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The day she goes mad—
No. All right.
Her brother leaves for college when she’s sixteen.
Her father is dignified, stately, pompous, shakes his hand. Laertes’ eyes flick to her, and they have a moment of that quick, unspoken language they’ve shared since they were four: her eyebrows go up, his lips twitch, and Laertes steps back from his father, opens his arms.
Ophelia embraces him, lets herself be pressed into his shoulder for a long moment before she lets go. He nods, picks up his bags, turns to make his way onto the airplane.
On the way back home, she doesn’t let anyone see her cry.
It’s like this:
Their father gives Laertes a car for his sixteenth birthday, and Laertes loves it more than everything, spends hours in the garage and comes out with grease smeared on his face and his hands, takes girls with round apple-cheeks and blue ribbons in their hair out in it and comes back home a little after midnight with red smears of lipstick on his neck, stinking of liquor and something sweet.
Ophelia notes it down carefully, the way she notes everything about her brother. Notes the pomade he smears into his hair. Notes the leather jacket he buys himself, the way it settles around his shoulders like it belongs there. Notes the music that pours out of his bedroom window on hot summer nights, music that stirs something in her soul that she can’t explain.
In the mornings she combs her hair, smooths down the ruffles on her dress, makes a moue at herself in the mirror and applies the waxy red lipstick. Looks at herself sideways, tilts her head, widens her eyes, bats her eyelashes.
Laertes’ car roars. Ophelia thinks of tigers, of predators’ eyes in the dark, of hot green jungles halfway across the world in countries she’ll never see.
Hamlet, then.
Hamlet’s all leather jackets and gelled hair, too, slim as a whip. If her brother’s smile is like a butcher knife, wide and straight, then Hamlet’s smile is like a razor.
He takes Ophelia dancing. He’s good at it, too; there aren’t a lot of boys who ask her to dance, but she can feel the skill in his fingertips, is half-laughing by the time he pulls her close to his chest. They go to a diner, after, and he insists on buying her a slice of pie a la mode, catches her wrist with one hand and feeds her a sweet, cold spoonful of vanilla ice cream when she insists she can’t eat another bite.
The city’s spread out beneath them by the time he stops his car, kisses her as neatly and skillfully as he’s done everything else, wraps a hot arm around her back, and she pulls back, pushes at his chest firmly. “No,” she says, and he nods briskly, lets her lean her head against his shoulder, runs a hand up and down her arm as she watches the stars.
He kisses her good night when he drops her off at her front door, and if she were a poet she’d say it’s full of lightning, her bones alight with it. That night in her bedroom she lays awake, lets the summer wind blow in through her window, thinks of his smile and his lips and his hands and—
After some time, she reaches a trembling hand down between her legs.
It’s like this:
Her brother appears in the doorway of her bedroom, arms crossed over his chest, says, “Want to go for a ride?”
He drives too fast; to be honest, she’s not surprised, just lets the wind snatch the ribbon out of her hair and tilts her face up to the sky. It’s alive today, burning an aching blue, and by the time her brother stops she’s breathless.
Laertes is watching her out of the corner of his eye, and she struggles to find something to say, comes up with, “It’s a beautiful car.”
“You could work on it sometime,” says Laertes. It sounds stilted, awkward.
Ophelia turns her head and lets her eyes meet his. He looks uncertain; he’s sixteen, hair slicked back, and she knows from her mirror that she’s growing to look more and more like him with each passing day.
He looks away first, digs in the pocket of his leather jacket and proffers a packet of cigarettes. “You ever smoked?” he says.
She’s fourteen. She shakes her head.
“You should learn,” he says. “I’ll teach you. Here, I’ll light it,” and he flicks his lighter, sets a tiny, perfect flame dancing in the sunlight.
Ophelia coughs and coughs, but she smokes the whole thing, and Laertes nods at her and offers her another, and this time she’s smoother, exhaling grey clouds into the air. It tastes like ash and something sweet and rotting, but he says, “I’m glad you did that,” when she’s done.
Hamlet has a motorcycle; Ophelia wraps herself around his back, and the wind snags another ribbon from her hair. She’s wearing a red dress, and it’s low-cut.
They climb a hill, lay on their backs to watch the clouds. Hamlet’s a few inches away from her, his long fingers hands still on his thighs; it’s a long half-hour before she leans over and kisses him, and another fifteen minutes before she takes his hand and moves it to her breast.
The day she goes mad—
Not yet.
Denmark’s a small town.
There’s not much in a town like this. A post office; a drive-in movie theater; a few diners. There’s the battered school gates, and the trees scratched with the initials of lovers from decades past, and the river.
Ophelia’s always liked the river. She’s spent afternoons there reading since she was a little girl, long hours with Daphne du Maurier and E.B. White and Emily Dickinson and the Bronte sisters. The flowers itch at her legs when she’s wearing short dresses, and the world is at peace.
