by M. L. Rio
Filippa grew quickly ill and reached for Camilo’s arm to steady herself.
Filippa: “Sick, O, sick!”
Meredith (aside): “If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.”
James (to Camilo, throwing down his glove):
“There’s my exchange. What in the world he is
That names me traitor, villain-like he lies.”
His voice rose to call me from my hiding place. The heralds were summoned, the trumpets sounded; Filippa collapsed and was carried offstage by a bevy of second-years.
Herald (reading): “‘If any man of quality or degree within the lists of the army will maintain upon Edmund, supposed Earl of Gloucester, that he is a manifold traitor, let him appear. He is bold in his defense.’”
I breathed in through the scarf tied over my mouth and nose to disguise me, then entered upstage, one hand on my sword.
Me: “Know my name is lost;
By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit.
Yet am I noble as the adversary
I come to cope.”
Camilo: “Which is that adversary?”
Me: “What’s he that speaks for Edmund Earl of Gloucester?”
James: “Himself. What say’st thou to him?”
I spoke a litany of his sins to him, and he listened with keen and intimate attention. When he replied, it was without his usual malice, his usual arrogance. His words were thoughtful, humbly aware of their own falsehood.
James: “Back do I toss those treasons to thy head;
With the hell-hated lie o’erwhelm thy heart,
Which—for they yet glance by and scarcely bruise—
This sword of mine shall give them instant way
Where they shall rest for ever.”
We drew our swords, bowed to each other, and our final duel began. We moved almost in unison, blades flashing and gleaming under the artificial stars. I began to gain the upper hand, delivering more blows than I received, maneuvering James toward the narrow mouth of the Bridge. Sweat glistened on his forehead and in the hollow of his throat, his footwork growing clumsier. I forced him deep into the unfriendly darkness of the house until he could go no farther. The last ring of steel on steel echoing in my ears, I thrust my rapier under his arm. He grabbed my shoulder, gasped, his own blade clattering down on the mirrored floor of the Bridge. I let my sword fall, too, slid one arm around his back to take his weight and looked down to find him staring past me, into the gloom of the stage left wing. Gwendolyn was standing there at the edge of the light, her expression blank with shock. Holinshed stood beside her, and Detective Colborne stood beside him, the badge on his hip glinting in the fiber-optic starlight.
James’s fingertips dug into my arms. I clenched my teeth and lowered him slowly to the floor. Behind us, Meredith was being ushered from the apron to the wings. Camilo watched her go, his face dark with questions.
Meredith: “Ask me not what I know.”
Camilo: “Go after her. She’s desperate; govern her.”
The last second-years left the stage. I crouched over James. The violet sash we used for blood had emerged from the open neck of his shirt, and I drew it out slowly as he spoke.
“What you have charg’d me with, that have I done,” he said. “And more, much more. The time will bring it out.” He shivered under me, and I laid one hand on his chest to keep him still. “’Tis past, and so am I.” A tired smile formed on his mouth. “But what art thou / That hast this fortune on me? If thou’rt noble, / I do forgive thee.”
“Let’s exchange charity.” I pulled the scarf away from my face. There was nothing else to do to comfort him. “My name is Edgar and thy father’s son.”
I glanced toward the wings. Meredith stood beside Colborne, talking close in his ear. When she realized I was watching her, she closed her lips and slowly shook her head. I turned back to James. “The gods are just,” I said, “and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to scourge us.”
James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two. “Th’ hast spoken right; ’tis true,” he said. “The wheel is come full circle; I am here.”
Camilo spoke behind us, but I barely heard him. My next line was meant for him, but I said it to James instead. “Worthy prince, I know’t.”
He stared up at me for a moment, then lifted his head and pulled me down to meet him. It was almost a brotherly kiss, but not quite. Too fragile, too painful. Soft whispers of surprise and confusion swept through the audience. My heart throbbed, and it hurt so badly that I bit his lip. I felt his breath catch and let him go, lowered him to the floor again. Silence lingered overlong. Whatever Camilo’s line was, he had forgotten it, and so I spoke out of turn. “List a brief tale; / And when ’tis told, O that my heart would burst!”
I couldn’t remember the rest. Didn’t care to. Camilo cut my speech, perhaps to make up for his previous lapse, his voice stumbling and uncertain. James lay limp on the floor, as if Edmund’s life had left him and whatever remained of his own was not enough to move.
Camilo: “If there be more, more woeful, hold it in;
For I am almost ready to dissolve.”
I didn’t speak again. My voice was forfeit. A second-year, realizing that neither James nor I would say another word, came dashing in and shattered the spell of stillness that had descended over the stage. “Help! O, help!”
I let Camilo converse with her. Deaths were tallied and accounted. James’s time came to be carried off, but neither of us moved, sorely aware of what waited on the other side of the curtain. Servants and heralds said our lines in shy, unsteady voices. Frederick entered, with Wren dead in his arms. He, too, sank to the floor and, despite what anyone could do, died, crushed under the weight of his grief. Camilo—the last bastion of our collapsing world—finished the play as best he could, with a speech that should have been mine.
