A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult)

by Dot Hutchison

  But they see me.

  So I wait for the people to come out of Claudius’ office, and I beg them to go back in and speak to Claudius again, to tell him of my father’s ghost who comes to his office to work as he always did, to tell him that murdered souls can’t rest easy. Faces melt into each other, time fracturing in strange ways. I reach for a woman’s scarf in the late morning and find myself clutching a man’s sleeve in the early afternoon. They both shake me off, those two and countless others.

  They never go back inside.

  Claudius never comes out when he knows I’m there.

  And eventually, either Horatio or one of the under-gardeners or footmen comes to take me away again.

  And now someone stands, at all times, outside my broken door.

  Mama’s dresses are still hung about my room, tapestries of embroidered cloth that make a brilliant spill against the sterile white walls. She hated the formal occasions, hated the expectations that were made of a school wife. She would have nothing to do with Gertrude’s elegant sheaths and simple lines.

  She wore the corsets of an earlier time, the yards and yards of fabric that swept around her like a fountain. She needed less air in the stays, and then she went to the lake and didn’t need air at all.

  I pull one of the gowns from the wall, all plum silk and sheer black overlays, nearly the color of my hair, my eyes, my bruises. I fumble with the stays, with the laces that tighten around me like Dane’s arms, that squeeze my ribs and waist and my hips. I can’t tighten them all the way on my own, but I can get into the dress, with its drapes of jet beads and the black embroidery, black like the waters of the lake at night. It’s too long for me, but I hold up the skirts and spin around and around and around until the skirts and my hair spin with me in a great spiral of ink, of night, of bruises against the air.

  “Ophelia.”

  I stop spinning, but the air doesn’t. It goes on without me, tugging at me until I fall, and strong hands have to catch me.

  “I … I think I convinced Mrs. Danemark to see you.” Horatio never calls her Gertrude, even though she gave him permission that third summer. “You’ll have to come now, though.” His eyes follow the lines of the dress and pain fills them, darkens them.

  I take his hand and lead him out the open door, then let him take the lead because I have no idea where we’re going. Gertrude will stand in one place, and maybe she’ll finally see me, hear me; maybe I won’t be the ghost my father is, that Hamlet is. He takes me to the parlor, but the stage is long gone, the chairs restored to their private clusters around the space, even the dainty little couches for the women that look as though they’ll collapse if anyone sits on them.

  Gertrude’s eyes are red against her pale face, and strands of silver gleam at the roots of her hair. She’s in her late forties, and for the first time she looks it, looks older, and Claudius’ ring weighs down her hand.

  She weeps at night because she can’t weep where anyone might see her, and now she’s too tired to hide the signs.

  Horatio exhausts himself to take care of me.

  She exhausts herself to take care of an image.

  She isn’t quite bright, isn’t quite clever.

  And now, worn and weary with her makeup painted on more thickly to try to conceal that, she isn’t quite Gertrude.

  “Where is the beauty of the Danemarks?”

  Her right hand—the hand not weighed down by a ring too bright and gaudy—flutters anxiously at her chest. “How are you, Ophelia?”

  “Your hand wouldn’t pain you so were the right love upon it.”

  Her eyes widen, deepening the lines she’s always hidden so well. “Whatever do you mean, sweet child?”

  “He is dead and gone, lady. He is dead and gone, and at his head an angel guards and an angel weeps, all for a band of gold that broke in the face of the truth.”

  “Ophelia—”

  “Black his shroud, and blue, ice blue, dead blue, the color of the school blue—”

  “Claudius!” she cries with relief, and a shadow moves across the floor to take its place at her side. She clings to the hand that extends to her, clutches it against her cheek like a lost child. “Claudius, look, the poor child.”

  “Flowers covered him, clothed him head to toe, but flowers never grow on a grave without tears to nourish them. Where are your tears, lady? Why don’t the flowers grow?”

  Claudius stares, and for the first time since I’ve known him, his eyes aren’t emeralds, aren’t cold, hard stones that keep the thoughts behind the facets. He stares at me, and there’s pain there, the pain that wasn’t there when his brother died. He clears his throat uncomfortably, his hand shaking as he reaches out to touch my cheek. “How are you faring, lovely girl?”

  “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be!” Laughter spills too brightly from my lips, but how great a change this has wrought in him! He never saw me until he couldn’t ignore me and now, how he calls me lovely and lets us see the humanity in his eyes, the humanity that comes at too great a cost and too late.

  Far, far too late.

  “But sometimes we don’t even know what we are, and now a ghost sits in a worn leather chair and shuffles papers that don’t exist. You have made a ghost of him who served you best.”

  Claudius bends down closer to his wife, passes a hand over her hair without mussing the arrangement. “How long has she been like this?”

  “I don’t know; I’ve only seen her just now.”

  They aren’t going to listen.

  “I can’t help but weep to think that you’ve hidden him in the cold ground,” I tell them quietly, “and yet my brother must know of it, if he knows of anything, and so your secrets bury us less deep than you suppose. Good night, lady. Good night, sweet lady.”

  Gertrude is not the cleverest of women, but she has always tried to do well by me.

