Our King Lear has serious acne and every girl in summer camp is in love with him. Lear needs to wield a certain authority over the cast, a challenge when all your actors are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Moira, the camp’s head director, picked Markus because he’s the tallest and has the deepest voice. Those two traits also prove irresistible to college girls. In the second week, I spot him kissing Lily in the shade of the dusty pecan trees. A few days later I see him holding hands with Cassie beside the lake. (Lily and Cassie play Lear’s daughters, which makes Markus’s trysts sort of disturbing. But that’s the risk you run when you stick a bunch of horny college kids on a farm all summer.)

*

On Friday afternoons, I trade in the teens and rolling hills for the antiseptic halls of Dad’s facility in Austin. The drive is ninety minutes, my car’s stereo is broken, and with the chaos of the past few months I haven’t had time to get it fixed. At the facility, they play easy-listening Muzak in the common rooms, which annoys the hell out of me but doesn’t seem to bother the nurses. After a rocky few first weeks, the nurses have come around to Dad. They call him “El Profesor” and me “La Profesora.” Each time Dad and I talk, I have to start at the beginning: the Shakespeare camp, how Moira asked me to be the assistant faculty director this summer, possibility of extension next year. I used to vary the wording, but now it’s a liturgy.

His collarbone is visible in the too-large gap of his button-down shirt. When he was living alone, he forgot to eat. He’s gained weight since, but it’s still strange to see him so skinny. The facility charges one hundred dollars per week to launder and press his oxford shirts and trousers so he can wear what he wore every day to teach his classes, rain or shine, Texas heat or Texas cold. Not that he appears to notice.

“When are you taking me home?” he asks.

Another thing: I paid extra to replace the dorm-quality furniture with Dad’s actual stuff, but the familiar leather couch and overcrowded bookshelf have not kept him from wanting to go home. He asks this question every fifteen minutes.

“Dad, don’t you want to hear how we’re doing the scene with the soldiers? Don’t you know we’ve got a girl playing Edgar?”

“But when am I going home? Everyone here is too old.” His thin fingers curl around my wrist. “I can take care of myself, you know.”

I’d hoped that the new job would be distraction enough. Dad loved Lear. He loved the Bard so much that instead of saying grace before dinner like every other family in Texas, we did lines. (Cut to six-year-old me with folded hands, reciting, I can no other answer make but thanks / And thanks; and ever thanks.) If they’d let physics faculty staff the camp, he would’ve.

He grips harder. “Why can’t I live by myself anymore?”

Be grateful that he’s not yelling and pounding his fist on the table. “Dad, want to know the rules for the sonnet memorization contest?” I structure my own questions to tempt him, but he never takes the bait.

* 

From nine until noon I sit next to Moira on the first row of oak benches in the old barn and help with rehearsal. Most of the kids are honors-college English majors and brilliant, but a few show up with worse acting skills than a straight-to-DVD horror movie. Thank God for Moira. She doesn’t know Shakespeare, but she’s worked in theatre for like a hundred years and has run the camp for the past three. Every morning she starts with basic stuff, breath control and mirror games and body work. That puts the kids in stitches—they don’t get much opportunity to crawl around like a chimp in their 200-level John Donne seminars. After that, Moira hands off to me.

The campers are supposed to be off-book, but I want them to understand the language, to breathe its meaning, so we’re working on paraphrasing. I suspect that Markus has convinced his classmates to use the most generational slang possible. In Act Two, Scene IV, Markus-as-Lear tells Cassie-as-Reagan, “Girl, that’s not how you treat your fam. I admit I’m old AF. C’mon, let me stay in your crib.”

To which Cassie says, “Not falling for your bullshit. GTFO back to Goneril.”

They radiate delight in their own cleverness. Markus is rosy and proud. I can’t bring myself to interrupt.

Afterward, Moira says, “I did not understand a damn thing they were saying today. Not a word.”

“I think I did. They kept it interesting, at least.”

She frowns. “Is fam short for family?”

* 

During the free evening hours, when the kids are off kissing or costume-sewing, I sit on one of the Adirondack chairs overlooking the lake, my director’s copy of the play on my lap. The bank is fringed with live oaks, and the air hums with cicadas. The camp’s oldest outbuildings are at least a hundred years old. The whole place was built on an ancient pioneer settlement, now swept clean by the Hill Country winds and time. If you squint at the barn in the tawny afternoon light, you can almost forget what century you’re in.

