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So he kills her, and she dies.
So he kills her, and she rises.
So he kills her, and he weds her, and that is impossible, that two brides would lie together as newlyweds; it’s something Claudio had never imagined he could hope for, something he never thought would come to truth, and he wonders if maybe it hasn’t after all — if he’ll wake up and find her gone again, grave dirt in their bed and blood on his hands.
/
What were you so afraid of? Claudio wants to ask himself sometimes, when he watches Hero in the garden, dress swirling around her legs, the light catching ever-so-gently on her hair, and when she looks to the window and smiles at him like she means it. What did you really think of her? How cruel do you think she could be? Hero had never told him a lie. (He wonders if that’s changed now. He wonders that every night, when he asks how she is, when he tells her he loves her — like a plea, like penance — and she repeats the words.)
What did he really think of her? But in truth he hadn’t thought of her at all. He had thought of himself: the ill-fitting suit at the masquerade, the voice cracking reed-thin for every man in Messina to hear. And of course there was Benedick, there was always Benedick, but Benedick was different, she was smooth and slick and swift-talking and she had a mouth full of teeth behind all those joking barbs, and if men didn’t like her, they at least knew to leave her alone, and Claudio was — Claudio, was all, and Hero was Hero. Hero was Hero, which was to say he couldn’t breathe when he looked at her, which he and Benedick had called romantic cliche and laughed about over their cups for years, and sworn never to marry, like they could pretend it was something they wanted (to live bachelors, they said, to live free) and not something that they’d never really have a choice about, like this. Being themselves. Being the kind of women they were.
All those joking drunken vows, and Hero made him want to swallow them all, however bitterly made, however foul they tasted. She was breathtaking, she was magnetic, she was impossible to look away from, she was — it was impossible to say anything that fit without devolving into nursery-rhyme cliches and lines that would have made Benedick laugh to tears. She was Hero. She was very beautiful and her voice was like music and she showed every emotion she had in her eyes, and she spent at least an hour in the garden every day, and she made faces at him from across courtyards while her father spoke, and he was in love with her; that was it, the long and short of it. That Hero was Hero and Claudio loved Hero and all the rest was for the poets to draw out.
And he hadn’t been thinking of her at all. She had dissipated in his mind like mist, a gentle doomed Eurydice, as soon as he realized Don John was serious. He had thought of himself, and how much absurdly shorter he was than Don John or Don Pedro listening in, and how young and stupid he had to look, pulling at his cuffs. He had thought that he should have seen it coming, after all. That he’d been afraid, at the masquerade when Don Pedro intervened, for good reason. That no one would ever keep him hers if she realized she could have a real man, and not a woman in wolf’s clothing.
Of course, he remembers thinking, why am I surprised? And what hurt was that he still was, anyhow.
/
Thou hast killed my child.
And that part wasn’t so surprising, either, was it? He remembers being sixteen years old with his hair new-cut short, already a soldier in the making, already learning to keep his head down and crop himself close to the skin and do what they say because he was the weaker vessel and he hadn’t room to argue. And he remembers curling into bed with her face flashing behind his eyes — not Hero’s, some other girl’s, the first girl he ever loved, someone whose name he still remembers but doesn’t speak, because he never spoke to her, anyway. He was afraid. He didn’t know what he was. More man than woman, maybe, but never man enough, but then, he was never woman enough either. But he knew he wasn’t anyone who could touch her, who could even take her soft smooth hand, without bringing the world down on their backs.
I say thou hast belied mine innocent child.
Funny, he’d never expected the circumstances, but he’d been waiting for the words a long time.
How afraid he used to be, of hurting someone with a mere touch.
How afraid he should have been, for Hero.
He never learned to hold anyone gently. He learned to stand taller and roll his shoulders back and lower his voice and hit like a man and say yes and play along when rich men threw lives and money around. Even before the truth — that she had always been faithful, that she had always been his Hero and he had always been hers — Leonato’s words were enough to clench a cold fist around his heart, to flood his veins with poison; his stomach turned over; he was almost sick. Instead he stood taller and rolled his shoulders back and lowered his voice and kept one hand on his sword and shoved back when Benedick pushed him and he kept his face from cracking like marble and kept the tears from welling up and tried to mimic Don Pedro’s laughing-jackal smile and tried to laugh off the challenge and the offer of the cousin and the rambling of the stupid fool constable and thought am I doing it right am I doing it right am I playing along am I playing along am I acting right am I speaking right am I doing it right is it working am I right and of course he wouldn’t ever be, but maybe he could pretend.
Her death shall fall heavy on you. Heavier every day since she’s come back.
/
So that’s it, isn’t it. So they’re married. So they’re wife and wife. So the ending’s happy, but the pieces haven’t all been picked up, have they, and he’s still afraid she’ll cut herself on the shards. Afraid she’ll cut herself on his hands, too. Beatrice hates him; Beatrice should. Benedick might hate him too, but he can never tell; Benedick has a smile and a laugh for every man-or-otherwise she meets. She laughed the same when they were brothers in arms drinking around the campfire as she did in the courtyard with one hand on her sword and the other fisted in his collar. If she’s forgiven him, he’ll never know. He’s not sure he wants to. He’s not sure he wants her to, either.
Hero, though — he wants Hero to forgive him.
Isn’t that the most selfish part?
She shouldn’t forgive him. Maybe she’s obliged to, or feels obliged to, now that they’re married, now that they share the same bed and the same house and the same family name. Now that everyone’s eyes are on them, more so even than Benedick and Beatrice — because Benedick and Beatrice were lost causes before each other, anyhow, oddities in their own right, and it was no great loss if they never wed, but Hero and Claudio are young and she’s a pretty maid and he’s a handsome soldier and if this falls apart, if this fragile thing between them shatters, it will not be about them anymore. It will be that they are both women. It will be that he is the wrong kind of woman, and look what he’s done to her now.
Maybe she feels like she has to. Even though she shouldn’t. He wants her to, but he doesn’t; he loves her, but he’s not sure she knows that, and he’s never been good with words.
In the evenings, in their bed, she gets quiet. Not cold, not standoffish, but quiet, staring at the ceiling or the folds of their blanket, and Claudio is afraid to touch her, even now that they’re married, even now that it isn’t a sin. Shouldn’t be a sin.
“Goodnight, love,” she says, head on the pillow, mind far away, looking at him but, really, looking somewhere else.
“I love you,” he says, and he means I love you; “good night,” he says, and he means I’m sorry.