A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult)

by Dot Hutchison

  And a more terrible idea, one that pricks needles along my spine and makes my head swim: is she all right with that?

  Was she part of it?

  She crosses her legs at the knee, her hands resting atop it with her right hand covering her left. She hides the ring so often, like she’s ashamed of it, like it doesn’t—or shouldn’t—exist. This is the woman who decided to marry the first man who asked her so she wouldn’t have to make the more difficult choice between them.

  I don’t think she knows.

  I don’t think she’d allow herself to.

  Horns blare all around us, and the car moves forward a few yards, that much farther from the school and her son and her husbands, away from my parents. Still, memory sits heavy between us.

  Which is worse, to struggle to fly against the tether that always snaps you back? Or to accept the tether with such blind contentment that you don’t even mind when your wings are clipped?

  CHAPTER 14

  I know I should tell Father that the pills aren’t working as they were so he can make me an appointment with the doctor for different medications. It’s happened before, and the doctor said that was perfectly natural, that the body develops immunities or that it can change as it goes through puberty. Different pills might prove my mother wrong, might take away the sights and sounds, might restore the barrier between myth and reality. They might make me blind to the changes coming. They might leave me deaf and unbalanced in a world that’s suddenly so small and limited.

  But I don’t want to go back to the cold place. Every time we’ve had to adjust the medications, they lock me in the cold place until they’re sure the new chemicals are working, so I can’t accidentally speak the truth before the pills are strong enough to stop me. Then I’m surrounded by machines and cameras and strangers with needles and I can’t …

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

  There’s another storm building outside, fierce and shrieking even though it hasn’t broken yet. Winds race through the gardens and the woods, rattle branches into a murderous thunder against the sides of the house. The song of the bean sidhe is soft now, almost done, just a whisper, an echo. The death they might grieve forever, but they mourn only the ghost that is sorrow.

  Behind that though, woven through the winds, are the hoofbeats and feral cries of the Wild Hunt in the woods. They always ride when the winds are fiercest. Sometimes I think the wind hurts them, burns their skin and strikes tears to their eyes with the speed of their chase, and that they use this as distraction from the greater pains. They’ve been riding for so long already, countless centuries, and they must ride still or turn to dust as they dismount.

  I wonder if any of them choose that death, choose to suddenly age and crumble into dust and ash when the endless Hunt becomes too much.

  Such a price do men pay when they would visit with the kings of faerie. There is always a price to see their private world.

  I lie awake in my bed, the blankets pushed back and my knee-length nightgown bunched against my thighs. There is no ceiling fan in my room, only the painted-over holes to show where one used to be, so the air sits in heavy pockets wherever the weak push of the air-conditioning vents can’t reach. Through the walls to my right I can hear Father snoring as he does whenever the weather changes, a deep, stuttering sound that seems more like he’s choking than simply breathing wrong.

  Laertes isn’t in his room. He was for a while, but then his phone rang and I heard him sneak out. He’s probably in town now, charming the pants off some girl who hasn’t listened to her friends and doesn’t realize that he isn’t making her any promises. They’ll have sex and maybe he’ll call her again, but it’ll only ever be for something physical, something with no ties and no demands, nothing he ever has to keep track of or give himself to.

  It should disgust me, but in this one way, Laertes is our mother’s son. In every other way, he’s Father’s, but he still has this one piece of Mama. He doesn’t think of it that way because he’s never known how she was, but it comforts me even as it probably shouldn’t.

  A bell tolls through the dead night, clear and poignant, one rich note for each hour. Three o’clock in the morning, and I have yet to sleep.

  At this point, I might as well give up and concede that I won’t. Not this night, at least.

  The house is still. Not silent but still. I can hear Father’s snores on the third level, and on the second I can just barely hear the music Horatio plays to help him sleep. On the bottom level, a light glows from the Headmaster’s study. I can hear Claudius’ voice but no other; he must be on the phone. It should startle me, but I suppose he has many contacts over the world from his traveling days. What is absurdly early here must be quite reasonable for whoever he’s talking to.

