by M. L. Rio
Holinshed: “Hung be the heavens with black: yield, day, to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry’s death.
England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.”
He frowned, crumpled the paper and returned it to his pocket.
“Dellecher never lost such a student,” he said. “Let us remember Richard well, as he would have wanted. It is my honor to unveil for you his portrait, which from today forward will hang in the lobby of the Archibald Dellecher Theatre.”
He reached over to pull the limp black cloth off the easel. Richard’s face emerged from behind it—it was his Caesar portrait, what it had looked like before it was recolored and resized—and my heart leapt up into my throat. I felt myself step off the dock again, plunge down into the frigid water of the lake. He glared across the beach at us—imperious, enraged, in some abhorrent way alive. I gripped Filippa’s hand so hard her knuckles went white. Holinshed was wrong: Richard didn’t want to be remembered well—he had never been so forgiving. He wanted to wreak havoc on the rest of us.
“I can only say so much on Richard’s behalf,” Holinshed went on, but I barely heard him. “I did not have the privilege of knowing him as well as many of you. So I will step aside, and let someone nearer and dearer speak for him now.”
He finished without any grander gesture and retreated from the podium. I glanced down the bench in dismay, but Meredith hadn’t moved. She sat, ashen-faced, with Alexander’s left hand in her lap, clutched tightly between both of hers. Four of us were linked now, like dolls in a paper chain. I could feel Filippa’s pulse between my fingers and loosened my grip.
A soft susurration made me look the other way. Wren was on her feet and moving toward the podium. When she got there she was barely visible, a pale face and fine blond hair hovering just above the microphone.
“Richard and I never had siblings, so we were closer than most cousins,” she said. “Dean Holinshed was right to say that he was larger than life. But not everybody liked that about him. I know actually that a lot of you didn’t like him at all.” She looked up, but not at any of us. Her voice was small and unsteady, but her eyes were dry. “To be perfectly honest with you, sometimes I don’t—didn’t—like him either. Richard wasn’t an easy person to like. But he was an easy person to love.”
On the bench across from ours Mrs. Stirling cried silently, one hand clutching the collar of her coat. Her husband sat with his fists balled up between his knees.
“Oh, God,” Alexander muttered. “I can’t do this.”
Meredith dug her fingernails into his wrist. I bit my tongue, clenched my teeth so tight I thought they would crack.
“The idea that I would have to … let go of him, before we were old and falling to bits, never even occurred to me,” Wren went on, picking her words one by one, like a child stepping from stone to stone to cross a stream. “But it doesn’t just feel like I’ve lost a cousin. It feels like I’ve lost part of myself.” She let out a tragic sort of laugh.
James grabbed my hand so suddenly that I started, but he didn’t seem to see me. He watched Wren with a kind of desperation in his expression, swallowing repeatedly, as if he might be sick at any second. Filippa trembled on my other side.
“Last night, I couldn’t sleep, so I reread Twelfth Night,” Wren said. “We all know how it ends—happily, of course—but there’s sadness there, too. Olivia has lost a brother. So has Viola, but they handle it very differently. Viola changes her name, her whole identity, and almost immediately falls in love. Olivia shuts herself away from the world, and refuses to let love in at all. Viola is trying desperately to forget her brother. Olivia is maybe remembering him too much. So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?” She looked up from the sand and found us, gaze drifting from face to face. Meredith, Alexander, Filippa, me, and finally James. “You all know that Richard refuses to be ignored,” she said, speaking to us, and no one else. “But maybe every day we let grief in, we’ll also let a little bit of it out, and eventually we’ll be able to breathe again. At least, that’s how Shakespeare would tell the story. Hamlet says, Absent thee from felicity awhile. But just awhile. The show’s not over. Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight. The rest of us must go on.”
She stopped, stepped back from the podium. A few hesitant, heartbroken smiles had appeared in the audience, but not for any of us. We held one another’s hands so hard we couldn’t feel them anymore. Wren walked back to her bench on unsteady legs. She sank down between her aunt and uncle, stayed upright for a second or two, and then collapsed into her uncle’s lap. He bent over her protectively, tried to shield her with his arms, and soon they were both shaking so badly I couldn’t tell which one of them was sobbing.
SCENE 7
An impromptu wake happened at the Bore’s Head. We were all in desperate need of a drink, and none of us wanted to return to isolation in Hallsworth House. Our table felt miserably empty. Richard’s usual seat was unoccupied (nobody even wanted to look at the blank space where he should have been), Wren was already en route to the airport, and most other people only came over long enough to express their condolences and raise a glass to Richard before departing again. We didn’t speak much. Alexander had paid for an entire bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, which sat uncapped in the middle of the table, the contents slowly diminishing until there was only an inch of liquid left.
Alexander: “What time is Camilo coming to pick us up?”
Filippa: “Soon. Does anyone have a flight earlier than nine?”
We all shook our heads together.
Alexander: “James, what time do you get in?”
James: “Four in the morning.”
Filippa: “And your dad’s coming to get you at that hour?”
James: “No. I’ll take a cab.”
Meredith: “Alexander, where are you even going?”
