And We Stay (9 page)

AFTER FINISHING A SMALL POEM AND A SMALL PIZZA, EMILY SIGNS HERSELF
out for a stroll. She heads toward Main Street, cigarettes and matches tucked deep inside her coat pocket. In the drugstore, she buys more batteries for her flashlight and a three-pack of thick socks so that she doesn’t keep having to spend a whole dollar just to wash and dry the one pair she brought from home. And because the girl behind the counter looks to be underage, too, she takes her chances and asks for a pack of cigarettes, which the girl passes over without a word. Emily also buys a silly greeting card for K.T., nothing too sappy. The inside says, “Thank you for being you,” and on the front is a photograph of a small boy and a smaller girl, their backs to the camera, gazing up at a very tall tree. It reminds her of a story Paul told her one November night when they were sitting in his truck.

“This one time when I was really young,” he said, reaching over for Emily’s hand, “Carey and I were building a fort together after school, and a golden maple leaf fell on my head like a little hat. I lifted it down and studied it. The leaf was so perfect that I shimmied up the trunk and tried to reattach it to a branch. I told Carey, who was, like, four, that
the branch was the leaf’s mother, and the leaf was her perfect child. Then Carey started to cry.”

Paul paused.

“Why did she cry?” Emily asked.

“I thought it was because she felt sad for the leaf and the branch. But she said she felt sad for me. I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because I know you, Paul, and you’re going to feel really bad if you can’t get the leaf to stay.’ Which, needless to say, I couldn’t. It floated back down to the ground. ‘You should keep it,’ Carey told me. ‘Put it on your dresser.’ But I said no—it would be lonely indoors.”

“So what did you do with the leaf?” Emily asked Paul.

“I left it there on the ground just in case.”

“Just in case what?” Emily asked.

“Just in case it was magic,” said Paul. “I know it sounds stupid, but back then, I believed in that stuff. And the leaf was all golden and everything, so it wasn’t out of the question.”

Paul had been right: magic is not out of the question. Outside the drugstore, Emily heads toward the bench, lighting a cigarette and checking her watch in the glow. It’s a little after nine, but because it’s Saturday night, she doesn’t have to be back till eleven. After smoking the cigarette down to the nub, Emily crushes the butt on the concrete with her boot and looks up at the sky, at the stars like tiny hands waving from a long way away. In the distance, a train rattles, but there’s no sign of people. The Dickinson place is dark except for the porch light. Emily walks to the iron gate, which creaks but yields, and she steps slowly up to the house. The light doesn’t wink at her this time. She leans back so she can
see the second story. According to her book, the room on the left is where the poet slept and wrote, wrote and slept, for most of her life.

Emily Dickinson was gone from home for only a year, when she was sent to a girls’ school ten miles away in South Hadley, a school now called Mount Holyoke College. When Emily Dickinson arrived there as a boarder at the age of sixteen, she was labeled as a girl “without hope,” one of 80 girls out of 234 who had refused to stand up at assembly and profess their faith in God. By the end of the year, 51 of those had either changed their minds or caved under pressure. But not Emily. She and 28 other girls had stayed true.

This is the challenge: To stay. To stay true. That’s what the poems are—a test to see how truthful Emily Beam can be. The blank page listens, but it can’t talk back. Like the tree from which it comes, it has an innate ability to keep secrets. So far, Emily has kept her secret. Paul could have kept it, too. They could have lied to everyone and gone off and had the abortion—together. She and Paul could have rewritten history, sashaying their way into the future, putting the past in a box to store in the attic.

Which secrets did Emily Dickinson commit to paper, and which were too damning to share with the trees? Three weeks into her year at boarding school, Emily Dickinson had chosen to stay in her room while the rest of the girls went outside to see a traveling menagerie as it passed through the town. What was it that had prevented her from celebrating the bears and monkeys? The windows of the yellow house at 280 Main Street aren’t giving anything away. In the dark, Emily Beam tiptoes across the front yard to the side of the
house, where she finds a garden. She knows she is trespassing, but she can’t help it; something is drawing her with the pull of a magnet. The moon drops out of a cloud, lighting her way to a small cluster of flowers, their petals tipped with silver. Early crocuses. It is so far from spring. Emily bends to them, recalling a day long ago when she sat on her knees in the snow outside her front door, puffing hot breath onto the first crocus so it wouldn’t die.

It is colder now than it was that day when her mother had to trick her into coming inside. She had lured Emily with hot chocolate. Emily takes her right hand out of her coat pocket and, with a finger, traces the outline of each purple flower. How can a thing so fragile push its way through the frozen dirt? She looks up at the moon, but it doesn’t tell her.

Under its white, eerie glow, Emily feels something akin to wind but stronger and softer rock her from side to side. The motion is not at all scary because it’s so familiar. She does not have to fight to keep her balance; she allows it to take her, take her back. Warmth drapes her shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl, and a hand as soft as velvet slides her hair out of its ponytail and brushes it down her back. In her ear, a voice whispers,
They are yours, all yours, go ahead
. But the crocuses are too humbly triumphant. She leaves them in the earth, her eyes hot with tears, a new poem burning itself all the way down to her feet. She walks back to school composing her verse, composing herself.

