was impossible to identify Point Zero. I squirmed, unable to dismiss the idea that some huge invisible weight was crushing down on me like a boulder. (It was that ponderous crouching demon Guilt. At the time I didn’t know him, but in the months to come he would climb onto my chest every night and sit snarling there, an ugly Fuselian nightmare.) The fire burned down to embers and its light slowly left the room, leaking out through the cracks. Lacking oxygen, light-headed, I tilted back toward unconsciousness, and it was more like suffocating than falling asleep.
A whisper brought me back to life.
“Oliver.”
I sat up and blinked against the gloom at James, but it wasn’t he who had spoken.
“Oliver.”
Meredith had appeared, a pale shape in the dark void of her bedroom door. Her head drooped against the doorframe like a flower bud swollen with rainwater, and for one odd moment I wondered what the weight of her hair was, if she felt it hanging down her back.
I pushed my blanket off and crept across the room with another furtive look at James. He lay on his back, head turned to the side, away from me. I couldn’t tell if he was dead asleep or trying too hard to fake it.
“What is it?” I whispered, when I was close enough for her to hear me.
“I can’t sleep.”
My hand twitched toward her, but it didn’t get far. “It’s been a bad day,” I said, lamely.
She exhaled, gave me a weak nod. “Will you come in?”
I leaned away from her, forcibly reminded of that night in the dressing room when I’d withdrawn in exactly the same way. She could tempt anyone, but Fate didn’t seem like a good target. We had one casualty already. “Meredith,” I said, “your boyfriend’s dead. He died this morning.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s not that.” Her eyes were glassy, unapologetic. “I just don’t want to sleep alone.”
That little prick of sadness burrowed deeper, touched me at the quick. How well I’d been trained to mistrust her. And by whom? Richard? Gwendolyn? I glanced over my shoulder at James again. All I could see was a shock of his hair sticking up behind the arm of the couch.
It didn’t really matter where I slept, I decided. Nothing mattered much after that morning. Our two souls—if not all six—were forfeit.
“All right,” I said.
She nodded, only once, and went back into the room. I followed, closed the door behind me. The blankets on the bed were already disheveled, kicked around, messy. I slid between the sheets in my jeans. I’d sleep in my clothes. We’d sleep. That was all.
We didn’t touch, didn’t even speak. She climbed into the bed beside me and lay down on her side, one arm folded under her pillow. She watched me as I settled myself, propped my own pillow up a little higher. When I stopped moving, she closed her eyes—but not before a few tears leaked out, slipped between her eyelashes. I tried not to feel her trembling against the mattress, but it was like the tick of the mantel clock in the Castle: soft, persistent, impossible to ignore. After what might have been as long as an hour, I lifted my arm, without looking at her. She shifted closer, tucked her head against my chest. I curled my arm around her.
“God, Oliver,” she said, her voice small and stifled, one hand pressed over her mouth to keep it in.
I smoothed her hair flat against her back. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
SCENE 4
Everything was canceled. The remaining performances of Caesar, and all of our regular classes before Thanksgiving. We had tea with Frederick twice at Hallsworth House, and Gwendolyn ate dinner with us once, but in the two remaining days before break, we saw no one else. On Tuesday we returned to the Castle to collect our things. Richard’s death had been officially dismissed as an accident, but this revelation did surprisingly little to allay our unease. That evening, we were expected to attend his memorial service, where we would see—and be seen by—the other students for the first time since Saturday night.
The Castle was empty, but something in the surrounding woods had changed. There was a foreign smell in the air, of chemicals and equipment, rubber and plastic, the trace odors of a dozen unseen strangers. The stairs leading down to the dock were cordoned off by a bold yellow X of police tape. Up in the Tower, I dragged my suitcase out from underneath my bed and packed without paying attention, piling shirts and pants on top of mismatched shoes and socks and rolled-up scarves. For the first time, I was looking forward to a few days at home for Thanksgiving. Normally Filippa and Alexander and I stayed on campus over break, but Dean Holinshed had informed us that the school would be closed for the holiday, for the first time in twenty years.
I bullied my suitcase down the helical staircase to the second floor, swearing and grunting as I pinched my toes under the wheels and crushed my fingers against the banister. I emerged into the library, sweating and irritated, dragging the suitcase behind me. The others had already gone except Filippa, who stood alone in front of the fire with the long brass poker in her hand, pointed down at the floor like a sword. She looked up as I clattered in and threw myself into a chair—deliberately avoiding the closest one, which I still thought of as belonging, somehow, to Richard.
“Has the fire been going all this time?” I asked.
“No,” she said, lifting the poker to stoke the two skinny logs there. “I lit it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just felt wrong.”
“Everything feels wrong,” I said.
She nodded absently.
“Are you coming with us to the airport?”
“Yes,” she said.
