Willow
Mid-morning on Saturday, I grabbed my phone and typed a text to Angie.
Help!
Are you being held for ransom by pirates? she texted back. Because I sleep in on Saturday, Holloway.
I have to spend the day with Isaac.
My phone lit up with Angie’s number. I hit the green button and answered, “Yes, I’m serious.”
“Why? When? How did this happen?” Her voice was equal parts sleep and indignation. “Whoa. Is this—pause for dramatic effect—a date?”
“Absolutely not,” I said, making my firm voice belie the flutter in my stomach. “Martin Ford asked us to hang out and get to know each other better. So we’re not so awkward on stage.”
“A likely story,” Angie said. “Ok, what’s with the S.O.S.?”
“I need a ride into town to meet Isaac.”
“Doesn’t Isaac drive? He’s got an old blue pickup, if I’m not mistaken. Hold up.” Her voice dropped. “You’re not ashamed to be seen in his truck, are you?”
“For God’s sake, I’m not a completely shallow bitch.”
“I know, but us plebes need to stick together against the bourgeoisie.”
“You’ve seen Marie Antoinette too many times.”
“No such thing. Sophia Coppola is a goddess.” She yawned. “What were we talking about again?”
“My imaginary prejudice against Isaac’s truck,” I said. “The real problem is my dad. He won’t let me see Isaac outside rehearsal. If I tell him we’re hanging out all day because the director told us to, he’d never believe me. He’ll yank me from the play.”
“Hmm, a legit dilemma. Very well, Cinderella. When do you need me?”
“I’m meeting Isaac at one o’clock.”
“Your carriage shall arrive at quarter ‘til, but girl, I got yearbook shit to do the rest of the day. I can’t be schlepping your booty back home when your non-date with Isaac Pearce is over.”
“I’ll figure something else out. Thanks, Angie.”
I sat on the windowsill in my room, overlooking the neighborhood. Green things were starting to grow again. The snow was gone and the sun was golden and bright in a clear sky I’d never seen in Manhattan. It splashed long stripes across my hardwood floors and the pile of blankets still there.
I’d had a rocky sleep last night, but no terrors. Instead, whenever I woke, my thoughts were filled with the rehearsal.
And Isaac.
He’d been cold and rude to me in rehearsal. No, correction, Hamlet was rude to Ophelia. But the scene called for it and I had to take it. That’s what I signed up for. I could be a professional and not take it personally. There was nothing between us—he was acting a part. And besides, the more realistic he was, the better the show.
The love was there first.
I pulled my script on my lap and wrote those words—just an actress taking notes from her director, that’s all—at the top of Act Three. Black X’s crawled along the side margin, looking like they were swarming up the page to overtake those defenseless words floating at the top.
I drew a protective bubble around The love was there first with arrows stabbing out to keep the X’s away… Then shut my script.
You’re going to be as crazy as Ophelia by the time this thing is over.
Angie honked from the driveway at quarter of one. I breezed past my parents in the living room. They were bickering about some work function in Indianapolis Dad wanted Mom to attend with him.
“Where are you going?” Dad said.
“Out with Angie.” I grabbed my white jacket from the hook in the mudroom. When I came back out, Dad was peering through the kitchen window to the front drive.
No, Dad, it’s not Isaac. Aloud I said, “Be back before dinner.”
Dad nodded. “Glad to see you’re making friends.”
I hurried down the drive to hop into Angie’s car. Her unruly curls were held back by a colorful headband. Her black sweatshirt read I’ll stop wearing black when they make a darker color.
“Don’t you look so pretty and fresh for your non-date with Mr. Pearce,” she said, taking in my light jeans and pink cashmere sweater. She leaned closer. “Nice perfume. And are you wearing lip gloss?”
“Shut up. My lips are chapped.”
She grinned. “His might be too. You should probably share.”
“Stop.” I rolled my eyes but that silly flutter was in my stomach again. I turned on the music to avoid having to talk about it.
It was just before one when Angie dropped me off in front of the HCT.
“Thanks so much, Ange,” I said, hopping out. “I appreciate it.”
“One last thing,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Kiss him.”
A jolt shot through me. “What?”
“With tongue.”
“What the hell for?”
“Ophelia and Hamlet were lovers, right? So, for research or Method acting or whatever you call it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Isaac’s not into me. And judging by his pissy mood in rehearsal last night, babysitting the newbie actor all day is the last thing he wants to do.”
Angie shrugged. “We’ll see. I want a full report. Tonight. Not on Monday morning or I’ll be dead from curiosity.”
“Bye, Angie,” I said.
