A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult)

by Dot Hutchison

  I don’t know Claudius the way I know the rest of the Danemarks. He is only these few months past returned to the school from his business ventures, and so I have only ever seen him in passing when he joined his brother’s family for scattered holidays or birthdays. It is easy to suspect the worst of him when I know almost nothing of him. It is unkind of me, but I find that I don’t want to know this cold-eyed man, this stranger who stands in his brother’s place.

  We hesitate at the top of the stairs, reluctant to disturb the Danemarks’ hard-won moment of peace, but the caterers need their plates and mugs returned and there’s really no call anymore to hide in the reading nook. Horatio and I ease down the stairs like shadows, unnoticed against the silence, but Laertes’ steps fall loud and harsh upon the polished wood, and those at the bottom look up at the sound.

  Gertrude reaches out to me and I step forward, let her take my hand and draw me even closer until she can press the back of my hand to her powdered cheek. “Thank you, Ophelia.”

  “If I could be of any help, that’s thanks enough,” I answer quietly, and she smiles through her exhaustion.

  “Goodness, look at us, all crows in our fine feathers.” She shakes her head and stands with both Dane and me to steady her. “We should change. And perhaps … will anyone mind too much if supper is a bit … informal tonight?”

  We all shake our heads, and Dane even manages a shaky laugh. “I’m not even sure I could think of eating,” he admits.

  His mother kisses his cheek, passes a hand along his dark hair in a soothing gesture.

  The house is silent, but my room is not. The keening cry of the bean sidhe pierces the glass of the window, curls in the heavy pockets of warm air the air-conditioning can’t move. It’s softer now that Hamlet is buried, full of a deep mourning rather than a razor-sharp grief. I close my eyes and just listen. Can Hamlet, at rest now within the earth, hear them?

  When I cross to the window, I can see them clustered just beyond the iron fence of the graveyard, five unearthly beauties with long silver-white hair that falls past their feet to puddle like quicksilver in the grass. They wear robes like spun moonlight, glowing gently against the deepening twilight, every feature of their faces sharp and defined despite the distance, carved in such a way no human hand could ever capture. They are faerie woman, the singers of death.

  As the sun sinks into the lake, the bean sidhe are joined by other forms within the cemetery itself, flickering like candles as they slowly gain definition. Mostly to one side of the cemetery though, the side built on unconsecrated ground where the body may gain eternal rest but the soul may not. Tears burn my eyes, and the blue-white shapes waver like flame.

  A knock on the door makes me dash my hand across my eyes even as I turn, expecting it to swing open with no further warning.

  It stays closed.

  There’s a smear of mascara and eyeliner on the back of my hand, but the closed door so puzzles me that I ignore the mess and cross the room to answer the door. Dane stands just outside, one arm against the frame as though it’s the only thing keeping him standing. He’s changed his clothes already, abandoned the suit in favor of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, both black. The angry red that washes his eyes provides his only color.

  One eyebrow arches, and he reaches out with his other hand to trace the lines of black across my cheeks. “You’ve been crying?”

  “I think I was about to,” I admit.

  Hesitantly, as if he’s unsure of the comfort, he folds me into his arms. I can’t help but marvel at it, his heartbeat racing against my cheek. His arms crush the wilted carcasses of the violets in my hair, and they release a last, ghostly scent that’s gone before my body can even register that it was there. There isn’t anything left but an echo of the perfume. All day I have sought to give him comfort, and now he would comfort me. The tears damp my cheeks, his shirt, and I know when he feels them because his grip tightens almost painfully against my back, and I don’t even care because I finally have hope that Dane might recover from this.

  He pulls a folded handkerchief from his back pocket and gravely wipes my face, using the moisture of the tears to clean away the makeup. “You haven’t even changed yet.”

  I glance down at the black dress. In the bleeding light from the hallway, my pale skin nearly glows against the void of color, blue veins close to the surface in my hands and wrists. “I couldn’t decide how.”

