A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult)

by Hutchison, Dot

  Dane briefly lets go of my hand to light a second cigarette, breathing deep to let the flame catch, then reclaims my hand. “I don’t know how to do this,” he confesses.

  Laertes stiffens, and even as he fights the urge, I can see his head turn and his eyes glance over his shoulder to where our mother’s grave sits bathed in moonlight. There is no ghost there, not that he could see it if there were. “No one knows how to do this,” he says eventually. “We do it anyway.”

  “Why?”

  We all turn to look at him, but Dane has eyes only for the dying blossoms that hide his father’s grave with decaying beauty.

  “Why do we do it, why do we blindly march alongside death and act as though it won’t claim us as well? Why do we put up with it? Why do we work so hard to get through it when all we can do is experience it again and again?”

  “Because the alternative isn’t any better,” Horatio tells him.

  “Isn’t it?”

  Horatio takes a long look around the cemetery. To him, it’s silent but for the sound of our breathing and the breeze that rattles and whistles through holes in the statuary. “If this is where it ends, no, I don’t think it’s better.”

  “What if this isn’t where it ends?”

  “You mean Heaven?” asks Laertes.

  “Or Hell or Purgatory or any sort of after. How do we even know that something does come after? What if this is all it is?”

  “Then we should be in even less of a hurry to discard it,” points out Horatio.

  “We fear death because we don’t know what secrets it holds, but isn’t that exactly what we do with life?” Dane argues. “How can we define them differently if in action we treat them the same?”

  “You can work through fear of living, even the fear of dying, but the fear of being dead or whatever comes after … there’s nothing you can do against that. They’re not the same.”

  The song has shifted. I recognize this one, remember it wrapping around and pulling me down as I drowned all those years ago. I’d never realized that the bean sidhe have different death songs, always thought of it as one endless song that shifts to embrace the one it mourns, but it’s genuinely different from the song they give Hamlet, even as threads weave through them to keep the honor of the Headmaster.

  I close my eyes and lean against Dane’s shoulder, lost in the memory of water in my lungs and bells ringing in my ears. He releases my hand to drape his arm across my back and arrange me comfortably against his side. His fingers idly twine through my hair to unknot the violets that soon fall in a limp circle around me.

  The boys keep arguing, and somehow the words become lyrics to the alien language of the song, death and dying and living in death, until I wonder if they’ve forgotten the original questions. There’s Laertes’ voice, a light tenor that skips across the words even when anger gives them an edge, always looking for the next word before the previous is even done. Beside him is Horatio’s baritone, earth-rich and smooth, a voice that carries on the breeze and wraps through the keening, never angry, never cruel. I can feel Dane’s voice as much as hear it, between the other two in pitch but knife-sharp with pain, with longing. The words are quick, but the meaning is not, and the others miss a great deal by trying to answer rather than absorb.

  Dane presses the rim of the flask against my lips, the burning edge of his cigarette so close to my skin I can feel the heat, and I wonder if he’ll let it burn me even as I obediently swallow the vodka. His thumb rolls across my lower lip to catch a stray drop.

  A sudden shout of cloth against cloth and I know Laertes has jumped to his feet. “Ophelia, it’s time for us to go. Father will be worried.”

  “Let her be for once, Castellan, can’t you?” sighs Horatio.

  I almost want to open my eyes, to see Horatio’s expression at this unexpected defense, but my eyes remember the darkness of the lake within the death songs and so won’t allow me light.

  “This isn’t your business, Tennant,” Laertes growls. “Ophelia, come on.”

  But he isn’t brave enough to grab at me with Dane’s arm around me, and I don’t move away. I can hear Dane’s heartbeat, the way I heard my own until the water stopped it, and his doesn’t falter, doesn’t stop. Slowly, the cold waters of the lake recede and let me feel the warmth of his body against mine.

