A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult)

by Dot Hutchison

  Gertrude turns away, her face buried in a handkerchief.

  “You’re a lesson in madness, Ophelia, all your thoughts and remembrances connected to that single fact.”

  “There’s fennel for you and columbines. And rue—some for you, and some for me.” I tuck the flowers into his hair, into mine. “There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they all withered when …” The last basket of violets, knotted into my hair, washed out along with dirt and sweat to scatter along the tiles of my shower. Violets to a dinner, to a play, to a consummation that made the star blaze brighter than ever. “They withered, when our father died. They say he made a good end.” I slant a glance towards Gertrude and Claudius; her shoulders shake as she weeps; he pours another drink. “They buried him in secret, not even a flower to mark his grave. Keep a murder silent like the grave and the body will vanish from thought as surely as from sight.”

  But he turns to Claudius and Gertrude, seeks an explanation from them because even now—now, of all times—he still won’t listen to me. “Has she converted her grief to this … this … what is this?”

  “Laertes …” Claudius sets the glass down hard on the desk and grips my brother’s shoulder. He looks like he wants to step closer, bring Laertes closer, but he forebears. “Laertes, I know you have been rather … insulated from things here of late, but I promise to explain everything to you if you will only give me the chance. There is much to tell you, much to acquaint you with. Will you listen?”

  I have no doubt Claudius will do just as he says: he will explain.

  He will explain the poison into Laertes’ ears as surely as he did his brother’s.

  “He isn’t going to come back,” I tell him, but Laertes doesn’t even turn back to me. “He isn’t going to come back. He is dead. Go to your own deathbed; he still won’t come back. Revenge will not bring him back. He is gone.”

  Horatio takes the last flower from my hand and slowly, precisely, shreds it until a rain of petal pieces surround him like a circle of salt. “He’s gone, Ophelia,” he whispers, “but so is your brother.”

  Is he Father’s son? Or Mama’s?

  Perhaps in this, he is Dane’s friend more than anyone’s son, a plague rather than an inheritance, a disease of revenge born of every ugly emotion with which death acquaints us.

  The price of Dane’s revenge is still mounting.

  “Do you think you can eat something?” Horatio’s face is thinner, his cheeks hollow. He’s missed meals chasing after me, but he isn’t used to pills that rob him of appetite, doesn’t have a body that forgets to feel hungry.

  I lace my fingers through his, silk from the too-long sleeves a soft layer between our skin, and give him a smile. “I can try.”

  The others don’t even notice when we unlock the door and leave; Horatio deliberately leaves it open, and it’s barely a moment before a group of parents charge past us to ram the gates. In the kitchen, I tell the cook I’m hungry, and she bursts into tears, gives me a quick hug that cracks my ribs and squeezes all the air from me. As she cooks, maids and footmen and under-gardeners drift in, a gradual cluster around the warmth of the massive hearth. She adds more food each time more enter.

  The newest under-gardener, the butler’s nephew who graduated high school only months before, is the last to enter, and then all the house and garden staff are gathered together, Horatio and I welcome in their midst. He pulls his hat off his head, ginger hair standing up in every direction and tears tracking down his face. “Jack’s dead,” he says simply. His eyes find me within the group and take in my shredded hands still streaked with blood and dirt. “He’s with his roses.”

  Their grief is soft and gentle, a summer rain in the midst of so much raw pain. The cook passes around hot food and drinks and slowly, the stories start. Stories about Jack and his love for the gardens, his fondness for a good beer—or a bad beer—his ornery nature. Laughter joins the tears.

  Then Horatio is smiling at me, and I look down to find my plate is empty. I don’t remember eating, but his relief is so palpable that I smile in return, settle into his shoulder, and listen to this celebration of Jack’s life.

  There’s so much death in this place, sudden and unexpected.

  But there’s joy, too, when the life was well-lived. There’s comfort in the reporting.

