Courtney Summers - Defy the Dark

Hal bows coldly over one of my hands when his mother offers it. I refrain from speaking, hoping my horror will be taken for propriety, for shyness.

We sit, all seven of us, and it is easy to remain silent as the men, but for Hal, converse on the state of the city, and Mrs. King and Mother trade hair care secrets. Lars attempts to engage Hal twice, but my prince puts him off with quiet, convoluted answers that border on rudeness. I catch him watching me, but when I lift my chin he shakes his head, refusing to truly see.

And how can I blame him?

He came here expecting the agony of flirting with me, while longing for my brother. Instead, his is the agony of confusion, of not belonging. I recognize the madness hiding in his eyes, for it is a disease I know intimately.

Once near the end of the meal I say to him, “My father has excellent cigars, and I know you enjoy such things.” As if I want to hint at our secret, as if I want him to understand.

He stares at me and sips his wine—his only glass, which he has nursed the last hour.

Daddy, who has somehow moved his chair nearer to Charles King’s, says, “We’ll retire to the study to taste them, straight from my cousin’s in South Carolina. And I’ve some lovely brandy to match.”

Hal’s eyes are on Lars as my brother folds his napkin to stand. Lars dislikes smoking, but he puts his long hand onto Hal’s shoulder with a polite smile, leading my prince out. Hal’s face is tight, and I can guess he’s panicking.

I am, too. I didn’t mean to suggest they leave us.

Mother and Mrs. King lean back in their seats, glad to have the men gone, and I slouch, wanting to put my head on the table, to sigh out all my sorrow. “May I go outside, Mother?” I ask, interrupting her as she begins to discuss her longing for the springtime with its allowance for outrageous hats.

She waves her hand, and Mrs. King smiles with sympathy. “Poor dear, you must be overwhelmed. I know how strange my Hal can be, but he never lies, not with his poetry. He loves you.”

I nearly choke on my thanks.

Our garden is small and trapped between high stone walls. The hedges are trimmed and evergreen yew, with two iron benches facing each other across a centerpiece of brown rosebushes. There is a birdbath carved of marble, and the water is frozen at the edges. I come out here every morning to break the ice until it’s too thick, so the cardinals can drink.

I arrive, and Hal is already there. His hands grip the birdbath and he hunches over it. I think, We both fled to the garden. To the nighttime. Looking up, I spot the half-moon between the roof of our house and the neighbors’. Its light shines purely in a cloudless sky.

Taking a long breath, I cross the frosted, dead grass in my thin slippers. They soak through, and I shiver from the freezing wind on my ankles. I’ve come out in a wool wrap, but this dress—this dress!

“Hal,” I say in my low voice, and he spins around.

“O.”

He peers through the darkness, but I know the moon is on my face. The face he knows, but painted like a woman’s. My lips must be as dark as cherries. “What is going on?” he hisses.

Ignoring my cold toes and the layers of skirt around my calves, I stride forward. I grab his lapels in my fists and I drag myself up to kiss him before he can protest.

I open my mouth, I invite him in, and for one brief eternity Hal kisses me back. He tastes me, and I moan into him, I pull at him. His hands find my waist, silk against my ribs, the soft shape of me under that gown, and I am free. I’m kissing him hard, because I choose to, like a man, but his hands are on my own body, pressing into my hips, without thick layers binding me into a false shape, without a boundary between us, hiding me, disguising what I am.

I don’t need my suit to be O, not when I’m kissing him.

The moment I realize it, Hal King tears away.

“Ophelia.” My name is like a curse when he says it.

“Hal. Oh, God, Hal.” I flicker my fingers in the cold air, wanting to bury them again in his jacket, in his hair. To touch him.

Laughing once, and then again, he covers his face. “You’re a girl.”

“A girl with a mouth, with eyes and—and poetry, Hal.”

He spins away in an antic dance. “You’ll throw my words back at me.”

“All men and women have those things, you said. What you love transcends sex.”

“God! I don’t want—I’m not—” Hal shakes his head.

I go to him, to prove what I’m saying. To show him I’m O. He loves me.

The wool wrap is heavy on my shoulders, and I imagine it a coat, I take shallow breaths as though my chest were bound. Grabbing his head in both hands, I say as fiercely as I can, “Everything I was those nights, I can be again. I am. The moon is up and all I need is my jacket and hat, Hal.”

He circles my wrists and pulls my hands away. For he is all man and stronger than me. “What of when the moon is down then? You’re my wife?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to love you only at night.”

The words slap across my face. I am harsh in return. “It would be better if I were a boy and you couldn’t love me at all? Except in dark alleys and illegal dance clubs? This is best.” Now that we’re here, together, all my doubts and uncertainties and fears are gone—I know what I want.

Hal pulls at his unwaxed hair. “I can’t change my desires, or I’d have stopped kissing boys a long time ago, Ophelia.”

“But you did! You kissed me and you loved it.”

“Don’t fool yourself. You’re no girl. I don’t know what you are. Girls don’t do what you did. You’re neither.”

I want to be both, I think, but I can’t say that. Hal abruptly releases my wrists and storms past me into the house, taking my heart with him.

Empty and numb, I sink to the spiky, frozen grass and lie back, staring up at the moon. At the spotlight of my madness.

And I remember how, just this evening as the sun still burned in the sky and I painted this color onto my lips, the moon was up, too, and visible. It rose before sunset, paler and blending gently into the darkening blue, but still there. Still the moon.

In darkness and light, in the shadows between, I go mad.

I know who I want, but I also know who I am. I remember when Hal said to me if we were caught, we’d be murdered, and he didn’t care when I kissed him. If he meant it, if it was true, he would love me still, in any clothes, in any body. Because my mouth and eyes and soul are the same.

But we need time. I can’t go begging to him, for he broke off marriage talks. I can’t play the girl only and win him that way, but neither can I arrive at Club Rose, hoping to see him, in my brother’s suit.

All I can do is figure out how to live with this madness.

Inever intended for anyone to think I died. Yet I stand, on an afternoon so gray with heavy clouds it’s neither day nor night, in front of my family’s town house where the memorial service for Miss Ophelia Polonius is beginning.

Ice slicks the pavement and I shiver into the long, fur-lined overcoat that I stole from Father’s closet three days ago before disappearing near the train station. It slipped my mind that the river rushes on the other side of the meadow, and that when I was a little girl our nanny took both Lars and me there one day. I spent that afternoon telling my brother stories about mermaids who leave their undersea homes to get feet and walk on their own, and then I begged for weeks to go back. Mother forbade it because of the homeless wanderers to be found near the trains.

It’s no wonder Lars thought of the river before the trains. And I did leave my favorite silk scarf in the meadow for them to find.