by Emma Scott
I forced myself to concentrate on my lines. The hundreds and hundreds of words I’d speak tonight. Words that had given me refuge. Given me a voice.
Yet the only two words I wanted to say were I’m sorry.
Or… I love you.
I didn’t see Willow until she stepped onstage in Act One, making her entrance with Justin, her brother. Laertes warned Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet, to be afraid of him. Hamlet couldn’t give her the future he promised. He was trapped by his birthright, unable to choose his own fate. Whatever he said to her couldn’t be believed.
Then Polonius, Ophelia’s father, took the stage and took his turn unloading on her. Declaring she was too mentally feeble to know her own self-worth. Incapable of making her own decisions.
You do not understand yourself so clearly…
Affection! Pooh, you speak like a green girl…
Marry, I’ll teach you. Think yourself a baby…
Ophelia bore the brunt of these exchanges on her face. Everything playing across her beautiful features. The audience was enraptured. She wilted under the pressure of her brother and father. Her love for Hamlet crumbled under the weight of their expectations. Willow was telling the story of the other night, of her life, as if Shakespeare had written it for her. My heart broke.
I took that pain onstage with me for the ghost scene, when the spirit of Hamlet’s father tells his story. Betrayal and murder. Poison poured into his ear by his brother’s hand.
I went looking for Willow the second I was offstage. I found her in the wings, sitting on an overturned bucket in the dark, her hands folded in her lap. She gasped as I took her arm, immediately pulling away. “No. Isaac, I can’t talk to you.”
“Shh.” I moved her to a dark corner, dimly lit by an emergency exit sign.
“I can’t talk to you,” she said again, her voice rising.
“Willow…”
“I can’t.” Her gaze darted around the darkened area. I’d never seen her so frail and nervous. She’d blow away at the slightest wind.
“You can. Tell me what happened.”
She shook her head, her eyes wide. “I can’t. I promised I wouldn’t.”
“Promised who? Your dad?” I gently took her shoulders. “He’s making you do this. Why? For what?”
Her mouth opened and shut. She looked almost panicked as she pulled from my grasp. “I have to go. I’ll miss my entrance.”
“Fuck the play,” I said. “Talk to me.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “You have casting agents out there. This is your night to—”
“Is this about the money my dad owes?” I said. “If it is, forget it. I’ll take care of it.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head miserably. “It’s so much more than the money.”
“Then tell me.”
“He’ll destroy you…”
“Fuck him too,” I said. “I’m not afraid of him—”
“You should be.”
“Why?”
“Because you have no idea what you’re up against.” She was calmer now, stoic and resigned, which was worse than the frantic fear. “I’ve seen firsthand what privilege can do when it wants something.”
I ran my hands through my hair. “You don’t trust me to make this right? Is that it?”
“You can’t do anything,” she said, her voice breaking down to a whisper. “And he’s taking us away.”
“Away.”
“He’s been transferred to Canada. We leave Harmony in four weeks.”
The words hit me in the chest. She couldn’t go to Canada. She was just finding her way out of the cold. She needed Harmony to heal.
“He can’t do that,” I said, rage burning in my throat.
“He can. I’m not eighteen and even if I were—”
“You’ll be eighteen in a couple of months.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter to him.”
“So what are you saying? It’s… It’s over? We’re done? Forever?”
In the dimness, her eyes shone large and soft. “I hope not. But…”
“But what? We wait? Months? Weeks? How long? Goddammit, Willow…” I grabbed her hand, making her flinch. “Stay. Stay with me. Or Marty. He’ll take you in.”
“No, Isaac. You have to go too. Tonight is your chance for success.” She struggled to pull her hand out of mine. “You’re hurting me,” she whispered.
I let go immediately. Pain whipped my skin. She was giving up. Choosing him over me.
I was losing her.
“I have to go?” I asked. “For what? To prove myself? What’s it going to take, Willow? How much money do I have to make until I don’t stink of the junkyard anymore? How much is good enough for your father? Good enough for you?”
“You know that’s not true,” she said. “You’ve always been more than good enough for me.”
“Then why aren’t you fighting?” I said through the wall of my teeth. “You’re giving up. You’re letting him win.”
“He’s already won. If I don’t…”
“If you don’t what?” I took her hand again, trying to squeeze from it the answers she wouldn’t speak. “What’s in this for him?”
“Isaac, don’t.”
“Tell me, Willow. Tell me now. What did you trade me for?”
“I have to go.”
I pulled her close to me, inhaling her, feeling her body one last time. “I would’ve done anything for you.”