Alexander: “Staying with my foster brother in Philly. Fuck knows where my mom is. You?”
She tilted her glass, watched the watery dregs of Scotch trickle around the melting ice cubes. “My parents are in Montreal with David and his wife,” she said. “So it’ll just be me and Caleb in the apartment, if he ever comes home from work.”
I wanted to comfort her somehow, but I didn’t dare touch her, not in front of the others. There was a tightness in my chest, as if all the shock and horror of the last few days had strained my heart.
Me: “We have the most depressing holiday plans of all time.”
James: “I think Wren’s are probably worse.”
Alexander: “God, fuck you for even saying that.”
James: “Just providing some perspective.”
Meredith: “Do you think she’ll come back after break?”
Silence came crashing down on the table.
“What?” Alexander said, loudly.
Meredith leaned back, glanced at the next table. “I mean, think about it,” she said, at a quarter of Alexander’s volume. “She’s going to go home, bury her cousin, have three days to mourn, and then come all the way back across the ocean for exams and auditions again? The stress could kill her.” She shrugged. “Maybe she won’t come back. Maybe she’ll finish next year, or not at all. I don’t know.”
“Did she say something to you?” James demanded.
“No! She just—I wouldn’t want to come back right away if I were her. Would you?”
“Christ.” Alexander dragged his hands across his face. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”
Besides Meredith, nobody had. We stared down into our drinks, cheeks pink with shame.
“She has to come back,” James said, looking from me to Meredith as if one of us could somehow reassure him. “She has to.”
“That might not be best for her,” Meredith said. “She may need some time away. From Dellecher, and—all of us.”<
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James was still for a moment, then stood and left the table without another word. Alexander watched him go, gloomily. “And then there were four,” he said.
SCENE 8
My family home in Ohio was not a place I enjoyed visiting. It was one of twelve mostly identical houses (all clapboard, painted barely different shades of beige) on a quiet suburban street. Each came complete with a black mailbox, gray driveway, and jewel-green lawn dotted with little round boxwoods, some of which had already been wrapped in white Christmas lights.
Thanksgiving dinner (traditionally a dull affair made cheery only by the abundance of wine and food) was unusually tense. My mother and father sat on opposite ends of the table, wearing what I always thought of as their “church clothes”: black slacks and embarrassingly similar pea green sweaters. My sisters bumped elbows on one side, and I sat alone on the other, wondering when in the world Caroline had gotten so thin, and when, for that matter, Leah had done the opposite and developed curves. Both of these changes seemed to have become points of contention in my absence—my father told Caroline to “stop playing with her dinner and eat it” more than once, and my mother’s eyes kept flicking toward Leah’s neckline as though the depth of it made her profoundly uncomfortable.
Oblivious to her scrutiny, Leah had peppered me with questions about Dellecher since we opened the wine. She, for some reason, took a keen interest in my alternative schooling, while Caroline had never displayed any interest at all. (I knew better than to be offended. Caroline rarely displayed an interest in anything unrelated to frenetic exercise or her 1960s fashion fetish.)
“Do you know yet what play you’re doing spring semester?” Leah asked. “We’ve just read Hamlet for world lit.”
“I doubt it’ll be that,” I said. “They did that last year.”
“I wish I could have seen you do Macbeth,” she went on, in a rush. “Halloween here was incredibly lame.”
“Too old to dress up now?”
“I went to this absolutely awful party as Amelia Earhart. I think I was the only girl there not wearing some kind of lingerie.”
The word “lingerie” coming out of her mouth was a little alarming. I hadn’t been home much in the past four years and still thought of her as much younger than sixteen. “Well,” I said. “That’s—well.”
“Leah,” my mother said. “Not during dinner.”
“Mother, please.”
(When had she taken to calling her “Mother”? I reached for my wineglass and emptied it hastily.)
“Do you have pictures of Macbeth?” Leah pressed. “I’d love to see them.”
“Don’t give her any ideas, please,” my father said. “One actor in the family is enough.”
Privately, I agreed with him. The idea of my sister wearing only a nightgown and being ogled by all the boys of Dellecher made me feel slightly nauseous.
“Don’t worry,” Caroline said, slouched down in her chair, pulling at a loose thread on the cuff of her sweatshirt. “Leah’s much too smart for that.”
Leah’s cheeks flamed pink. “Why do you always call me that like it’s something horrible?”
“Girls,” my mother said. “Not now.”
Caroline smirked and fell silent, smearing mashed potatoes around with her fork. Leah sipped at her wine (she was allowed half a glass, and half a glass only), still blushing. My father sighed, shook his head, and said, “Oliver, pass me the gravy.”
An excruciating half hour later, my mother pushed her chair back from the table to clear the dishes. Leah and Caroline began carrying things out of the dining room, but when I made to stand up my father instructed me to stay where I was.
“Your mother and I need to talk to you.”
I sat up straighter, waiting. But he didn’t say anything else, just returned his attention to his plate, picking at the broken bits of piecrust that were left. I poured myself a fourth glass of wine with clumsy, nervous hands. Had they heard about Richard somehow? I’d spent two days loitering around the mailbox and snatched the Dellecher newsletter out as soon as it arrived, hoping to prevent exactly that.
