The Game of Love and Death

by Martha Brockenbrough

  The earth turned, dragging tracings of starlight across the velvet sky. Ethan stumbled into the hall. He climbed the stairs, one slow step at a time until he was at the top. Helen’s room was near. He could hear her rustling about. What had happened? They’d sat down to read, and then she’d taken his hand, and then he knew all of these things that seemed impossible.

  And yet, they explained so much. They explained the hold James had on Ethan. Why it felt like love when he’d first laid eyes on him, even if was he nothing more than a pawn.

  Ethan closed his door. Looked at the space where he’d spent so much time: at his bed, at his desk, at the windows that looked out over the grounds below and gave a view of the booming finale of a fireworks display in the distance. If James Booth was someone else, someone who was not a human exactly … perhaps what Ethan had done with him didn’t count.

  Perhaps he wasn’t one of those.

  For a moment, Ethan felt relief so great he wanted to weep. To not be attracted to boys. He wanted this so much for himself. He’d spent hours in this room, trying to talk himself out of the wanting, the desire for Henry most of all.

  And yet he could not continue to pretend. All of that attraction had happened before James. Even though he had never acted on it, it was who he was. There was no changing it. The Independence Day celebration outside had ended, and the open curtains revealed a crescent moon. Was it waxing or waning? He never could tell. But if it had a choice, would it shrink into complete darkness or make its journey bursting with reflected light?

  Ethan picked up a pen and a sheet of paper. One slow letter, one hard-fought word at a time, he wrote to Henry, who needed to know what he and Flora were part of. Henry needed to know who James was, that he was an ally of sorts. Ethan wished he knew who Death was. One of the musicians? The person who had arrested Henry? That seemed the most likely thing of all.

  He told Henry not to give up on Flora. We do not choose whom we love, he wrote. We can only choose how well.

  The handwriting was atrocious. Entire sentences had been crossed out. Ethan was sure he’d spelled half of the words wrong. It wasn’t good enough. He couldn’t send it. Tired as he was, he copied the words on a new sheet. He threw the draft away. He sealed the letter and addressed it. Then he wrote a shorter note to his parents, explaining that he would be enlisting in the navy in the morning. He slipped it under their door. Then he packed a bag, left Henry’s letter in the outgoing mail slot, and disappeared into the night. Ethan wanted to spend one last night as a free man, a free man who knew who he was and who he would never be. He wanted to watch the sun rise on that day his life began anew.

  When the door closed behind him, Death slipped out of her room. She found the letter in the mail slot.

  And then she burned it.

  AFTER the whole sorry Ethan business, Love demanded a meeting. Death agreed, but insisted on choosing the location. When Love arrived in the Chinese room of the Smith Tower, a few floors down from where Henry’s father had jumped, Death was already there, lounging in a rosewood chair carved with a dragon and a phoenix. She faced a small table with a glass of red wine and a plate of escargots, and was tearing the snails out of their shells with a tiny fork.

  Love settled on a plain mahogany chair. The space over his heart where the book had been felt empty. Nagging, like a missing memory.

  Death demolished a snail shell between her teeth. “That one didn’t want to come out.” She spit the splintered remains into the dish. A shard clung to her lips, and Love wanted nothing more than to remove it.

  “Soup?” she said, pointing to a tureen. “It’s turtle.”

  Love declined.

  “I don’t know how the girls stand this chair.” Her lips glistened with butter. “It’s uncomfortable.”

  The Wishing Chair had been a gift of the Chinese empress. Any young woman who sat in it was guaranteed an engagement within a year. The chair might have been uncomfortable, but it worked as promised. He felt a stab of compassion for his opponent, who had no capacity to feel hope. He shrugged it off. This was not his sadness to carry. He wanted his book back. Ethan too. But that, he feared, was a heart he dared not call again.

  Behind him, the city of Seattle reached toward the water’s edge. Electric lights burned in many of the buildings, hazing the bottom of the sky with their glow. Beside a nearly vanquished moon, stars hung overhead, the solitary recipients of infinite human wishes.

