I breathe in as deeply as I can (my lungs still feel too small) and knock. As I wait on the porch in the warm summer shadows, I wonder if Filippa warned her.
When she opens the door, her eyes are already wet. She slaps me hard across the face, and I accept the blow without protest. I deserve much worse. She makes a small sound of wounded satisfaction, then opens the door wide enough to let me in.
Meredith is as perfect as I remember her. Her hair is shorter now, though not by much. She wears her clothes a little looser, too, but again, not much. We pour wine but don’t drink it. She sits on a chair in the living room and I sit on the couch beside it and we talk. We talk for hours. There’s a decade of things we haven’t said.
“I’m sorry,” I say, when there’s a pause long enough for me to screw my courage to the sticking-place. “I know I have no right to ask, but … what happened with you and James in Gwendolyn’s class, did it ever happen offstage?”
She nods, not looking at me. “Once, right afterward. We thought we were going our separate ways, but then I walked into the music room, and there he was. I wanted to go right back out again, but he grabbed me and we just—”
I know what must have happened, without her telling me.
“I don’t know what made us do it. I needed to understand, you and him and how he’d wrapped you quite so tight around his finger. I couldn’t think of any other way,” she says. “But it was over as soon as it started. We heard someone coming—Filippa, of course, she must have known something was wrong—and sort of came to our senses. Then we just stood there. And he said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ I said, ‘The same thing you’re thinking about.’ We didn’t even need to say your name.” She frowns down into the red pool of her wine. “It was just a kiss, but God, it hurt like hell.”
“I know,” I say, without resentment. Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated—confusion made a masterpiece of us.
“I thought it was over then,” she says, her voice strained and uncertain. “But the night of the Lear party—I was in the bathroom, fixing my makeup, and I felt a hand on my waist. At first I thought it was you, but it was him, and he was drunk, and talking like a crazy person. I shoved him off and said, ‘James, what is the matter with you?’ And he said, ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ He grabbed me again, but it was violent. Painful. He said, ‘Or maybe you’re the only one who would, but why object? What’s done is done, and even-handed justice for us both.’ And that was enough—I knew. I got away, barely. Got out of the Castle and went straight to Colborne. I told him everything I could. Not about the dock, not that morning, but everything else. And I wanted to tell you, right there in the crossover, but I was afraid you would do something stupid, like help him run off in the middle of intermission. I never thought…”
Her voice fades out.
“Meredith, I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t think. I didn’t care what happened to me, but I should’ve thought about what would happen to you.”
She won’t look at me, but she says, “There’s one thing I need to know, now.”
“Of course.” I owe her that much.
“Us. All that time. Was any of it real, or did you know all along, and we were just a get-out-of-jail-free card for James?” She glares at me with those dark green eyes, and I feel sick.
“God, Meredith, no. I had no idea,” I tell her. “You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.”
She nods like she wants to believe me but there’s something else in the way. She says, “Were you in love with him?”
“Yes,” I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.
“I know.” She sounds exhausted. “I knew then, I just pretended not to.”
“So did I. So did he. I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head, stares out the dark window for a moment. “I’m sorry, too, you know. About him.”
It hurts too much to talk about. My teeth ache in my head. I open my mouth to speak, but what comes out instead is a gasp, a sob, and the grief that shock has kept at bay crashes through me like a flood. I pitch forward, that strange twisted laugh that’s been stuck in my throat for ten years finally bursting out. Meredith lurches out of her chair and knocks her wineglass to the floor but ignores the sound of it shattering. She says my name and a dozen other things I barely hear.
Nothing is so exhausting as anguish. After a quarter of an hour I am utterly spent, my throat ragged and aching, my face hot and sticky with tears. I lie on the floor with no memory of how I got there, and Meredith sits cradling my head as if it’s a fragile, precious thing that might, at any moment, break. When I’ve been silent for another half hour, she helps me to my feet and leads me to bed.
We lie side by side in solemn darkness. All I can think of is Macbeth—he has James’s face in my imagination—shouting, Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep, so sleep no more! Oh, balm of hurt minds. I want sleep desperately, but do not hope to have it.