Some days she takes her shoes and socks off, soaks her feet in the river. It’s all snowmelt, and they go numb before too long, but she doesn’t pull them out and dry them off. Instead, she digs her fingers into the dust of the bank, hopes her fingernails will go brown with dirt, stays there until she can feel her toes wrinkling.
She doesn’t know if her father notices. She doesn’t know what her father notices, to be honest; when she and Laertes are young, he barely says a word to them, just pushes them out the door after they’ve eaten breakfast and sometimes forgets to let them back in for dinner.
One August day when she’s about nine, she and Laertes catch frogs on the bank, drop them one by one into a bucket. Laertes tells her they’ll start a frog farm, keep the frogs as pets, and Ophelia giggles and smears her dirty hands on her white socks.
It’s a broiling day. By the time they’re done, the frogs trapped at the bottom of the bucket are lying still, won’t shake themselves awake and hop out into the cool river when Ophelia pokes at them with a muddy finger.
“It’s okay,” says Laertes half-heartedly, “I bet they’re tired, they just want to take a nap, that’s why they’re not moving.”
“No, they’re not, they’re dead,” says Ophelia.
Laertes shrugs, sticks his dirty hands in his pockets. The remaining frogs bound out of the bucket and onto the bank. They walk in comfortable silence through the cooling twilight back to their house; their father’s holed up in his study, and Laertes makes a dinner of leftover blueberry pie and they eat it on the couch, and nobody stops them or tells them to go to bed until it’s very, very late.
Her father loves Laertes better.
Which is all right, because it makes sense.
Laertes is older than her, and he’s braver and stronger and more quick-witted and more charming, and he’s had far more girlfriends than she’ll ever have boyfriends, and he learned how to smoke cigarettes before she did, and he has more friends and goes to more parties, and his smile is easier and his face is more friendly. If Ophelia were her father, she’d love Laertes better, too.
Her father also loves Laertes better because Laertes is a boy. And for all that he prefers to smoke with his friends after school, he can throw a football with the best of them, and everyone knows if he tried out for the team he’d be the star; and he loves his car, and he’s got a new shade of lipstick stain on his neck every week.
Ophelia notes all of this as carefully as she can, and listens to the music that pours out of Laertes’ window in the late summer hours, and sits in her room and reads and aches with something she’ll never be able to name.
The night before Hamlet leaves for college, he stands underneath her window in the middle of the night and throws pebbles at it—plink, plink, plink—until she opens it, climbs down the tree in her backyard with her skirt fluttering around her, and falls into his arms.
The next day both he and her big brother are gone.
Ophelia doesn’t know why it’s so important that no one see her cry. It might be because she’s been a crybaby since she was a child, heard her father’s stern reprimand that crying doesn’t help too many times to cry in front of him; but it’s more than that, because she turns away from her stuffed bear with one button eye, huddles into herself on the bed, sobs until she can’t breathe any more.
She goes to school, and comes back from school. The house is as empty as it’s ever been. She does her homework, goes out to wander by the river, comes back and makes her own dinner, falls asleep.
Sometime in December she starts noticing that it’s harder to get up in the mornings than it used to be. She stands under the hot blast of the shower for a very long time before she can will herself to wash the shampoo out of her hair, moves through school with the clinical precision of routine, goes home, falls asleep as early as she can.
She has her first panic attack in January.
It’s a very simple affair. She’s lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, and then she is suddenly and abruptly unable to breathe, curled in on herself, tears coursing down her cheeks. Her mouth stretches wide; in some part of her brain that’s still very calm, she thinks she might be trying to scream. There’s no breath in her lungs; no sound comes out.
It lasts for around half an hour, and then it stops. She blinks slowly at the ceiling, draws the covers over her head, goes to sleep.
Her grades slip, then slide, then plummet. She doesn’t really notice at first; by the time there’s a stern letter from the school, she doesn’t really care, and it’s not as if her father has ever really put in the effort to notice.
She’s smarter than anybody she knows, except one, and he’s at college. She does the bare minimum, coasts through on seventy-percents, passes enough of her classes not to repeat the eleventh grade, waits, waits, waits, prays for June.
The day she goes mad—
Almost. Not quite.
Hamlet’s father dies in late May, a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday.
She didn’t know him well. He’d been a good friend of her father’s, but from the crowd at his funeral, it looks like he’d been a good friend of everyone.
Hamlet’s leather jacket is gone, and his hair is cut military-short by his ears. His suit is too big for him, and when Ophelia looks for him after the ceremony is over, he’s gone without a trace.
Laertes is home for two glorious weeks.
He sits on her bed, springs creaking, and looks up and down her bookshelf. “What have you been reading?” he says, and his tone is aimed at jovial but misses by a mile.
She shrugs. After all this time missing him, she can’t quite remember what it’s like to have him here.