  “You’ll have to ask nicely,” Death said. “I will also consider begging.”

  Damn her and the way she invaded his mind. If that was how she wanted to play, fine. He sent her images of things he’d witnessed without her as he followed Henry about town.

  Here, the image of Henry fastening his tie around his neck; there, Henry combing the unruly curls from his forehead; the shine of lamplight on his shoe as he polished it; the gray ribbon of sidewalk unrolling itself at his feet. Leaves full of sunlight. The world seen through the eyes of someone in love with a woman, in love with life.

  It took most of Love’s concentration to send the images so purely, but he paused now and then to watch Death’s expression change. She grew impatient and pawed through the rest of the memories as quickly as he could form them: of stolen kisses and swift touches, and most of all Henry and Flora as they played “Someday,” every charged note of it, performance after performance ending with crashing waves of applause.

  This magic had happened. Even if they never performed together again, they’d been altered by it. Irrevocably.

  She pulled away, her eyes dark around the edges. He leaned in to dab her face with his handkerchief, but she grabbed his wrist. “Don’t.”

  Then she shoved everything off the table — the wine, the empty snail shells, the soup. “And what of it? We have two days left in the Game, and still she refuses him.”

  His wrist stung where she’d grabbed it. “How are you faring in your attempts to lure Henry away?”

  She arranged herself carelessly in the chair, draping one hand over its back. “I have two ways to win. You have but one. History and the odds are on my side.”

  Love could not argue either point.

  But what were odds? The odds against any one human being born were tremendous. The chain of moments that led to it was long, a chain made of infinite human choices that each had to occur in sequence to lead to a particular birth. The odds of either Flora or Henry being here at all were one in four hundred trillion, give or take.

  “Two days left.” She held up a pair of fingers. As if Love could forget or would not understand the words. She tossed the book back at him. He caught it and felt immediately soothed by its warmth and familiarity.

  Then Death gave him her awful Helen smile and faded like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat. As she did, Love thought of something he hadn’t before. Where was the real Helen? The one Death was impersonating? It seemed a small matter, really. And yet, much could hinge on the minutiae. He sucked in his breath and stood, hoping there was still time.

  It was the middle of the night when Love reached the human Helen. The place smelled of stale breath and antiseptic, and an acid light filled the hallways. The rooms, each a white rectangle behind a door with a square of reinforced glass in its middle, were for the most part dark. Almost all of their inhabitants were sleeping. Helen wasn’t, and Love was glad, for he hated to disturb the rest of someone who’d been so wounded.

  He materialized in the room not as James Booth or any other human, but as a creature Helen would welcome: a wiggling cocker spaniel puppy whose breath smelled of hay and summertime. He whimpered, and she sat up, looking left and right. Then, in the gray light, she spotted him on the floor and lifted him in bed with her. Love felt her heart. Please tell me this is not another hallucination. They say I went mad, but I know that I didn’t. I’ve forgotten, is all. I’ve just forgotten.

  Love kissed Helen on the chin and she gigg
led. She curled around him in bed, her heart pressed to his rounded back. Love sensed the spot where Death had taken the girl’s memories. The edges around that hole in her mind were ragged, preventing her from reaching the ones that lay further back. Love repaired the tear. The form he’d chosen was perfect for this: soft, vulnerable, full of life and love.

  Helen fell asleep around him as soon as he started. He was gone by the time she woke in the morning, and forever after, she thought of his visit as a dream, the sweetest of her life. The restoration of most of her memory caused great excitement with her physician, who telephoned her parents once he’d determined her recovery was indeed legitimate, that she was a person of consequence, and, most important, that someone would cover the bill for her care. By the time all of that was settled, Love had already returned to Seattle.

  WHISPERING. There had been so much whispering since Ethan left the house. Annabel hated whispering. It was rude, rude, rude. And now, after the phone call, there was more of it, and when she asked what everyone was whispering about, she was sent from the room.