  Did he get the poison from one of those people? Some way that would be harder to trace to him? Or did he manage it all himself so there wasn’t even the potential of a trail?

  Sweat pearls on my skin as soon as I step outside, the humidity a deep weight in my lungs. Almost it makes me think of drowning. Strands of hair stick unpleasantly to my face, neck, and back. I’m on the wrong side of the house for the winds that whip through the trees.

  As I walk around to the back, to the gardens, I can see a light on in Dane’s room. Not the main light, but something smaller, softer. A desk light, perhaps? I’ve never been in his room, never even stood in the doorway, but it seems right. He’s just a shadow from here. I think about going to him, about asking if he wants to walk with me, but I need this moment for myself.

  He’s going away.

  Or at least trying to, which really amounts to the same thing. For days he’s done nothing but read over the study abroad information, seizing on it as a way to run from his father’s death and mother’s betrayal, a way he won’t have to see his uncle officially take his father’s place. He could run away, hide himself for months in some foreign country. Maybe he could be someone new there, someone who doesn’t have the weight of Elsinore Academy’s legacy, someone who isn’t lost.

  He’s got Laertes excited about it too. My brother has nagged our father endlessly over the past few days and seems very likely to continue. Father isn’t pleased; he worries what would befall one of his children so far away, so far from his immediate supervision and influence. He tries to brush it aside, tells Laertes that he’ll forget about it soon enough, but Laertes can be stubborn, far more so than Father has any reason to suspect.

  Even Horatio looks through the papers. His scholarship doesn’t cover options like study abroad, but Gertrude—seeing Dane’s interest in it—has offered to pay for it herself should he decide to pursue it.

  They’re all leaving or trying to leave. They all want to walk away.

  I stay and I stay and I never walk away and I watch everyone else walk away from me.

  The wind snaps suddenly, whirls my hair around me in a purple-black flurry, and I slap a hand to my thigh to keep my nightgown down. Either Claudius or Dane could see me through their windows, perhaps even Father should he awaken.

  I can see flashes of the Wild Hunt as it moves through the deep woods, lean greyhounds draped across the saddles. Centuries ago, a human king and his men visited a faerie king in his own lands and emerged to find three hundred years had passed in the space of an evening. The first man to dismount aged and crumbled to dust and ash before his fellows’ eyes. But faeries aren’t entirely without mercy; their host gave them a pack of fae hounds to carry with them. The dogs will know when the men can safely dismount, and they’ll jump down from the saddles. Until then, the men ride and ride and ride through the centuries, waiting for that sign.

  They’ve been waiting so long. Sometimes I wonder if the dogs will ever jump down.

  I stop when my feet touch something wet. Without realizing it, I’ve come to the edge of the lake. Not the dock, nor the stretch of willows where Dane lit a fire inside me that won’t abate, but the midpoint. The property line of Elsinore Academy ends ha
lfway through the lake; the rest of the lake belongs to a reclusive couple who insisted on some sort of boundary being erected to keep students off their side of the water. They mounted tall posts deep into the lake bed and strung a chain between them to keep the boats from crossing. There’s nothing to be done against those who swim—it’s a rite of passage to swim to the far side and leave something on the couple’s back porch—but it clears the school of responsibility.

  It’s also the way to the island.

  Mama showed it to me, taught me the trick. I haven’t done it in years, haven’t been to the island since I drowned, but I step forward onto the first post despite the fear that crawls under my skin.

  They’re all going to leave.

  Maybe this can finally be the time I walk away. The time I leave.

  I step carefully onto the links of the chain, remembering what Mama said. The chain will sway; it always does. If you tense up, you’ll fall. Sway with it. Don’t sway so hard you make it sway more, but let your body move with the chain so you can keep your balance.

