Missing Mr. Wingfield

by E. Christopher Clark

  She almost told him. A few months ago, before she’d seen what she’d seen, Michael was almost on par with Desiree in the cool parental figure department. But not anymore. No, instead of telling him, she pled the fifth.

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “So, what’d you think of the play?” she asked him, looking for a way to distract him, to get closer to the mug without him noticing.

  “I enjoyed it,” he said. “It was helpful.”

  “Helpful?” she said, circling, trying to see if he would counter. “How so?”

  “Well, it was about my great-grandfather, wasn’t it? I always wanted to know how our family got so fucked up, and now I know.”

  “Well,” she said, “only some of the story was verifiable fact. Uncle Matt embellished the rest.”

  “Oh, so he’s still Uncle Matt, is he?”

  Man, he was insufferable. Tracy sighed, then said, “Seeing as he’s actually my mother’s brother and not just her cousin, yes.”

  “Semantics,” said Michael, still not moving, still not turning away.

  Get him talking about the play, she thought. Get him pontificating. He’ll pace. You’ll get your chance.

  She asked, “How much did you know about Old Silas before seeing the play?”

  “The basics,” he said. “I knew he was a Civil War vet, that he married a whole bunch of times before he met my great-grandmother, that he was in his seventies when they tied the knot. I knew he was an asshole to his two kids.”

  “What did you know about the boot?” she asked.

  “Not a lot,” he said. “And I still don’t get why it was so important.”

  He didn’t get why it was so important?!? How could he say that he finally understood how the family got fucked up without also understanding the metaphor of the boot?

  “The boot was a metaphor?” he asked.

  Shit, she thought. How much of that did I say out loud?

  “For what?” he said.

  “God,” she said, “you really are hopeless.”

  “OK then, Ms. Valedictorian, illuminate your poor, uneducated uncle.”

  She sat on the table, beside the mug, exasperated. And then, when she realized where she’d sat—beside it instead of in front of it—she was even angrier. A few inches to the left and she could have done the deed behind her back before he was any the wiser.

  “The boot belonged to his father,” she said, “a mariner who preferred the adventure of the sea to the quiet comforts of his family.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I knew that.”

  “When his father drowned at sea, the boot was all that washed ashore. It was a warning, but it was also a promise.”

  “A promise of what?” said Michael.

  “A promise of possibility without boundaries, of—”

  “Death isn’t a boundary?”

  “You know what I mean?”

  “I don’t think I do,” said Michael.

  Tracy rose, looked him in the eye. She said, “Our family broke and continues to break because we can’t make choices. We want the adventure the boot promises, but we also want the safety that comes when the boot is under the bed instead of on our foot.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair,” said Michael. “To your mom, or to anyone else who—”

  “This isn’t about my mom,” she said. “This is about you.”

  Bingo! That got him, hurt him. He glared at her for a moment, his eyes wide. His lips trembled, the corners of them twitching, as if caught between a smirk and a frown.

  He asked, “You don’t think I’ve made choices in my life?”

  “I know you haven’t,” she said. “I know you can’t.”

  He made to open his mouth and say something, but then seemed to stop himself short. Then, he walked toward the exit, mumbling, “You have no idea, kid. No idea.”

  While his back was turned to her, Tracy slipped the nip bottle out of her pocket, unscrewed its cap, and poured its contents into his mug. She gave the mug a swirl, pocketed the empty bottle, and then said, “Don’t forget your mug.”

  Michael turned around, faced her again. “My mug?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’m done cleaning up in here for the night.”

  He came back to the table, picked up the mug, and took a swig.

  “Does it really help you relax?” she said. “The cocoa?”

  “I wake up pretty panicky, most mornings. This has always done the trick.”

  She smiled, gave a light laugh. “Chocolate always hypes me up,” she said.

  “Don’t I know it?” he said. “All the times I babysat you as a kid…” He trailed off, sipped at his cocoa again. “You really think I can’t make choices?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” said Tracy. “Mom couldn’t either, not until she had that Christmas Carol dream of hers.”