I almost didn’t take the job, though I’d eyed it for years. A serendipitous opening: the previous assistant director had gotten pregnant and moved back east. But when Moira called, I wavered. Faculty are required to live out here for the full eight weeks, and it had only been a month since security found my pajama-clad father wandering campus in search of a seminar that he hadn’t taught in years. How bad is it, I’d asked the security guy—old Irishman named Paul—and he’d said, diplomatically, Miss, he’s wearing pajamas and crying a wee bit.

By the time Moira offered, I’d just moved Dad into the facility, and felt guilty about leaving him so soon. Also, he was difficult. In his first two weeks at the facility, he pulled the fire alarm five times as a jailbreak distraction, and the nurses were not happy.

Then a day before my offer deadline, we had a really bad visit. Spittle flying, his fist slamming against the table so hard I thought he’d hurt himself. He kept saying, I don’t want to be here. Why did you put me here? The nurses had to pull him off me while he wailed, Take me home. Take me home.

The next day I called Moira to accept. She asked if I was sure—Moira knows the saga, had helpfully driven Dad’s car home on the day they found him on campus. I said some distance would be good. Plus, they’d upped his meds and he seemed more stable.

There was one wrinkle: Moira had told me Twelfth Night, but three weeks after I accepted she called about switching to Lear. The dean’s decision, some obscure excuse involving a donor and a departmental feud. I was like, How are we supposed to do Lear when most of them aren’t even old enough to drink?

* 

I provide the scholarly rigor. Meter, textual analysis, where to cut lines. Moira directed an award-winning Cyrano de Bergerac in blank verse, but she likes having a Shakespearean on hand. While I was cleaning out Dad’s place, she called and said she was about to crack open the text for the first time in her life.

What’s Lear about? In one word, she said.

I said, Death, and she laughed.

Ah, great. Perfect poolside reading for the grandkiddos’ swim meets.

* 

In week three, Moira comes up after rehearsal and says, “It isn’t working, is it?”

“What? The Port-A-Cools? I fixed those yesterday.” The place is so old that shit’s always breaking down: mourning doves nesting in the barn’s eaves and on the spotlights, or the sewing machine going kaput.

But no, Moira means the play. More specifically, she means Markus, whose Lear characterization consists mostly of a tremulous voice and shaky hands. “He’s not getting it,” she says. “It’s like he’s playing a parody of an old guy. Can you work with him?”

“Of course he’s not getting it,” I say. “He’s twenty-one. He thinks he’ll never die.”

She pats me on the shoulder. “Great! Looking forward to the results.”

* 

I have a soft spot for blond, ruddy-cheeked, corn-fed Markus. Some kids show up at camp fully formed—Cassie comes to mind—but Markus always seems to be grasping for the right personality to wear each day. I suspect Moira is testing me.

I find Markus in the sewing room. For once, no girls around. He’s hand-stitching the elastic band for his fake gray beard. He blushes when he sees me, which makes him look even younger. “I’ll be fully off-book by tomorrow, promise.”

“Right, no, not worried about that,” I say. “I wanted to talk about your characterization of Lear, actually.”

He looks like he might puke. “Am I doing it wrong?”

“No, no. You’re great. I’ve just been thinking, you know? And I wanted to ask, how do you think he feels about what’s happening to him? Psychologically.”

Markus tilts his head. “I mean, he’s getting old, he’s going crazy, and he’s angry about it.”

I wonder if I’m going to fail Moira’s test. “Right. I think there are hints in the text, though. Do you think maybe his anger is a symptom?”

“Like a disease?”

I usually try not to spoon-feed my students, but I’m grasping here. “Maybe he can feel that his mind isn’t really working anymore.”

Markus won’t stop nodding enthusiastically. He looks like a collectible sports bobblehead. “No, totally. He’s so crazy he doesn’t even see it. That’s the tragedy. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise, def.”

* 

For an hour I lie on my twin bed in the assistant director’s cottage and stare at the cracking ceiling. I want this job next summer. Or rather, I want to be offered the opportunity to decide whether to come back next summer. When we reconvene at afternoon rehearsals I decide to pivot. I get everyone sitting in a circle on the stage. Lily has snared the seat next to Markus and appears to be icing Cassie out. Markus’s gaze nervously shifts between the two girls. I almost feel bad for him.