  It wasn’t fair.

  First Henry, and then Ethan, and now Helen, who had disappeared not long after Mama had hung up the phone. Helen had been listening at the door, and Annabel had been hiding in the alcove behind her. It was very strange how Helen had left the house. First she was there, and then she wasn’t. Annabel would have to ask about it once Mama calmed down.

  Annabel crept into Ethan’s room, which still had most of his things. His baseball uniform. His school pennant. All of his suits and ties and Oxfords. It still smelled like him too. Grass and perspiration and Lucky Tiger Bay Rum aftershave, Annabel’s favorite.

  There was a piece of paper in his wastebasket. She lifted it out and smoothed away the crumples. Dear Henry, it read. She started reading it, but it was about mushy, yucky things. Besides, she was excited to get to the part where she sealed it in an envelope, wrote an address, and licked a stamp. That was the fun of letters, not writing them.

  Annabel sat at Ethan’s desk. She found an envelope. She dipped his fountain pen in the ink and addressed it properly, as Helen had showed her. She’d memorized Henry’s address from the letter he’d written to her asking about her bicycle riding. She attached the stamp and put it in the slot. The mailman would deliver it the next afternoon.

  The whispering stopped, but no one came for Annabel, who fell asleep on Ethan’s bed and dreamed about him. It wasn’t a good dream. In it, Ethan was a sailor in a war, and he died. The dream made her cry. She woke when Mama called her down to supper, glad it was just a dream and not real life. She dried her face and went downstairs to eat. She couldn’t remember being this hungry in her entire life.

  BEFORE long, Henry would have to leave his rented room for the Majestic to do his sound check for the night’s show. A week ago, he’d have been out the door already, counting down the minutes until he could see Flora again. They hadn’t replaced her since her departure, and she was spending all of her time at the airfield, breaking in the new Staggerwing Helen had purchased. Henry was now singing Flora’s numbers, but he wouldn’t perform “Someday,” no matter how much Sherman and the audience begged. The audience, he ignored. Sherman and the band, he promised a new song as soon as the right idea struck.

  He’d been trying to write one, but all that he’d produced were notes to Flora, notes he knew he’d never send.

  Someday, we will climb the Eiffel Tower.

  Someday, we will lie on the sand beneath an Italian sun.

  Someday, we will play music in New York City.

  Someday …

  There were so many of them, each more vivid than the last. He’d torn the page into strips so there was one wish on each ribbon of paper. These, he slipped into his jacket pocket when Mrs. Kosinski knocked, because they were only meant for one set of eyes.

  Henry opened his door.

  “This came for you in the post.” Mrs. Kosinski stood there in her housecoat, examining the letter. “Looks like little-girl handwriting, if you ask me.”

  He held out his hand. After a moment, Mrs. Kosinski relinquished the envelope. She waited in the doorway.

  “Thank you,” Henry said, ignoring the look of disappointment on her face.

  He closed his door, leaned against it, and eased open the flap, expecting a letter from Annabel. But it was from Ethan. He read it twice, the second time sitting on his bed because the contents were so bewildering. On its surface, Ethan’s tale made no sense. But below that, in the part of Henry that could feel the truth of things as easily as he felt music, as deeply as he felt bound to Flora, he knew everything Ethan had written was true. It was true, and it changed everything, for all of them.

  He put the letter into his pocket next to the someday notes. For a moment, he wondered what he should do, because he did not want to look foolish in front of Flora. But only for a moment. And then he had his hat and his coat. And he was out the door, for he was not going to the Majestic.

  “Musta been some letter!” Mrs. Kosinski called out after him.

  He did not reply.