  “If you’re that worried about your father, go tell him where we are then.” Dane’s words, his tone, challenge my brother as they have so many times before, friends who compete against each other constantly in school, in temperament and, I think, for Hamlet’s affection, Dane who needed that pride from his father and Laertes who can only find a very different sort of pride in his own, a pride that stumbles over awkwardly expressed affection. “Perhaps you could refill the flasks while you’re at it.”

  I open my eyes in time to see Laertes stalk away, both flasks left behind. He may come back in a while with new flasks or a bottle. He may not come back at all. It’s impossible to tell how the pieces of him will war and win against the others. He is more and more our father’s son. He will drink and smoke and take girls to his room, but he won’t let himself think even for a moment that little Ophelia can make her own choices and decide who she wants to be with or that she wants to be with someone. I think if he comes back tonight, it will be to drag me home to a lecture from Father, some new way to call me a liar when I’ve not lied.

  I took my pills, but the pills are like words, they don’t always mean anything even when they should.

  The discussion ends with his departure, and the three of us sit in a silence that should be far less comfortable than it is. In the end though, it’s always been Laertes who’s needed to talk, to fill the space with sound because he’s our father’s son. When silence is a living thing, it can be a friend, sometimes even a comfort. The flasks are empty now, and neither boy moves to light another cigarette. The moonlight pours down on us, makes the weak flame of the candle tremble and shake in a fitful breeze.

  Dane’s hand drifts down my back, my side, smoothes my hair over the curve of my hip until my entire awareness follows the paths of his fingers against my skirt, the fabric slowly inching up until he can trace patterns on the skin above my knee.

  Horatio smiles slightly, meets my eyes, and the smile grows. With a push against his knees, he unfolds and stands, one of the flasks in hand. “I’ll be back,” he says quietly, his voice somehow part of the silence rather than an intrusion. Dane says nothing, simply hands him the other flask and watches him walk away.

  “Will you promise me something, Ophelia?”

  He hesitates, but I wait, knowing he’ll continue when he’s arranged the words the way he wants them, the way that will mean something real.

  “Will you help me?” he whispers and turns so his breath stirs strands of hair across my temple. “Help me remember, help me forget? Help me get through this?” He tilts my face towards his, and the muscles in my neck scream in protest, but then he’s kissing me and I can taste the vodka and the bitter sourness of the cigarettes and I know I’d promise him the moon if he asked for it.

  He gathers me even closer, shifts me against him so I’m nearly in his lap, but the awkward pain in my neck eases and I hesitantly kiss him back, my fingertips trembling against the line of his jaw, a touch as light and insubstantial as the ghost I sometimes am. One of his hands twines through my hair, his short nails pricking against my scalp, and the other rests on my thigh beneath the skirt.

  He asked for my help, and I don’t know if this is helping, but I don’t know how to pull away. I don’t know how to walk away from this boy who needs me so much. Still alive when I should be dead, Father and Laertes need to protect me, but they don’t actually need me. There are others who could give Dane comfort, perhaps even this comfort, but he’s asked for my help, for my promise. He needs me, and I’ve never been needed before, something as terrifying and wonderful as the kisses that leave me dizzy and clinging to him.

  “Promise me,” he whispers again
st my lips, and I answer in kind.

  At the head of the grave, the candle pops with a sudden strength, the flame tall and wide. For just a moment from the corner of my eye, I think I see a flicker of blue-white, like the beginning of the ghosts that have long since ceased to find us interesting, but even before another kiss closes my eyes, the thought is gone in a trick of moonlight.

  And sometime in the dark hour before Horatio returns, I tell him of the man I knew, the man who greeted me with violets and made time each night to chase the nightmares away with a kiss and a blessing, the man who was never afraid of me when my own father can never hide the fear in his eyes, the man who sleeps beneath the earth beside us and will never wake again. I kiss away the tears that tremble down Dane’s cheeks with every word and let my own fall to splash against my blouse, and when the words surrender to the meaning that goes beyond words, we let the silence speak the meaning.