“With tongue,” she called just as I shut the door on her.
I turned and nearly tripped over my damn feet. Right in view of Isaac, who leaned against the brick wall next to the theater’s box office, smoking a cigarette. My heart crashed against my chest then dropped to my knees.
If there is a God, Isaac did not hear that.
“Hi,” I said, moving toward him slowly, like a lion tamer walking up to a big cat.
A panther.
He wore his usual jeans, boots, and black leather over a white shirt. His dark hair was wet from a shower and his gray-green eyes watched me with a bored detachment.
“Hey,” he said. Nothing more.
“I brought my script,” I said. “If you wanted to run lines or something.”
He exhaled a plume of smoke, dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out with his heel. “Whatever. Did we decide coffee or food?”
“Coffee’s good.”
“Okay.”
We walked the block and a half to Daisy’s Coffeehouse without talking. Isaac held the door for me.
“Thanks,” I said.
No reply.
Not into this. Got it. Message received.
Daisy’s was a cute little place with warm wood flooring and tables that were half-filled with patrons. They chatted over steaming cups, typed on laptops or read books. Nina Simone crooned over the sound system.
“What do you want?” Isaac asked.
“I can get my own,” I said, reaching for my purse. Isaac gave me a stormy glare and I met it with my own pointed look. “Listen, it’s obvious you don’t want to be here. No sense making you pay for it, too.”
He opened his mouth and then snapped it shut. He turned away, looking around the café. When he spoke, his voice was softer.
“There’s a table over there,” he said, indicating a two-seater tucked in the corner near a small shelf marked Free Books. “Tell me what you want to drink and then grab it.”
“Medium latte,” I said. “Please.”
He nodded and I went to the table. He came back a few minutes later with a latte for me and what looked like black coffee for him, both in mugs instead of to-go cups.
He started to sit, then stopped. “You need sugar?”
“Two, please.”
Female eyes followed as Isaac went to the little station of creamers and stir sticks, and a small smile spread over my lips. Date or non-date, it didn’t suck to have a hot guy sitting across from me.
Not a date, I thought. We’re just sitting.
“Something funny?” Isaac asked, sliding into his seat.
“Nothing,” I said, taking the sugar. “Thank you.”
He sipped his coffee and the silence stretched until it itched.
“You take your coffee black?” I asked, a painful crank of the engine to get this conversation going. “I could never. Too strong for me.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure this is exactly what Mr. Ford had in mind when he sent us out here. ‘Hamlet, go find out how Ophelia likes her coffee.’”
Isaac’s lips twitched, then finally smiled and the tight tension between us cracked a little. “Call him Martin or Marty,” he said. “He won’t answer to Mr. Ford.”
“Good to know,” I said. “You’ve worked with him for a lot of shows, right?”
“Five years now.”
“You have a favorite?”
His eyes on me were steady and unblinking. “Oedipus. So far.”
“That’s funny. That’s the only one I’ve seen.” I cleared my throat and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “So, will you really be off-book in three weeks? You carry half the play.”
“It’s a lot,” he said. “I have help though.”
“Yeah?” It was the first time he’d offered something of himself.
“Yeah. Kid who lives next door to me helps me run lines.”
“Lucky you.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. “I’m really lucky.” He put a subtle filter over the last word, tingeing it with bitterness but not enough to invite questions.
The conversation sputtered out again. After a few excruciating moments, I reached for my bag. “I brought my script. Not sure what Mr. Ford… I mean, Martin, had in mind, but we can run lines now if you want. I don’t want you to lose the day.”
Isaac crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Why do you keep apologizing?”
I bristled. “I’m not apologizing.”
“You are.”
“Well, it’s not like you’re super thrilled to be here so—”
“I am,” he said. “I mean, I’m here. Now we can run lines or whatever you want to do. But stop worrying if this is a waste of my time. It’s not.”
I folded my arms and leaned over the table at him. “You know, it would be a helluva lot easier to not feel like you’re here against your will if you didn’t act like you’re here against your will.”
He pursed his lips. “I don’t make a lot of conversation.”
“I can see that,” I said. “But I need this assignment, or whatever you call it, to work. You have this whole acting thing down, but I’m scared shitless. I need all the help I can get.”
The front legs of his chair came down. “You don’t.”
I blinked. “Sorry?”
“You don’t need that much help. I saw your audition. And being scared is a good thing.”
“How do you figure?”
“It’s how you know you care.”
I turned my coffee mug around. “Being scared doesn’t feel like care. It feels like danger.”
