A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult)

by Dot Hutchison

  Gertrude has dressed me in the school colors, making her wedding about the school even when there’s no one to see her statement—no one to be convinced that this travesty of a marriage is actually a perverse loyalty. Of fear.

  For the first time, I think Gertrude might not be quite bright. Clever, perhaps, in the way a society wife must always be clever, but not quite bright, and even as I feel guilty for thinking it, I know the idea will always be there now. She looks so pleased with herself, pleased with her creation.

  I swallow hard and force a wan smile to my face. “It’s a lovely dress.”

  “And you look beautiful in it, Ophelia. I knew you would.”

  She’s dressed as well now, a simple but elegant gown of rose silk that brings a healthy glow to her skin. She bends close to the mirror to adjust the way her hair frames her face, and I take the moment to study the elbow-length sleeves of the dyed lace. The bruises are still there, if one knows to look for them, but they look like shadows of the pattern. Neither Father nor Laertes will see them.

  Dane will.

  If he shows up. I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to me before, but he has no reason to want to be there this evening. I know Gertrude expects him to be there, in the way a mother expects her son to be there for important events, in the way a hostess expects her progeny to do their duty, but what could possibly compel him to witness an occasion he detests with every fiber of his being?

  We walk to the stone church in silence. The men are already there, waiting for us. A basket sits in the nave with two small bouquets entirely of white. Gertrude hands me the one twined through with pale blue ribbon. It’s smaller, but not by much; neither of the arrangements is large or ostentatious.

  “Walk before me, Ophelia.”

  There’s no music, nothing to tell me how fast to walk, and Father’s shaking head makes me decide I must be going too quickly.

  Laughter, sharp and derisive, fills the small gathering at the altar, and I glance to one side to see Dane sprawled across a pew, an unlit cigarette in one hand. “Eager, Ophelia?” he asks. “Or just desperate to get it done with?”

  There’s no safe answer with my father there, and Dane knows it, but he still seems to expect some response. I pull one of the white roses from the bouquet and hand it to him, watch his fingers curl into a fist around it, crushing it.

  Claudius beams as Gertrude walks down the aisle. His hard eyes seem almost human as he watches her. It makes me wonder if, somewhere in wanting whatever his older brother had, he might actually love her, might have loved her all these years that she was his brother’s wife. It still makes my skin crawl.

  Even the priest seems disconcerted. He doesn’t look at either of them as he speaks but keeps his eyes on the open book in his hands. When the time comes to exchange rings, Claudius slides a gaudy eyesore onto Gertrude’s finger, a flashing, bulky thing of diamond and gold.

  Ambitious and clever, but not subtle.

  It looks like it should bruise her skin with its weight. The ring he gives her to place on his own hand is nearly as bad, bright and tacky in the candlelight.

  I look away when he leans forward to kiss her, stare resolutely out one of the plain glass windows. Sap stings my hands, and I know I’m squeezing the stems too tightly, but if I drop the bouquet I’ll just punish my hands some other way to keep from saying anything, to keep from walking away.

  A blue-white flicker in the window slowly resolves into a face as the evening turns to night. A dignified face, full of strength and pride and love. And sorrow. An infinite, nameless sorrow. Hamlet is here to watch his wife and brother marry. Captivated by the weight of his grief, I stare too intently, until Laertes grabs my elbow with a scowl to jolt my attention back to the now-married couple.

  What God has joined, let no man rent asunder.

  No man save Claudius, who sundered a marriage, sundered a life, so he could claim the woman at his side.

  While Claudius and Gertrude pose at the altar for the hired photographer, I mumble something to my father about hair spray and needing air. He nods abstractedly, his eyes on the photographer, and I walk silently and quickly through the nave and out the door, the bouquet left behind on the stone floor. I’m only vaguely aware of Dane following me, too intent on just getting out, getting away. On the front steps, I gulp in shaky breaths.

  “You hate this, don’t you?” I look at Dane, his face soft in spite of the frown that furrows between his eyes. For the first time since the engagement was announced, he accuses me of nothing. “Anyone sensible to true feeling must,” I whisper, stunned by my own honesty.

  “I’m drowning, Ophelia.”

  I remember drowning. The pain goes away when you die. It only comes back when you try to live. I offer him my hand because I have nothing else to offer. He considers it for a long moment, then reaches out and takes it. He doesn’t step any closer and neither do I, our joined hands between us like a promise.

  The ghost walks away from the window and returns to his grave, sits down on the elaborate marble headstone only two days planted.

  But he’s not alone.

  At the foot of the grave, a second blue-white shadow coalesces into an identical form, but where its twin is sorrow, this one is rage.

  A hand closes around my heart and squeezes. It’s impossible to breathe, impossible to think. There’s only fear and a gasping, painful shock. I’ve grown up with the ghosts that play hide-and-seek through the gaps in my medications, but I’ve never seen two ghosts for a single man, never seen a split like this. How is such a thing even possible?

  I’m sorry, Hamlet. I’m so sorry.

  I’m sorry I can’t speak against your murder.

  I’m sorry I can’t protect your son.