“There’s two angles I’d like us to try leaning into today,” I say. “For one, there’s a lot of ominous supernatural phenomena. These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us, et cetera.”

“Witchy,” says Cassie. “Like, an eclipse would have probably felt totally apocalyptic at the time.”

“The widening gyre,” says Luis. He’s a chubby kid from the Valley, quick-witted enough to quote Yeats and play the Fool.

“Exactly. And second, this is a very militarized society. Lear travels with a hundred soldiers. What does the text tell us about how the characters react to that threat?”

To my great relief, the kids coalesce around those directions. Markus still affects that corny tremor, but the boys playing Kent and Gloucester have a new, tense, martial edge. Lily and Cassie seem to better grasp the danger posed by their father as commander-in-chief, although Cassie is the standout.

I let them play it through. The early-evening summer rays slant through the barn and suspend dust motes in their light. “Nice,” I say. “That’s it for today, guys.”

* 

By the end of the fourth week, Moira has only praise. She claps her hands on my cheeks. “Incredible job. Brilliant. Age-appropriate.”

“It wasn’t really fair to make Markus carry it,” I say. “You know what people say about Lear. By the time you’re old enough to play the part, you’re too old.”

“This is why I need you,” says Moira. “Watch out, the dean’s going to see this and make you do Lear every year.”

Early Friday afternoon Cassie catches me outside the canteen, where I’m inhaling meatloaf at the rickety picnic table and steeling myself for the drive. “Hey,” she says. “Can I say something about today’s rehearsal?” I brace myself for some drama about Markus and Lily. Instead, she says, “That was good, right? Like, it’s not just in my head?” When I tell her it’s not, she beams a huge smile that crinkles her sunburnt cheeks. For just the briefest second, I think about skipping this week’s visit. Remaining here, with the kids, in this golden light.

* 

I drive ninety minutes listening to absolutely nothing and arrive to find Dad in a sour mood. As we walk to his unit, he gestures around and says, “Look at this! Everyone here is so old!”

In fairness to him, he’s the youngest in the facility and the only one I’ve seen without a walker. Drool doesn’t dangle from his mouth, and he doesn’t look glazed at chair yoga. Early on I tried to bring a bouquet of carnations—his favorite—but flowers aren’t allowed because some residents try to eat the blooms. Dad’s unit, at least, has retained the familiar smells of the leather couch and his musty biographies.

When I return from washing my hands, he is hunched and weeping.

“Dad? What’s wrong?” I run to kneel at his side. An awful sense of repetition grips me. Didn’t we do this last week? The week before?

“I want to go home.” Sucks in a breath, hiccups. “I want to go home. I hate it here.”

“Dad, no. You like it here. The nurses said you had a great time at chess this morning. Remember?”

“I miss your mother. I want to go home. I miss my house.”

“But this place is nice too.”

“You’re not—” He raises his fists in the air, then drops them. “You’re not listening to me.”

“Dad,” I say. “I’m listening.”

“You’re not. You’re not. I want to go home.”

I try a tactic that worked last month. “This is home, Dad.” I pat the couch. “Look. It’s your couch. It’s your books.”

“You’re lying to me!” His eyes are wild, watery. His voice has gone high and childlike. “I want to go home!”

I want to grab him in my arms. I want to hold him close to me. He reaches for my wrists, my forearms.

“Please,” he says. “Please. I can’t stay here anymore.” He begins to keen, a thin high-pitched sound. Tears roll down the creases in his face. He says my name, over and over. He says, “Please, please, please.”

I want him to stop, but I don’t know how. We have done this before, a video-game sequence where I can’t remember the right combination of buttons to push. I feel a spreading desperation. I let my hands brush against his shoulders but I don’t grab him. “Dad. Come on. You like it here. We like it here.”

A nurse sticks her head into the unit. “Do you need help, Profesora?”

“Yes, thank God,” I say, then immediately feel terrible for saying it. Still I disentangle his hand from my arm. “Dad, I’m so sorry. I have to go.”

“Please.” His voice cracks. “Take me home.”

