Page 28 of Sawyer

“Don’t push me over,” she mutters.

“Then push back a little,” I whisper.

“Alright, actors!” Bruce cries. “We’re all in place.” He looks around the stage, then frowns. “Wyatt and Layla, you’re playing siblings, remember. No funny business while you’re on my stage.” His eyes land on me. “Yes, Sawyer and Ivy! Oooo! I like the tension!”

As Bruce speaks, Ivy relaxes, letting herself lean back fully. I can feel the prickle of wool fibers through my T-shirt, the column of her spine nestled neatly against the column of mine.Our spines fit together, I think, marveling at the thought.

“Now,” says Bruce, “I will give you individual scenes to run together. You must speak in a whisper, which means you may need to strain to hear, but it will demand that youlistento each other.Heareach other. Heathcliff and Cathy, start on page forty-two. Catherine’s death scene. Vera, I want you and Mr.…”

I tune out the rest of Bruce’s instructions, opening my script to page forty-two. At some point, I realize, Ivy and I have equalized the pressure of our backs, which makes the structure of our positions feel cooperative, integrated…even, essential.

“You start,” Ivy whispers. She must have turned her head a touch because I feel her breath on my ear.

“Right. Okay.” I’ve read the book twice at this point, and Bruce’s script at least five times, and this scene is—by far—the heart of the work, the underlying theme. I want to get it right. “Give me a second, okay?”

“Okay.”

The stage instruction reads that Catherine lies in her bed, on the brink of death, straining toward the door of her chamber.Heathcliff appears in the doorway, out of breath, as though he’s climbed a dozen flights. He rushes to her bedside and grasps her in his arms, kissing her head and forehead, her cheeks and nose and lips. When he draws away from her, agony is chiseled into the sharp lines of his face. She will not recover from this illness, and he knows it now.

“Catherine!” I whisper, leaning into her, but trying to be gentle with her dying body. “My life. My soul. How can I bear it?”

“You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff.” She coughs weakly. “I will not pity you.” She pauses, then adds, “You are so strong! How many years will you live after I’m gone?” She coughs again, and it’s a pitiful sound. “Will you be happy when I’m gone? When I’m deep inside the earth, will you forget me? Will you pass my grave twenty years hence and say, ‘There is Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her once, but I have loved many since.’”

I clench my jaw in anger and injustice. She lies in the bed she earned as Mrs. Edgar Linton. She dies another man’s wife, giving birth to his brat. And yet, she is so damned selfish, she demands my reassurance that I will love none as I have loved—as I love—her. She forces me to say the words when the truth of my heart is etched upon hers.

“Are youbedeviledto speak so?” I demand. “Those words will be branded in my memory and eating deeper eternally after you have left me! I could as soon forget you as my very existence! I willneverlove another. But you! You selfish, brutal creature, while you lie in eternal peace, I will livehere, on earth, without you…in the fires of hell!”

“I will not…be at peace,” she vows softly, a coughing attack making her heave and jerk against me. “How can you imagine it so? I’m not wishing you greater torment than mine, Heathcliff. I only wish us never to be parted, and should a word of mine distress you hereafter, think I feel the same distressunderground, and for my own sake, forgive me! Hold me, Heathcliff! Tighter!”

I lean back against her, harder, more urgently. “Whydid you despise me?Whydid you betray your own heart? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. If you loved me, then whatrighthad you to leave me? Because misery and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, Catherine—not on my part. Never!”

“Oh, Heathcliff!”

“You, of your own will, did it. You chose your poor fancy for Edgar Linton over—overme!Over us! I have not broken your heart—youhave broken it, and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that Iamstrong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you…oh, god! Have pity! Shouldyoulike to live with your soul in the grave?”

She shutters against me, and I imagine she is crying. My hands shake from wanting to reach for her, caress her, hold her. When she speaks again, it is in quiet sobs.

“If I’ve d-done wrong, I’m d-dying for it now…”

Another cough, so much weaker now through her tears. I lean forward a little, hoping she will lie back against me and use my body as her final resting place.

In the script there is a note that Nelly hurries into the room and tells Heathcliff he must go, that Edgar and the doctor are coming.

“No!” Cathy cries, her head lolling between my shoulder bones, soft red hair tickling the back of my neck. “No!”

“Cathy, I will stay under your window in the garden—”

“No!” she orders me. “Youmaynot go. Youmustnot go. Not for an hour! Not for a minute!”

“I must! But I will return!”

The script says that Heathcliff jumps from Catherine’s bedroom window into the garden. When Nelly, Edgar, and the doctor enter the room seconds later, she has died. Somehow, they manage to save the baby, which Edgar whisks from the room.

Against my back, Ivy unclenches every muscle. The hand holding her script flops onto the floor and the binder slides open from her lap onto the wooden stage. I am frantic to turn around and look at her, to be sure she’s still breathing, to make certain she didn’t…die.

I forgive you!I want to scream.I forgive you! For your own reasons, you chose him over me, but you loved me, too. In your own way, you loved me, too. I forgive you!

But Heathcliff’s sorrow takes him to a different, darker place. I lean forward until my chin almost touches my knees, and the shadow of my body makes the script on my thighs hard to read. Catherine lies prone on my back, her weight welcome, and yet—if she is truly gone—terrifying.

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