“I know,” she said, her tears wet on my neck. “I’m sorry.” She took a step away. Then another. “Goodbye, Isaac.”
Then she was running toward the stage. Bursting like a comet under the lights and falling into her father’s arms.
“O my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted!”
As her lament poured out onstage, my old armor of silence locked around me.
Never again.
I’d never show myself like this again.
I told Willow things I’d never told anyone else. I gave her my best self. And for what? She wouldn’t fight for us. Now I stood here, alone, helpless. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t fight for us alone.
Part of me hated her. But a truer part of me loved her. Understood her. I knew the truth of what was happening: it was all the wounds Xavier marked on her. They’d just begun to heal, and then her father unknowingly ripped them all open again.
It wasn’t her fault.
My mother dying wasn’t her fault either. But the loss was there. The yawning void of a life without Willow.
I lost her and so my own words meant nothing.
Willow
Act Three, Scene One. The end of Ophelia and Hamlet.
A props person pressed a beaded necklace into my hand, then handed me a rolled-up parchment tied with a red ribbon. Hamlet’s love letter, written in Isaac’s own hand.
Never doubt I love…
I peeked through a crack in the side curtains, peering into the audience. My parents were somewhere in the dark theater, watching. So was the casting agent who could give Isaac a new life. I had to protect his chance. If anything good could come out of this nightmare, it would be Isaac finding the success his talent deserved.
And maybe someday…
I couldn’t see someday. Everything felt hopeless. I could only picture a cold and snowy tundra sprawling in all directions. Me dropped in the center, a swirling icy wind whistling over me. And when I turned eighteen, what then? I had no money. All my life, I’d depended on my parents for everything. Now they had me trapped.
The only thing I could do was give Isaac this performance. Give him my best.
Just tell the story.
Onstage, Isaac was deep in his To be, or not to be soliloquy, tearing into it with naked rawness, leaving the audience pinned to their seats. The conflict within him burned bright in every word. The struggle to keep going when the desire was to give up. The ordeal of fighting when all you wanted was to sleep.
At the end
, the audience held its breath until a single pair of hands began a spontaneous ovation that swept through the entire theater. I’d never heard of that happening before.
Isaac held still until it was over. I stepped onto the stage.
“The fair Ophelia,” he said. His voice drew inward and he added, “In thy orisons be all my sins remembered.”
Hamlet strolled in a small circle around me, hands clasped behind his back. Black trousers, black boots, and a black doublet with a gold pendant sewn onto the front. Dark and dangerous. And unraveling. His hair askew, tousled and wild above his sleek, neat clothes. His lips bore a tight, mirthless smile. His eyes looked at me with a shifting sea of love, longing, anger, pain.
“Good my lord, How does your honor for this many a day?” My voice was already shaking.
“I humbly thank you; well, well, well.”
With a shaking hand, I held out the letter and the necklace. “My lord, I have remembrances of yours, that I have longèd long to re-deliver; I pray you, now receive them.”
Hamlet gave a small jerk of his chin, as if perplexedly amused. “No, not I; I never gave you aught.”
He continued his strolling around me as I thrust my hand out again.
“My honour'd lord, you know right well you did; And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed as made the things more rich…” I swallowed my tears… “Their perfume lost, Take these again; for to the noble mind rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.” I put the necklace and letter in his hand. “There, my lord.”
Hamlet took them both, not breaking his stride. His lips curled up in a horrible sneer and his laugh was a mockery.
“Ha, ha! are you honest?”
“My lord?”
“Are you fair?”
His circling was making me dizzy as I fought to hold his gaze.
“What means your lordship?”
Hamlet shrugged, as if the answer were simple. “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.”
“Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?” I asked.
He replied it was easier for beauty to turn a virgin into a whore, than honesty to turn a whore back into a virgin.
You’re too late, he was saying. The damage is done.
“This was sometime a paradox,” he said, his voice growing soft, his steps slowing. “But now the time gives it proof.” He stopped his slow prowl around me and held my gaze, pain riding the surface of his face. Then he dropped his gaze to the letter and I watched his eyes fill with tears.
“I did love you once.”
Tears slid unbidden down my cheek. “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.”
The entire theater held its breath. The air felt crystalline and ready to shatter.
“You should not have believed me,” he said quietly. And tore the letter and its red ribbon to shreds. The pieces fell like snow and blood as he raised his head to look at me.
“I loved you not.”
His words slammed into my chest and sunk deep into my heart. I straightened to my full height, my lips trembling as the cold came back, turning me numb. Uncaring. And this time I reached for it.
Feeling nothing, I thought, would be preferable to the pain that was to come.