  Michael chuckled. “I’ll never forget when she told me about that. Sounded like she was high as a kite. But whatever the three spirits showed her, it did the trick. Within a year, she and the Runt were through and she and Desiree were together at last.”

  Tracy slipped her phone out of her pocket, checked the time, and then said, “She had a little help getting that dream going, I have to admit.”

  “What do you mean?” said Michael.

  “Well, Uncle Matt was getting sick of hearing her bitch about her plight, so one night he asked me to slip a little something into her evening tea. I was young and angry and he promised it would make things better, so…” She trailed off, waiting for him to catch on.

  “Really?” said Michael. “He did that? You were, what, seven or eight? What was it?”

  “An old family recipe,” said Tracy. “Or, well, it was something one of Old Silas’ wives cooked up. The Wiccan. The one he strangled to death in the play.

  Michael shook his head, finished his cocoa, and set it down on the table again. Tracy checked her phone. It was almost time.

  “Christ,” said Michael, “I can’t believe he got you involved in that.”

  “It was all for the best,” said Tracy.

  “Yeah,” he said, “because she was going to sleep. But what if she’d gotten up in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, showing him the nip bottle. “ I guess we’re going to find out.”

  “Tracy,” he said, rubbing his stomach, then clutching it as he winced. “What did you…”

  He stumbled as he came toward her, tried to steady himself on the chair. But it was no use. O true apothecary! she thought. Thy drugs are quick.

  “I know the truth about you,” she told him, as he began to twitch. “It’s time to make sure you know it, too.”

  From the second floor, she brought mannequins. From the attic, she brought a table, chairs, and props. And then, once everything was set, she went back to the lighting booth. From the cooler, she withdrew another nip bottle, with a less potent brew, and she downed that herself. She had to drink it quick. It was the only way, according to Ada’s notes, to induce a collective hallucination, to join Michael on the trip which he was about to take.

  When she began to see things out there on the stage herself, things that weren’t there but were, she lay her hands upon the lighting board and got the show on the road.

  21

  Guilty Feet That Got No Rhythm

  The courtroom was a sort of mashup. On the one hand, it looked the trial scene from The Undiscovered Country, Michael’s favorite Star Trek film: a big circular room with a beam of light shining down on the platform where stood the accused. But, on the other hand, it was too colorful to be Klingon. The jury, seated all around them, was comprised of every female comic book, cartoon, science fiction, or fantasy character Michael had ever crushed on, each of them done up in the most audacious outfit they’d ever been seen in. They all looked annoyed to be there, everyone from Slave Leia to Little House’s Laura Ingalls, from The Little Mermaid to Lost’s Charlotte Lewis. There were six copies of Scarlett Johanss
on seated behind seven variations of the X-Men’s Jean Grey. And Dana Scully was there too, chatting it up with what looked like a Vulcan and looking quite pleased to be rid of Mulder for the evening. God, Tracy thought, as she looked around, I have never seen so many redheads in one place.

  Michael was still out cold, though clad now in an orange jumpsuit. Fitting, Tracy thought, given that orange was Michael’s favorite color. She thought of how happy he’d be, under different circumstances, to have found something to wear in that shade besides his ratty old Reese’s t-shirt.

  And what was she wearing, Tracy wondered, looking herself over. Judge’s robes, of course. Simple black. Nothing crazy. No powdered wig, or anything like that. She sat behind a tall podium, looming high above the scene, like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. A banner hung down the front of the bench, a rather severe looking Venus symbol stitched into it.

  Tracy took up her gavel and banged it down three times. “All rise!” she called out. And when Michael still did not stir, she waved to the shadows at the foot of her bench and two bailiffs stepped out, one done up like a swordswoman of old, the other like a gunslinger from beyond the apocalypse. The two women pulled Michael to his feet as Tracy repeated herself: “I said, ‘All rise!’”

  Michael squeezed his eyes together, shaking his head. “Where am I?” he said.

