by Amy Huntley
dead. The question is, do we want to risk trying again and
again to save ourselves? We could end up killing Sandra,
too."
This is a horrifying idea. I can't believe I didn't realize
it back when I was trying to save Gabe. That wild shot hit
me, but it was only inches away from hitting Sandra instead.
I tell Gabe, "There's no way I'm going to risk that happening.
I know that whatever time Sandra has left to live will be
shadowed by what she saw her mother do to us, but I want
her to live. I know she'll make the world a better place."
"You did, too," Gabe tells me.
I'm taken off guard by the compliment. It's the nicest
thing anyone's ever said to me. "You, too," I say, meaning
it. "But our chance at that has passed. I don't want to spend
eternity trying to change what's already happened. I want
to move on."
I'm ready.
M4
Ready to allow what might have been to remain a
mystery. Ready to check out the After. Ready to find out
if immortality will "unveil a third event to me," as Emily
Dickinson said.
Maybe I can hang out with her in the After .. - her and
my mother and Gabe's father, all of us really understanding
what life and death mean.
"I want to move on with you," Gabe tells me.
We float there for a moment uncertainly. "Do you know
how to get to the After?" Gabe finally asks.
"Do you?"
"No."
Tammy said we'd be able to do it when the time was
right. I think it's like everything else. We just let ourselves
be there."
And suddenly that's what we're doing. Everything hums
and buzzes with peaceful electricity. Warmth without heat,
satisfaction without gain, being everything and nothing all
at once . . . and losing language. I feel it slipping away from
me, but I don't miss it as it floats off on a wave, my life ond
all its wtn I time.
MS
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT fOR SALE
HaaasCsliini .p.Hfcte!s?.is. _
epilogue
APPLICATION ESSAY
Comple:e a personal statement below. Your essay
should answer one of the following questions In 500
words o' less:
1. Why do you feel that Oregon University is the
right college for you?
2. Writs about a person who has been significant to
you, and explain how they have had an impact on
you.
3. Describe the most significant obstacle you have
encountered and how you have managed to convert
that into a positive experience.
I was always a Robert Frost kind of girl. My best friend,
Madison, wasn't. Emily Dickinson was her favorite poet. I
never understood why until Maddy died.
Much of Frost's poetry has a rhythm or rhyme that has
always pleased and comforted me. When he begged me to
think aboui "The Road Not Taken," I believed in the power
to choose. When he observed, "Some say the world will end
in fire, / Sane say in ice" I never minded wondering which
would be the case because he also reminded me that I have
" . . . miles ta go before I sleep."
Emily Dickinson, however, I used to consider downright
weird. Her poems were too focused on death. Full of pain and
even occasionally cynicism, they left me feeling hopeless.
My actitude about all that changed, though, when
Madison died. When I turned to Robert Frost's poetry for
comfort, I found none. His assertion that he had "miles to
go before I sleep" frightened me. After all, I was facing miles
of life without Madison. My world had ended in fire, and I
was left wondering whether I could have prevented Madison's
death if I'd traveled a different road on the day she
died. And then, in the poem "Out, out—" Frost hit me with
a callous truth. Of a dead boy's family and friends, he wrote,
"And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to
their affairs." All around me, so many people seemed to
be treating Maddy's death that way. Dates were made for
dances, and teachers went on assigning homework.
In the midst of my grief, it was Emily Dickinson who
comforted me. When I read her poetry, it was almost as
if she were in the room with me. Don't ask me whether I
mean Madison or the poet. I'm not sure. Perhaps they both
were.
There were moments when I was reading Dickinson
when I was horrified. I wasn't sure if the "he" in the following
poem meant Death or God:
He stuns you by degrees—
. . . Deals— One— imperial— Thunderbolt—
That scalps your naked Soul—
I wondered if Madison fblt she'd been dealt an "imperial
thunderbolt" as she lay dying on the entryway floor of my
house. I certainly felt as if my naked soul had been scalped.
The horror these lines made me feel kept me reading more
of Dickinson's poetry, and I discovered Dickinson understood
what I was feeling:
Tbe last Night that Sbe lived
It "was a Common Night
Except tbe Dying— this to Us
Made Nature different
We noticed smallest things' —
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon otir Minds
Italicized— as 'twere.
Dickinson expressed so well the way that Maddy's death
has italicized her life upon my heart: her smile, her support,
our Halloween antics, and our late-night sleepovers. These
small things, so overlooked before, are etched upon my
heart, where Maddy will go on living tor as long as I do.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOf-NOT FOR SALE
HarogCotiina Publishers
acknowledgments
Thanks many times over to my daughter and husband for
putting up with me during the writing, revising, and editing
of this novel. I also want to thank my parents, sister, and
brother-in-law. Your support through the last few years has
been invaluable.
April, Ann, Deb, Kay, Lori, Ruth, and Tim: You really
are the World's Greatest Critique Group; I'd have been lost
if you hadn't adopted me. Special thanks to Donna Dunlap
for being the first reader of this manuscript and encouraging
me to keep up with it. I'm grateful to John Olstad for
looking over my physics sections. Any of the mathematical
incompatibilities between Einstein's theory of relativity and
the theories of quantum mechanics that still appear in this
novel are due to my use of poetic license; he gave me fair
warning.
I'm grateful to my agents, Josh and Tracy Adams, for
believing in this novel. I'd also like to thank my editor,
Donna Bray, for pushing me to make this a better book, and
Ruta Rimas, her assistant, for helping to guide me through
this process.
About the Author
AMY HUNTLY. a high school English teacher, makes her debut as
a novelist with THE EVERAFTER. She lives in East Lansing. Michigan,
with her husband and daughter. She blogs about writing at
www.writebraine
rs.blogspot.com.
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