Suresh: Do you think Hayden regrets anything?
Xia: That’s also a complicated question.
—On Reclaiming Stories:
An Interview with Felicia Xia
Excerpted from Tell Me A Tragedy
I was more afraid of Hayden for killing Rasmussen than for killing my father.
My father’s death was an accident. Mismatched malicious intent. I can see that now. Rasmussen’s was not.
I watched Rasmussen die on the screen. Charles and I stood in the security room, video feed screens winking at us from the wall. On one of them, one electronic tile in the mosaic that pieced Elsinore together, Rasmussen was dying. He choked, slowly. I couldn’t make out any details, only that he crawled, slowly, dragging his wasting body across the floor, and then he stopped.
Before I could watch him fall still entirely—was that his chest, still heaving?—Charles grabbed me by the wrist, livid.
“Did you know about this?” he asked, already dragging me from the room.
“No,” I said, trying to wrest my arm away. “No, I had no idea—let go of me, I can walk like a normal person.”
But he kept going.
I dragged my feet against the ground, stubborn, but Charles didn’t even look back.
“I swear to god, I had no idea he was going to do that, I—”
“I find that hard to believe,” Charles said curtly.
And then we were at his office.
Charles shoved me through the door and I shuddered, hoping he wouldn’t notice the disturbances, the things I’d reorganized.
He yanked out the leather chair, then gestured towards it.
I looked down, blank.
Charles, with nothing of the force he’d used to get me here, pressed a hand into my shoulder blade and pushed me towards the chair.
I blinked. “What are we doing?” I asked.
Charles didn’t move his hand. “You have the location, right?”
Instantly, white-hot panic dropped over me like a gauzy veil. The dummy sheet with the supposed location—the fake—sat in my pocket like glaring red light, warning, warning. “Yeah,” I said.
Charles shook the chair. “Sit down,” he said. “Let’s check it over.”
When I looked closer, there was a manic gleam in Charles’s eyes: opaque, his pupils slicked over with a bright film. His hands didn’t shake, but I thought he looked most like Hayden in that moment—poised and put-together, but the edge of something roiling underneath, waiting to spill out.
So I sat. I let him push me in front of the desk. I took out the sheet of paper and I dropped it on the desk.
Charles snatched it up, didn’t look back when he left the room.
All I could do was sit, breathe.
I wondered what it was like outside. Had the sun come up yet? Had the edges of morning started to bleach the midnight ink sky yet? I breathed in the stale lab air and pretended it was from fresh morning.
We’d been so close.
Above me, the speakers spluttered.
Felicia? Horatio asked, tentative.
“How are you here?” I asked, confused.
I don’t know where you are. I traced your pager. But—he sounded sardonic—I’m assuming this means you’re in Charles’s office.
“Where is he?” I intoned. I wasn’t asking about Charles.
I can’t tell you.
“Of course you can’t.”
Just like you couldn’t tell me what you did in the basement lab.
“Right,” I said. Those were the rules. Keep to your boundaries. Secrets everywhere. All of us deceiving each other to keep Charles from getting the full picture, desperate to look for a place to slip away between the competing narratives. And now it was all ruined.
But I wanted to know… Did you know any of it? Did you plan any of this with him? Horatio sounded concerned. Whether it was for me or Hayden, I didn’t know, and I didn’t care to, anymore.
“No,” I said. Something inside me recoiled, because it wasn’t all true, and because I was so certain the letters wouldn’t ruin him, and I was wrong. “Are you helping him?”
Horatio was silent for a long time. I wondered if Charles had figured out all our lies yet. If he was on his way back.
I want to, he told me eventually. But I’m not sure how to.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know how you feel.”
I know he’s probably the last person you want to see right now, but don’t pretend you’re not worried about him.
“Of course I’m worried about him. I don’t remember a time before I was worried about Hayden goddamn Lichfield, but that doesn’t mean I have to clean up all his messes.” For the first time that night, digging deep inside myself, I couldn’t muster up the little, watery sympathy I had for Hayden. It was as if it had all fallen out between my fingers. And for the first time, I felt free. I was numb, but underneath, I was angry. I wasn’t beholden to anyone, least of all Hayden. “You should know, actually,” I said, “if I find him, I won’t be shooting to injure.”
Another bout of silence.
I drummed my fingers on the edge of the chair, sucking on my bottom lip.
Okay, Horatio finally said. Thank you. I will.
And then he was gone.
And I was alone.
So I waited.
I don’t know if what I was saying was a bluff, then. But there, in that space where I suddenly didn’t care about what happened to Hayden Lichfield, my chest felt hollow and full to bursting at the same time. Like I’d let go of something that had grown so heavy I hadn’t even realized. Like I wasn’t breathing air, but pure helium, buoying me up.
Whatever happened next, I would make my own damn decisions, set my own damn course.
Hayden was already dead to me.