A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult)

by Dot Hutchison

  He takes the ring back, twirls it on a fingertip, and I watch the gleam in the dying light. It flashes through the sapphire, dark and deep. “I think I have it.”

  “Have what?”

  “The solution.”

  “To what?” I ask on a laugh. “You’re talking in riddles, Dane.”

  “But I am so very good at it.” He lifts my heavy mass of hair and drapes it over one shoulder, takes individual stray strands and places them with others. I tremble under his gentle touch, his fingertips soft and scratchy against the back of my neck, and with a flick of his hand, the clasp of my necklace releases. The thin silver chain drops from the weight of the pendant, but I’m not fast enough to catch it before it disappears down the top of my dress.

  He laughs again, a low and wicked sound that should be unfamiliar, but I remember this Dane, the Dane of mood swings and mischief before they took him to the doctor for his own pills. His voice caresses the curve of my ear. “I’ll retrieve it if you let me.”

  My face flames. His hand sweeps around to trace my collarbone, my sternum, flirt at the edge of the fabric, and finally I clap my hand against his to keep it in place. “Don’t,” I whisper.

  “Why not?”

  Because it’s not real yet. Because I’m scared I may be my mother’s daughter. “Just … don’t.”

  “Then get the chain back, Ophelia, or I will.”

  I shudder, but it doesn’t even occur to me not to obey that low voice with just a hint of a threat. Or perhaps a promise. I’m not sure which it is. My blush spreads down my chest as I move my hand over his, down into my dress where the heavy knot pendant has caught against my bra. I lift it out, and his fingers twine through the chain before I even have it above the line of fabric. In his grip, the pendant slides down the length of silver until it rests in his other palm. He hands it to me, then strings his class ring on the chain, and reclasps it around my neck.

  His ring hangs just above the hollow of my breasts, half hidden by the top of the dress. He presses a hand against it, concealing it even as he pushes it closer against my skin. His lips brush my ear. “Promise me you’ll wear it.”

  “Dane—”

  “Please.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  He tugs at my legs to turn me sideways in his lap, his dark grey eyes trained on my face. He doesn’t even answer at first, just knots the silver pendant into my hair until it can brush against my shoulder. He taps at it to make it swing. “You’re the one thing that’s real,” he tells me finally. “The one thing that makes all of this real, that makes me feel real. I need you, Ophelia. I need to know that you won’t walk away.”

  I’ve never been the one to walk away. I’m always the one waiting for the others to come back, because I don’t have anyone else to walk towards.

  His hands are moving again, teasing beneath my skirt at my knee, the soft skin above it. His other arm supports my back, keeps me against his chest, the length of his fingers uncurled against the side of my breast through the dress. I try to remind myself that he’s done this with other girls and that he only clings to me because I’m the one here, but his ring is cold against my flesh.

  His mouth claims mine, tender but urgent, and I shatter. All the protests, the words of refusal that a good girl should have on her lips, the concern and the thoughts and the things that make sense, they all splinter off into nothingness, shards of unreality that sink into the lake and drown. “There is no word for you, Ophelia,” he murmurs between kisses. “You’re everything. Just … everything.”

  I can hear laughter from the waters, but I can’t remember if I took my pills. I’m almost certain I did, scared that Father would check after breakfast the way he sometimes does, but I can’t … The memory is there, but it’s lost within Dane’s kisses, trapped with every reasonable thing until only this moment exists.

  But every moment ends.

  We’re both breathless when he pulls away, our eyes caught in a kind of horrified fascination. He breaks the line of sight and cradles me against his chest, and somewhere the gasps for air become sobs that wrack his entire frame. There are good days and bad days, as Horatio reminded me. Sometimes everything seems fine, and then the world explodes so suddenly, so drastically, that you can’t even recognize it in the fragments that remain.

