I nodded. “You take the other bedroom.”
She straightened up—slowly, gingerly, like everything hurt.
“Going to sleep?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I hope I never wake up.”
The first real pang of sadness stuck me like a needle, but it had nothing to do with Richard, not really. I wanted to say something but couldn’t find a single adequate word and so I sat silent and immobile on the couch as she, too, left the room, half her brandy undrunk. When the door closed behind her I deflated, slumped against the pillows behind me, dragged my hands across my face.
“She doesn’t mean it,” James said.
I frowned behind my fingers. “Is that meant to be comforting or critical?”
“It’s not meant to be anything,” he said. “Don’t be angry with me, Oliver, I can’t take it right now.”
I exhaled and lifted my hands off my face. “I’m sorry. I’m not angry. I’m just … I don’t know. Drained.”
“We should sleep.”
“Well. We can try.”
We lay down—I on one couch, James on the other—but didn’t bother trying to find sheets or proper pillows. I smashed a decorative bolster under my head and pulled a throw blanket down over my legs. On the other couch, James did the same, pausing to finish his brandy and what was left of Meredith’s. When he was settled, I turned out the lamp on the table behind me, but the room was still saturated with firelight. The flames had shrunk to small buds of yellow, flickering between the logs.
As I watched the wood blacken and crumble and collapse, my lungs constricted, refused to take in sufficient air. How swiftly, how suddenly everything had gone wrong. Where did it even begin? Not with Meredith and me, I told myself, but months earlier—with Caesar? Macbeth? It was impossible to identify Point Zero. I squirmed, unable to dismiss the idea that some huge invisible weight was crushing down on me like a boulder. (It was that ponderous crouching demon Guilt. At the time I didn’t know him, but in the months to come he would climb onto my chest every night and sit snarling there, an ugly Fuselian nightmare.) The fire burned down to embers and its light slowly left the room, leaking out through the cracks. Lacking oxygen, light-headed, I tilted back toward unconsciousness, and it was more like suffocating than falling asleep.
A whisper brought me back to life.
“Oliver.”
I sat up and blinked against the gloom at James, but it wasn’t he who had spoken.
“Oliver.”
Meredith had appeared, a pale shape in the dark void of her bedroom door. Her head drooped against the doorframe like a flower bud swollen with rainwater, and for one odd moment I wondered what the weight of her hair was, if she felt it hanging down her back.
I pushed my blanket off and crept across the room with another furtive look at James. He lay on his back, head turned to the side, away from me. I couldn’t tell if he was dead asleep or trying too hard to fake it.
“What is it?” I whispered, when I was close enough for her to hear me.
“I can’t sleep.”
My hand twitched toward her, but it didn’t get far. “It’s been a bad day,” I said, lamely.
She exhaled, gave me a weak nod. “Will you come in?”
I leaned away from her, forcibly reminded of that night in the dressing room when I’d withdrawn in exactly the same way. She could tempt anyone, but Fate didn’t seem like a good target. We had one casualty already. “Meredith,” I said, “your boyfriend’s dead. He died this morning.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s not that.” Her eyes were glassy, unapologetic. “I just don’t want to sleep alone.”
That little prick of sadness burrowed deeper, touched me at the quick. How well I’d been trained to mistrust her. And by whom? Richard? Gwendolyn? I glanced over my shoulder at James again. All I could see was a shock of his hair sticking up behind the arm of the couch.
It didn’t really matter where I slept, I decided. Nothing mattered much after that morning. Our two souls—if not all six—were forfeit.
“All right,” I said.
She nodded, only once, and went back into the room. I followed, closed the door behind me. The blankets on the bed were already disheveled, kicked around, messy. I slid between the sheets in my jeans. I’d sleep in my clothes. We’d sleep. That was all.
We didn’t touch, didn’t even speak. She climbed into the bed beside me and lay down on her side, one arm folded under her pillow. She watched me as I settled myself, propped my own pillow up a little higher. When I stopped moving, she closed her eyes—but not before a few tears leaked out, slipped between her eyelashes. I tried not to feel her trembling against the mattress, but it was like the tick of the mantel clock in the Castle: soft, persistent, impossible to ignore. After what might have been as long as an hour, I lifted my arm, without looking at her. She shifted closer, tucked her head against my chest. I curled my arm around her.
“God, Oliver,” she said, her voice small and stifled, one hand pressed over her mouth to keep it in.
I smoothed her hair flat against her back. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
SCENE 4