  I’m sorry I can’t fix this.

  As if he can hear me, the ghost on the headstone gives a slow, sad smile and a solemn nod.

  The other throws back his head and gives a feral, silent scream that contorts his face, makes his fisted hands shake.

  And even though the lake is out of sight, I can hear my mother laughing.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 12

  The lake has become a strange sort of refuge of late. My mother and I died here, but somehow that holds less pain than the gardens where Hamlet was murdered, the graveyard where the fractured pieces of his soul find different forms, the house where his wife and murderer share a bed. In the lake, the pain went away, didn’t return until they dragged me from the water and bruised my chest and mouth with their desperate need to make me live.

  I’m not brave enough to go to the island yet. Mama taught me how to swim when I was young, and I suppose it’s not truly possible to forget, but I haven’t actually done so since the drowning. I wave to Horatio, swimming laps in front of the island, and he waves back with his next front stroke. I sit on the edge of the dock, where the students sometimes launch canoes on the weekends, and dangle my legs over the edge. The water is still lower than usual, the ever-present promise of rain in the thick air an oft-repeated taunt against our expectations. My feet barely touch the surface, a slight coolness against my skin that almost makes me think I could walk across it like glass.

  I don’t try.

  Once, I might have, and Mama would have laughed and encouraged me in the attempt, but I know better now.

  I know better than to trust what my mother finds delightful.

  Even in life, my mother was a strange, beautiful creature who never belonged in a mundane world. Her marriage vows, the fact of Laertes, of me, were ties that brought her back to the school time and time again, but she always ran away, as if just once she might sever those bindings and be truly free. Always she came back. Always she ran away again.

  Father doesn’t speak of it, and I’m not sure how much Laertes knows, but Mama never stopped to consider what was appropriate to tell her daughter, and when you disappear in public no one ever watches what they say. My mother seduced and betrayed; she threw herself at men to make herself fee
l alive because within her there was such a terrible emptiness that the lake waited patiently to fill.

  That is what I fear when I think of what it means to be mother’s daughter. The madness my father and brother see … it only scares me when I see the reflection of it in their eyes. It’s too natural, too much a part of me, to scare me on its own.

  Before Dane’s kisses, before his needy touch that set my skin on fire, I never knew to fear the rest of my mother’s legacy, the part that seduces and is seduced in equal measure.

  The morgens play at the island, not just Mama and Dahut but a number of them, their laughter like music over the water. Ignoring Horatio, who can’t see them anyway, they dare each other as far as possible up the small stretch of land to gather flowers and weave them into coronets. The ones who manage to get all but a foot out of the lake tease their friends by hanging the garlands from the willows that line the island. The others dive deep and push off, slicing through the water and up, up into the air as high as they can in a fountain of droplets that glitter like diamonds in the afternoon sun, and reach for the flower crowns.

  They left fear behind a long time ago when they left behind life to become morgens. They’ll spend forever this way, young and beautiful, waiting for the chance to lure men to their deaths, men who are foolish and starstruck. It doesn’t matter if the man is good or not, simply that he is male and therefore capable of betrayal. They never try to lure Horatio or Dane because Mama calls them mine.

  I could be one of them, if I wanted.

  Mama promised.

  As rarely as she makes her promises, she always keeps them.

  I wouldn’t know fear, wouldn’t know pain. No one would be scared of me because no one would see me.

  When I think of such things, it isn’t the thought of Laertes that keeps me from calling out to my mother and asking her to keep her promise. It’s partially Father, who needs so badly for me to be a better daughter than my mother was a wife. Mostly, it’s Dane. Because he needs me as much as Father does. Because I’m never the one to walk away. Even when everyone else leaves, I never do.

  I lift the chains at my throat until I can hold both the pendant and the ring in my cupped palms. Gertrude shows such obvious pleasure in seeing that I continue to wear it. Silver and ice blue and sapphire, her unintentional match to her son’s class ring. The school’s colors, the colors of death and funerals and weddings, all tied together so I can’t think of one without recalling the others.

  “Ophelia, what are you doing here?” A sharp voice, taut with fear and accusation.

  Laertes.

  I don’t turn around, my eyes still on Horatio and the laughing morgens. I can hear him stomp down the length of the dock, feel him stop behind me. He doesn’t touch me, but it isn’t hard to imagine his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “It’s a beautiful day,” I answer neutrally. “I’m enjoying it.”

  “What is that in your hand?”

  I let the ring drop so only the double-heart pendant shows, even as I know he’s already seen it. “The necklace Gertrude gave me.”

  “The other.” He doesn’t wait for an answer but drops down beside me, his hand yanking at the longer chain to expose the ring. “Whose is this?”

  “Mine.”

  The answer makes him scowl. “Ophelia, don’t make me bring this to Father.”

  Don’t make me bring this to Father. Don’t make me tell Father. As if I could make him do anything he didn’t want to do. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I returned the threat, if I offered to tell Father of the cigarettes and liquor, of the steady stream of girls that find their way into his bed when Father’s locked away in his office. All the small defiances that don’t mean anything because he never makes them known.

