Mom didn’t say anything. Neither did I.
“Then tonight I had a dream that seemed to answer the question for me,” he went on. “You know how I use dreams in my work with my clients. Well, this one felt as important as any I’ve ever had or heard of. Not my usual kind of thing. May I tell you?”
“Go on,” Mom said.
“I was staring into a pot of water looking at my own re.flection. Then my face changed into the face of a woman. She was wearing some kind of old-fashioned cap and she looked strong, noble. She had a long nose, and dark eyes, and she said, ‘Return, fool, to the place ye once called home. Your work is there.’ Then her face went away and I saw an old man with a long white beard. He said, ‘Portentous and perilous is the state of the work. Shakespeare dwells where you should be. Go and tell him—’ and that’s when I woke up. About two hours ago. And I’ve been lying here ever since trying to work the dream out in terms of my anima and my archetypal old man. That’s clear enough. And the Shake.speare reference obviously refers to both of you as actresses. But the intensity of the dream is what’s so significant. It was like I wasn’t sleeping at all. Those two people felt absolutely real—”
“You’d better tell him what’s going on, Miri,” Mom said.
And I did.
When I was done, Dad was so amazed he could hardly speak. “I can’t—” he began. Then, “How on earth—?” Then, “Do you think I can be of any use? Never mind. I’m coming. I’m coming home. Shakespeare. My God.”
“Miri,” Mom said. “Your father and I need some time to talk.”
“I’ll go check on the guys,” I said.
The four of them were lying on the furniture in the liv.ing room asleep or half-asleep. They raised their heads when I came in.
“My dad’s coming home,” I said.
“Then I shall meet the great doctor of souls!” Edmund said. “Excellent!”
“Yeah, pretty excellent.” I threw my arms around Ed.mund, loving him, feeling him wanting to love me back. Then, when he’d disentangled himself—reluctantly, I thought—I hugged Drew like the friend he was.
“Thank you, Drew,” I said. “If you hadn’t started fooling around with Achilles and his turtle, this wouldn’t be hap.pening.”
“Really?”
I told him about Dad’s dream, and about Joan Hart’s scry.ing.
“Wow,” Bobby said. “Friend Drew, thou art a mighty geek.”
Drew shook his head. “I’m glad your dad is coming home, Miri. I’m glad for anything I did to help. But this is serious. If Joan Hart can scry your dad, and Doctor Dee can see him, too—that implies that something’s up with whatever it is that separates our time from theirs. More than I realized. Your mom was right. I am in way over my head.”
He looked so worried that I moved over and sat beside him on the sofa and hugged him again. “Drew, it’s okay. You meant well. It’s not your fault if the time flow or whatever starts backing up like a clogged toilet.”
“What did Doctor Dee say in your father’s dream?” Drew said. “Something about perils and portents? Perils doesn’t sound good…. I sent the plans for wet-cell technology! Doc.tor Dee made a battery following them.”
“Yeah, and if you hadn’t he wouldn’t have been able to answer your messages, right?” Bobby asked, confused.
“Yes. But then William Shakespeare showed up in my room today,” Drew went on. “And I wasn’t even trying to do that. To bring him here. See what I mean? Equation. I send something there, so something from there has to come here. But it’s not an exact equation, which suggests that there’s some kind of balance that’s out of balance—”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “Does that mean somebody from our time ended up in Edmunds’ time when he came here?”
“If I’m right, then, yes,” Drew said. “But we’re probably never going to know.”
Drew’s phone buzzed.
“No, Mom, I’m fine,” he said into it. “I’m at Miri’s with some of the cast. Two in the morning, I know. Yes, of course, sorry. Be there in fifteen.”
He put the phone away.
“Are you in trouble?” I asked him.
“I suppose that depends on how you define trouble,” he said. “On the one hand, my mom’s a little angry with me, and it’s so late I’m going to be dead on my feet at work to.morrow. On the other hand, I may have started the unrav.eling of time....which seems somehow worse.”
Edmund and Shakespeare looked solemn. Drew, hunched on the sofa, looked like he felt completely alone.
Bobby tugged on Drew’s arm.
“Come on, man. You’ll figure it out. Or Doctor Dee will. But you gotta get some sleep. If you don’t you’ll go crazy.”
Drew got up. “If I’m not crazy already. I’m not sure. See you tomorrow, guys. Later today, I mean. See—can’t tell yesterday from today, time problems, ha ha. Anyway, thanks for the hugs.”
“Here. Have another,” I said, and hugged him again. “It’s good to have you for a friend, Drew.”
“Yeah. You, too, Miri. Good night.”
The door closed behind him and I wondered what it would be like to have a brain like that, to live in a world like his. I wondered if that very special brain had anything to do with why I never saw him with a girl.
Chapter Thirty
Dad was coming home. Everything was going to be good again. I couldn’t wait; the three days it was going to take him to get to us seemed like three hundred years. I’d have gone crazy if I hadn’t had the show to do.
Drew’s mom was able to get us the use of the parish hall at St. Stephen’s, the church where she preached sometimes, for our rehearsals. St. Stephen’s was an old church built in a kind of medieval style and the hall went well with the show.