  A smile flickers across his face, the ghost of the Dane I knew only a few days ago, the Dane who would seize on the words and play with them, carve them down to every possible meaning until they mean nothing in their ambiguity. But this Dane smiles, and that’s enough for now. The rest will recover with time.

  “I was hoping we could do something tonight,” he tells me. “The four of us. For … for my father.”

  Part of me wants to tell him that this whole day has been for his father, but of course it wasn’t. Funerals are for the living, not the dead. “How should I change?”

  The smile again, and this time his fingers against my face, tracing the sharp line of my cheekbone. “Never change,” he whispers. “Stay exactly like this, exactly you, forever.” He brushes a soft kiss against my lips, his body hunched to close the space between us, and I sway into him, my hand at his hip. Heat swamps me, followed by a fierce shiver until goose bumps race along my skin despite the fire that blazes within. “Never change,” he murmurs again. “But if you could manage to wear something suitable for sitting on the ground while staying exactly as you are, that might be best.”

  I promise to meet him downstairs in a few minutes, and he gently closes the door. My hands wrestle with the fastenings of my dress, but my thoughts are flying everywhere—anywhere—else. Before this day, I have never been kissed, but now Dane has kissed me more than once, and I don’t know if it’s because he craves the simple contact or if it’s actually me he sees.

  A knife slides between my ribs, a white-hot agony aimed unerringly at my heart. I want it to be me, want it to be real, but even if it isn’t, I’ll let him kiss me because it almost makes him smile. Because it eases his pain. There’s something profoundly wrong with that, something that shrieks in my mother’s voice that I should let no one take such things from me, but I don’t think my mother ever loved anyone deeply enough that they even could hurt her, much less loved them enough to let them. I am my mother’s daughter, but I don’t have her selfishness.

  I love and I hurt, inescapable and intertwined.

  If Dane didn’t love his father so much, his death wouldn’t have hurt as badly as it does. To love is to hurt, either in giving pain or in suffering it. Which helps more with grief: feeling the pain or sharing it?

  CHAPTER 6

  Eventually my hands cooperate enough that I can drape the dress across the laundry hamper for the maids, but with Gertrude in charge of my wardrobe, I have nothing truly suitable for sitting on the ground. I’m half naked and shivering for several minutes before I finally find a black skirt and pair it with a black blouse. I hate black, but Dane seems to need it around him just now. Peeling away the nylons, I slip my feet into sandals and open the door to reveal Laertes, his hand curved as if reaching for the doorknob.

  He eyes me suspiciously. “Dane asked to see us.”

  “I know; he told me.”

  “When?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “He came to your room.” Laertes’ gaze is locked on the dress and underthings lying in the open.

  Ah. I let out a slow breath and look him in the eyes. “He knocked on the door and never came farther than the frame. He didn’t enter the room, and he did not see, say, or do anything inappropriate. Laertes, at some point, you really do have to trust me.”

  His expression says that day will never come. Only then does it occur to me to wonder if my lips are kiss-swollen. I have seen it in other girls as they rush slightly late to class or when they emerge from the gardens with their boyfriends—or with Laertes—but I have always supposed
it takes many kisses before such a thing can happen.

  I cannot raise a hand to check without making him wonder at the gesture, so I simply close the door behind me and content myself with the observation that the high collar of his shirt doesn’t quite hide the fading hickey on the side of his neck.

  Horatio meets us at the bottom of the stairs, unashamed of his worn jeans with the threadbare knees and faded shirt that used to be black before too many washings. He stands with a hand in one of the back pockets; in the other, denim bulges around a pack of cigarettes. “Dane’s getting something; he’ll be right back,” he says in greeting.

  When Dane joins us a moment later, a black jacket open over his shirt, his hands are empty. He immediately takes my hand, fingers lacing through mine, and ignores Laertes’ scowl. “Thank you,” he tells us, and even my brother is not immune to the simple sincerity—to the need—that resonates within those words. The scowl fades, and if he does not look at our joined hands, at least he doesn’t speak against them either.