  Father has never had these kinds of friendships, never had this community to mourn and celebrate in equal measure. Laertes, Dane, Horatio, and I gathered together around an open grave with cigarettes and flasks and told stories of the Headmaster, to honor the man he was, and I think the staff gathered here to do the same.

  No one speaks of Father. Another good man gone to his grave, yet no one gathers to celebrate him.

  Even Laertes only speaks of revenge.

  I want someone to speak of me someday.

  Horatio’s hand squeezes mine, and he leans over to kiss my cheek.

  I think someone will. Someday.

  CHAPTER 38

  Laertes plots and plots and plots, with Claudius dripping poison in his ear like a malevolent fairy godfather. Every time my brother sees me, he looks newly stricken, and soon he doesn’t see me at all. His eyes pass over me if I enter the room; his ears don’t hear the words I speak.

  So I stop trying.

  Mama sees me, watches me, her eyes track my progress as I pace along the long curve of the lakeside. She laughed to see me in another of her gowns and told me how pretty I look, but there in her eyes I can see the echo of the worry she wants to feel. Dahut has had hundreds and hundreds of years to forget, but Mama’s only had eight. Eight years since we died, since bruises and breath brought me back.

  Father made a choice between us, and I’ve always wondered if he regretted it.

  Now I’ll never know.

  Because though his ghost moves through his office with imaginary papers and conversations, though he smiles when first he sees me each night, it’s still not something he’ll speak about.

  Mama watches but aside from that first observation each day, she doesn’t say anything. Just the fact of her is enough to remind me of her promise. She waits to keep it, waits for the emptiness and the lake to rush in so she can take me away like she always said she would.

  They’ve given up trying to keep me in my room. There’s no point. Too many people have seen me, too many people know the carefully fractured pieces of truth that Claudius tries to spin and control.

  Polonius is dead and Dane is gone and Ophelia’s lost her wits.

  Each morning, Horatio wakes up beside me, goes to shower and change clothes, and comes back with the maid that brings breakfast, and for his sake I choke the food down. When he leaves for classes, I come to the lake, because it’s the one thing that still makes sense.

  The only thing that ever did.

  Always did.

  A heavy wool blazer settles around my bare shoulders.

  Classes must be out.

  Horatio crouches down beside me, his balance off on the tangle of willow roots. He shivers in the cold without his coat, hunches his body against the fierce wind that slices through his thin dress shirt. “How you haven’t come down sick is beyond me,” he tells me, teeth chattering.

  Because I have a star burning inside me. It burns hotter and brighter every day, tendrils of flame under my skin and on my tongue, too much truth in my eyes. I hold out my hands, the moonlight skin tinted blue from the cold I can’t feel, and trace the veins that run like seams through the surface. Like cracks that will open up and spew forth streams of lava. “Do you know what a star does before it collapses?”

  He shakes his head, eyes dark with worry. It’s hard to remember how bright they can be, when he laughs, when he dances, because now even when he smiles he’s worried.

  “It expands,” I whisper, and wait for the flames to show.

  The star will expand until it consumes all of me, and then, when there’s nothing left to consume, it will collapse into a hungry black void the lake will race to f
ill, a vessel without a bottom.

  “I got a package today from Dane.”

  He holds it out to me, places it in my lap when my hands are too stiff to take it without dropping. He chafes my hands between his to share his warmth, share his feeling, his usefulness. It’s a plain box, but the markings aren’t from England.

  They’re from Virginia.

  Within, a slew of sealed envelopes bear ink across the front in Dane’s careful cursive.

  “He sent it from Monticello Academy.”

  Reggie Fortin’s school. A model of what Elsinore could be without a Danemark as Headmaster.

  “There’s a letter in there for you.”

  The ink spells out different lengths, but the letters don’t mean anything, have no connection to the letters of flame that spill through my veins and mingle danedanedanedanedane with iloveyouiloveimsorryiloveyouiloveyouimsorryiloveyou. His hands reach down into the box, sort through the envelopes until he can find the one that should have my name on it, but nothing about it looks familiar. I hold the letter against my chest, wonder if I can absorb the words this way instead.