Then there was Shakespeare.
When Edmund introduced him, he said, “Everyone, this is my brother Bill. He just got here from England. He thinks he can act. I told him he could take over a couple of small parts. So if he tries to give you any advice about how to do your lines—Don’t. Listen. To. Him.”
We all laughed. Including Shakespeare.
And the Bard behaved himself. The casual arrogance I’d picked up on the night he arrived was gone. Maybe giving him a show to be in improved his character. He was quiet during breaks, and polite to everyone, even his brother. But he was so good, even in the small parts he was given, that he made the rest of us see how we could do our own roles better. And when we broke for discussions about how to improve a scene or a line, and what it really meant, the one guy on the planet who could have let us know exactly what the author intended stood back and stroked his beard, maybe asking a question or two. And always a good question that led to the best answer for that actor.
Nobody recognized him the way we had. Why would they? In Dad’s clothes, with his hair pulled back in a pony.tail, he looked like a middle-age guy doing community the.ater. After rehearsals, Edmund, Bobby, Shakespeare, Drew and I crowded into Drew’s car and came back to our place. We sat around with Mom, talking about the show until way after midnight.
There was still tension between the brothers, and it could blow up away from the theater. The first night after re.hearsal, Shakespeare said to Bobby, “I like well your Tybalt. Ye bring something to the role I have not seen before. I think it is a secret good-heartedness. I did not write it so, but ’tis charming.”
“Wow, Will,” Bobby said. “Coming from you, that means everything.”
But the remark made Edmund snap. “Will, damn ye—ye gave your word. Do not be gulled by him, Bobby. He likes your playing little and wants ye to change it. ’Tis his way to charm when he cannot command. Next will come a few modest suggestions which ye will be a fool to take.”
“I meant no more than I said,” Shakespeare said. “What a rogue ye must think me.”
“Aye, I do. For ye are,” Edmund said.
And Bobby looked hurt.
But then in a few minutes we were back to the flow of good talk, and after a while,
Edmund said, “At least what my brother told ye is true, Bobby. Your Tybalt is something new.”
When it was over and Drew and Bobby went home, I thought, This is what my life is going to be like. Love, and Shake.speare, and acting and theater twenty-four-seven forever. And my dad is coming home.
And on Saturday, Dad drove up in an ancient Toyota crammed with his stuff.
When I heard a car door slam, I ran to the living-room window—not like I’d been waiting or anything—and I called out, “He’s here.”
Mom came in from the kitchen.
Edmund and Will had been waiting with me. Edmund stood up.
“Come, brother. Let us absent ourselves from their felic.ity awhile.”
Shakespeare stood up and followed him down the hall murmuring, “Absent—felicity...”
Which meant he was trying to remember it until he could write it down.
I opened the door. There Dad stood, weary, tall and long faced, looking more like a wet dog than anything else. See.ing him again, so familiar, and so strange, was almost like recognizing Shakespeare had been. But Dad’s portrait was in my heart. It would change to fit this slightly different face.
“Miri,” he said.
“Daddy,” I said.
“I love you,” he said, and embraced me.
And then Mom was there, standing beside me, running one hand through her long ash-blond hair, a little off-balance and looking up at him.
I took a step out of Dad’s arms.
“Ohhh,” Dad said and wrapped himself around his wife.
They stood there a long time, holding each other and breathing things that made me want to say, “Hey, guys, get a room.”
So I went and knocked on Edmund’s door.
“Let me in,” I said. “Mom and Dad need privacy, and so do I.”
“You are come in very good time,” Shakespeare said. “I am seized with an idea for a play. And there is a part in it for you.”
He had a pile of paper in front of him covered with his old-fashioned scrawl in blue ballpoint ink.
“’Tis a piece of old trash he is rewriting,” Edmund said.
“’Twill not be trash when I have worked it over.”
“What do you call it?” I asked.
“The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, I think,” Shake.speare said.
“A fig on it,” Edmund said. “Everyone has seen the old one.”
“No, no, don’t knock it,” I said. “He may be on to some.thing.”
And that afternoon in our spare bedroom, I read some of Ophelia’s lines as they came from Will Shakespeare’s hand. And when Mom finally knocked on our door and said thank you and we could come out now, there was almost half of the first act.
The Shakespeare brothers entered the living room grace.ful and elegant in Dad’s polo shirts and jeans. Together, they bowed to him. Dad offered his hand.
“Gentlemen, call me Paul,” he said.
“We give thanks, sir, for your gracious welcome,” Shake.speare said.
Edmund took Dad’s hand and said, “Tell us, Doctor, for my brother and I are most interested, what is this psychol.ogy ye do?”
“Ah,” Dad said. He stood up straight like he’d just forgot.ten he was tired. And by the time Dad had finished answer.ing him about four hours later, the Shakespeares had heard all about Freud, Jung, Adler, gestalt, archetypes, repression, suppression, the collective unconscious, the id, the ego and a few hundred other things.
Dad asked them a million questions about England, what they dreamed about, and had their dreams changed since they came here, and what had that been like, flying through time from Doctor Dee’s secret chambers to our kitchen, and to Drew’s room.