In 15 Hart Hall, Emily transposes the poem, called “The Meeting,” to a page with two other half-written poems and reads back over the one about the robin’s egg.
Where’s the hope there?
Emily thinks to herself. Although it’s a Saturday night and she’s alone, she is not entirely sure that it’s loneliness she feels. With loneliness, you’re trapped by the physical world, but with solitude, you’re at one with it, as she was for that moment kneeling by the perfect crocuses. Emily is growing accustomed to the loneliness when it comes, announcing itself in the bottom of her soup bowl, in the water left running in the sink, in the twilit sky just before stars. In French class yesterday, she found herself hollowed out by a painting of a woman in a café, a portrait by Degas.

But it might be solitude rather than loneliness that surrounds her when she writes. Emily signs the card for K.T. and leaves it on K.T.’s pillow. Then she returns to her desk, turns to a blank page in her notebook, and makes a list of golden things.

For hours, poems roll in. Emily records them with the fountain pen that K.T. left on Emily’s desk as a surprise. K.T. taped a note to the pen, tucking them both inside the book that Madame Colche had lent her. “This will make you feel more connected to E.D.,” the note said. “P.S. Didn’t she write with one of these?”

Emily wasn’t sure what E.D. wrote with, so she tried to look it up in her book. It wasn’t in there, so she walked over to the library and looked it up in another book. Emily Dickinson wrote with both pen (it didn’t say what kind) and pencil and had a large pocket sewn into her favorite white dress for keeping stubs of lead and scraps of paper. The book showed a photograph of the dress displayed on a mannequin. As Emily Beam puts the gold tip of the pen (add that to the list!) to paper, she tastes apples, golden apples, though the words flowing out in black ink are bitter and musty.

Emily Beam,
February 18, 1995

A GIRL HAS ONLY ONE LIFE, NOT TWO. BUT WHEN EMILY BEAM WAKES
on Sunday at one o’clock in the afternoon, which is later than she has ever slept, she swears to K.T. that she has been reincarnated.

“Do you think I’m crazy?” Emily asks.

“You haven’t even had your coffee yet, and you’ve lived two lives already?”

“Okay, look,” Emily says, sitting back down on her bed. “I went for a walk last night, and something happened. Something really strange. Have you ever had déjà vu?”

“Yeah, a lot, but then we found out that they were actually epileptic seizures. You know those pills I have to take every morning? That’s why I have to take them.”

A voice on the other side of the door, Annabelle’s, calls out: “Emily Beam? Phone call.”

“Shit,” Emily says, hopping up and grabbing her Harvard sweatshirt. “What if it’s my mom and she told Annabelle who she was?”

“She’s not really your mom, remember? She’s your ‘pretend mom.’ ”

“K.T., I swear you’re on crack.”

From down the hall, Emily sees the receiver dangling
by its twisted cord. “Annabelle?” she calls out. But Annabelle is gone. Pulling her sweatshirt over the T-shirt she slept in, Emily hurries to the phone and places the receiver to her ear.

“Hello?”

A girl’s voice she doesn’t recognize says her name.

“This is she,” says Emily.

“It’s Carey. Carey Wagoner.”

Emily catches her breath.

“Your mom gave me your number.”

“Carey. Oh, my God.”

“I’ve been thinking about you. I hope it’s okay that I called.”

Emily hugs the receiver as close to her ear as she can. “Sure,” she tells Carey.

“We didn’t get a chance to talk after …”

Emily lets what doesn’t need to be said hang itself on an invisible wire. In the silence, she hears the creak of a door. Annabelle steps out of her room and gives Emily a little wave.

“So how’s your new school?” Carey asks.

“So far, so good. I’ve only been here for a month or so—”

“Same here. I went back to school after Christmas break.”

“Me too,” Emily says, watching Annabelle disappear into the bathroom.

“Everybody’s being super nice to me,” says Carey. “It’s weird.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Even people who never spoke to me before.”

“Well,” Emily says, “people can be that way.”

“Do you like your roommate?”

“Yeah, I really do. I got lucky for once.”

“That’s good. You deserve it,” says Carey. “We don’t blame you, Emily. That’s why I called. Me and my mom and dad. We just started family therapy, and our homework is to tell somebody we know that we don’t blame them for what happened to Paul.”

“And you picked me,” Emily says.

“Is that all right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Annabelle sweeps out of the bathroom, giving Emily a pat on the back as she passes. When the door to Room 12 opens, Emily hears a snatch of a song by Madonna.

“My mom and dad picked Gigi, in case you were wondering,” Carey says.

“Oh,” says Emily. “Okay.”

“I was scared to call you,” says Carey.

“You shouldn’t have been.”

“I’d like to talk. If you have a minute.”

Emily looks around the empty hall. Annabelle’s door is closed—all the doors are closed.

“Hey, look, Carey. Let me call you back when I have some privacy.”

“Sure. I guess you’ve still got the number.”

“Yeah,” Emily says, “I’ve got it.”

“I’ll be home for the rest of the day. I’m playing softball now, but we don’t practice on Sundays.”

“Okay.”

“Well, thanks,” Carey says.

Emily sets the receiver quietly back onto its cradle without saying goodbye.

During basketball season, which started in early November, Emily had cheered for both the boys’ and the girls’ home games. Carey was the only freshman starter on the varsity team, and because she and Emily were kind of, in a roundabout way, connected, during the first couple of home games, Emily cheered longer and louder when Carey made a basket. Paul thought it was sweet. He told Emily she’d make a great mother someday. And then, lo and behold, she was pregnant.