  “Who are the other letters for?”

  “There’s one for me, for Keith. For Laertes. For his mother and uncle. One for … one for Jack.”

  “Virginia is a long way from England.”

  “And not at all far from us,” he sighs. “I haven’t had a chance to read mine yet to find out why he’s there and not in England. I just got the package before I came out here for you.”

  “Laertes won’t read his.”

  “Sounds about right.” He cradles my cheeks in his palms, and only then do I realize how cold I should feel, that his hands should burn my skin. “Will you come inside?”

  “Not yet.” I hold the box up to him when he would shift to sit beside me. “You have things to do.”

  “They can wait.”

  Can they?

  After too long a moment, he sighs and takes the box back, pushes to his feet. “I’ll come back for you in a little while, all right? Unless you come in on your own.”

  “You’re the best of us.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if that means as much as it should,” he murmurs.

  “Words never mean anything. Look beneath them.”

  He gives me a small, sad smile and leaves his coat around my shoulders as he walks back to Headmaster’s House and its cacophony.

  A small splash tickles my bare feet, and I look up to see Mama pulling herself from the water. She leaves one foot in, the closest she can ever come to leaving the lake. “You have things to do too, Ophelia. It’s time and past.”

  “Not yet.”

  Because the sun is still a star and time is still moving too fast. Time slows at the event horizon, slows and slows and slows until maybe the actual point of destruction never comes. But the sun is still a star and the black hole hasn’t been born yet.

  She takes the heavy envelope from my hands, her fingers leaving damp spots that darken the paper, and slides a nail under the adhesive seal. When she unfolds the pages, a jumble of ink dances across the sheets, meaningless and incomprehensible.

  “My Ophelia,” she reads aloud, her voice soft with the compassion that’s as much a memory as the fear and the mourning. “By now, you’ve learned the truth of what happened that night, or at least parts of it. As I spoke with my mother in her room, a voice cried out from within her closet. I thought it was Claudius—who else would hide in my mother’s closet?—and before I could command my body to action, the gun was already in my hand and aimed and my finger against the trigger. The horror I felt upon finding it was your father … There are no words, Ophelia, for the horror or my grief. I hid him to buy the time to see you, to tell you, and then seeing you I couldn’t find the words I should have spoken.

  “I destroy that which I most love, and so all my destruction centers in you. You bear my pain, my grief, you take the bruises from my hands, and because of my love, you lose everything that can be held dear, and I am sorry for it, more sorry than you’ll ever know.

  “Tom Rosencrantz and Tom Guildenstern have long since reached England with the letters from my uncle in hand, letters which listed my name with a reminder of favors owed and a favor requested in response. He would have had me killed at the hands of his friends, in a foreign land where it cannot be connected to him, where by the time it filtered back to the parents and students of Elsinore Academy, it would have been just a tragic accident born of my own recklessness. Given my behavior over the past months, is there anyone there who would doubt it, save you and Horatio? Death would be no unwelcome thing, I think, but not now. Not yet.

  “My promise was made foolishly, I know that. In life my father would never have asked such a thing of anyone; that he should ask it in death should have been enough to make me walk away with no oath made. But he is my father, even if his soul is sundered by the manner of his death, so perhaps I would have made the promise anyway. For his honor, for my honor, you again bear the price, a price beyond any reasonable measure. But the promise was made and must be kept, and I have much yet to do.

  “I write this as a guest of Monticello Academy, a personal guest of Reggie Fortin, and I’ve been allowed to sit in the classrooms and witness firsthand the changes he wishes to introduce to Elsinore, and Ophelia … does it make me a disloyal son to think his changes would be no bad thing? The girls here speak of careers and achievements, things done in their own name, not of some unnamed, unknown future husband, and it’s a daily race between the boys and girls for the highest ranks within the classes. They’re happy, even with all the extra work, and I think so many of Elsinore’s girls would feel the same way if they were only challenged in this manner. I’ve told Reggie some of what has occurred at Elsinore these months past—not all, surely not all—but some, and he has promised to continue his persistence. He reminds me a great deal of Horatio, whose heart will break when he opens an envelope and finds a will folded between the pages of a letter that can never say as much as it needs to, and the thought helps ease the pain.