“I was the more deceived,” I said with as much nonchalance as I could muster.
Hamlet’s eyes flared at my callous reply. His pent-up anger and pain flooded out on a current of ancient words. He strode to me, loomed over me.
“Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?”
He gripped me by my shoulders, forcing a gasp out of me. My eyes were locked on his, unable to look away.
“What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery!”
His grip tightened, as he caught his breath, mastering his anger. Up through his eyes rose a plea. One last chance for us.
“Where's your father?” Hamlet asked, his voice cracking open to show Isaac.
The play vanished. The stage and theater disappeared. The audience shrank to one single seat with my father in it. Watching from the dark as Isaac asked me—begged me one final time—to choose him.
He thought it was simple—disobey my father and love him. Love him no matter what. But he didn’t know what he was asking. He didn’t know what I knew. What my father could do to him. Staring in his eyes, I saw the love for me, but I also saw the ruination of everything he’d worked for. His dreams crushed by accusations my father could make. Endless resources and the influence of a multi-billion-dollar company behind them.
I’d die before I let that happen—before I let Isaac take on a crime he was innocent of while Xavier walked free.
The choice tore me in half. Whatever I decided would be my ruination. Live a life without Isaac. Or stay with him and watch him lose everything.
I had no choice.
My father was in the audience, watching.
I drew in a shaky breath, my eyes pleading for forgiveness as I uttered the simple lie that unraveled us for good.
“At home, my lord.”
Isaac’s eyes flared again. His fingers loosened their hold on my arms but didn’t let go. He turned his face to the audience. The stage lights wouldn’t let him find my father in the crowd, but I knew he spoke only to him.
“Let the doors be shut upon him,” he whispered, “that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house.”
Isaac let go and I fell to my knees. I had a line but it was lost as I struggled to draw breath between the choking sobs that were strangling my throat. Isaac started to turn away, done with me. Done with us.
Then he whirled back around, shaking, unable to contain the pain any longer. He let it all out, spitting words that hit me like slaps to the face.
“If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.”
His voice rose, cracking, as tears filled his eyes. “Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough,”—he jabbed his finger at his own heart—”what monsters you make of them!”
He stood over my sobbing form, breathing heavily. Gathering up his pain, calling it home and pressing it back inside. He spoke his final line in a voice devoid of all emotion. All pain. A tone that promised his silence from that moment forward.
“Farewell.”
There is a willow grows aslant a brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them.
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like a while they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
—Act IV, Scene VII
Three years later…
Willow
I woke up to a sticky Indiana summer morning, the heat laying on me like a second, damp blanket. Air conditioning was on the long list of household improvements to my rental in The Cottages. I’d only been back in Harmony for three months, and food and rent ate up most of my little salary from the HCT. I didn’t have much left over for home renovations.
I kicked the covers off to get some air on my skin. My bed was the same four-poster
queen-size from my parents’ house in Emerson Hills. It had moved with me to Canada, to Billings, Montana, and then to Austin, Texas. Three times in three years my dad was relocated, chasing the oil profits. My mother finally gave up packing and hauling furniture and insisted on pre-furnished homes with every move. It was wasteful and silly, but it was her way of protesting being dragged around North America.
I didn’t protest. I had no voice. No money. Nothing. The only thing I asked was to take my bed, including the sheets and blankets. If I pressed my nose to the linens and inhaled, I imagined I could still smell Isaac there—gasoline and smoke, peppermint and aftershave.
“Isaac.”
I let his name sigh out of me as I lay on the bed in my cottage, my hand pressing over my heart. No matter how often I thought of him—and it was constant—the ache in my chest never diminished. Missing him never got easier.
I shook off the sadness before it weighed me down, and got out of bed. I padded across the hardwood floors, through the living area, decorated with my own little touches. Wooden comedy and tragedy masks I found at a swap meet in Texas. A colorful Cheyenne throw rug I’d bought in Montana, soft under my feet as I crossed into the kitchen.
I started the coffee and my gaze lingered on the framed poem hanging next to the kitchen window. Angie wrote it for me in Mr. Paulson’s English class in high school. She sent it to me in Canada, before she left for Stanford.
Willow Tree
Its limbs the long hair
of a sad girl,
reaching for the
ground.
‘Sturdy as an oak,’ they say.
A willow is stronger.
It bends to the storm.
Harsh winds whip it,
its leaves are torn
and carried away.
It bends but doesn’t break.
It may weep
but it will
never
fall.
I smiled as I lifted my coffee mug, gratitude and anticipation in every sip. Counting the minutes until this weekend, when Angie would be at the final performance of A Doll’s House at the HCT.