It was another five minutes before my mother came back. She sat beside my father in the chair that had been Leah’s during dinner and smiled, a nervous twitch of her upper lip. My father wiped his mouth, set the napkin in his lap, and looked pointedly at me. “Oliver,” he said. “We need to talk to you about something difficult.”
“All right, what?”
He turned to my mother (as he always did when “something difficult” needed to be said). “Linda?”
She reached across the table and seized my hand before I could withdraw it. I fought the urge to squirm out of her grip.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” she said, tears already in her eyes. “And it’ll probably come as a surprise to you, because you’ve been away from home so much.”
Guilt crept down my spine like a spider.
“Your sister…” She let out a small, strangled sigh. “Your sister isn’t doing well.”
“Caroline,” my father said, as if it weren’t obvious which one of them she meant.
“She’s not going back to school this semester,” my mother went on. “She’s been trying so hard to finish, but the doctor seemed to think it would be best for her health for her to take a break.”
I glanced from her to my father and said, “Okay. But what—”
“Don’t interrupt, please,” he said.
“Fine. Sorry.”
“You see, sweetheart, Caroline’s not going back to school, but she’s not going to stay here,” my mother explained. “The doctors think someone needs to keep a closer eye on her than we can, being away at work every day.”
Caroline had the least common sense of the three of us, but the fact that my parents were talking about her like she couldn’t be left alone was more than a little unsettling.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that she’s going to be … going away for a while, to stay with some people who can help her.”
“What, like rehab?”
“We’re not calling it that,” my father snapped, as if I’d said something obscene.
“Okay, then what are we calling it?”
My mother cleared her throat delicately. “It’s called a recovery center.”
I glanced from her to my father and back again before I said, “What the hell is she recovering from?”
My father made an impatient sort of sound and said, “Surely you noticed she’s not eating right.”
I pulled my hand away from my mother. My mind was blank, stuck, unable to process this information. I took another unsteady sip from my wineglass, then put my hands in my lap, out of reach.
Me: “Right. That’s … awful.”
My father: “Yes. But now we have to talk about what it means for you.”
Me: “For me? I don’t understand.”
My mother: “Well, I’m coming to that.”
My father: “Please just listen, won’t you?”
I squeezed my molars together and watched my mother.
“This recovery center, it’s expensive,” she said. “But we want to make sure she’s getting the best treatment possible. And the problem is—the problem is that we can’t afford the recovery center and your school at the same time.”
My whole body went numb so fast I felt light-headed. “What?” I said, like I hadn’t heard her.
“Oh, Oliver, I’m so sorry.” Tears had spilled out of her eyes and were making dark spots on the tablecloth, like dripping candle wax. “We’ve agonized over this, but the truth is, right now we need to help your sister. She’s not well.”
“What about her tuition? You just said she’s dropped out—what about that?”
“It’s not enough,” my father said, shortly.
I looked from him to her, openmouthed, disbelief turning my blood to sludge. It pounded and oozed slowly from my heart to my brain. “I have one semester left,” I said. “W
hat am I supposed to do?”
“Well, you’ll have to talk to the school,” my father said. “Think about taking out a last-minute loan if you really want to graduate.”
“If I want— Why wouldn’t I want to graduate?”
He shrugged. “I can’t imagine a diploma really makes a difference to an actor.”
“I— What?”
“Ken,” my mother said, despairingly. “Please, let’s just—”
“Let me get this straight.” Anger kindled deep in the pit of my stomach, quickly devoured the little twigs of incredulity. “You’re telling me I have to drop out of Dellecher because Caroline needs some celebrity doctor to spoon-feed her?”
My father banged his open hand down on the table. “I’m telling you you need to start considering monetary alternatives because your sister’s health is more important than us paying twenty thousand dollars for you to play pretend!”
I glared at him for a moment in stupefied outrage, then thrust my chair back and left the table.
SCENE 9
I spent four hours the following day locked in my father’s office, on the phone with Dellecher’s administrative staff. They patched me through to Frederick, to Gwendolyn, and even, eventually, to Dean Holinshed. They all sounded exhausted, but they each assured me that we’d work something out. Loans were suggested, along with work-study and late scholarship applications. When I finally hung up, I retreated to my room, lay on my bed, and stared at the ceiling.
Inevitably my eyes wandered down to the desk (cluttered with old production photos and programs), to the bookshelf (stuffed with tattered paperbacks, purchased for single dollars and quarters from used bookstores and library sales), and from poster to poster tacked on the wall, a gallery revue of my high school theatre endeavors. Most of them were Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, even a leftover handbill from a wildly misguided production of Cymbeline, which was set in the antebellum South for no reason the director could ever satisfactorily explain. I exhaled with a strange fond sadness, wondering what on earth had occupied my thoughts before Shakespeare. My first fumbling encounter with him at the age of eleven had quickly blossomed into full-blown Bardolatry. I bought a copy of the complete works with my precious pocket money and carried it everywhere, all too happy to ignore the less poetic reality of the outside world. Never before in my life had I experienced something so undeniably stirring and important. Without him, without Dellecher, without my company of lyric-mad classmates, what would become of me?