Camilo: “The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest have borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”
The stars all went out at once. Darkness came plunging down. The audience slid slowly, uncertainly into applause. I clung to James until the lights came up again, then helped him to his feet. Wren and Frederick reanimated like the living dead. Filippa and Meredith and Alexander emerged from the wings, without raising their eyes from their feet. We bowed stiffly from the waist and waited for the lights to go out again. When they did, we walked single file toward the wings. The curtain closed behind us, a heavy sweep of velvet, shutting out the soft human noise of the audience—climbing to its feet, recovering.
The work lights burned back to life overhead. The first- and second-years shrank away from Colborne’s unfamiliar face. He came slowly forward from his place beside the line sets, watching James as if there were nobody else in the world. “Well,” he said. “We couldn’t play make-believe forever. Are you ready to tell me the truth?”
James wavered beside me, opened his mouth to speak. Before he could make a sound I moved forward, the decision already made, made in the same instant it flashed into existence.
“Yes,” I said. Colborne turned toward me in disbelief. “Yes,” I said again. “I am.”
SCENE 7
Lights and sirens. Outside in the insubstantial air, audience members in their best clothes, technicians in black, and actors in costume watched as Walton guided me into the back of a car with Broadwater Police Department branded on the side. Everyone was whispering, staring, pointing, but I could only see my classmates, huddled together just like that day on the dock all over again. Alexander’s face was so full of sadness that there was no room left for surprise. In Filippa’s expression there was only a desperate kind of confusion. In Wren’s, emptiness. In Meredith’s, something violent I couldn’t find a word to describe. And on James’s face, despair. Richard stood beside them, so solid it seemed a miracle that no one else could see him
, eyes burning black, somehow still unsatisfied. I looked down to the handcuffs already glinting on my wrists and sank onto the cracked leather seat of the car. Colborne shut the door, and in the small, quiet darkness I struggled to breathe.
I spent the next forty-eight hours in windowless interrogation rooms, fingering tiny cups of lukewarm water and answering questions from Colborne, Walton, and two other officers whose names I forgot as soon as I heard them. I told the story as James had told it to me, with only necessary variations. Richard, enraged by my and Meredith’s betrayal. Me, swinging the boat hook at his head in a fit of jealous fear. They didn’t ask about the morning after.
Further performances of Lear were canceled. Following a map I had drawn on the back of Walton’s legal pad, Colborne led five cops with flashlights down into the undercroft, where they broke into my locker with a crowbar and bolt cutter. Damning evidence, covered in my fingerprints. “Now,” Colborne told me coldly, “might be the time to call your lawyer.”
I didn’t have one, of course, so she was provided for me. There was no question whether it was homicide, only of what degree. Our best chance, she explained, was to argue imperfect self-defense instead of murder two. I nodded and said nothing. I declined my phone call to my family. They weren’t whom I wanted to speak to. On Monday morning I was informed of my new status as a pretrial detainee, but I wasn’t sent to county right away. I stayed in Broadwater, because (according to Colborne) moving me to a bigger, more crowded facility might mean I never made it to my trial at all. It seemed more likely that he was stalling. Even after I had handed in my written confession, I could tell he didn’t quite believe it. After all, he had come to the FAB expecting to arrest James, acting on information provided by an “anonymous source.” Meredith, I assumed.
Perhaps that lingering doubt was why he let me have so many visitors. Filippa and Alexander were the first. They sat side by side on a bench on the other side of the bars.
“My God, Oliver,” Alexander said when he saw me. “What the hell are you doing in here?”
“Just … waiting.”
“Not what I meant.”
“We’ve talked to your lawyer,” Filippa said. “She asked me to be a character witness.”
“Not me, though,” Alexander added, with a sad little twitch of a smile. “Drug problem.”
“Oh.” I looked at Filippa. “Will you do it?”
She folded her arms tightly. “I don’t know. I haven’t forgiven you for this yet.”
I ran a finger along one of the bars between us. “I’m sorry.”
“You have no idea, do you? What you’ve done.” She shook her head, eyes hard and angry. When she spoke again her voice was the same. “My dad’s been in prison since I was thirteen. They’re going to eat you alive.”
I couldn’t look at her.
“Why?” Alexander asked. “Why did you do it?”
I knew he wasn’t asking why I killed Richard. I squirmed where I was sitting on my cot, grappled with the question.
“It’s like Romeo and Juliet,” I said, eventually.
Filippa made an impatient sort of noise and said, “What are you talking about?”
“Romeo and Juliet,” I said again, and risked glancing up at the two of them. Alexander had slumped against the wall. Filippa was glaring. “Would you change the ending, if you could? What if Benvolio came forward and said, ‘I killed Tybalt. It was me.’”
Filippa hung her head, pushed her hands through her hair. “You fool, Oliver,” she said. I couldn’t argue with that.