  “Michael Silver,” said Tracy, “you are on trial for your crimes against femininity.”

  “On trial for what?”

  Tracy smirked down at him. “Anything you say can and will be held against you in this court. So, we recommend you shut up.”

  “If this is a trial,” said Michael, “where is the jury? Where are the lawyers?”

  “This is your courthouse,” said Tracy, waving her gavel around, urging him to see for himself. “You built it, brick by brick. So, you tell me.”

  He said nothing for a minute, as he looked around, locking eyes with several of the women his subconscious had invited to render his verdict. His jaw went slack, his lower lip drooping. Tracy couldn’t tell if he was staring in disbelief, or if he was ogling them.

  “You’re the judge?” he said, still not looking at her.

  “Apparently,” she said. “And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to call my next witness.”

  Now he looked. “Wait,” he said, “the judge doesn’t call witnesses.”

  “In here she does,” said the two bailiffs.

  Tracy was amused by this. All the power rested with her, except for the final judgment. And maybe that was her call, too. After all, the jury was fiction; she was reality.

  “OK, fine,” said Michael. “But don’t you mean first witness, not next?”

  She wasn’t sure what she meant, so she embellished: “We’re halfway through this trial already, Mr. Silver. Have you been asleep this whole time? Is this matter not worthy of your attention? Did you not see me, right here in front of you?”

  “No,” said Michael. “I, uh…”

  “How typical,” said Tracy.

  “How unsurprising,” said the bailiffs.

  “Tracy!” shouted Michael. “Wait a minute. I—”

  But Tracy ignored him. She looked down at the notes in front of her, scribbled so many days ago now, back when the potion was still brewing, when it wasn’t even certain when Michael would be in town, when it seemed like there would be more time to plan, more time to prepare the case. Tracy looked at the notes and saw her mother’s name—Veronica—and that’s who she called first.

  In the real world, she felt her hand sliding up the fader for a second pool of light, off to the left, but she didn’t see the mannequin there that she was expecting. She saw Veronica, a younger Veronica, five and a half months pregnant, in a godawful prom dress the color of a pistachio. Tracy closed her eyes, tried to remember what was real, and then looked down. There was no fader anymore. There was nothing more real than the young woman beside her, nothing closer to the truth than the gavel in her hand.

  “Please,” Tracy said to Veronica, “state your name for the record.”

  “Veronica Amelia Silver,” said the young woman—younger, Tracy realized, than she was herself.

  “And what,” said Tracy, “is your relationship to the accused?”

  “I’m his cousin,” said Veronica.

  “Could you please explain the scene we are about to see?”

  “Scene?” said Michael. “Is this a courthouse or a playhouse?”

  Tracy realized how preposterous it sounded, but scene was what she had meant to say, what she felt compelled to say. She pointed down at him with her gavel. “The accused will remain silent until spoken to.”

  “This is absurd!” said Michael.

  “Guards?” said Tracy.

  The Gunslinger drove the butt of her rifle into Michael’s stomach, and he fell to his knees. Then the Swordswoman grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head backward. She put her sword to his throat.

  “The accused will remain silent until spoken to,” said Tracy. “Do you understand.”

  Still on his knees, Michael nodded. A drop of blood traced its way down his neck, from the edge of the blade and onto the collar of his jumpsuit.

  “Ms. Silver,” said Tracy, “please continue.”

  “This was the night of our prom,” she said, and suddenly it was, the courtroom replaced with a school gymnasium all done up in maroon and white, the DJ playing a schizophrenic mix of Nirvana and Michael Jackson. “I didn’t want to go,” said Veronica, “but my dad didn’t give me a choice. He decided it would be best for the family’s good name if I went with the baby’s father, my soon-to-be husband, to keep up appearances.”