Camilo had offered to drive the fourth-years to O’Hare. From there, Meredith would fly to New York, Alexander to Philadelphia, James to San Francisco. Wren would ride with her aunt and uncle and fly with them to London. (They had arrived the previous day, and Holinshed had arranged for them to have a room in Broadwater’s only nice hotel, Hallsworth House being occupied.) I was bound for Ohio. When pressed, Filippa told people she was from Chicago, but I had no idea whether she had family there.
“And after that?” I asked, trying and failing to make it sound offhand.
She didn’t answer, just watched the fire, eyes hidden by the reflection of the flames on her glasses.
“Pip, I swear I’m not trying to pry—”
She stabbed at the embers again, a little savagely. “So don’t.”
I shifted in my chair. What I wanted to tell her seemed nonsensically important. “Look, you know you could come home with me if you wanted to, right?” I said, abruptly. “I’m not saying you do or you should, just—if you needed somewhere to go. I mean, they’d all freak out because I’ve never brought a girl home and they’d completely misinterpret it, but just—in case. That’s all, I’m sorry. I’ll shut up now.”
She turned away from the fir
e, and I was relieved not to find her frowning. Instead, she looked at me with a sad, stricken expression. I was seized by the strange unfounded idea that she was debating whether or not to say I love you. But the difference between us was that she assumed people just knew those sorts of things, while I was always worried that they didn’t.
“Oliver” was what she did say. She sighed my name out like it was a breath of something warm and sweet, then leaned back against the mantel, maybe too tired to stand up on her own. “I’m scared.” She said it with a wry smile, as if it were somehow embarrassing.
“Of what?” I asked, not because there was nothing to be scared of, but because there were so many scary things to choose from.
She shrugged. “Of what happens now.” Neither of us spoke again before the clock on the mantel chimed. Filippa glanced up. “It’s five.”
The memorial service was scheduled for five thirty.
“God,” I said. “Yeah. We should go.” I heaved myself out of my chair with great reluctance, but Filippa didn’t move. “Coming?” I asked.
She blinked at me with a look of blank puzzlement, as if she’d just woken up from a dream she already couldn’t remember. “You go ahead.” She plucked at the front of her sweater, which was streaked with soot. “I ought to change.”
“All right.” I hovered, half in and half out of the doorway. “Pip?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t be scared.” It was a selfish thing to say. If she lost her nerve, I couldn’t imagine what would become of everyone else. She was the only one of us who never flinched.
She gave me a smile so fragile I might have imagined it.
“Okay.”
SCENE 5
I found James at the top of the trailhead, just standing there, staring down the path like he couldn’t make himself take another step. If he heard me approach he didn’t react, and I waited behind him in twilight silence, unsure of what to do. An owl hooted somewhere in the treetops—perhaps the same owl from Saturday night.
“Do you think it’s a bit morbid?” he asked, without preamble, without even turning around. “Having the service on the beach.”
“I guess the music hall felt a little too … festive,” I said. “All that gold.”
“You’d think they’d have it as far away from the lake as possible.”
“Yeah.” I glanced back toward the Hall. It might have been Halloween again—James and I lurking like shadows under the trees—but the air was too cold, pressing against my skin like a flat steel blade. “I don’t trust it anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“First Halloween, now this,” I said, with a shrug he didn’t see. “It’s like the lake’s turned on us. Like there’s some naiad down there that we’ve pissed off. Maybe Meredith was right and we should have gone skinny-dipping at the start of term.” I didn’t realize how stupid it sounded until it was out of my mouth.
“Like some kind of pagan ritual?” James asked, turning his head so I could just see the side of his face, the curve of his cheek. “Good Lord, Oliver. Sleep with her if you must, but don’t let her get inside your head.”
“I’m not sleeping with her.” I could see that he was about to protest and added, “Not, you know, figuratively.”
“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” he asked, and turned to face me—the movement deliberately casual, not convincing.
“What?”
“Whether it’s figurative.”
“I don’t understand.”
He raised his voice so it cut through the soft forest silence like a razor blade. “No, you must not, because I really don’t think you’re that sort of idiot.”
“James,” I said, too mystified to really be angry, “what are you talking about?”
He looked away. “You,” he said, staring off into the trees. “You and her.” He grimaced, as though saying the words together left a bad taste in his mouth. “Do you not understand how it looks, Oliver? It doesn’t matter if you are or are not actually sleeping with her—it looks bad.”
“What do you care how it looks?” I asked, forcing the show of indignation, more unnerved than anything else. His sarcasm was caustic, unfamiliar.
“I don’t,” he said. “I really don’t. I care about you, and what might happen if you carry on like this.”
“I don’t—”
“I know you don’t understand, you never do. Richard is dead.”
I glanced back toward the Hall again, the quadrate silhouette at the top of the hill. “It’s not like we killed him.”
“Don’t be naïve, Oliver, for once in your life. He’s been dead two days and his girlfriend’s already in bed with you every night?” He shook his head, thoughts tumbling out in a reckless, implacable rush. “People won’t like it. They’ll talk. They’ll gossip, that’s what people do.” He cupped his hand around one ear and said, “Open your ears; for which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks?”