  I hold Dane through his tears, comb my fingers through his dark hair just as my mother used to do to me when I woke from nightmares of the fury and despair that ride on ageless steeds through the forest. Just as I did during those long nights, he slowly calms under the repetition. Finally, he captures my hand and presses a scorching kiss against my palm.

  “You’re everything,” he says again, and this time I believe him.

  We stay at the lake until full dark makes it impossible to see. We’re halfway back to the house when he stops on the path and hesitates. “Do you mind if we …”

  I’m used to his silences now, used to the way he trails off as if the words have suddenly lost purpose. “You want to say good night to your father.”

  He nods.

  I shyly reach for his hand, and he lets me take it, lets me weave my fingers through his and give a light squeeze. “Then let’s go.”

  His gratitude is no less for staying silent, and despite the darkness, we turn off the path to cross the yard to the plain stone church. Lamps mounted on either side of the wooden double doors act as a beacon, but we curve to the right, to the cemetery that has become such a familiar sight. The light from the door doesn’t reach far, does little to alleviate the darkness over the graves, but where Dane is blind, I can see the ghostly light of the spirits chained to the unhallowed ground.

  I lead him to Hamlet’s grave. The flowers have died and been replaced with new ones through the week, the freshly cut blooms over the dead ones, but in the right light you can see the decaying remnants through the gaps of the blossoms.

  A blue-white flicker rivets my gaze to the head of the grave. The breath rips from my throat in a hoarse gasp.

  “Ophelia?”

  I shake my head, terror clawing through my skin in a violent wave of goose bumps. It’s indistinct as yet, a vague form of light that could almost be man-shaped. There is nothing there to scare me.

  Except … oh, except …

  “Ophelia, what’s wrong?” Now Dane sounds scared, his voice higher, more like Laertes, and I realize how tightly I’m gripping his hand, almost as hard as he held mine through the funeral.

  I scramble for an answer, a word without meaning because I can’t stand to tell him the truth. “I … Jack!”

  His eyes scan the darkness around us. “He isn’t here, Ophelia, now what’s wrong?”

  “He … he stopped lighting the candle.” My entire arm trembles as I point to where the candle burned every night for a week. “I knew he’d stop after a week, but I thought …”

  “It seems impossible that so much time has passed,” he murmurs.

  He says good night to his father’s grave and leads me away from the cemetery, but I hesitate at the gate and turn to look over my shoulder at the blue-white flicker in the moonlight. There’s nothing there that should scare me.

  Except that the fledgling ghost is born from Hamlet’s grave.

  I don’t know if Jack’s candle didn’t work or if there’s something more sinister that keeps him tied to the dead flesh beneath the earth, but Hamlet is still here.

  With Dane’s hand warm against mine, his kisses still bruising my lips, it’s all I can do not to weep.

  CHAPTER 8

  Each night, Dane and I end our evening in the graveyard so he can say good night to his father’s grave.

  Each night, he thinks it’s futile, thinks there’s nothing he can say that his father will ever hear.

  Each night, I watch the ghost gather strength and definition, and I say nothing. It’s clearer now, the features visible beneath the amorphous blue-white light. The light is always there, but it’s pulling in under the skin until it’s just a halo
around him. I can see the strong features, the dark hair with its dignified sweeps of grey, the close-trimmed beard with the silver ribbons near the corners of his mouth.

  Some nights he watches us, his face lost to an expression of such infinite sorrow that I drown in a storm of tears as soon as I’m safely back in my room.

  Some nights he rages, his face marred by a paroxysm of such fury that I can’t breathe, can’t think of anything but running away.

  And I say nothing to Dane, standing beside me thinking his father is on his way to Heaven, because I can’t bear to give him this fresh pain. Dane can’t see the ghosts; there’s no way for him to ever know.

  In the daylight, when the fear and the sorrow recede, curiosity invades. I tell myself not to ask questions because no good can come of knowing, so perhaps there is something of my father in me after all.