The nurse pats my shoulder. “He will not remember next time.” She smiles at him. “La Profesora has to leave. You want to watch television?”

“I love you, Dad,” I say. He won’t stop looking over his shoulder at me. The television fills the unit with its eerie glow. “I’ll see you soon.”

* 

Markus confronts me right after I’ve gotten out of the lake. I’m so focused on hiding my swimsuit-clad body that I don’t notice his distress until he says, “You don’t think I can do it.”

“Markus, what?” I say. “Are you talking about the play?”

He squares his shoulders. “Lily says that’s why you made it more political, because you wanted to take the attention off my Lear.”

Lily is a canny bitch, I want to say. “I thought you guys were dating? Why would she say that to you?”

“I broke up with her for Cassie. You’re not denying it.”

“Oh. No. I do deny it! That wasn’t my intent.” I search for the words. “It’s hard to play Lear.”

“I knew it!” he says, victorious, and I’m ready to defend myself before I notice that the corners of his lips are trembling slightly. His lower lip sticks out for a half-second before he draws it back. Oh God, I think, I’m crushing him like tissue paper, big baby. He says, accusingly, “You think I’m a bad actor.”

“Oh, Markus.” The beach’s gravel is digging into the backs of my bare thighs, but standing would interrupt the moment. I want to hug him, but I don’t. I want to say, You would’ve been the perfect Duke in our abortive Twelfth Night, but I don’t. “This is my fault.”

“Yeah? Why?”

I decide to be honest. “Look, Markus. The role challenges actors twice your age. It’ll be hard to convince an audience no matter how good you are. So maybe I’ve set you up for failure.”

“So I’m failing.”

“No. Well, yes.” I dig my fingers into the sand and try to think. “What if I said failure is inevitable when the text is so much bigger than us? What would you do then?”

I’m pleased to see he’s really considering this.

“Maybe,” I suggest, “think about what it would take to make the role your own?”

* 

Every Sunday morning, after a full week of boiled-to-burnt canteen coffee, Moira and I escape to the nearest small town for iced lattes. For Moira, it’s a double-escape—when she’s not at camp, she’s with her husband, her daughter, and three grandkids in a big rented farmhouse down the road. We sit on the coffee shop’s veranda and listen to farmers’ trucks rattling down Main Street.

“So you told Markus the truth, huh? Bold move.”

Moira has these narrow, appraising, sky-blue eyes. I shrug without meeting her gaze. “I thought it would make him feel better to know that the problem’s baked into the role and his age. Not like, his skills.”

“Well, it worked. Much better without the grandpa impression.”

“He’s not going to Hollywood.”

“He’s not bad, though.” Moira leans over to steal the last bit of my scone. “His PDA with Cassie at Friday night dinner almost made me throw up. He picked a good one, that Cassie. She’s one of the sharper kids we’ve had here. Is it crazy to say she reminds me of myself?”

“I knew it.” Moira and Cassie have the same autumn-tinged hair.

“Now that you mention it, I also fell in love with a sweet, emotional farm boy. Maybe I should give Cassie some advice. Tell her watch out, before you know it, you’re sixty, got grandkids, spending your summer Friday nights watching twenty-year-olds stick their tongues down each other’s throats.”

I laugh and thank her for holding down the fort. But while she was eye-rolling over sloppy joes, I was driving back on 290 in silence except for the creak of my car and the rush of passing semis, surrounded by landscape so blank and dark that there was nothing to think about besides Dad. More and more often, his face looks wiped clean of the man I used to know.

* 

Until security found Dad barefoot in pajamas in the quad, this is what I had planned for the summer: Visit the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C. Fly to Chicago for a rendezvous with that medievalist I met last spring. Sit in the backyard with Dad on those warm, long-shadowed Austin nights, close enough to the park that the creek’s burble soundtracks our conversations. Grill hot dogs. Talk about the medievalist. Dad recites a sonnet in his thin, clear voice.

* 

Moira and I sit in the barn and watch the kids do their last full run-through. The air is suffused with the soft scent of century-old wood and the thick bales of hay we used for benches.

By now, the kids have a vision. They’ve draped the stage in thick black curtains and hung a large cardboard moon. Luis programmed the lights to strobe during the storm scene on the heath. They’re wearing military fatigues, leftover from a past Coriolanus, and it works: Their Lear is set in a vaguely supernatural, highly superstitious universe where everyone jostles for power and the world teeters on the brink of war.