My voice stuck in my throat, dry as chalk. “Why are you talking about this like we killed him?”
He grabbed the front of my jacket, like he wanted to throttle me. “Because it fucking looks like we might have. You think people won’t wonder whether someone might have pushed him? You keep sleeping with Meredith and they’ll think it was you.”
I stared at him, too surprised to move. His hand was the only solid thing, the brunt of his anger thrust against my chest in the shape of a fist. “James, the police—they’ve said, it was an accident. He hit his head,” I said. “He fell.”
He must have seen the fear in my face, because the hard lines around his eyes and mouth vanished, like someone had cut the right wire to defuse him before he went off. “Yes, of course he did.” He looked down, let go of my jacket, and brushed one hand across the front to smooth the wrinkles out. “I’m sorry, Oliver. Everything’s gone sideways.”
I offered an awkward shrug, still half trapped by my nervous paralysis. “It’s all right.”
“Forgive me?”
“Yeah,” I said, a split second too late. “Always.”
SCENE 6
The tiny fairy lights of a thousand candles flickered on the beach. Half the attendants held narrow white tapers in cardboard cups, and luminarias hovered at the end of each row like little spectral ushers. The fourth-year choral music students were gathered in a dense clump on the sand, singing softly, voices shimmering off the water, as if our capricious mermaids were in mourning. Beside them on the beach were an old wooden podium and a covered easel stand. White lilies bloomed at the base of each, their gossamer fragrance too delicate to disguise the earthy smell of the lake.
James and I filed down the center aisle through a thicket of whispers that parted reluctantly to let us through. Wren, Richard’s parents, Frederick, and Gwendolyn were seated on the first bench on the right—Meredith and Alexander on the left. I sat beside them, James sat beside me, and, when Filippa arrived, Alexander and I shifted farther apart to make room for her. Why, I wondered, had they put us at the front, where everyone could stare? The rows of benches felt like a courtroom gallery, hundreds of eyes burning on the back of my neck. (The sensation would eventually grow familiar. It is a unique kind of torture for an actor, to have an audience’s undivided attention and to turn your back on them for shame.)
I glanced across the aisle at the opposite bench. Wren sat beside her uncle, who so fiercely resembled Richard that I couldn’t help staring. The same black hair, the same black eyes, the same cruel mouth. But the familiar face was older, lined, and streaks of silver had crept into the sideburns. This, I had no doubt, was what Richard would have become in twenty years or so. No more chance of that.
He must have felt my gaze, the way I felt everyone else’s, because he turned suddenly in my direction. I looked away, but not fast enough—there was a moment of contact, a jolt of electricity that rattled me from the inside out. I breathed in at a gasp, the lights of the candles dancing in my peripheral vision. Why all these fires?
I thought. Why all these gliding ghosts?
“Oliver?” Filippa whispered. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.” I didn’t believe me, and neither did she, but before she could say anything else the chorus fell silent and Dean Holinshed appeared on the beach. He was dressed in black except for a scarf (Dellecher blue with the Key and Quill embroidered on one end), which hung limply around his neck. Besides that ribbon of color he was a grim, imposing figure, his beaky nose casting an ugly shadow across his face.
“Good evening.” There was a wilted, weary quality to his voice.
Filippa laced her fingers through mine. I squeezed her hand, grateful for something to hold on to.
“We are here,” Holinshed said, “to honor the memory of a remarkable young man, whom all of you knew.” He cleared his throat, folded his hands behind his back, and for a moment looked down at the ground. “How best to remember Richard?” he asked. “He is not the sort of person who will soon fade from your memories. He was, you might say, larger than life. It does not seem far-fetched to think that he is larger than death also. Of whom does this remind you?” He paused again, chewed on his lip. “It is impossible not to think of Shakespeare when one thinks of Richard. He has appeared on our stage many times, in many roles. But there is one role we never had the opportunity to see him play. Those of you who knew him well will likely agree he would have made a fine Henry Five. I, for one, feel cheated.”
Gwendolyn’s bangles jingled as she lifted her hand to her mouth. Tears rolled down her face, dragging long streaks of smeared mascara with them.
“Henry the Fifth is one of Shakespeare’s best beloved and most troublesome heroes, much as Richard was one of ours. They will, I think, be similarly lamented.” Holinshed reached into the deep pocket of his overcoat, feeling for something. As he searched for it, he said, “Before I read this, I must ask Richard’s fellow thespians to forgive me. I have never pretended to be an actor, but I wish to pay my respects, and I hope that, given the circumstances, both you and he will find it in your hearts to forgive me for my poor delivery.” There was a breathy murmur of laughter. Holinshed unfolded a sheet of paper from his pocket. I heard a rustle of fabric and looked sideways. Alexander had taken Filippa’s other hand. He stared straight forward, jaw jutting out.