  He squints at the interior of the ring, the smooth silver marred by a slender inscription. “This is Dane’s.”

  Wordlessly, I take the ring from his grasp and replace it within my shirt

  “Christ. Why do you have Dane’s ring?”

  “Because he gave it to me.”

  “Why did he give it to you?”

  Why do you ask so many questions and never make them the right ones?

  “You two have been close since the funeral,” he says slowly.

  I shrug. “We’ve always been close.”

  “Not close like this.”

  “Like what?”

  His scowl deepens. He doesn’t like it when I ask the questions, doesn’t like realizing that he doesn’t have all the answers. “You know he’ll never be serious about you. He never is.”

  Does he realize he’s looking at a mirror rather than a window? Dane’s no blushing virgin, but he hasn’t made nearly the dent in the female student body as Laertes. In the past several years, I can only think of four or five girls whose names have been tied in any way to Dane’s.

  Seeing her children together, Mama detaches herself from the other morgens and glides towards us. Barely a ripple follows her progress through the water.

  “Ophelia.”

  I watch Mama instead of Laertes. Mama smiles, not at all a nice smile, and the cruelty there is aimed at the son who refuses to see her.

  “Ophelia, are you even listening to me? He’s only taking advantage of you!”

  “He’s done nothing, Laertes,” I tell him. “We talk, or we sit together. That’s all.”

  “That’s not the way he looks at you.”

  “You would know, I’m sure.”

  He flinches and hunches his shoulders against some invisible blow. When he loses a boxing match, that’s almost always the reason why: he always flinches from the blow. He cracks his knuckles out of reflex, then winces as his swollen, discolored finger pops back into place. “He’s just going to hurt you. No one can reason with him right now, so you need to be the one to break off whatever this is. It’s my job to protect you, Ophelia.”

  “It isn’t.”

  He hisses and opens his mouth to argue, but a sudden splash makes his shirt cling to him, plasters a few strands of hair across his face. He looks out across the lake for a breeze, ripples, anything to explain this, but Horatio is much too far away. He doesn’t see Mama floating in the water, doesn’t hear her laughing.

  I turn away so he can’t see my smile.

  Once upon a time he saw the same things I did, heard the same things I heard, and always felt guilty because Father gently—sometimes brusquely—told us they were only stories. One night Mama took us deep into the woods and told us to watch for the Wild Hunt as it rode past. She said humans who listened to the Hunt could be driven mad.

  I watched them in wonder, the horses and the greyhounds and the men with their ageless rage and fatigue, and clasped my hands in front of me at the terrible beauty of their passage.

  Laertes clapped his hands to his ears and knelt down in the grass and autumn leaves, buried his face against his knees so he couldn’t see anything. After that, he never did. He never again saw the faeries that dance along the garden paths on moon-soaked nights, never heard the bean sidhe keen for those who died at the school. He convinced himself they weren’t real.

  The last time he saw Mama, she was in a box like the Headmaster’s, lowered into a hole on the boundary of the hallowed ground, a delicate compromise with the priest who couldn’t decide if it was an accident or suicide.

  His cell phone rings in his pocket, and he pulls it out, but he doesn’t answer it right away. He grabs at my chin, forces my face towards his, and studies me as though something would tell him the answers he seeks. “Stay away from Dane, Ophelia. Stay far, far away from him.”

  “Answer your phone.”

  He swears but does, and as he walks away, I can hear him greeting the female voice that emerges, faint and tinny, from the speaker. In theory, it’s our phone, to be shared between us. I’ve never carried it. Who would I call?

  “It’s always a sad day to discover that one’s son is a hypercritical prick,” Mama says with a mock sigh. She lays back against the wate
r, her dark hair floating around her on the surface like an oil slick.

  “You don’t feel sad anymore. No sorrow, no fear, no anger, no pain.”

  “That’s certainly true. But I imagine I might be sad to discover such a thing.” She watches me from half-closed eyes. “Are you going to do as he says?”

  “No.”

  Her laughter makes me question the wisdom of that decision, but it’s the only decision I know how to make. Dane needs me. “That’s my girl.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “Always is.”

  She leaves soon after, returns to the morgens and their easy play.

  I stay on the dock until my skin stings from the sun. I feel like I’ve reclaimed the lake from my nightmares, or at least begun to. Standing, I wave again to Horatio and point to the house so he won’t worry when he sees me gone. I walk barefoot up the paths and through the gardens, avoiding the alcove where Hamlet died. Jack waters the plants as they need it, but some of them show signs of the wait for rain, their leaves curled at the edges, the grass spiky and crisp despite the sprinklers. There are pockets of shade across the garden paths, trees that grow overhead or the sudden height of a hedge, but the sun and lack of water gradually make me light-headed, and I know it’s time to head in.

  I enter the house through the kitchen to ask for some lemonade and a snack. I’m perfectly capable of carrying it up the stairs myself, but the cook tells me she’ll send a maid with it once the current batch of cookies is out of the oven. I don’t argue with her.

  Instead, I poke my head into Father’s study on the first floor. His flyaway hair is barely visible over stacks of folders and papers. I clear my throat to get his attention.