  To Hamlet Danemark VI, who I have only ever known as Dane except when he was in trouble, I give the best I have of his father, and he marvels at the gift even as he weeps that such a gift could ever be. So perhaps this is healing, and perhaps this is helping.

  I remember death. I remember the silence and the stillness, the absolute serenity. I remember that there was no fear. It was only after, when they brought me back to life, when they plugged me into machines and gave me pills and left me alone in the cold place, that I felt fear. Fear is only ever for the living, and Dane bears enough fear for us both, so I will be his bravery.

  I’ll be whatever he needs me to be.

  I promise.

  CHAPTER 7

  It’s been a week since the funeral, but the strangeness doesn’t fade. I still expect Hamlet to join us for dinner, to see him walking through the gardens in the afternoons. I still wake up expecting to smell coffee permeating the house, to walk down to breakfast and see him refilling his mug at the sideboard. He went through five cups before noon, and now the kitchen stocks instant singles that are as unpalatable as watery mud.

  I find myself waiting for him in the gardens, where we’d sometimes spend quiet summer afternoons reading, surrounded by the blooms and the soft breezes that dance off the lake. Dane comes to me there now, his black clothing a wound against the bright days, after mornings spent assisting his mother with thank-you cards and letters and all the things a woman of good breeding must do even in the midst of grief. He shows no interest in what I’m reading but sprawls out on the grass beside me, his head in my lap.

  Sometimes he sleeps. Sometimes he just stares at the clouds that drift in feathery wisps across the unfeeling sky. And sometimes he takes the book from my hand, closes it, and asks me to talk to him. Never about anything, never words of consequence or meaning but just words, words to take off the edge, words to make him remember, words to make him forget.

  Just words.

  We spend the afternoons this way, then separate to change for dinner, a meal marked by the empty chair at the head of the table. Claudius tried to sit there the day after the funeral, and Dane became so hysterical he threw half the contents of the table at his uncle. None of us ate that night. It was impossible not to overhear the screaming fit between Claudius and Dane about respect. I’m not really sure who won. Claudius hasn’t tried to sit at the head of the table since, but he has been firmly ensconced next to Gertrude, where his hand finds its way too frequently to her arm and, I suspect, her knee under the table.

  Neither of them has the thing he truly wants, so they both glower at each other from opposite ends of the table.

  Father sits next to Claudius. When Claudius doesn’t have his head bent towards Gertrude, he speaks with Father about the school and the Board of Governors. He’s been accepted onto the short list of applicants for the vacant position, but it will be a few weeks before any kind of decision is made. In the meantime, he seems intent on learning as much as possible about how the school is run. Father prefers Laertes to sit near him so he can hear the discussions as well. He hasn’t said anything about it yet, at least not to my knowledge, but I think he wants my brother to take his place one day.

  That notion is as entertaining as it is disconcerting. More and more Laertes is becoming the kind of man who is at home behind a desk—becoming our father—but I remember the little boy who sat wide-eyed against our mother’s side and listened to the stories of a city that drowned in a storm at high tide, of the King and his men who ride endlessly through the fierce winds in the desperate hope that one day they can dismount without turning to dust. That little boy would never belong behind a desk.

  When dinner is done, Dane stands from his place between me and Horatio and walks away. Sometimes Horatio follows him, to keep him company for as long as he’ll allow.

  I don’t follow.

  Because as the evening draws to a close, as the sun starts to set into the lake, and the ghosts start to flicker in the cemetery, Dane drifts to my open doorway, his lanky body propped against the frame, and holds out his hand. He never says a word then. He doesn’t have to.

  Because I take his hand, every evening, and let him lead me away. Sometimes he wanders for hours in search of some tiny place on the grounds that doesn’t remind him in any way of his father. Sometimes he wants to go where those memories are strongest.

  Tonight he leads me to the lake, to the small crescent stretch of grass half buried beneath the drooping branches of the willows that line the water. My heart skips a beat, then another, and my steps falter next to his, but he tugs me forward with a curious look and I force myself to remember that I’ve come to the lake many times since that day.