  Out of the darkness beside Veronica appeared Tracy’s father, the Runt, dressed in a tuxedo, a green cummerbund at his waist to complement the dress of the awkward girl beside him. They looked so strange, so young. Not that they were old now—they were the youngest parents in her grade, in fact—but the idea of them creating her this early in their lives was harder to stomach in reality than it had been in theory. Even the photo albums didn’t do this scene justice. Somehow, by the time it came time for photographs, the two of them would figure a way to at least look like they liked each other. But now, standing on the edge of the dance floor, not quite an arm’s length apart, his hands clasped behind his back, hers folded underneath her breasts and above her belly, they looked like they had never touched each other before, let alone touched enough to—

  Tracy shook her head to rid the thought from her mind.

  “Meanwhile,” said Veronica, “the person I wanted to be with, Desiree, wasn’t going to go at all.”

  “But she did go,” said Tracy, “didn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Veronica. “At the last minute, my cousin Michael asked her.”

  Michael stood, shrugging off the bailiffs as if they were ghosts, which is what they seemed to be now. He looked all about the room, searching, it seemed, for Desiree.

  “And she said yes?” asked Tracy.

  “Yes,” said Veronica.

  “Ms. Silver, is it true that your cousin was a freshman on the night in question?”

  “Yes,” said Veronica.

  Tracy scribbled on her notepad, pencil scratches echoing through the chamber. “Do you have any idea then,” she began, “why Desiree, cheerleading captain, star of the field hockey squad, lusted after by hundreds of her schoolmates, would deign to accept Mr. Silver’s invitation?”

  Veronica looked over at Michael, who was still looking around for Desiree. She shook her head, sighed, and then said, “She felt sorry for him.”

  “Why?” said Tracy.

  “Because,” said Michael, still looking, about to step from his circle of light, “because I’d had a crush on her from the moment I first met her.”

  “Mr. Silver,” said Tracy, “I will not warn you again. I’m not interested in your version of things, however truthful you might swear it to be, whatever excuses you might have for—”

&n
bsp; From the shadows came Desiree’s voice. “Let him tell the story,” she said.

  Tracy had heard it all before, the awkward circumstances under which Veronica’s cousin had once crushed on her future wife. Back in the day, Michael swore he was in love with Desiree. At fourteen, maybe he didn’t know what love was, but he knew for sure that he felt something. And it wasn’t just ‘the hots.’ He had more than just ‘the hots’ for her. As his grandfather had so eloquently put it, at that year’s Christmas party, Michael lit up like Rudolph’s nose at the mere sight of Desiree. And if that wasn’t love, then what the heck was it?

  What was it about Desiree, in Michael’s opinion, that made her so combustible? Well, you had to look at it this way: she was a senior, and a cheerleader, and far prettier than any cover girl he’d ever seen, and yet, despite all that, Desiree still said “hi” to him in the hallways at school. She was Veronica’s friend—what a fucking idiot he was, Tracy thought, if he didn’t see they were more than that—and that meant she knew Michael by proxy, and kinda-sorta had to be cordial to him when they bumped into each other at parties and whatnot. But she was under no obligation to acknowledge his existence within the hallowed halls of the high school. And even if she was so obligated, she surely wasn’t required to give him a smile on occasion, or a wave. Acknowledging a freshman’s existence, let alone a freshman boy’s existence, was tantamount to social suicide. And yet—

  Desiree danced with him now, stunning the room in her scarlet satin shift. “I didn’t go to prom with you because I felt sorry for you,” she said. “I said yes because I wanted to put a smile on someone’s face, and if it couldn’t be Veronica’s, if it couldn’t be mine, then why not yours? You were always so sweet.”

  “Objection!” shouted Tracy, ready to hurl her gavel at the pair of them.

  “Tracy,” said Veronica, off dancing with the Runt now, making a fool of her pregnant-ass self. “Give him a chance to defend himself.”

  “No!” said Tracy. “I will not. That’s all he ever does: defend himself. All those pre-emptive strikes to keep us feeling sorry for him and stop us from asking the difficult questions. Like this one,” she said. “Mr. Silver, do you recall where you were on the night of December 31, 1991?”