  Dane leads us outside, down the path to the church and the graveyard beside it. I flinch, his hand squeezing mine in response, and I shake my head slightly at the implicit question. I don’t want to speak of it where Laertes can hear.

  But oh, the ghosts!

  They hover above their graves in unhallowed ground, suicides and vocal unbelievers, those who have crossed the laws of Heaven so openly that their souls remain tied to these mounds of earth and decay. As the night deepens, they gain solidity and the flickering blue-white light becomes individual bodies, faces, people, some of whom I’ve known.

  There are others, so many others over the century and a half the school has been open, but the ones I knew are always the hardest to see, their faces so familiar. They always look somewhat baffled to appear in the graveyard, tied to their unblessed graves rather than the afterlife or oblivion. Then, when the initial moments have passed, when they realize they’ll spend another night watching the world they’ve left behind, some of them weep, some of them rage, and some of them look so lost I wonder if they’ll ever find a way beyond this.

  I try to stay away from the graveyard at night, watching the ghosts through my window so they never know that I can see them, hear them, when the medications are forgotten or not working. I tear my eyes away from them as I follow Dane through the fence into hallowed ground. I don’t want them to know. I don’t want them to find someone who can hear them but not help them, and I don’t want anyone to see me interacting with them.

  I don’t want to go back to the cold place.

  Dane stops beside his father’s grave and drops gracelessly to the ground, his long legs folded beneath him. My hand still in his, I have no choice but to follow him to the freshly packed earth on one side of the flower-decked mound. After a brief hesitation, Horatio and Laertes sit on the other side of the grave. We nearly glow in the moonlight, in the ghostlight, except for Horatio, whose tan skin blends with the shadows of the night.

  From the pockets of his jacket, Dane produces two flasks, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter. He tosses one flask across to Laertes, unscrews the cap of the other, and takes a long slug. He offers me both the pack and the flask; I take the flask, ignoring Laertes’ habitual growl of disapproval, and let the liquid burn down my throat. Alcohol interferes with the pills, but they’ve become next to useless anyway. The boys light up; the sour smell of tobacco floats through the sickly sweet scent of the wilting flowers, and soon a thin wreath of smoke hovers between us.

  On the other side of the fence, two of the bean sidhe watch us curiously, brushing their long hair with silver-backed combs as the other three continue to sing.

  How many times have we gathered like this, the boys smoking, the flasks being passed back and forth? I’ve never thought to count it and can’t now that I try. So many times we’ve sat like this in the gardens, in the fringe of the woods, or even somewhere in town. The place is new, the grave is new, but the rest of it is familiar and comforting, even as my skin prickles under the bean sidhe’s sight.

  A candle flickers at the head of the grave where the heavy stone will one day stand. It’s a simple thing, a cheap blackout candle in a dented tin cup, but its flame slides over the gold of the band on Dane’s left hand, the silver class rings, the steel flasks. I know that Jack put it there, Jack who’s pagan to the soles of his feet and believes that the dead need a light to guide them home. He’ll keep a candle lit at the head of the grave for the next seven nights, so whenever Hamlet’s soul leaves his body, the candle will take his spirit and fling it homeward on a wisp of smoke.

  I asked Jack once what he meant by home, but all he said was “whatever comes after.” I suppose he doesn’t believe in Heaven or doesn’t want to presume what the afterlife may be, but he’s always called it home, as if nothing living has a home or if home changes with death.

  “He’s really gone, isn’t he?” Dane asks suddenly, and the way the silence shatters makes us all flinch.

  Even the ghosts look over, woken from their own pain to wonder at someone else’s. They see the four of us gathered, the newer spirits recognize us, and they watch us to see who has died. There are a handful of ghosts scattered across the sanctified ground, murdered or unfinished, but those ghosts are always selfish, with no concern for the living except what touches them. Our grief never disturbs them from their own reflections.