They came back, from time to time. Just to talk. To tell me what was happening at Dellecher. To tell me when my family found out. Filippa was the only one brave enough to speak to my mother on the phone. I wasn’t brave enough to speak to her myself. I never heard from my father, or Caroline, but I didn’t expect to. Colborne found Leah outside the station one morning, sobbing and throwing rocks at the side of the building. (She’d fled Ohio in the dead of the night, as I had once done.) He brought her in to see me, but she wouldn’t speak. She only sat on the bench, staring at me and biting her bottom lip raw. I spent all day apologizing, uselessly, and that night Colborne put her on a bus back home. Walton, he assured me, had called my parents to tell them where she was.
I didn’t see Meredith before my trial, and heard of her only through Alexander and Filippa and my lawyer. I should have been desperate for a chance to explain myself, but what would I say? She had her answer by then, to the last question she’d asked me. But I thought of her often. More often than I thought of Frederick, or Gwendolyn, or Colin, or Dean Holinshed. I couldn’t bear to think of Wren at all. Of course, the only person I really wanted to see was James.
He came halfway through the first week of my detention. I would have expected him sooner, but according to Alexander it was the first time in days he’d even managed to pick himself up off the floor.
I was asleep when he arrived, lying on my back on my narrow cot, stuck in the permanent daze that had persisted since intermission of Lear. I sensed someone outside the cell and sat up slowly. James was sitting on the floor in front of the bars, pale and somehow insubstantial, as if he’d been stitched together from scraps of light and memory and illusion, like a patchwork doll.
I slid down off the cot—feeling suddenly, unexpectedly weak—and sat facing him.
“I can’t let you do this,” he said. “I didn’t come sooner because I didn’t know what to do.”
“No,” I said, quickly. I’d played my part, hadn’t I? I’d followed Meredith upstairs, without thinking what might happen when Richard found out. I’d convinced James to leave Richard in the water when no one else could. I’d made my fair share of tragic mistakes, and I didn’t want exoneration. “Please, James,” I said. “Don’t undo what I’ve done.”
His voice emerged scratchy and raw from his throat. “Oliver, I don’t understand,” he said. “Why?”
“You know why.” I was done pretending otherwise.
(I don’t think he ever forgave me. After my incarceration he visited often, at first. Every time he came he asked me to let him make things right. Every time, I refused. I knew by then that I would survive my time in prison, quietly counting down the days until all my sins had been atoned for. But his was a softer soul, sunk in sin to the hilt, and I wasn’t sure he would. Every time he took my refusal a little bit harder. The very last time he came was six years after my conviction, six months since I’d seen him. He looked older, ill, exhausted. “Oliver, I’m begging you,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore.” When I refused again, he pulled my hand across the table, kissed it, and turned to leave. I asked where he was going and he said, “Hell. Del Norte. Nowhere. I don’t know.”)
My trial was mercifully short. Filippa and James and Alexander were all dragged in to testify, but Meredith refused to say a word in my defense or otherwise, and gave every question the same useless answer: “I don’t remember.” My resolve cracked a little every time I looked at her. Other familiar faces I avoided. Wren’s and Richard’s parents’. Leah’s and my mother’s, blotchy and tearstained and distant. When it came time for me to speak for myself, I recited my written confession without emotion or embellishment, as if it were just another monologue I’d memorized. At the end, everyone seemed to be expecting an apology, but I didn’t have one to give them. What could I say? This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.
We settled on second-degree murder (plus time for obstruction of justice) before the jury ever reached a verdict. A bus took me a few miles downstate. I turned in my clothes and my personal belongings, and began my ten-year penance on the same day that the Dellecher school year ended.
Colborne’s face was the last familiar one I saw. “You know, it’s not too late,” he said. “If there’s another version of the truth you want to tell me.”
I wanted, in some strange way, to thank him for refusing to believe me.
“I am myself indifferent honest,” I admitted. “But yet I could accuse
me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.”
EPILOGUE
I feel, at the end of my story, sapped of life, as if I have been bleeding freely for the past few hours instead of simply speaking. “Demand me nothing,” I say to Colborne. “What you know, you know: / From this time forth I will never speak a word.”
I turn away from the Tower window and avoid his eyes as I walk past him, toward the stairs. He follows me down to the library in respectful silence. Filippa is there, sitting on the couch, a copy of Winter’s Tale open in her lap. She looks up, and the fading evening light darts across her glasses. My heart is a little lighter at the sight of her.
“It is almost morning,” she says to Colborne, “and yet I am sure you are not satisfied / Of these events in full.”
“Well, I can’t ask much more of Oliver,” he says. “He’s confirmed a few long-standing suspicions.”
“Will you rest easier with one less mystery on your mind?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I thought some closure would make it more bearable, but now I’m not so sure.”
I drift to the edge of the room and stare down at the long black burn on the carpet. Now that I’ve told Colborne everything I feel unmoored. I have nothing of my own now, not even secrets.
The sound of my name makes me turn back toward the others.