  Until now.

  Such fools do our fears make of us.

  Chapter 36

  The driveway is full of cars, full of people who mill about in suits and talk over each other, full of students who watch their parents and their parents’ lawyers with wide eyes or cynical smiles. I drift among them and pockets of silence burst around me; they stare after me.

  Do they know my father’s dead?

  Do they know Dane pulled the trigger?

  Do they know Claudius started it all?

  But they don’t know anything, that’s why they’re here, to demand the answers Claudius can’t and won’t give.

  Horatio tugs gently at my elbow to lead me away from a clutch of former students and drapes his jacket over my naked shoulders. The grass is grey now, all the green leeched away by death and fear and frost, and it crunches beneath my bare feet. Away from the drive, away from the people, away from the house of ghosts and those who create them.

  To the gardens.

  But the gardens are also a world of ghosts, ghosts draped in burlap and stripped branches and dead plants that Jack mourns, each and every one, like a slain child.

  Jack has never had children.

  Every autumn, every winter, I think I understand why.

  Because there’s just so much death.

  All through the fractured days and nights, the bean sidhe have sung for my father, but now it’s a new song, gentle and deep and so sincere I wonder if I’ve ever heard them sing before. Their laments are a duty, but now they mourn, truly mourn, and their song kills the few plants still struggling to live. I tuck my arm through Horatio’s and let him lead us along the paths, close my eyes so I can listen to the song that calls an answering sorrow from the star in my chest.

  Death is an old friend at Elsinore Academy, a constant companion to the students whose parents want too much, give too little. It murmurs through their fears, through their desperations, through every test and grade and struggle, through every friendship and relationship, through every e-mail or phone call home, every visit that does or doesn’t come. Death stalks among us, and sometimes w
e take it by the hand and let it lead us to a place where none of it is supposed to matter anymore.

  And it doesn’t matter.

  It just doesn’t go away.

  It ties Hamlet even as it sunders him, ties him to the cemetery and the rage and a promise not yet fulfilled.

  But it freed my mother, released her to the lake that had always waited to claim her, broke the chains of sorrow and fear and feeling until only the memory remains.

  Dahut doesn’t remember, or perhaps she never knew.

  Perhaps she was only ever that terrible emptiness that waited to be filled by the storm-swollen tide. Perhaps the city and the walls and the gates were only ever delaying what always had to happen.

  Mama will forget the echoes. In time. Eventually she’ll forget even the memory of those feelings, won’t be able to name them even in others.

  The lament grows louder, and I open my eyes to see a bean sidhe before us on the path. She holds out a hand, not to take mine but to bring me closer of my own will, to follow her. I asked the bean nighe a question, and they gave me an answer; now the rest of the fae have no reason to ignore me. I broke the wall.

  But perhaps I’ve always been one of them, because the bean sidhe simply holds out her hand until I tug against Horatio to follow her. He can’t see her, can’t hear her, but he studies my face and lets me change our direction without a word of argument. She stops outside the greenhouse, joins the line of silver-white women who can barely be seen in the gloomy grey light.

  The glass is framed in steel and steel is iron, so they can’t go any farther.

  Before this, they’ve never seemed to want to.

  The air inside the greenhouse is humid, each breath a weight in the lungs. Outside, the air is nothing but a cold knife that slices through. There’s never really a way to breathe, to use the air for a way that makes sense rather than shaping it into meaningless words.

  The flowers struggle, and some of them even bloom, but they’re never as vibrant as their cousins outside, never as true. There’s no truth in what’s unnatural. There never is, can never be.

  There’s no truth in a ghost.

  The roses bloom, their colors pale echoes, blush and peach and faded yellow, with never a chance to deepen, to become more. Their thorns are sharper, stronger, a defense against the artificial life. The heavy heads droop towards the soil.

  Towards Jack.

  “Oh, God,” breathes Horatio and crosses himself.

  I kneel down in soil still damp from the watering can at Jack’s side. His eyes are closed, his mouth partially open, and he’s fallen atop one of his arms, the hand over his heart. His left arm is swollen. Everything about him is still.

  Horatio reaches past me to press two fingers deep into Jack’s wrinkled neck, but we both know there’ll be nothing to find. “We should call an ambulance.”

  There’s no point. There’s never a point. Mama was dead before they called. I was dead, but they yanked me back with bruises and breath long before the ambulance arrived. Hamlet was dead; Father was dead.

  Jack is dead.

  The ambulance never matters.

  Petals drop from the roses, their edges curled and withering, and brush against Jack’s leathery, sunbaked skin like kisses, like rain. Like tears.

  I push against him until I can roll him onto his back in the bed of soil, fold his arms over his chest. His eyes are closed, so I close his mouth, his skin cool but not cold to the touch. Horatio doesn’t run for help, doesn’t pull out his phone; he just watches me as I neaten Jack’s stringy white ponytail and the stained, patched overalls.

  The roses weep for him, weep where I can’t, because there are no more tears. The star burns away everything but the lake, and the lake never shares its water; it only ever takes, never gives. There are no tears.