  GOING on instinct alone, Henry took a cab to the airstrip. He spent the last of his money doing so. Had he guessed wrong, he’d have been stranded there, miles from home. It was a possibility he didn’t let himself consider. And he found her exactly where he’d imagined she’d be, working alone on her new plane, a Staggerwing the color of a candied apple. Dressed in coveralls, she wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, as if it had been a long day with much to do. But she looked happy — so content Henry almost turned away and began the long walk back to the club.

  He couldn’t resist watching her a moment longer, taking in the way the slanting light found her, the way she seemed to know exactly what she was doing as she circled the red Staggerwing, studying it from every side. If he could have left her to this happiness, knowing he was leaving her free to do this thing she loved, he would’ve, without a second thought.

  But if he could not persuade her to love him, she would die.

  That was the end of the Game Ethan had spelled out in his letter. Henry wished it had been otherwise. Had he been the player cursed to die, that would be different. He would have hated such a fate, but not nearly so much, particularly since the Game had brought them together.

  The sky darkened as Henry stood there, weighing his options. The ruin of the situation and the cruelty of the Game sank in fully. He saw two choices: He could keep the truth secret and make one last play for her, ask her one last time to love him. If she agreed, and did not know her life depended on it, then he would know she was telling the truth. Or he could tell Flora of the letter and use it as leverage. Surely loving him was preferable to death.

  But to love someone in order to avoid death: This was no form of love at all. This was cowardice. Flora would never choose it.

  As he stood, he realized a third option.

  He’d tell her the truth. If she refused him, he would find Death, and he would offer his own life in trade. Would it be enough? It had to be. It was all he had left to give.

  Flora finally noticed him. “Don’t you have a show tonight?” She tucked a lock of stray hair behind her ear.

  “I had something more important to do.”

  “Henry,” she said, her voice full of warning.

  “I won’t take much of your time,” he said, walking closer. “There’s something … something you ought to know. Is there someplace we can go, someplace where we’re not outside like this?”

  She led him to the hangar. He handed her Ethan’s letter, which she read in the light of a single bulb hanging down from the ceiling.

  “Henry,” Flora said afterward. “You can’t tell me you believe this is true.”

  “I didn’t want to believe it,” he said. “But I can feel it. Can’t you?”

  Flora didn’t reply for the longest time. Her teeth chattered. As e
ver, Henry gave her his jacket.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m not even cold. I don’t know why I’m shaking like a wet cat.”

  “I can guess,” Henry said.

  More silence. Flora folded the letter and handed it back. “I don’t want any part of this. Even if it’s true, it’s humiliating. We’ve been played. Tricked. Manipulated. I never consented to be owned like this. It’s barbaric.”

  He looked at her in disbelief. “Is that what you really feel? That’s all?”

  “What do you mean feel?” she said. “I don’t know anything about what I’ve ever felt. And neither do you. You can’t. Everything you feel — everything you’ve felt — that was put inside of you by someone else for his own purposes.”

  “But I can know,” he said. “I do.” He reached for her hand, but she pulled hers away and hid them behind her back. “I don’t care how I came to feel this way about you. I want it to continue forever. I want to give you everything —”

  Flora held up her hand so he’d stop. “I knew better than this, Henry. I did. All along, I knew I wanted nothing to do with love. And it’s madness for us to continue, knowing how it will end.”

  “You can’t mean that,” he said. “It doesn’t have to end that way.”

  “I refuse to submit to it. I choose not to believe. Not in the Game. Not in the consequences. I’m going to live my life, by myself, as I choose, and I suggest you do the same.”

  “What if we ran away?” He hated how desperate his voice sounded.

  “Henry.” She looked up at him, her eyes glazed with tears. “They’d find us.”

  “Maybe not. Or at least maybe not right away. It’s worth a try.”

  “I can’t say yes to this, not this way,” she said. “If only —”

  “If only what? Just say the word. What do I need to do?”

  She turned away from him. “There’s nothing you can do. So now, before we hurt each other any more, let’s say good-bye. I’m not going to live on anyone’s terms but my own. With Helen’s sponsorship, I’m going to make that trip. It’s going to change everything for me.”