  Horatio flicks the ash from the glowing end of his cigarette onto a small mound of bare earth, where nothing lives to catch the fire. Neither Dane nor Laertes pause to consider where the ashes will land, but Horatio always takes this care. “He is gone,” he answers, “but his legacy remains.”

  “His legacy.” Dane laughs, a humorless sound, and swigs from the flask. “And what will that be, I wonder?”

  “We are, I suppose.” Horatio flexes his hand, studies the glint of his class ring in the light of the single candle. “The first time I ever saw your father, I had just come home from delivering papers, and he was sitting at our kitchen table. I’d never seen a suit so nice. Mom was frantic, terrified that whatever she gave him wouldn’t be good enough. But the Headmaster—your father—smiled and said that tap water was just fine. He seemed delighted to meet my brothers and sisters. They were all in awe of him. And then he offered me a scholarship to come here, said all of my expenses would be paid, said as long as I worked hard and behaved as I should, I’d be guaranteed a free ride into a good college, and I could do whatever I wanted in the world.”

  I knew the Headmaster always went out to offer the scholarships in person once the selection process was finished, but it had never occurred to me that Horatio had once met him in such a way. I’d known Hamlet all my life, familiar before I even knew what familiar was, but Horatio could remember the first time, only six years ago.

  “He took me back with him the next day. I left most of my clothing there for my brothers because he said uniforms were part of the scholarship, but he took me out and bought me clothing and a suitcase so I could walk into the school and not feel … less. I’d never flown before, never even seen a limo, much less ridden in one, never seen anything like my first sight of Elsinore Academy, and I kept expecting him to take it all away, to tell me there’d been a mistake and this was all much too fine for me.

  “And then he brought me into the house,” he continued, his words accompanied by thin threads of smoke. “He introduced me to you, Dane, and said I was a new student and would need help to learn my way before classes started. Then you introduced me to Laertes, and between the two of you, you made sure that I knew the school and grounds better than most returning students. I kept waiting for the catch. For you to mock me because I was poor and in over my head, but you never did. If that’s not your father’s legacy, what is?”

  The ghosts murmur amongst themselves, and one of them suddenly wails an off-key counterpoint to the soft, steady keening of the faerie women. “The Headmaster’s dead!” she cries. The others join her cry, but their voices are human, g
rating against the beauty of the bean sidhe, and I wish I could close my ears to them and still hear the death songs of the keeners.

  Dane hands the flask back to me, and I take another sip, the metal warm where his lips have been.

  Across from me, my brother lights another cigarette from the old one and crushes the now-dead butt against the heel of his shoe, then tucks it behind his ear to dispose of later. “I was unbelievably nervous before my first bout,” he offers, a new contribution to this impromptu tribute. “I spent the entire day before pacing myself into a sick frenzy—couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, snapped at everyone and everything. After dinner, the Headmaster took me to the gym and handed me my gloves and started working me through simple warm-ups. He held the heavy bag or sparred with the punching mitts, and the longer we worked, the more I put my body through the steps I knew so well, the less nervous I felt. Finally, he put his hand on my shoulder and told me to remember that moment, that place where everything felt right and made sense, and the rest would work itself out.

  “When I won the next day, I thought I would burst when he said he was proud of me, not just because I was one of his students or because he looked at me as a … a nephew of sorts but because he actually was proud of me, just as me.”

  He leaves the rest of it unsaid, why that feeling was so foreign and new: our father’s pride is hard to come by, his attention hard to win from his tasks when we want it rather than when we’d prefer to avoid it.

  Dane shifts next to me, and I know he’s waiting to see if I’ll add a story, a memory, some reminiscence that makes the feeling of Hamlet strong between us, but how do I separate out a single thread from everything that is and was Hamlet? And how can I say what I loved best about him when that statement will bring my brother such pain, such anger?

  How can I say, as I sit with the wails of the ghosts and the bean sidhe ringing in my ears, that his greatest kindness was in not treating me like I’m mad?