  It would be easier to just go into the water and pull myself along the chain, but there’s something about walking across the water that appeals to me, that appealed to Mama. My feet remember the journey. It’s a drunken, unsteady progress to the second post but easier to the third, to the fourth, until I feel as though I could walk a tightrope without fearing the fall. Not even the wind scares me. It tugs and pushes in equal measure, stirs my hair about me like a cloak of silk rags, licks away the sweat from my skin.

  The last post stands a little more than a foot from the edge of the island, from the tangled roots that creep out into the water. I lurch back and jump, land clumsily on the thick grass that grows between the surrounding willow trees. The center of the island is a thick profusion of flowers, carefully tended every day by Jack. He comes out here in a little canoe, every morning and every evening. My mother’s grave may be in the cemetery, but this is her shrine.

  The wind teases the flower crowns tangled in the drooping willow branches. Some of them are old, dried in place, but others are so fresh I know the morgens have been playing at the edge of the water again. Jack never says anything when he sees the flowers in the trees. Jack always knows more than he says.

  We used to dance here, Mama and I, to the music that no one else could hear. Our feet crushed the thick grass in a circle between the flowers and the trees, hidden from the school by the curtains of the willows. And she’d laugh—oh, how she’d laugh. We spun through the night, our pale skin aglow in the moonlight, our dark hair like shadows.

  I take one step, then another, and spin on the ball of my foot and feel my hair spin with me. My nightgown tugs at my legs, narrow and confining, and I shrug out of it and drape it over one of the branches. My underwear follows. Now there’s nothing but moonlight, nothing but the pale gleam of silver and white and lifeless veins of blue under the skin. Just as my feet remember how to cross the chain, they remember how to dance, and I spin around the shock of flowers with my arms spread wide.

  So many steps but always in a circle, always coming back to the same point again and again. Never going anywhere. Never leaving, never walking away, always coming back.

  The wind murmurs through the leaves and kisses away the sweat as soon as it forms on my skin. Thunder rumbles softly overhead, drums to dance to, to sway to.

  We dance in the circles, and the rest of the world goes away. There are no bruises, no poisons, no foreign places. There is no marriage, no death. Colors fade away, lost to the deepest shadows and moonlight. There is no ice blue, no drowned skin or coffin linings or attendant dresses. Dane belongs here, in the shadows of the night dance, his dark grey eyes and sable hair and moonlight skin. He belongs here, but he doesn’t know how to dance, because the dance isn’t a word to play with and dissect and destroy. He can’t understand the dance, can’t make it less than it is by finding every meaning.

  My mother’s laugh fills the circle.

  It’s only later that I realize it’s coming from me.

  CHAPTER 15

  Two nights before the students return, Claudius decides to hold a formal dinner to celebrate. I’m not even sure what he intends to honor with this gathering; he has held so many celebrations through the past two months, so many gatherings with little more outward point than to talk and drink too much wine. Gertrude doesn’t stop him, doesn’t tactfully suggest that such festivities make him less than dignified.

  She simply asks me to assist her and doesn’t look directly at her son.

  Any more tension and Dane will snap, but this is not something either Gertrude or Claudius chooses to see. He, Horatio, and Laertes have all formally submitted their requests for the study abroad programs; Laertes has set his sights on France, while the other two aim for Germany. They all promise to write me long letters in place of the e-mails Father would surely read, sending them by way of Jack, but they’re promises that will most likely be forgotten as soon as they step foot off the planes. I try to be happy for them, but it’s hard.

  They’re my only friends.

  I don’t know if it came from growing up at the school, if it’s from the fact that I died, or it’s just something to do with me, but I’ve never been able to make friends with the other students. I try sometimes, in an awkward and thoroughly self-conscious way, but such conversations never last long. The only girls who willingly talk to me are the ones who are trying to get to my brother and think cozying up to his sister is a sure way of achieving that.

