Falling for Your Madness (21 page)

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark …”

I bit my lip. Tears flowed down my face.
I hate you, Alfred, Lord Tennyson!

“
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.”

“Professor,” I whispered. “What does this all mean?” I wanted him to stand up.

“Dearest one, I have removed all the obstacles I can think of regarding our engagement. I have but one more, and I must do it immediately. I don’t know what is going to happen.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“I love you so. I will lay down my life for you.” He kissed my hand again.

Then he stood, and I reached out for him. He stopped me. “Please do not reward me until I have earned it.” Then he turned and walked back inside the box.

“David! Where are you going?”

“To slay a dragon.”

Then King David the Magnificent disappeared.

But Excalibur remained on the floor.

Monday, October 28, 2012

332 Babcock Street

Brookline, Massachusetts

8:14 a.m.

“Did you get any sleep at all?” Ruby covered me with a blanket. I was half-asleep on our couch.

“Nope.”

“He’ll come back for you when he’s ready.”

“How do you know?”

“You never released him, did you?’

She was getting ready for class.

“I’ll sleep when I know where he is.” I had thought, just like the rest of our friends, that David’s disappearance was a trick, that he would be back in a minute or two. But he wasn’t. While the rest of my friends were impressed with Merle’s magic, I pleaded with Merle about where David was and what he meant by “slaying a dragon
.
”
Merle would only say cryptic things like, “David has his way of doing things. Be patient.” Merle was such a yellow-jacketed weasel.

Then I had realized that I had power. I picked up Excalibur, and I insisted that Merle take us to David’s apartment to find him. David wasn’t there. I had waited for him for over an hour, but Merle had kept saying that he wouldn’t show. He wouldn’t come home until he had accomplished his goal. I didn’t know what the goal was. Merle wasn’t telling me.

Merle did have the decency to take me and Ruby home. I held onto Excalibur the whole time. I didn’t want it out of my sight. I knew
the sword belonged to the king.
If I held it, then David would come back to me.

Then I had remembered: Of course! It’s alone with me in the apartment. I took it out in the hallway, then out on the sidewalk, the site of the not mugging and the revisionist history first kisses and all those kisses on my hand. I waited for another hour.

I brought it back into the apartment. I couldn’t bring it into my bedroom. That wouldn’t be right.

I had spent the night on the couch with King David’s sword at my side.

I sat up. I wanted coffee. No, I didn’t. I wanted tea.

I examined the sword again. It was so intricate and beautiful and heavy. Was this the actual Excalibur or just a great family heirloom? Was this sword the “it” that was mentioned in Dr. Bowles’ Good Riddance Day letters?

If this was just a museum piece, then my sweetheart David had a serious obsession, one that I wanted to live with but wasn’t sure if I could. If it was the real thing, then the school paper he had written was true, despite what Grant said. That meant that I could be queen.

I grasped the hilt one more time. As I touched it …… the sword disappeared!

“Do you know what the weather is like today?” Ruby turned on the telly.

I screamed. “It’s gone! The sword is gone! What happened to it?”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean I had it with me all night, and now it’s missing! It disappeared into thin air! I think I’m going crazy!”

“Laura! Is that David? That
can’t
be him!”

A local news program was showing the visit of Prince William and Kate in Boston. The Prince was at a homeless shelter, shaking hands with vagrants. Behind the Prince, in stained and torn mail, without his crown, with a gash on his head and a scruffy-looking beard, stood a very tall David.

“It’s him! He’s okay!”

David looked terrible. He was very different from the regal and powerful king of last night. The crown was gone. His black curls were pasted to his forehead. His beard looked shaggy. His costume was stained and torn. He approached Prince William, and Excalibur was in his hand.

“Oh my god! He’s going to kill the prince!” I fell backward on the couch. In my mind, I saw him do it. I saw the foil-wielding David on Charles Street. I took those words Fay had said, “school shooting”
and “unstable,”
and envisioned a horrific result. William was the dragon
.
They’re going to get him. David will be arrested and his record of violence will catch up to him, and I’ll never see him again. If they don’t kill him first. I felt like I was having a heart attack.

All David did was extend his hand to the Prince. Prince William shook it. David asked him a question. You couldn’t hear anything because the broadcasters were telling the audience about William’s itinerary, and it was going by so fast. Prince William nodded to David.

Then I gasped. David
gave him Excalibur.

They cut to a commercial.

Monday, October 29, 2012

121 Commonwealth Avenue, #2

Boston, Massachusetts

9:26 a.m.

“I know him. He’ll insist on having a shower.”

That’s what I had told Ruby when I had thrown my clothes on, grabbed my bag, and ran to the T. The C train crawled past all the stops at a record-breaking slowness. St. Paul Street, then Kent Street, then Hawes Street, then St. Mary’s, then Kenmore, then finally Hynes, the closest one to David’s apartment.

I had run up the stairs from the station and sprinted down Massachusetts Avenue through dozens of students, whom I was quite certain had not done enough reading. I had turned right on Commonwealth Avenue and told myself that I would just park the lower hemisphere of my lovely body on his doorstep until he came home. He would have to come home. We were having tea today. He was far too vain to let me see him like that.