“It is,” Isaac said. “It’s dangerous to put yourself out there. To rip your heart out and throw it to the audience. What if they hate what you’re trying to say? What if they don’t understand it? Or worse, what if they don’t care? The validation of your entire life is tied up in your art. So yeah, that’s pretty fucking dangerous. And scary.”
I glanced up at him over my cup as I soaked up his little kernels of knowledge I desperately needed. “You don’t seem scared. You seem cool as shit, all the time.”
He smiled faintly. “It’s all an act.”
“You said that before. At my audition.”
“I remember,” he said, only this time his short answer wasn’t a wall to the conversation but an opening.
“You also said I’d get Ophelia,” I said. “And you were right, because I took your advice. I told the story.”
He nodded. “It’s the only thing to do.”
I went back to my coffee, thinking he couldn’t be more right. I ran my finger along the edge of my coffee mug’s handle. “So, since we’re here, can I ask… Does it help?”
“Does what help?”
“Acting. I mean, why do you do it? For relief?”
He nodded. “Yes. For a little while. But there’s always more there. More story to tell, so to speak.”
“What’s your story?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to snatch them back. They were so horribly invasive.
And I couldn’t give mine in return.
“Well,” he said.
I waved my hands. “No, forget it.” I grabbed for my coffee and took a long pull to keep my mouth occupied.
He shrugged. “It’s sort of what we’re here for, right?” His lips pressed together and relaxed, as if he couldn’t decide to release the words behind them. His long fingers tapped the stirring stick I’d used in my coffee, his eyes far away.
Maybe he was like me. Maybe under the bravado and aloof manner and don’t-give-a-fuck, Isaac Pearce only wanted a little piece of normal. To sit over a cup of coffee and just talk.
“My mom died when I was eight,” he said. “She had a stroke. She was too fucking young to have a stroke, but… It was a blockage no one knew about. It killed her instantly.”
A slow horror crept under my skin.
Did he see her die? Please tell me he didn’t see it.
“I was at school,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I went to school with a mom and came back without one.”
“I’m so sorry.”
His smile was hard and quick. My stirring stick moved through his fingers, turning over and over.
“Sounds dramatic, but losing my mom so suddenly was like having the wind knocked out of me for an entire year. No way to process what happened. She wasn’t sick. One minute she was there, totally healthy, and the next minute she was gone. It was so fucking meaningless.” He shrugged, a casual, bitter acceptance of something terrible. “So I stopped talking. I didn’t see the point.”
“For a whole year?” I asked.
He looked up at me, his features hardening. “You heard that, huh?”
I sat back. “Well…yes. At school.”
He waved a hand. “It’s okay. There’s some weird shit floating around about me. My dad isn’t well. You probably heard that too.”
He deserved honesty, so I nodded.
“He didn’t take Mom’s death well either. Drove him to drink. Talking to him never got me much but a fist or a boot after that anyway.”
I swallowed hard and Isaac noticed.
“Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you that shit. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does,” I said. “Of course, it does.”
He didn’t reply but I saw my words land on him and sink in.
“Then you found acting,” I said, and it wasn’t a question. “I heard it helped you find your voice again.” Shame burned my skin for sucking up rumors and gossip as if there weren’t real people on the other side.
“Fourth grade,” Isaac said. “When I went back to school, Miss Grant was the only teacher who didn’t demand I talk. She put someone else’s words in front of me one day and said, This character needs a voice. If you could lend him yours, that would be great. Like I was doing her a favor.” He glanced at me. “So I did. It wasn’t me talking. It wasn’t my words. And that made it okay.”
“You’ve been acting ever since?”
“Yeah.”
“And it helped you.”
He nodded. “That’s the funny thing about art. If it’s really good, you can see yourself in it. Sometimes a little bit. Sometimes a lot.”
“Do you see yourself in Hamlet?” I smiled faintly. “Seems like the exact kind of question Martin wants us to ask each other.”
He didn’t smile back. “Yeah, I do. Hamlet hates that his mother married Claudius so soon after his father died. In Hamlet’s eyes, Claudius is an imposter king, sitting in a chair that doesn’t belong to him. I lost my father when my mom died. An imposter sits in our shitty trailer now, drunk and unrecognizable, pouring the poison down his throat.”
Now I had to bite the inside of my cheek. Angie told me by doing this play with Isaac, I’d have a front row seat to his incredible talent. Sitting across from him at this little table, I realized he had an incredible mind, too. Poetry in his own words, though I doubt he knew it. His quiet observations about his life were a thousand times more potent and raw than anything I’d seen him do onstage.