  It takes me almost a fortnight to make a decision on it, but finally I have to know. Why is Hamlet tied to earth? It cannot simply be that he died without confession and absolution or all the world would be awash with the ghosts of good and bad alike.

  After lunch, I retrieve my book from my room and head out into the gardens, but rather than seek out a comfortable bench, I look for Jack.

  Jack Barrows is as much a part of this school as the Danemarks, a descendant of the original caretakers, as tied to the soil as any of the plants he tends. The gardens are extensive even before the greenhouses, but somehow he cares for them all, order within the shock of life. Every day, no matter the weather, he spends his time in the gardens, soil streaked up his arms and across his face, and every night he retreats to his tiny cabin deep in the woods. He comes up to the house to eat with the servants and leave a basket of flowers outside my door each morning and always seems uncomfortable within walls. Some nights I can see the thin trail of smoke from his chimney when he needs more light than the candles can give him in a single-room building with no electricity.

  Hamlet offered to run power out there for him, but Jack refused.

  He isn’t easy to find, but everywhere I walk I can see the careful tending that says he’s been through recently. The roses are pruned back, some of them tied to the delicate trellises that separate the paths; the weeds have been pulled, the soil loose where their roots clung.

  He worships my mother, and I’ve never been sure why. Even now, over seven years after her death, he tends the flowers on her grave and on the island in the center of the lake, continues to bring me flowers every morning as he did when she was alive. I asked Mama once if he was in love with her, and she laughed so brightly, I almost felt ashamed of the question, but then she gathered me close and buried her face in my hair and told me there were all kinds of love. It wasn’t really an answer, but then, what could I expect when I’d asked the wrong question?

  I finally find him in a sunny alcove, on his knees in the grass to transplant violets in a great ring about the space. The stone bench is more a chaise, a low stone couch with one high curved end for support. This was Hamlet’s favorite spot in the gardens, with a view of both the house and the lake, and his afternoon reading often turned into a nap in the sunlight.

  And it was where he died, where Jack found him lifeless and warm. Gertrude didn’t want an autopsy or blood tests, didn’t want the doctors cutting into her husband’s body. As ever, the local authorities were deferential to a fault where the Academy was concerned, so the coroners examined him as best they could and said it must have been a heart attack despite there being no warnings of it in his last physical. Such things can happen, they said, especially in stressful jobs, even though Hamlet was perhaps young for such spontaneous failure.

  Jack grunts a greeting as he lowers a plant into the waiting hole, the roots carefully cupped in his gnarled fingers. He doesn’t look away or pause, intent on his task.

  I sit down on the very edge of the bench, my skin crawling with memory, and wait.

  He isn’t one for talking. I was almost five before he ever said anything to me, and that was just a warning not to play in the lake until I knew how to swim. When Mama was gone on her frequent flights, her escapes from the gilded cage of the Academy grounds, I followed Jack around the gardens with an endless stream of chatter, parroting Mama’s stories of the Wild Hunt and the faeries that danced in the stone rings and the bells that rang in the lake.

  Then one day, he sat back on his heels, studied me for so long I wanted to fidget and squirm, and then handed me a trowel and showed me how to gently dig around the roots of a plant that needed to be moved. He’d always tolerated my presence before that, as he tolerated Laertes, but from that day on, I was truly my mother’s daughter in his eyes, something that pleases him as much as it terrifies my father.

  Sometimes I wonder if there will ever be a time when I’m not defined by my mother, but I do it as much to myself as anyone else.

  Finally, all the violets have moved from the pots to the beds that ring the clearing and Jack’s blue eyes flick to me as he paces the perimeter with a dented, battered watering can. “Penny, Miss Ophelia.”

  “I’ve been thinking of the Headmaster,” I answer, and the wealth of lines around his eyes deepen.

  “I suspect most of us have.”

  “Tell me about when you found him?”

  He shakes his head in time with the gentle shakes of the watering can that ensures no plant is hit too hard with the falling liquid. “Can’t be any good in that.”