  If they spread their legs, that’s a very sure way of getting my brother’s attention.

  Sometimes I even tell them that.

  They never seem to appreciate it.

  The Board of Governors will be here tonight, along with a handful of influential donors, people Claudius desperately needs to keep happy through this first year. No one says the word probation, but it’s understood. If, at the end of his first year as the Headmaster, the Board is unhappy with his performance, they will seek to replace him.

  Reggie Fortin won’t be here, though he has the right to attend. He’s at his school preparing for the year ahead. His uncle, whose health is poor, has sent representatives to speak for them. Rumor says that they want to institute an exchange program for the students. They don’t mention the girls specifically, but I think we all understand what isn’t said: they want the girls from Elsinore Academy to see what a true education should be, to get the students behind their push for reform.

  I think they’ll be the only ones surprised when Claudius refuses. The trophy wife traditions of Elsinore Academy have given Claudius a wife so docile she’ll marry her brother-in-law only six weeks after her husband’s death and support him wholeheartedly in every endeavor. It’s not in his interest to change that. If he has his way, which seems likely, future versions of himself will still have the opportunity to cull obedient, charming wives from the graduates of this school.

  I lack the assurance a good society wife must have, but in so many ways I am Elsinore’s ideal female graduate. I don’t speak unless spoken to; I never venture an opinion; I almost never show an inclination but for what my father—who is, after all, the Dean of Curriculum—instructs. If I weren’t a ghost tied to my dead mother in the lake—if I had things I wanted to do and a person I wanted to be—I think I would hate it here. We have separate classes that teach us nothing of the world beyond our boundaries, and sometimes I wonder how many of my classmates would leap to exactly the chance Reggie Fortin wants to offer.

  When we have everything arranged to her satisfaction, Gertrude shoos me upstairs to dress. She mentions the ice-blue dress, but I pretend not to hear. I’ll never wear that dress again, not only because of the purpose it was put to but because it’s the color of death and drowning and all cold things. I don’t have a choice of wearing the color given the accents on the school uniforms, but that dress I can banish to the depths of the closet.

  Upon my return to the first floor, Father fusses over the
low, square neckline of my simple lavender dress and the height of the heels, his mostly grey and white hair just slightly untidy. More than ever, with Laertes so desperate to get away to someplace new, Father needs me to be the biddable little girl with nothing more than flowers on my mind. He needs me to be a good daughter. Gertrude chides him for it, a delicate dance of tact and friendship that says nothing of my mother. He lets it drop, but he watches me; his worried eyes track me whenever Dane and I cross paths.

  Dane, for his part, takes care to make sure this happens as frequently as possible. There’s a part of me that delights in the possibility that he just wants that much to be around me, but I know Dane too well: he’s doing it because my father’s concern amuses him. It’s less than kind, but at least it means he’s not sulking in the corner.

  Nothing can make him polite to the guests.

  Perhaps she realizes this, because after a time, Gertrude gives her permission for us to hide in the alcove under the stairs. Laertes keeps to Father’s shoulder, a taller shadow with barely concealed impatience. The rest of us retreat immediately. Though the guests are invisible from our places on the velvet-covered benches, the sounds float on the air, contained bursts of too-light laughter and the low rumble of grave conversations.

  Sheltered from sight, Dane tucks an orchid into my hair and laughs as Horatio and I try to remember its meaning. Finally, he leans forward, lips moving against my ear, and tells us it stands for delicate beauty, and Horatio smiles at the soft kiss that follows.

  Eventually, however, all the guests are gathered, and Father’s assistant Reynaldo retrieves us for the first stage of festivities. We all gather in the parlor, flutes of sparkling champagne in our hands, and watch the new headmaster mount the small platform against one wall. It’s little more than two steps, but it gives him the advantage of height, drags the eye to him as something to be noticed. Gertrude stands on the step below him, beautiful and elegant in a sapphire silk sheath.