If We Were Villains: A Novel

Part 4 – Act IV

“It’s shorter than I remember,” I tell Colborne, as we stand looking down the dock toward the water. “Back then it felt like it went on for miles.” We’ve wandered through the woods to the south side of the lake, talking quietly. Colborne listens with unfailing patience, weighing and evaluating every word. I turn to him and ask, “Are the kids even allowed down here anymore?”

“We can’t exactly stop them, but once they realize it’s just a dock and there’s nothing to see, they lose interest. We have more of a problem with people stealing stuff that used to be yours.”

This has never occurred to me, and I stare at him. “Like what?”

He shrugs. “Old books, costume pieces, the photo of your class in the hall behind the theatre. We got that one back, but not before someone scratched your face out.” He sees the confusion in my expression and adds, “It’s not all bad. I still get letters trying to convince me that you’re innocent.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I get those, too.”

“Are you convinced yet?”

“No. I know better.”

I walk down the dock and Colborne follows, one step behind. I know I owe him a new ending for our old story, but I find it unexpectedly difficult to continue. Up until Christmas, we could pretend that we were mostly all right—or that we would be, someday.

I stop at the end, looking down into the water. I’ve aged well, one might say. My hair is still dark, my eyes still clear bright blue, my body firmer and stronger than it was before prison. I need glasses now to read, but besides that and a few extra scars, I haven’t changed much. I feel older than thirty-one.

How old is Colborne now? I don’t ask, but I could. Our relationship is not inhibited by expectations of politeness. We stand with our toes peeking over the edge of the dock, not speaking. The green smell of the water is so familiar that I feel a soft tug at the back of my throat.

“We didn’t come down here as much when it was cold out,” I say, without prompting. “Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we mostly kept to the Castle and sat around the fire, scratching out speeches and scansion. It almost felt normal, except that empty chair. I don’t think I ever saw anyone sit in it after he died. We were a bit superstitious, I guess—plays full of witches and ghosts will do that to you.”

Colborne nods vaguely. Then his expression changes, shifts, brow furrowing. “Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?”

The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it,” I say.

He mimics my smile, though his is tentative, unsure of where the humor really is. “Why’s that?”

“It’s hard to put into words.” I pause, waste a minute trying to collect my thoughts, then proceed without having collected anything at all. “We spent four years—and most of us years before that—immersed in Shakespeare. Submerged. Here we could indulge our collective obsession. We spoke it as a second language, conversed in poetry, and lost touch with reality, a little.” I reconsider. “Well, that’s misleading. Shakespeare is real, but his characters live in a world of real extremes. They swing from ecstasy to anguish, love to hate, wonder to terror. It’s not melodrama, though, they’re not exaggerating. Every moment is crucial.” I glance sideways at him, unsure if I’m making any sense. He’s still wearing that uncertain half smile, but he nods, so I continue. “A good Shakespearean actor—a good actor of any stripe, really—doesn’t just say words, he feels them. We felt all the passions of the characters we played as if they were our own. But a character’s emotions don’t cancel out the actor’s—instead you feel both at once. Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”

I slow down, come to a stop, frustrated by my own inability to express myself (a frustration exacerbated by the fact that, after ten years, I still think of myself as an actor). Colborne watches me with keen, curious eyes. I wet my lips with my tongue and proceed more carefully.

“Our sheer capacity for feeling got to be so unwieldy that we staggered under it, like Atlas with the weight of the world.” I sigh, and the freshness of the air derails me. How long will it take, I wonder, for me to get used to it again? My chest aches, and maybe it’s the unfamiliar purity of the air, but maybe not. “The thing about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent … He speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.” I stop. Shrug. “You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”

Colborne lowers his eyes, looks down into the white glare of the sun on the water. “Do you think Richard would agree?”

“I think Richard was under Shakespeare’s spell as much as the rest of us.”

Colborne accepts this without protest. “You know, it’s strange,” he says. “Every now and then I have to remind myself that I never actually knew him.”

“You would have loved or hated him.”

“What makes you say that?”

“That’s how he was.”

“What about you? Did you love him or hate him?”

“Usually both at once.”

“Is this what you mean about feeling everything twice?”

“Ah,” I say. “You see, you do understand me.”

The quiet that follows is comfortable, at least for me. I forget why we’re there for a moment and watch as a leaf breaks loose from a tree and comes twirling down on the breeze to land on the water. Rings ripple out toward the edges of the lake but disappear before they ever get there. I can almost see the seven of us running along the bank through the trees, tearing our clothes off, racing to the water, ready to fall in all together. Third year, the year of the comedy. Light and delightful and distant. Days we can’t have back.

“Well,” Colborne says, when he’s waited long enough for me to speak. “What’s next?”

“Christmas.” I turn away, toward the forest. The Castle is close now, the Tower soaring up out of the trees, its long shadow falling over the ramshackle boathouse. “That’s when everything went wrong.”

“How did it start?” he asks.

“It had already started.”

“Then what changed?”

“We were separated,” I say. “James went to California, Meredith to New York, Alexander to Philadelphia, Wren to London, Filippa … who knows where. I went back to Ohio. Being trapped together in the Castle with our guilt and Richard’s ghost, it was terrible in a way. But being divided from each other, flung to every corner of the world to face it on our own—that was worse.”

“So what happened?” he asks.

“We cracked up,” I say, but the phrase feels wrong. It was not so simple, or so clean, as a piece of fractured glass. “But we didn’t really shatter until we were all back together again.”