  I watch him sprinkle the last of the water, the can stacked neatly beside his other tools when he’s done. Jack always knows more than he says. I don’t even remember when I learned that, if it was something I realized over time or if my mother told me once, but he always knows more than he says. Jack sees more than most people, even if he can’t see the faeries he believes in so fervently.

  It takes more effort for him to kneel than it used to. He must be eighty if he’s a day, and he can barely move when the rain is gathering, but he refuses to retire. The most help he’ll accept is letting others clip the hedges and mow the lawns. He sinks his knees into the damp soil and leans over the violets to search the blooms beyond for invading weeds.

  He isn’t going to say anything else without a reason.

  I open the book in my lap, run my fingers across the shape of the letters without seeing them. Like Jack, I always know more than I say, but I think of the sorrow in Hamlet’s glowing eyes some nights, and other nights the rage, and I know it’s worth whatever momentary pain I have to pay.

  “He’s a ghost, you know.”

  He sits up so quickly that his back seizes, and the next few minutes are lost to a grimace of pain and slow, deep breaths to relax the muscles. Finally, he looks back at me over his shoulder, his thin white ponytail streaked with dirt and bits of plant matter. “You’ve seen him?”

  “Every night,” I whisper. “He’ll find his voice soon; I think he has something he needs very badly to say.”

  “Knowledge is a dangerous thing, Miss Ophelia. Knowledge cast us from the garden that was to the mercy of the demons and the fair folk. All the sins of the world, just from knowing for the first time what sin was.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in sin.”

  “No, but I believe in Nature, and in the acts that go against it.”

  “Meaning?”

  He doesn’t answer right away, and once again, I wait. He’ll either say it or he won’t. I think he will, because the conversation has already come this far, but he just as clearly doesn’t want to say it. “I hear the funeral home did a good job of presenting him for the funeral,” he says eventually. “Made his face smooth and stern.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Wasn’t how it was when he died.”

  I remember death, peaceful and serene, but I know that’s not how death always is. “Is a heart attack painful?”

  “Fearful painful, until you can’t feel it anymore,” he answers absently, and he should know, having had several of them over the past two decades. “But his
face was contorted past that level of pain. Whatever he was feeling had to be worse.”

  “So he didn’t die of a heart attack.”

  “I stripped his shirt to try CPR. Knew it was too late, still needed to try. He had a rash that spread across the skin, rough like oak bark. Never heard of a heart attack causing that.” With a deep sigh, he digs in the chest pocket of his stained overalls and withdraws a small syringe, like the kind doctors use to take blood samples. A large bead of potter’s clay covers the needle’s point. Only a trace of liquid remains, milky but mostly clear, too thick to be water. Dirty fingerprints cloud the surface of the glass, grains of soil caught in the ridges of the handle. He hands it across to me, the glass cool despite the sunlight that beats against us. “Found that half buried in the flowers. Fingerprints are mine, weren’t any on it when I pulled it from the ground.”

  “Poison?”

  “Most like.” He scratches at his bald pate, leaving smears of earth on his leathery skin. “Don’t know what kind, don’t want to. Even if he had a reason to, he couldn’t have taken it himself and buried it in the flowers; he didn’t have any gloves on him, no dirt either except his shoes.”

  I know I should be more shocked, more appalled, but ghosts always come back for a reason. Something had to work against the blessings of the priest and the sanctified ground. I roll the syringe across my palm, careful not to touch the needle or handle.

  “Miss Ophelia.”

  I look away from the syringe to see Jack watching me expectantly.

  “I was the one to find him, but do you remember the first here?”

  I was reading on a blanket by the tiny field of lavender that struggles to survive when I heard Jack’s shout. I left the book, left the blanket, because I’d never heard such a sound from him, and raced to the alcove as fast as I could run.

  Claudius was there before I was. He was the one who called the ambulance, the one who held Gertrude when the noise brought her from the house, the one who ordered us to keep Dane away when he would have come to look as well.