He raised his eyes to mine and slowly they came back to the here and now. And my awestruck expression.
“Shit,” he said. “That was probably way more than you wanted to hear—”
“Don’t apologize,” I whispered.
His eyes widened slightly, drawing me deeper into their gray-green depths. A storm-tossed ocean, miles deep. Icy and choppy on the surface. Warm stillness beneath.
We stared. And in the short silence, something settled between us. An agreement or understanding. He’d shared himself, yet asked nothing in return. I was free to float in the intimate closeness between the storyteller and the listener. I wasn’t trapped or weighed down by him.
I could become the storyteller…
Except I couldn’t. My own story had to stay locked behind my teeth. Unfair, but how could I tell my acting partner what I hadn’t been able to tell my own parents or best friends? Risk a mental breakdown in this cute little coffee shop?
No, the time to tell the truth had long passed. What happened to me could only manifest through the words and acts of a character written more than four hundred years ago. The safest way to tell my story was to cut, distill and refract it through the prism of Ophelia’s madness.
“I’m still trying to find the connection to Ophelia,” I said, not looking at him. “I haven’t done this before. Dialed deep into a character, I mean.”
“Yes, you have,” Isaac said. “Your audition piece.”
“That was three minutes. A single moment. Hamlet is so much bigger.” I arched a brow at him. “I distinctly recall you telling me as much at the audition.” I tapped my chin. “How did you put it? Ah, yes. You politely requested I not fuck this up for you.”
A small smile ghosted over his lips. “It’s my standard request,” he said. He crossed his forearms on the table and leaned on them. “Start with the basics. What do you and your character have in common?”
“I don’t know.” I sat back in my seat, thinking. “You could say my father’s an overbearing ass, like Polonius.”
Isaac nodded, his expression thoughtful. “It was his idea to move you out here in the middle of your senior year?”
“Yeah. Well, no. His boss transferred him. Even though my dad’s a senior VP, he obeyed without question. My mom loves Manhattan but even that wasn’t enough to keep us there.”
“Do you miss New York?”
“Not really.” I swallowed hard. This was veering a little too close to a spot marked X. “Turns out I like it here,” I said. “Something about Harmony feels secluded, and I think that’s what I need right now.”
“Why?” Isaac asked, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it.
I can’t tell you that, Isaac, I thought. Not ever.
I shrugged, as if a flick of the shoulder could disperse the weight I carried. “Manhattan’s busy and kinetic and I guess I got tired of the pace. Things move slower here. Maybe that’s why you don’t like it?”
Ball back in his court. Good. Except Isaac didn’t answer. He only looked at me for a long time. And I knew. I knew he could see right through my pathetic segues and my clumsy subject changes. He knew I wasn’t telling the story. Yet I sensed he respected the not-telling. The kind of respect for silence only someone who hadn’t spoken for an entire year could have.
“Yeah, I’m leaving Harmony,” Isaac said finally. “Martin has some talent scouts coming to the opening night of Hamlet.”
I set down my coffee mug hard. “He does? Oh my God. Isaac, that’s amazing.”
He shrugged. “We’ll see. I keep thinking it’s like a guaranteed ticket out but…”
“It will be,” I said. “They’re going to shit their pants over you.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. There will be much shitting of pants.”
He smiled with one side of his mouth. I had yet to see a full-blown grin or hear a hearty laugh from this guy. I wondered if I ever would before he moved out of Harmony.
He’s leaving Harmony, I thought, as if test-driving it. I didn’t like it.
“The theater won’t be the same,” I said, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear. “Martin will miss you.”
“He’ll be okay.”
“Won’t you miss it here? Even a little?”
Isaac met my gaze steadily. “No,” he said, and stared hard at something over my shoulder. I turned to look.
Outside, two Plastics and their boyfriends walked past the window. They slowed when they saw us, snickered to each other and continued on.
“Great,” I muttered. “Commence milling of rumors.”
Isaac’s expression darkened.
“Not about you,” I said. “Me. Jessica Royce and Company is under the impression I auditioned for the play just to follow you around.”
Isaac’s eyebrows went up. “Oh?”
“It’s total bullshit,” I said. “I don’t do anything I don’t want to do.”
Not anymore.
I straightened and drank the last cold dregs of my latte. “Anyway, I don’t give a shit what they think. Do you want to get out of here?”
Isaac frowned. “And go where?”
“I don’t know. Let’s get out and walk. I didn’t see much of Harmony when it was under the snow. You can show me the highlights.”
“Harmony has no highlights.”
“Impossible. Every place is famous for something.”
Isaac nodded. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “I know a place.”