  “Soon after you read this, I will be on my way back to Elsinore to do what must be done to end these bloody games. That there will be more blood before they find their end I have no doubt, for death engenders death, like a plague that cripples us at our greatest strength. One way or another, promise kept or broken, this will end.

  “And I hope to everything holy that you aren’t there to witness it. For his family, for his future, Horatio must stay, because if he surrenders this what else will he have? But you, Ophelia, you have only the lake waiting for you there, and I can’t abide the thought of you keeping your promise so soon. Your mother’s promise, your promise, they’re patient ones, ones that will abide until the time has come, and that time need not arrive anytime soon.

  “Run away, Ophelia. Come here to Monticello, if you’d like, and Reggie will offer you sanctuary, but run away somewhere, far away from Elsinore and the bloody end that comes. Wherever you go, I’ll find you if I should survive it, and even if I die to keep this wretched oath, Horatio will find you, take care of you. Just run away so none of this can bruise you anymore, so the rest of us on our paths to Hell cannot drag you down with us. You’re an angel, Ophelia, the angel that bears my pain and every good thing about me, the only reason there is anything left of that goodness, and it is that in me that urges you—begs you—to run away. Escape the ending of this tragedy.

  “Name me in your prayers, sweet angel, and someday, perhaps you can forgive me for all the ways I destroy you through our love. Yours ever, with all the love my twisted soul can offer, Dane.”

  Mama smoothes the creases from the pages and sets each one to float on the lake. The lake is hungry, so hungry, and it devours the paper and the ink and the words, so many words, words, words, not enough meaning that makes sense anymore.

  And as the pages break into pieces, as the bonds between the words dissolve into disparate breaths and syllables, Mama laughs and watches them die.

/>   CHAPTER 39

  I could escape.

  Statement or question? Dane seems so sure of it, but then he so often does. Dane lives in a world of certainties where even the worst torments might be escaped if one has the courage to take arms against them. He never woke in the middle of the night to his mother’s soft kiss before she fled to that strange world beyond, my own undiscovered country. He never saw her eyes with her inevitable return, always a little more broken, a little more heartsick. A little more wild.

  Of course, Mama also never had someone to run to, never had someone to make a place for her as Dane says Reggie Fortin would make for me. A place in a school that challenges the girls as much as the boys, a place where I could truly learn. Maybe even become.

  Become what? Mama had to read me Dane’s letter because the words on the page shattered. Monticello has strong girls who make names for themselves; I can’t even make sense of my own name on a sheet of paper. Monticello has no place for my fragments.

  I shrug off Horatio’s blazer, peel out of Mama’s fancy gown and leave it next to her on the shore. Delicate ice crystals, with little more substance than wishes, break against my bare legs as I step into the shallows of the lake. The cold shocks the breath from my body, but I take another step, then another, aware of Mama’s hungry attention at my back. My slip soaks up the water, the stain and damp drifting above my waist, rising nearly to the murmuring star.

  I could keep walking.

  I could escape.

  I can’t tell anymore if they’re the same thing. Maybe I never could. Could Dane?

  I remember death. I remember the silence and the stillness, the absolute serenity. I remember that there was no fear, no dread of something after. This constant terror, this uncertainty, this unceasing pain didn’t exist, but beyond the gates of Elsinore, they exist in abundance. Mama was so afraid, until she went into the lake and she wasn’t. Barely an echo of memory remains anymore.

  Somewhere in Virginia, there’s a school of red brick and white plaster and marble, a school without a cemetery, without despair and death and every choking thing. There’s a school with its arms open, willing to embrace a shattered girl, to do everything it can to keep her from breaking further.