If We Were Villains: A Novel

Lights and sirens. Outside in the insubstantial air, audience members in their best clothes, technicians in black, and actors in costume watched as Walton guided me into the back of a car with Broadwater Police Department branded on the side. Everyone was whispering, staring, pointing, but I could only see my classmates, huddled together just like that day on the dock all over again. Alexander’s face was so full of sadness that there was no room left for surprise. In Filippa’s expression there was only a desperate kind of confusion. In Wren’s, emptiness. In Meredith’s, something violent I couldn’t find a word to describe. And on James’s face, despair. Richard stood beside them, so solid it seemed a miracle that no one else could see him, eyes burning black, somehow still unsatisfied. I looked down to the handcuffs already glinting on my wrists and sank onto the cracked leather seat of the car. Colborne shut the door, and in the small, quiet darkness I struggled to breathe.

I spent the next forty-eight hours in windowless interrogation rooms, fingering tiny cups of lukewarm water and answering questions from Colborne, Walton, and two other officers whose names I forgot as soon as I heard them. I told the story as James had told it to me, with only necessary variations. Richard, enraged by my and Meredith’s betrayal. Me, swinging the boat hook at his head in a fit of jealous fear. They didn’t ask about the morning after.

Further performances of Lear were canceled. Following a map I had drawn on the back of Walton’s legal pad, Colborne led five cops with flashlights down into the undercroft, where they broke into my locker with a crowbar and bolt cutter. Damning evidence, covered in my fingerprints. “Now,” Colborne told me coldly, “might be the time to call your lawyer.”

I didn’t have one, of course, so she was provided for me. There was no question whether it was homicide, only of what degree. Our best chance, she explained, was to argue imperfect self-defense instead of murder two. I nodded and said nothing. I declined my phone call to my family. They weren’t whom I wanted to speak to. On Monday morning I was informed of my new status as a pretrial detainee, but I wasn’t sent to county right away. I stayed in Broadwater, because (according to Colborne) moving me to a bigger, more crowded facility might mean I never made it to my trial at all. It seemed more likely that he was stalling. Even after I had handed in my written confession, I could tell he didn’t quite believe it. After all, he had come to the FAB expecting to arrest James, acting on information provided by an “anonymous source.” Meredith, I assumed.

Perhaps that lingering doubt was why he let me have so many visitors. Filippa and Alexander were the first. They sat side by side on a bench on the other side of the bars.

“My God, Oliver,” Alexander said when he saw me. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

“Just … waiting.”

“Not what I meant.”

“We’ve talked to your lawyer,” Filippa said. “She asked me to be a character witness.”

“Not me, though,” Alexander added, with a sad little twitch of a smile. “Drug problem.”

“Oh.” I looked at Filippa. “Will you do it?”

She folded her arms tightly. “I don’t know. I haven’t forgiven you for this yet.”

I ran a finger along one of the bars between us. “I’m sorry.”

“You have no idea, do you? What you’ve done.” She shook her head, eyes hard and angry. When she spoke again her voice was the same. “My dad’s been in prison since I was thirteen. They’re going to eat you alive.”

I couldn’t look at her.

“Why?” Alexander asked. “Why did you do it?”

I knew he wasn’t asking why I killed Richard. I squirmed where I was sitting on my cot, grappled with the question.

“It’s like Romeo and Juliet,” I said, eventually.

Filippa made an impatient sort of noise and said, “What are you talking about?”

“Romeo and Juliet,” I said again, and risked glancing up at the two of them. Alexander had slumped against the wall. Filippa was glaring. “Would you change the ending, if you could? What if Benvolio came forward and said, ‘I killed Tybalt. It was me.’”

Filippa hung her head, pushed her hands through her hair. “You fool, Oliver,” she said. I couldn’t argue with that.

They came back, from time to time. Just to talk. To tell me what was happening at Dellecher. To tell me when my family found out. Filippa was the only one brave enough to speak to my mother on the phone. I wasn’t brave enough to speak to her myself. I never heard from my father, or Caroline, but I didn’t expect to. Colborne found Leah outside the station one morning, sobbing and throwing rocks at the side of the building. (She’d fled Ohio in the dead of the night, as I had once done.) He brought her in to see me, but she wouldn’t speak. She only sat on the bench, staring at me and biting her bottom lip raw. I spent all day apologizing, uselessly, and that night Colborne put her on a bus back home. Walton, he assured me, had called my parents to tell them where she was.

I didn’t see Meredith before my trial, and heard of her only through Alexander and Filippa and my lawyer. I should have been desperate for a chance to explain myself, but what would I say? She had her answer by then, to the last question she’d asked me. But I thought of her often. More often than I thought of Frederick, or Gwendolyn, or Colin, or Dean Holinshed. I couldn’t bear to think of Wren at all. Of course, the only person I really wanted to see was James.

He came halfway through the first week of my detention. I would have expected him sooner, but according to Alexander it was the first time in days he’d even managed to pick himself up off the floor.

I was asleep when he arrived, lying on my back on my narrow cot, stuck in the permanent daze that had persisted since intermission of Lear. I sensed someone outside the cell and sat up slowly. James was sitting on the floor in front of the bars, pale and somehow insubstantial, as if he’d been stitched together from scraps of light and memory and illusion, like a patchwork doll.

I slid down off the cot—feeling suddenly, unexpectedly weak—and sat facing him.

“I can’t let you do this,” he said. “I didn’t come sooner because I didn’t know what to do.”

“No,” I said, quickly. I’d played my part, hadn’t I? I’d followed Meredith upstairs, without thinking what might happen when Richard found out. I’d convinced James to leave Richard in the water when no one else could. I’d made my fair share of tragic mistakes, and I didn’t want exoneration. “Please, James,” I said. “Don’t undo what I’ve done.”

His voice emerged scratchy and raw from his throat. “Oliver, I don’t understand,” he said. “Why?”

“You know why.” I was done pretending otherwise.

(I don’t think he ever forgave me. After my incarceration he visited often, at first. Every time he came he asked me to let him make things right. Every time, I refused. I knew by then that I would survive my time in prison, quietly counting down the days until all my sins had been atoned for. But his was a softer soul, sunk in sin to the hilt, and I wasn’t sure he would. Every time he took my refusal a little bit harder. The very last time he came was six years after my conviction, six months since I’d seen him. He looked older, ill, exhausted. “Oliver, I’m begging you,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore.” When I refused again, he pulled my hand across the table, kissed it, and turned to leave. I asked where he was going and he said, “Hell. Del Norte. Nowhere. I don’t know.”)

My trial was mercifully short. Filippa and James and Alexander were all dragged in to testify, but Meredith refused to say a word in my defense or otherwise, and gave every question the same useless answer: “I don’t remember.” My resolve cracked a little every time I looked at her. Other familiar faces I avoided. Wren’s and Richard’s parents’. Leah’s and my mother’s, blotchy and tearstained and distant. When it came time for me to speak for myself, I recited my written confession without emotion or embellishment, as if it were just another monologue I’d memorized. At the end, everyone seemed to be expecting an apology, but I didn’t have one to give them. What could I say? This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

We settled on second-degree murder (plus time for obstruction of justice) before the jury ever reached a verdict. A bus took me a few miles downstate. I turned in my clothes and my personal belongings, and began my ten-year penance on the same day that the Dellecher school year ended.

Colborne’s face was the last familiar one I saw. “You know, it’s not too late,” he said. “If there’s another version of the truth you want to tell me.”

I wanted, in some strange way, to thank him for refusing to believe me.

“I am myself indifferent honest,” I admitted. “But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.”