  But it’s different, because now Hamlet’s dead. He was the one to pull me out, the one to bruise my chest and mouth with the desperate need to make me breathe, make me live. No one was there to do the same for him.

  “Ophelia?”

  I swallow hard and look up at Dane’s face, the pale skin marred less and less by fits of weeping as the days go by.

  “Are you all right?”

  Am I? “I will be,” I answer after a moment. “I just … don’t come to the lake that often.”

  “We won’t go near the water,” he promises. He looks so pleased with himself that I can’t help but smile. Suddenly the world makes sense again, because Dane is able to protect me, when I’ve spent so much of the past week trying to protect him.

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “I always keep my promises.”

  That too is Hamlet’s legacy to those who called him family: you keep your promises, and if you have cause to regret that, you should be more careful in making those promises.

  We sit down within the tangled roots of the willows, a safe distance back from the grassy lip that curls over the edge. I start to sit beside him, but he tugs me into his lap, one leg bent at the knee to provide more of a cushion between my thin dress and the roots below us. He tugs me back against his chest, his hands curled around mine against my thighs.

  Through the curtain of thin branches and leaves, we can see the colors streak against the surface of the lake. From this angle, the sun itself is invisible behind the island in the center of the lake, a roughly circular stand with a shock of willows that keep the center hidden. Jack tends the flowers there, his personal shrine to my mother, who loved that place above all others. How much time did we spend within the shelter of the willows, braiding flower crowns as she told me stories she said were truths? And through her stories rang the bells of the drowned city, the church bells that rang and rang and rang long after there was anyone to ring them.

  Pale shapes rise from the waters around the island, an echo of laughter floating across the lake. I close my eyes. I took my pills.

  I took my pills.

  When I open my eyes again, the shapes are gone. I’m not sure if I miss them or not.

  I turn our hands and flatten them against my thighs. His hands, with long slender fingers and large knuckles, completely cover my own. On his left hand, his father’s wedding band gleams go
ld against the pale skin, brassy and cheap against his complexion. On his right, the cool silver, dark sapphire, and ice-blue aquamarine of his class ring look more natural, more real. More right.

  “What are you thinking?” he whispers in my ear. “Your face never says.”

  “Gold washes you out,” I answer honestly.

  He laughs, a sudden, startled sound that makes my heart flutter in my chest. It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve heard him laugh. The sound fades too quickly. Just one more loss to mourn. “It was Father’s.”

  “I know.”

  “I just … it makes me feel …”

  “Close.”

  He considers the word, turning it over on his tongue, and finally nods. “I suppose.” He stretches one finger across from the other hand to trace the plain gold band. “Mother stopped wearing hers.”

  The day after the funeral, in fact. She came down to breakfast, her hand strange and unfamiliar without the tasteful band of gold-set diamonds. When Claudius took her hand to help her sit, his thumb rubbed against the pale skin where it had been. She took her hand away but didn’t scold him for it, and I still don’t understand why.

  The sunset is a bloody one that speaks to a clear night. We need the rain. The grass is still green, but it’s crisp and stiff, and the lake is lower than usual. We haven’t had rain since before Hamlet died. Even as I think it I tell myself it’s ridiculous, but it’s starting to feel like it never will.

  As the lavenders and reds deepen to the shifting blues, purples, and blacks of night, Dane pulls his class ring off and slides it down each of my fingers, one by one. It doesn’t fit any of them. Even on my thumb, the ring slides around so much that I have to make a fist to keep it from falling off.

  “Mine will be smaller,” I remind him. “The girls’ rings are more delicate.”

  “I like my ring on you.”

  “If it’s on me like this, I’ll lose it.” My skin shivers at his words. I know he didn’t mean it. It still makes me wonder. Not even about the uncertain future, the far-off days when a ring might actually mean something, but about what happens when school starts again and the halls flood with girls who are far more in Dane’s sphere than I could ever be.