Tonight is the opening. From here on out, no more rehearsal, just a matinee and an evening performance daily for a week. Because of this schedule, it’ll be two weeks before I see Dad again. I called yesterday to tell him, but the nurse said, Oh, Profesora, he’s in bingo. You want me to take a message?

I told her not to bother. I did almost call back the moment I hung up, but reminded myself: He won’t remember.

Every evening after sunset, I’ll gather the kids on the lawn, in the cool blue below the pecans, fireflies sparking in the tall grass. Behind us, the barn will throw long squares of light across the field. The kids will be so excited, nervous and fizzing. I’ll make them stand still in the sweet air and pretend not to see Cassie and Markus’s pinkies twisted together, or the way Lily leans on Luis. Then I’ll send them off, to disappear backstage until the curtain rises.

* 

The last evening. Markus-as-Lear and Luis-as-the-Fool sit in a lonely spotlight against the black-cloaked stage. Lear’s just been kicked out of his daughter’s house.

For the entire run, Markus has been serviceable at best. But tonight when he says, voice trembling, “I did her wrong—”  

Maybe it’s because I’m so damn exhausted from these two months, or maybe it’s closing night magic. Or maybe the Muse stopped by to gift Markus a little brilliance. Maybe it’s the soft hush of his delivery, or how his eyes look so dark and sorry. In that moment, I forget that Markus is twenty-one, that we’re in a barn in the Texas hills. There’s only the moor, the howling wind, my tears, and Lear and the Fool in the moonlight.

The Fool says, I’d have thee beaten / for being old before your time.

* 

Camp is a ghost town. The kids head off in their parents’ SUVs for family vacation. I spy Cassie and Markus kissing goodbye by the lake—I half-hope they’ll stay together, even though I know they won’t—but then they’re gone too. The place is drenched in quiet. Plasticky mattresses bare of sheets and the sewing room swept. Moira and I box up props and stack chairs, final tasks before we clear out until June. We pass the time by quoting lines from Shakespeare and trying to guess the play. I’m winning.

I’ve just clobbered her with Brutus’s speech about ambition when she says, “The job’s yours next year if you want it.” I had expected her to offer, but I didn’t think she’d ask so soon.

When I don’t answer immediately, she says, “Full fathom five thy father lies.” Then, “Ah, shit, sorry, that’s insensitive.”

“The first part’s from The Tempest. The second part’s not Shakespeare.”

“You’re really good at this, you know. Don’t deny yourself the opportunity. I’m not going to be head director forever.”

I leave her encouragement hanging between us. “But how is it / That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?”

“So you’ll think about it?”

“That’s The Tempest too.”

* 

I drive straight to the facility, even though I smell like sweat and barn dust. Without the stereo, the silence is a tunnel carrying me to Dad, in whatever state I’ll find him. I should have brought him to the facility sooner. It was inevitable that they’d find him wandering like that, or worse. But I wanted more time.

In June, I’ll drive back out to Hill Country. I’ll volunteer to get there before Moira. In the barn, in the thick heat, I’ll drag drop-cloths off the lighting equipment and sweep the stage. I’ll spend that first evening watching fireflies dance over the field that slopes to the lake. In the morning the kids will come running back to breathe life into the barn. We’ll do Twelfth Night, as planned, and Markus will be our Duke.

When I arrive, Dad sits beside the window, the standing lamp his sole light. Outside, the streetlights glow orange like candles in a row. I sink next to him on the tired leather couch. I reach for his hand. His skin feels like tissue paper.

“Dad,” I say. It falls out of me: “I’m so sad.”

He turns to look at me. He lifts his other hand and touches his fingers against my cheek. “Don’t be sad,” he says.

“I wish we could go home,” I say. “I wish you would recite me a sonnet again.”

“Oh,” he says. “Don’t be sad. Don’t be sad.”

I look at him and think about my tomorrows unfolding, highway ribboning away. I look at him and think about June. “The stereo’s broken,” I tell him. “In my car.”

He nods, grips my hand tighter. “That’s okay.”

So evening after evening there we sit; both side by side in lamplight lit, for now.