  I reach for the first knot of twine that binds the roses to the trellis. It’s rough against my fingers, scratchy and tough and settled into its knots. Finally, it releases and I move to the next, thorns sipping from my skin as I move my hands through the plants.

  Jack mourned each and every plant like a slain child, and they mourn him in return, weep for him in the way only plants can, by giving of themselves. Humans were never so generous. I weave the roses into a blanket over him, let them take the blood from my hands to make them strong so they can protect him from those who would try to take him away and make a ghost of him.

  Others will hide his body without any of the rites, without the prayers to release the spirit, because that’s what people here do: they create the ties that most are never strong enough to break.

  There aren’t enough roses.

  His head and his torso are covered by the bower, but his legs stick out obscenely against the dark soil. Horatio clears his throat and steps forward with a rough burlap blanket, perhaps even the same one Jack used to cover me when I came to the violets for comfort.

  He covers Jack’s legs and tugs away one of the hydrangea globes from three beds over, places the mass of pale blue blossoms between the gnarled hands, surrounded by geraniums.

  Perseverance and comfort, flowers to define the sum of a man.

  For Jack, I think even Dahut will try to mourn, silent moments for the man who tended the flowers that twine through her golden hair.

  The bean sidhe honor Jack; in their own way, they love him, the man who believed in them with every fiber of his being for all that he could never see them.

  Horatio weeps, quietly and with dignity, and this is yet one more thing to batter him, to break him. Sorrows come not as spies but as armies, whole hosts that stand at the gates to tear down our defenses. He’s so tired, so very tired. He surrenders to the tears that I can’t find, and I move through the greenhouse, collecting the flowers and herbs that have no one to love them anymore, only tend them. Tending and caring are such different things. I pile them into my arms until I can’t hold any more, my skirts dropped to drag through the soil at my feet.

  The glass door swings open and ushers in a frosty gust of wind that trembles through the plants closest to it and frames one of the under-gardeners, the same one who stands so often at my door since I broke the lock. “Miss Ophelia, your brother is here.”

  I turn to Horatio, who mops at his face with his sleeve, and he gives me a weak smile and comes to my side. “Yes, we’ll go see your brother,” he tells me. “Honestly, did you expect something different?”

  I didn’t expect to have the chance.

  I didn’t think he’d come home.

  I didn’t think …

  But then, the thoughts never stay even when they form, so perhaps I did think, and it flew away on sparrow’s wings only to fall and fall and die.

  There is so much death.

  “Let’s go see your brother,” Horatio reminds me and steers me towards the door.

  Arms full of death, I stumble forward.

  Chapter 37

  The under-gardener takes us back into the house and to the Headmaster’s office. He leads us through the kitchen rather than the main door; the entire house hums with conversations and anger and excitement. Bits and pieces of the discussions float above the others, spare words like “irresponsible” and “deplorable” and “unconscionable.” The under-gardener knocks politely on the door but calls through rather than open it. “Headmaster, Miss Ophelia and Mr. Tennant are here.”

  Locks scrape against the door before it opens. Gertrude has aged years since we left her in the parlor, years that show in the lines around her eyes and mouth, in the exhaustion that purses her lips into a thin line. She ushers us in, then closes and locks the door behind us, a lock and a door between them and the angry masses. The enemy at the gates.

  Claudius’ hands shake as he pours himself a glass of amber liquid. There’s no clink of ice—he isn’t wasting the space. He fills it to the brim and knocks it back; by the way his eyes are glazed, it isn’t his first.

  And Laertes …

  He’s so pale. Pale and worn, his deep blue eyes
ravaged by tears. His entire body trembles with the force of his fury. I can’t imagine they told him any more than they’ve told me, but someone has told him enough to put the picture together, someone has told him that Dane pulled the trigger, that Claudius was the reason Father was even in the room. Someone has told him just enough to stoke his fury.

  All in black, with his night-purple hair dull from travel, my brother almost looks like Dane. Only for a moment, from the corner of the eye, but the rage and the pain and the grief are all the same. His jaw is shaded with stubble, his face thinner than it was. Thinner, and older.

  And stricken.

  “Ophelia … ” he whispers. “Ophelia, what’s happened to you?”

  I glance at Horatio, whose eyes flicker from my tangled hair, the fading ring of bruises at my neck, to the bruise-colored gown and armful of flowers.

  “Have you been taking your pills?”

  Pills, pills, always the pills. How long has it been since Dane threw them away? Less than a day between that and Father’s death but how long since then? But what have pills to do with grief? With pain? What have pills to do with anything? The pills have nothing to do with Father’s death. “They buried him in a secret grave, where even the flowers cannot reach to weep.”

  He touches my face, his hands shaking. “If you had all your wits and begged me to revenge, it couldn’t be more moving than … than … this.”

  Revenge is sorrow waiting to weep.

  Look where it got Dane.

  Look where it got Father.

  There are better things than revenge.

  Flowers fall from my arms as I dig through the bundles and find one to press against his chest. “There’s rosemary,” I tell him, “that’s for remembrance. You need to remember. And there, that’s pansies. That’s for thoughts.”