They were at it until midnight while Mom and I watched and smiled at our guys, as excited with each other as if they’d discovered buried treasure.
The next day, Dad started having counseling sessions with the Shakespeares. It was their idea.
“If it can be that my brother and I may be better friends—” Shakespeare said at breakfast.
“—or friends at all,” Edmund said. “We would be so. Do ye think your psychology may make the world big enough for both of us?”
“I’ve seen much worse,” Dad said, and took them into the room he used as an office.
Sessions like that are supposed to be private, of course. The thing was, the Shakespeares wouldn’t stop talking. Wher.ever they were, whatever else we were doing—except for the show—they were rehashing everything they didn’t like about each other.
For instance, Edmund hated the way Will was always quoting him in his plays.
“Ye are a thief,” Edmund shouted one afternoon. “A jack.daw rogue who hasn’t an idea or a word in his head that someone else didn’t put there. As I know better than most.”
“Thief? I do but take in all that crosses my path, a thing I can no more change than the color of my skin. And I give back all, transformed!”
“Bah.”
“And by the bye, your acting is not near as good as you want the world to think,” Will said.
“Okay,” Dad said. “We’re getting somewhere.”
And somehow or other, they were. Dad could always ask the questions that took the brothers deep into their words to find the feelings that lay buried beneath them.
And because they were both actors and both brilliant and both Shakespeares, they were moving fast. It was only a few days before Edmund shouted out, “I know what ’tis, Will—”
And before he could finish, Shakespeare answered, “’Tis that we are too much alike!”
And they laughed long and hard.
“Ye will always be a rogue and a scoundrel,” Edmund said.
“And ye will always wish to be more of one,” Shakespeare said.
“We’re making progress,” Dad concluded.
It was a crazy time. Drew and Bobby were in and out, Mom and Dad were reconnecting. There was so much going on at once that I could feel my life flying toward something new. My life was changing, finding a new pattern, moving forward to something I wasn’t sure of, but knew I wanted. You could say it was chaotic—but in a good way. The old Mom, Dad and Miri dynamic that Dad had walked out on was only a memory—but memory is very important stuff. But each of us was working toward this new family idea
Douglas Rees
which seemed to fall naturally on all of us as soon as Dad hit the door.
As for Edmund and me, we were together every night, but always in the middle of a crowd. It wasn’t perfect—I defi.nitely wanted to hear more of what we’d been talking about that day when Mom had come home so inconveniently— but on the other hand, we were in each other’s arms every night, with his brother’s words to say to each other, and we meant every one of them.
And Dad didn’t have any more dreams about Joan Hart or Doctor Dee. It gave me hope that the past was starting to heal up, as Mom had thought it might. I was sure Shake.speare would get back to England eventually, somehow, and Edmund would stay. And we would be together.
Chapter Thirty.
One
The play was taking on its shape. We were all getting better.
Phil Hormel had been playing Friar Lawrence as a goody-goody. It’s easy to do it that way—I mean, he’s a friar, right? And he speaks in couplets and talks about flowers. But what kind of goody-goody knows so much about poisons and knockout drugs? So Friar Lawrence has something about him that isn’t quite in focus, like maybe being a friar had been a career change and before that he’d been something else, like a professional assassin. Edmund helped him to see this, and to act it. And Phil was good.
Bill Meisinger was becoming less of a mellow-voiced stick. Ann Millard was relying less on playing the nurse for laughs and finding her way toward the real character—a loving old woman. I had to admit, even Vivian was beginning to shine. She found things to do in the party scene, on the streets of Verona, and even in the role where she had to play a really stupid servant with a message to deliver—an
d a boy servant at that, so none of her sexiness was useful there.
As for me, I got what was probably the ultimate compli.ment from the author. “Your Juliet is most believable,” he told me one night. “I do not think any boy could play it bet.ter.”
Things were getting busy behind the scenes, too. Tanya Blair was drowning in work, trying to get the tickets printed and some publicity done. And, since no one was in charge of costumes, she had those on her, as well. When she heard about it, Mom stepped in to help, dragging Dad with her.
“It’s not like you have any paying clients right now,” she told him. “You might as well make yourself useful.”
To keep costs down, we all dressed in rehearsal clothes, with something red for the Capulets and something blue for the Montagues. Almost the only things we needed to rent were the swords.
Edmund was completely happy with that.
“In London we most often provide our own costumes,” he told me. “Piece them out with such weapons and bits of armor as we have in store. It works well.”
Tickets, on the other hand, were a complete surprise.
“Tickets?” Edmund said when I told him, like it was the first time he’d heard the word, which as it turned out, it was.
“Playgoers give a penny or two at the theater door,” Shakespeare said.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Nowadays people pay for their seats in advance. They get little pieces of paper with the date and time and even their seat numbers on them. And they pay a lot more than a penny.”
“We could pass a hat, perhaps,” Edmund said.
“No,” I said.
But it worked out, the same way everything was working out. Tanya Blair and my mom and dad got some printed, put up a website and sold them online and out of Drew’s mom’s yoga studio. And people bought them.
The Juliet Spell Page 18