I didn’t have to wait.

“David!”

“Laura! It is so lovely to see you! Forgive me, dear, I don’t have any flowers.”

I ran into his arms. It was one of those cheesy, schmaltzy, romantic moments that would probably embarrass me in the future, but I didn’t care.

“What happened? Where did you go? Why did you give it up? Where did you get that cut? Did you know I’ve been worried sick?”

He pulled me to a park bench.

“One thing at a time, darling. There is a story here, and you must leave it to the teller.” He held me very close and stroked my face.

He was filthy. His face was streaked with dirt. There was a growth of beard between his chin and his ears that was rough and uneven. His eyes looked tired and red. There was a cut, dried with blood, at his left temple, and it probably should have had stitches. The shimmer and elegance of the chain mail was dulled. The breastplate was missing. His leggings were torn at the knees, and he smelled like the Hynes Convention Center subway station. But he was there with me.

“So, Merle, that lazy, good-for-nothing, undersize excuse for a driver of mine, did it wrong. I was supposed to wind up in William’s hotel room. Everybody thinks that this is supposed to work like a Star Trek episode and there are exact coordinates and whatnot, but it’s always fuzzy. He says that his powers are spotty since he crossed over the Atlantic, but I say he likes to vex me.”

“David, please, get to the point.”

He kissed my hand. “When I said good-bye to you at the party—and oh my, were you lovely. Do you know how hard it was to leave you? I hadn’t seen you in five days!”

“I know. I missed you too. It just about killed me.”

He sighed. “Let’s not get distracted. When I left you, the plan was for me to go to William’s hotel room with Excalibur and …”

“You weren’t going to kill him, were you?”

“Laura, where do you get these ideas? No. Of course not. I would only kill if someone threatened you. It would make no sense to kill William. They would arrest me, and I wouldn’t see you again. I only wanted to speak to him. I thought that as the next generation of leadership in our families, we should at least try to reconcile. We owe it to England.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“No, I’m still very upset about it. Instead, I landed in a garbage dumpster in Chinatown. I blacked out. I only woke up because someone threw garbage on me. I think that’s how I got the cut on my head. I smell rather dismally right now. It took me a while to figure out where I was. I had a tussle with a rat, but I made short work of him. He obviously didn’t know Bartitsu.”

I tried to be patient with him. “Then?”

“I crawled out of the dumpster and discovered my breastplate was missing. It was very late by that time and very dark in those alleys, and I had to ask some local vagrants where the Prince was. They said they’d tell me if I gave them my crown. Hah! Like that would ever happen. It was dark, and I tripped over my big feet, and it fell off my head. Then I realized, of course, they wanted my crown, not
my crown.
They were speaking literally. I was speaking figuratively. So, I let them have it. They thought I was one of them, so they led me to a homeless shelter. I realized from the newspaper article my father showed me that this was the place where the prince was coming. What a stroke of luck!”

“Or maybe magic.”

“Hmm, I never give Merle credit unless I need a woman sawn in half. I am a gentleman, that would never happen. So, I went in, and the very nice people there gave me a blanket, which I didn’t need. They gave me a toothbrush, which I didn’t use until about three hours ago, a pair of socks, which naturally were not cashmere, and a meal, which was the worst cheeseburger I have ever eaten in my life. Then I heard a message from a clergyman about how much God loves me and how he had a plan for my life. Besides being ironic, I felt the speaker did poor job of backing up his points with specific texts. Then I got into an interesting conversation with a man …”

“David, you are talking way too much. Get to the point.”

“This
is
the point, dear Laura. The man claimed to be Samuel Adams, and he wanted me to join with him, his brother John, and the other rebels at Faneuil Hall to incite a revolution. I argued with him that perhaps he was right about the ‘taxation without representation’
issues, but I personally see the Loyalist point of view. But the man had no credibility whatsoever. Everybody knows John was his cousin, not his brother.”

“David, please. The point!”

He slipped off the park bench and kneeled on the ground in front of me. He held both my hands in his. He looked at me with those tired, red eyes, the ones whose madness had faded away into exhaustion. “I realized something last night, Laura.”

“What?”

He spoke very slowly. “I may be mad, but I’m not stupid. I know what my future holds.” He shook with fear. I had never seen him so vulnerable.

“If you ever release me, I’ll be going back to that homeless shelter. There will be no Oxford. There will be no Boston College.” He put his head back in my lap.

I lifted his chin. “No.”

He looked at me and nodded. “Yes. I am mad. Completely.”

“No, you’re not.”

“But I am. We Bowles men have always wrestled with delusion and paranoia and obsession. The only thing keeping me from losing my mind completely is knowing that you are here. You look me in the eyes and say in that beautiful way, ‘I believe in you.’”

I wiped my eyes.

David’s voice cracked. “My father lost everything when my mother left. He became nothing, a raving madman, because no one was next to him to tell him otherwise.”

“But you’re not him.”

“I might as well be.” He squeezed my hands. “You’ve seen everything. You know about me. You’ve met my family. You can tell I’m a mess.”