Slowly, we straggled up the beach. Meredith went first, after one last apologetic look at James—and one, for some reason, at me. Filippa followed, one arm around Wren’s shoulders. Colin and Alexander wandered up the trail together. I lingered, under the pretense of getting the rest of my costume out of the shed. When I came out, James was sitting right where we’d left him, looking out at the lake.
“You want me to stay?” I asked. I didn’t want to leave him.
“Please,” he said, in a small voice. “I just couldn’t deal with the rest of them, for a while.”
I dropped my stuff in the sand and sat beside him. Sometime during the party, the storm had passed over. The sky was clear and quiet, stars peering curiously down at us from a wide dome of indigo. The water, too, was still, and I thought, what liars they are, the sky and the water. Still and calm and clear, like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine, and really, it never would be again.
A few stubborn drops of water clung to James’s cheeks. He didn’t quite look like himself, somehow. He seemed so fragile I was afraid to touch him. He started to say something—maybe my name—but only the ghost of a sound slipped out before he stopped, pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. My chest ached, but the ache went deeper than muscle and bone, like some sharp thing had ripped a little hole right through me. I risked reaching toward him. He let out a small shuddering sigh, then breathed more easily. For a long time we sat side by side without speaking, my hand on his shoulder.
The lake, the broad black water, lurked in the background of every scene we played after that—like a set from a play we did once, shuffled to the back of the scene shop where it would have been quickly forgotten if we didn’t have to walk past it every day. Something changed irrevocably, in those few dark minutes James was submerged, as if the lack of oxygen had caused all our molecules to rearrange.
ACT II
PROLOGUE
The first time I leave the facility in ten years, the sun is a blinding white orb in a gray dishwater sky. I have forgotten how enormous the outside world is. At first I’m paralyzed by the vastness of it, like someone’s pet goldfish dropped unexpectedly into the ocean. Then I see Filippa, leaning on the side of her car, the light glinting off her aviators. I barely resist the urge to run at her.
We embrace roughly, like brothers, but I hold her longer than that. She’s solid and familiar and it’s the first affectionate human contact I’ve had in far too long. I bury my face in her hair. It smells like almonds, and I inhale as deeply as I can, press my hands flat against her back so I can feel her heartbeat.
“Oliver.” She sighs and squeezes the back of my neck. For one wild moment I think I’m going to burst into tears, but when I let go of her she’s smiling. She doesn’t look any different. Of course, she’s been back to see me every two weeks since they put me away. Besides Colborne, she’s the only one who has.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For what?”
“For being here. Today.”
“My poor prisoner,” she says, laying one hand on my cheek, “I am as innocent as you.” Her smile fades and she withdraws her hand. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
For a second or two, I really do think about it. But that’s all I’ve done since Colborne’s last visit, and I’ve made up my mind. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
“All right.” She pulls the driver’s door open. “Get in.”
I climb into the passenger seat, where a pair of men’s jeans and a T-shirt are neatly folded. I move them into my lap as she starts the car. “These Milo’s?”
“He won’t mind. I didn’t think you’d want to show up wearing the same clothes you left in.”
“These aren’t the same clothes.”
“You know what I mean,” she says. “They don’t fit. You look like you’ve gained about twenty pounds. Don’t most people lose weight in prison?”
“Not if they want to get out in one piece,” I tell her. “Besides, there’s not much to do.”
“So you exercise incessantly? You sound like Meredith.”
Afraid I’m going red, I pull my shirt off, hoping she won’t notice. Her eyes seem to be on the road, but her glasses are mirrored, so I can’t really tell. “How is she?” I ask, as I look for the tag in the other shirt.
“Certainly not struggling. We don’t talk much. None of us do anymore.”
“What about Alexander?”
“Still in New York,” she says, which isn’t the answer to the question I’m asking. “Took up with some company that does really intense immersive stuff. Right now he’s playing Cleopatra in a warehouse filled with sand and live snakes. Very Artaud. They’re doing The Tempest next, but it might be his last show.”
“Why?”
“Well, they want to do Caesar and he refuses to be in that ever again. He thinks that’s the play that fucked us all up. I keep telling him he’s wrong.”
“You think it was Macbeth that fucked us up?”
“No.” She stops at a red light and glances at me. “I think we were all fucked up from the start.” The car rumbles to life again, slides into first gear, then second.
“I don’t know if that’s true,” I say, but neither of us pursues the subject.
We drive in silence for a while, and then Filippa turns the stereo on. She’s listening to an audiobook—Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea. I read it in my cell a few years ago. Apart from exercising and hoping to go unnoticed, that’s what a fledgling Shakespeare scholar does in prison. By the midpoint of my ten-year tenure I’d been rewarded for my good (i.e., unobtrusive) behavior with a job shelving books instead of peeling potatoes.