If We Were Villains: A Novel

Part 2 – Act II

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.

Because I know the story, I barely listen to the words. I ask Filippa if I can roll the window down, and I hang my head out like a dog. She laughs at me, but says nothing. The fresh Illinois air skips across my face, weightless and flighty. I look out at the world through my eyelashes, alarmed by how bright it is even on this overcast day.

My mind wanders down the road to Dellecher, and I wonder, will I recognize it? Maybe they’ve torn the Castle down, razed the trees to make room for real dormitories, and put up a fence to keep kids out of the lake. Maybe now it looks like a children’s summer camp, sterile and safe. Or maybe it, like Filippa, has hardly changed at all. I can still see it, lush and green and wild, in some tiny way enchanted, like Oberon’s wood, or Prospero’s island. There are things they don’t tell you about such magical places—that they’re as dangerous as they are beautiful. Why should Dellecher be any different?

Two hours go by, and then the car is parked in the long empty drive at the Hall. Filippa gets out first and I follow slowly. The Hall itself is the same, but I look immediately beyond it to the lake, resplendent under the bloodless sun. The surrounding forest is as thick and savage as I remember, the trees stabbing fiercely up at the sky.

“You all right?” Filippa asks. I haven’t moved from the side of the car.

“This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod.”

Panic flutters softly around my heart. For a moment I’m twenty-two again, watching my innocence slip through my fingers with equal parts eagerness and terror. Ten years of trying to explain Dellecher, in all its misguided magnificence, to men in beige jumpsuits who never went to college or never even finished high school has made me realize what I as a student was willfully blind to: that Dellecher was less an academic institution than a cult. When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as it was offered at the altar of the Muses. Ritual madness, ecstasy, human sacrifice. Were we bewitched? brainwashed? Perhaps.

“Oliver?” Filippa says, more gently. “Are you ready?”

I don’t answer. I never was.

“C’mon.”

I trail behind her as she walks. I’ve braced myself for the shock of seeing Dellecher again—unchanged or otherwise—but what I’m not expecting is the sudden ache in my chest, like longing for an old lover. I’ve missed it, desperately.

“Where is he?” I ask, when I catch up with Filippa.

“He wanted to wait at the Bore’s Head, but I wasn’t sure you should go back yet.”

“Why not?”

“Half the same people still work there.” She shrugs. “I didn’t know if you’d be ready to see them.”

“I’d be more concerned that they’re not ready to see me,” I say, because I know that’s what she’s really thinking.

“Yeah,” she says. “That, too.”

She leads me through the front doors—the Dellecher coat of arms, Key and Quill, staring disapprovingly down at me as if to say, You are no longer welcome here. I haven’t asked Filippa who else knows I’m coming back. It’s summer and the students are gone, but the staff often linger. Will I turn a corner and find myself face-to-face with Frederick? Gwendolyn? God forbid, Dean Holinshed.

The Hall is eerily empty. Our footsteps echo in the wide corridors, usually so tightly packed with people that any small sound is trampled underfoot. I peer curiously into the music hall. Long white sheets hang over the windows, and the light falls in wide pale stripes across the vacant seats. It has the haunted feeling of an abandoned cathedral.

The refectory, too, is empty, almost. Sitting alone at one of the student tables, nursing a cup of coffee and looking distinctly out of place, is Colborne. He stands hastily and offers one hand. I grasp it without hesitation, strangely glad to see him.

Me: “Chief.”

Colborne: “Not anymore. Turned in my badge last week.”

Filippa: “Why the change of heart?”

Colborne: “Mostly my wife’s idea. She says if I’m going to risk getting shot on a regular basis, I ought to at least be paid well for it.”

Filippa: “How touching.”

Colborne: “You’d like her.”

Filippa laughs and says, “Probably.”

“And how are you?” he asks. “Still hanging around this place?” He glances down at the empty tables, up at the corniced ceiling, as though he’s not quite sure where he is.

“Well, we live in Broadwater,” she says. “We,” I assume, refers to her and Milo. I didn’t know they’d moved in together. She is almost as much a mystery to me now as she was ten years ago, but I don’t love her any less for it. I know more than most about desperately kept secrets. “We don’t come out here much during the summer.”

Colborne nods. I wonder if he feels at all awkward around her. He knows me—he knew all of us once—but now? Does he look at her and see a suspect? I watch him closely and hope I won’t have to remind him of our bargain.

“Can’t be much reason to,” he says, amiably enough.

“We’ve got to decide on a season for next year, but we can do that in town.”

“Any ideas yet?”

“We’re thinking about Twelfth Night for the third-years. We have two that actually share some DNA for the first time since—well, since Wren and Richard.” There’s a brief, uncomfortable pause before she continues. “And we really have no idea what to do with the fourth-years. Frederick wants to branch out and try Winter’s Tale, but Gwendolyn’s insisting on Othello.”

“Good group this year?”

“Good as ever. We picked more girls than boys for once.”

“Well, that can’t be a bad thing.”

They share a fast grin, and then Filippa looks pointedly at me. She raises her eyebrows, just barely. Now or never.

I turn to Colborne, mimic her expression. He checks his watch. “Shall we take a walk?”

“Whatever you want,” I tell him.

“All right,” he says to me. And then, to Filippa: “Coming?”

She shakes her head, somehow frowning and smiling at the same time. “I don’t need to,” she says. “I was there.”

Colborne’s eyes narrow. Unperturbed, she touches my arm, says, “I’ll see you tonight,” and walks out of the refectory, Colborne’s unasked questions hanging in the air behind her.

He watches her leave, then asks, “How much does she know?”

“She knows everything.” He frowns, eyes nearly disappearing beneath his thick brows. “People always forget about Filippa,” I add. “And later they always wish they hadn’t.”

He sighs, like he doesn’t have the energy to be really disgruntled. He contemplates his coffee for a moment, then abandons it on the table. “Well,” he says. “Lead the way.”

“Where?”

“You’d know better than I would.”

I’m silent, thinking. Then I sit. It’s as good a place as any.

Colborne chuckles reluctantly. “You want some coffee?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

He disappears into the kitchen, where two coffee urns stand in the corner. (They’ve been there at least fourteen years. They’re always full, though I never—even as a student—saw who filled them.) He comes back with a full mug, sets it in front of me. I watch the milk swirl as he sits down in the same chair he just got up from.

“Where do you want me to start?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Wherever you think is best. See, Oliver, I don’t just want to know what happened. I want to know the how and the why and the when. I want to make sense of it.”

For the first time in a long time, that little rip in the middle of me, the black bruise on my soul that’s been struggling to heal for nearly a decade, throbs. Old feelings come softly thronging back. Bittersweetness, discord, and confusion.

“I wouldn’t count on that,” I tell Colborne. “It’s been ten years and I still can’t make sense of it.”

“Then maybe this will be good for both of us.”

“Maybe.”

I sip my coffee pensively. It’s good—it has flavor, unlike the brownish slime we drank in prison, which only vaguely reminded me of coffee, even on good days. The heat soothes the swelling pain in my chest, for a moment.

“So,” I say, when I’m ready. The mug warms my palms, and the memories flood through me like a drug, razor sharp, crystal clear, kaleidoscopic. “Fall semester, 1997. I don’t know if you remember, but it was a warm autumn that year.”