He rubs at the back of his neck, looks out the window, says, “I saw the letter from the school.”
“I’m going to graduate,” says Ophelia, fiddles with her hands in her lap.
Laertes catches her wrist. “Look at me,” he says.
She looks at him. There’s something different in his eyes than there was when he left; he looks brighter, cleaner. Happier.
He says, “If you want to get out of Denmark, you gotta go to college.”
She looks away; he shakes her wrist. “I mean it. You can’t—I don’t know, marry Hamlet and live here in this house for the rest of your life. You can’t just do that. You gotta go to college. I don’t care where, but you gotta go.”
“None of my friends are going to college,” she says.
“Yeah, well,” he says, “if all of your friends were jumping off a bridge.”
“None of my friends are going to jump off bridges,” says Ophelia.
“It’s a metaphor,” says her brother. She stares at the wall; he squeezes her arm. “Hey. Do you hear me?”
A few hours after Laertes steps on the plane back to college, she snatches the keys from the kitchen table, slides them into the ignition of her brother’s beautiful car.
Hamlet’s motorcycle is parked on one of the hills above the city. He’s leaning against a tree, and there’s a boy sitting at his feet that Ophelia recognizes from the funeral, dressed in a cheap suit and looking at Hamlet like he’s the sun.
She doesn’t slow the car, just keeps on driving.
But she does catch Hamlet alone one day, out by the trees where they’d watched the clouds.
He kisses her like she’s something made out of gold and silver, something to be treasured. She pulls back, guides his hand to the hemline of her slip.
It hurts, a lot, which she expected. There’s no blood, which she hadn’t; Hamlet doesn’t notice, or if he does notice, he doesn’t mention it. She tastes alcohol in his mouth, and keeps her eyes open the entire time.
He leaves his leather jacket with her, offers to give her a ride home on his motorcycle. She blinks at him, shakes her head; she’ll wince over every bump on the car ride home, she knows that well enough already.
He shrugs, leaves her there. She watches the clouds change from one thing into another, wonders if she’s supposed to feel different.
The day she goes mad—
The day she goes mad.
She gives her brother flowers.
It’s more of an apology than anything, and a blessing, too, and a plea: remember. Their father’s not taking a nap, not resting; he’s dead.
She’d been glad when she’d heard her brother was coming home, even if it was only for the funeral; she’d thought she’d be able to see him again, one last time.
It turns out when you’re mad you don’t really ever see people, not properly. They treat you like broken glass: something infinitely fragile, infinitely dangerous. Her big brother won’t ever make her blueberry pie for dinner again.
Her brother won’t ever make her dinner again.
He won’t tell her when it’s time to go to bed again, and he won’t offer to let her work on his car again. He won’t ever give her a cigarette again; he won’t ever grab her wrist in the easy way of someone who knows he couldn’t ever really hurt her; he won’t ever let the radio pour rock ‘n’ roll out of the window into the summer night again, not ever.
She’d always thought she’d be able to say goodbye, but—
It’s funny, but she’s still very, very sure not to let people see her cry.
The river’s all snowmelt, just winter turning into spring. Always has been.
Ophelia’s left her doctors behind somewhere. She soaks her feet in the water, lets them turn numb, then wrinkled. Maybe they’ll turn blue.
Her big brother’s somewhere in town, pacing from one corner of a room to another. She imagines that his fists are clenched, and that his butcher-knife smile is turned into a snarl; there’s so much anger in him, and she closes her eyes, feels a smile spread over her face. He loves her that much, then. It’s nice to know.
A little lower. The water creeps up to her calves, then her knees. She’s sitting on the very edge of the bank now.
She’s wearing Hamlet’s leather jacket, and her low-cut red dress, and her brother’s motorcycle boots, and a bandana tied around her hair. It feels good. She doesn’t know why it took her so long.
She supposes they’ll dress her up nice for the funeral, with a pretty blue ribbon in her hair and waxy lipstick. It occurs to her that the thought bothers her, and that brings a smile to her lips; she hasn’t had enough energy to be angry in so long, and it feels like a little flame in her chest.
Off the bank now, and standing waist-deep in the water. She’s ruining her dress, and she’s already ruined her brother’s boots, but she knows what she’s doing.
Denmark’s a beautiful town, really. A prison, and a nutshell filled with nightmares, but she’d rather be trapped in a beautiful prison than an ugly one. It’s nice to see people who put in the effort to pretend things are fine.
She’ll miss the drive-in movie theater. And the post office. And the tree by her window where she fell into Hamlet’s arms—the water is up to her chest, now, and her heart feels numb enough that the thought barely hurts—and her house, and the sky.
There’s a slippery stone on the riverbed. Ophelia lets herself stumble forward, lets herself fall.
It’s colder than she ever thought it would be, at first. Then it’s very, very warm. She hears music, faintly.
It might be rock ‘n’ roll.