Chapter 39 2012
The air is cooling off the backs of her knees.
Languid orange clouds streak the sky. Viola watches The Viola draw her rapier, declare herself “no fighter.” She prays to God, she makes a dick joke.
The Sebastian is a goofy-looking boy poorly disguising a heavy Manc accent, but sweet and compelling.
Every time her brother laughs, it is a gift.
Viola can feel her mind at work, keeping up with the plot and the meter and chasing a memory she did not know she had.
“How have you made division of yourself?” The Antonio asks.
Her brother’s hand finds hers, a soft magic.
The perfect sense of falling apart and coming together.
Well, almost perfect. It finishes with a bitterness she cannot quite swallow.
There are no parents in Illyria, only revelry and pleasure and youth.
Lovers who misunderstand each other, who want each other to be different.
They see each other only for their disguises, they objectify each other.
The humor fails to mask the undercurrent of unnecessary pain.
The refused space to grieve. The audience is applauding, the cast is returning to bow and receive.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asks her brother as the crowds file out.
“Can I be honest?”
“You can be honest.”
“It was crap.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, complete bullshit.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, Sebastian was so… I mean, he was hardly there, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, true. It’s not really his story, I think.”
“No.”
“He’s there to solve a problem at the end, isn’t he,” she says.
“He’s there to make Viola feel like she can be herself again. But it’s not really about him.”
“Right.”
“And come on,” he says. “Everybody takes their masks off and they still magically like each other? Ridiculous ending. Too many coincidences.”
Viola thinks on this for a moment. “I think coincidences happen constantly, we just don’t always see them. I mean, technically, you and I are a coincidence.”
“I don’t even think Shakespeare liked it,” Sebastian says, waving the playbill. “Obviously he handed somebody the script and they were like ‘What do you want to call it’ and he was like ‘Whatever the fuck you want, dude.’ ”
“Twelfth Night or What You Will.”
“It’s just crazy to me that it was Mom’s favorite play and all.”
Why had they thought it was her mother’s favorite?
Their father told them so.
“No,” Viola says. “It wasn’t.”
Then, as if an incantation, she describes a play, their mother beside her, the curtain going up, the look on her face as she studied the characters, the crowded train station and the sense of safety, of a protected moment, the small plastic cartons of ice cream.
“We brought some home for you,” she says, the fact surprising her as it bubbles to the surface. “Chocolate, I think. It had melted.”
All anyone has is a few brief moments. The lingering sense of how she made them feel.
Maybe that’s enough.
In the morning, Viola leans by the front door as Sebastian pulls his suitcase out of her room and checks the bathroom for any traces of the last week.
“Don’t go.”
But he will, he has to. He looks at her with all the sad inevitability of adulthood, the impossibility of retreat into a house they can both call their own. And she will have to reckon with the wreckage, the number on her phone that she cannot text, the love that has gone.
“I’ll see you soon?”
The memorial. Eight weeks.
She hugs him until he is too heavy to hold.
When the door clicks she is alone with the shadow world of her thoughts.
The play wasn’t all terrible, was it? Surely it asks some questions of merit. Is love deluded? Can you walk away from grief? I don’t know, she thinks. I don’t know.