If We Were Villains

by M.L. Rio

“Oh, is all forgot?” I ask. “All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?”

It was hers, once, in the easy days of our third year, when we all thought ourselves invincible.

privately thinking that if it had been her, we probably would have gotten away with it.

It’s not as firm a promise as she wants. But she won’t get that. James is gone, and I’m sure of nothing now.

“That shirt in the locker,” she said. “It wasn’t yours, not from that night. I ought to know.”

We talk for hours. There’s a decade of things we haven’t said.

Then we just stood there. And he said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ I said, ‘The same thing you’re thinking about.’ We didn’t even need to say your name.” She frowns down into the red pool of her wine. “It was just a kiss, but God, it hurt like hell.”

Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning?

confusion made a masterpi...

but it was him, and he was drunk, and talking like a crazy person.

‘Or maybe you’re the only one who would, but why object? What’s done is done, and even-handed justice for us both.’ And that was enough—I knew. I got away, barely. Got out of the Castle and went straight to Colborne.

“Us. All that time. Was any of it real, or did you know all along, and we were just a get-out-of-jail-free card for James?”

“God, Meredith, no. I had no idea,” I tell her. “You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.”

“Were you in love with him?” “Yes,” I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.

“I knew then, I just pretended not to.” “So did I. So did he. I’m sorry.”

Nothing is so exhausting as anguish.

All I can think of is Macbeth—he has James’s face in my imagination—shouting, Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep, so sleep no more! Oh, balm of hurt minds. I want sleep desperately, but do not hope to have it.

I know more by now about what happened. He drove north from the small apartment he’d occupied outside Berkeley and drowned in the icy winter waters of the San Juan Islands. In his car, abandoned on the ferry landing, he’d left his keys, an empty bottle of Xanax, and a pair of almost identical envelopes.

Alas, the sea hath cast me on the rock, Wash’d me from shore to shore, and left me breath Nothing to think on but ensuing death. What I have been I have forgot to know; But what I am, want teaches me to think on: A man throng’d up with cold: my veins are chill, And have no more of life than may suffice To give my tongue that heat to ask your help; Which if you shall refuse, when I am dead, For that I am a man, pray see me burièd.

I am on the Internet, searching for every record I can find of James Farrow’s death in the bleak midwinter of 2004. I devour five, six, ten old articles, all of which say the same thing. He drowned himself on the last day of December, and though the local authorities dragged the freezing water for days and miles, his body was never found.

(Lord, what fools these mortals be.)