If We Were Villains: A Novel

Part 3 – Act III

Colborne and I emerge into the early afternoon together. The day feels primeval, prehistoric, the sun bright and blinding behind a thin layer of clouds. Neither of us has sunglasses, and we grimace against the light like reluctant, newborn babies.

“Where to now?” he says.

“I’d like to walk around the lake.”

I start across the lawn and he walks close beside me. Mostly, he’s been silent, just listening. Every now and then his face responds to something I’ve said—a subtle lift of the eyebrows, or a twitch at the corner of his mouth. He’s asked a few questions, little things, like “This was when?” Though the timeline is clear in my head, explaining it to someone else is a curious task, simple in theory but painstaking in practice, like assembling a long line of dominoes. One event inevitably leads to the next.

We walk all the way down to the woods without speaking. The trees are taller than I remember—I don’t have to duck under the branches anymore. I wonder how much a tree grows in ten years and reach out to brush the bark, as if each knotted trunk is the shoulder of an old friend I touch as I pass, without thinking. I reconsider: I don’t have any old friends except Filippa. How do the others think of me now? I haven’t seen them. I don’t know.

We emerge from the copse onto the beach, which looks exactly the same. Coarse white sand like salt, rows and rows of weather-beaten benches. The little shed where James poured blood all over me on Halloween is listing slightly to the side—a diminutive Tower of Pisa.

Colborne’s hands hide in his pockets as he looks out over the water. We can see the opposite shore, just barely, a hazy line drawn between the trees and their reflections. The Tower sticks up out of the forest like a fairy-tale turret. I count three across to find the window that was beside my bed, a narrow black slot in the gray stone wall.

“Was it cold that night?” Colborne says. “I don’t remember.”

“Cold enough.” I wonder if there’s still a clear patch of sky over the garden, or if the branches have all tangled together to block it out. “At least, I think it was. We’d all been drinking, and we always drank way too much, like it was something we were just supposed to do. The cult of excess: drink and drugs, sex and love, pride and envy and revenge. Nothing in moderation.”

He shakes his head. “Every Friday night I lie awake wondering what dumb thing some drunk kid’s going to do that I’ll have to clean up in the morning.”

“Not anymore.”

“Yeah. Just got my own kids to worry about.”

“How old are they now?”

“Fourteen,” he says, like he can’t quite believe it. “Starting high school this fall.”

“They’ll be all right,” I tell him.

“How do you know?”

“They’ve got better parents than we did.”

He smirks, not quite sure whether I might be mocking him. Then he nods toward the Castle. “You want to walk around to the south bank?”

“Not yet.” I sit down in the sand and peer up at him. “This is a long story. There’s a lot you don’t know yet.”

“I’ve got all day.”

“You going to stand until nightfall?”

He makes a face but bends his knees to sit beside me as a breeze blows off the lake. “So,” he says. “How much of what you told me about that night was true?”

“All of it,” I say, “in one way or another.”

A pause. “Are we going to play this game?”

“Wherein I am false I am honest; not true, to be true,” I say.

“I thought they would have beaten that bullshit out of you in prison.”

“That bullshit is all that kept me going.” One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

“Why don’t you just tell me what happened? No performance. No poetics.”

“For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.”

Colborne is quiet for a moment and then says, “You win. Tell it your way.”

I gaze across the lake at the top of the Tower. A large bird—a hawk, maybe—soars in long lazy circles over the trees, an elegant black boomerang against the silvery sky.

“The party started around eleven. We were all wrecked by one o’clock, Richard worst of all. He broke a glass, punched a kid in the mouth. Things got ugly and confused and out of control, and by two I was upstairs in bed with Meredith.”

I can feel his eyes on the side of my face, but I don’t look up.

“That was the truth?” he asks, and I sigh, exasperated by the note of surprise in his voice.

“Weren’t there enough witnesses?”

“Twenty shitfaced kids at a party, and only one of them actually saw anything.”

“Well, he wasn’t blind.”

“So there was something between you two.”

“Yes,” I say. “There was something.”

I don’t know how to continue. Of course, I was at Meredith’s mercy. Like Aphrodite, she demanded exaltation and idolatry. But what was her weakness for me, tame and inconsequential as I was? A thing of mystery.

As I tell the story to Colborne, guilt wriggles, wormlike, in the pit of my stomach. Our relationship was a point of significant interest, but Meredith refused to testify at my trial, stubbornly insisting that she didn’t remember what everyone wanted to know. She spent a few weeks being hounded by press people, which proved to be too much attention even for her. After I was convicted she went back to the Manhattan apartment and, for a month or so, didn’t come out. (Her brother Caleb made the news before she did, when he broke a paparazzo’s jaw with his briefcase. After that, the vultures lost interest, and I thought of Caleb more fondly.)

Meredith did eventually make her way to TV—she stars now in some legal drama loosely based on the Henry VI cycle. It was popular in prison, not because of its Shakespearean source material, but because she spends a lot of time on the show lounging around in slinky nightgowns that show off her figure. She came to visit me—only once—and when the rumor that I’d had some sort of affair with her surfaced, it won me unprecedented respect among the other inmates. If pressed for details I told them only what could be found on the Internet or was obvious: that she was a natural redhead, had a small birthmark on her hip, wasn’t shy about sex. The more intimate truths I kept to myself: that our lovemaking was as sweet as it was savage; that despite her normally foul mouth the only noise she ever made in bed was to murmur “Oh God, Oliver” in my ear; that we might have even loved each other, for a minute or two.

I give Colborne only the trivial details.

“You know, she came to see me one night,” he says, digging his heels into the sand. “Rang the bell until it woke us up, and when I opened the door she was standing there on the porch in this ridiculous dress, glittering like a Christmas tree.” He almost laughs. “I thought I was dreaming. She barged in and said she needed to talk to me, said it couldn’t wait, that there was a party on and it was the only time you all wouldn’t miss her.”

“When was this?”

“The same week we arrested you. Friday, I think.”

“So that’s where she went.” He glances at me and I shrug. “I did miss her.”

We lapse into silence—or as close to silence as we can get with the distant cries of birds, the murmur of the wind between the pine needles, the tiny wash of waves licking at the shore. The story has changed; we both feel it. It happens just like it did ten years ago: we find Richard in the water and we know nothing will ever be the same.