glorified by the whiteness of teeth.
The key chain Jesus is still praying for me
year after year, drugstore after drugstore,
praying in the darkness
of my coat pocket.
Emily Beam, February 27, 1995
All afternoon long, through trigonometry and Fitness for Fun, where Emily walks fast around the oval dirt track on the playing fields, she thinks about Chicago. She has never been, but she knows that it’s windy and next to a big lake. It was also home to many criminals, such as bootleggers who operated drugstores.
Emily has no desire whatsoever to go to Chicago. What was it K.T. said? It’s not about where you’re from; it’s about where you’ve been. If K.T. is right, Emily should go to Las Vegas because she has gambled. That’s what she should be advertising; that’s what her sweatshirt should say. Yes, as far as high stakes go, Emily has certainly been there.
On the morning of December 10, Emily sat on her bed with her box of stationery and tried to put into words why she and Paul couldn’t be together anymore. She still loved him, but it could not be. Emily’s parents had sat her down after dinner the night before and had told her they would be leaving in a week for Boston. After school on Friday, the last day of the semester, the three of them would get in the car and drive to Aunt Cindy’s. Emily and Mrs. Beam would stay with Aunt Cindy for the abortion, and Mr. Beam would fly home and then fly back to be with them at Christmas. Then the three of them—father, mother, and child—would drive back to Grenfell County sometime before the start of the new year.
“Before you go,” her mother told her, “you’ll want to explain things to Paul. It’s only fair to him.”
“Fair?” Emily screamed. “Fair?”
Her father shook his head in disappointment. Disappointment in her.
“Take a deep breath, Emily,” said her mother. “Take a few.”
Emily calmed down and said quietly, “I’m doing it in person. At least have the common human decency to allow me that.”
Her mother turned to her father, and he jerked his head into a nod.
“Do it tomorrow, then,” her mother said. “Best to get it over with so that we can all move on.”
“Terrific,” said Emily. “Gee, what a perfect way to celebrate my birthday.”
Emily wrote the letter to Paul three times, three different versions, but she couldn’t decide which one to give him. Before she went downstairs to ask to borrow the car, she folded up the letters and put them in a hat. Life—and this was what she was learning—was not something that could be controlled, no matter how smart you were or how smart your parents were.
The letter she picked out of the hat she copied over on a clean sheet of white paper. If Paul wasn’t home when she got to his house, she would leave the letter for him. If Paul was home, they would go for a walk in the woods, and she would tell him face to face. She would break his heart, and her own, in the middle of all that nature, under the branches and the gray sky. Under God’s watchful eye.
Emily drove over to Paul’s house unannounced. She didn’t call first. He wasn’t expecting to see her until he picked her up at seven o’clock to take her to dinner, but she did not want to go out for her birthday. It would feel wrong, now that she was pregnant, to celebrate the fact that she was seventeen. It would make her feel like a hypocrite.
As she drove to Paul’s, Emily scanned the sky. The birds and the leaves had flown from the trees. Everything was bare, and about to be bared. Snow had been forecast, and the clouds were heavy and low. Emily loved snow, but she hoped it wouldn’t come until late that night when everyone was safely in bed.
Paul was home. Carey answered the front door and ran upstairs to get him, and Emily and Paul walked out the back door. They made small talk just as they had done on Friday at school, focusing on her birthday dinner rather than the pregnancy. The avoidance, the phoniness, when she and Paul had always been honest with each other, wedged in between them, even though they held hands. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she told Paul the news under the winter trees.
• • •
On the last day of February, winter rages. Emily has a bad taste in her mouth after Tuesday’s dinner at her new assigned table. Because of the sleet falling in daggers, she doesn’t sign out for a walk. It’s been a week and two days since Carey called, and Emily is terrified the hall phone will ring for her. She has to walk by it twice to brush her teeth. When she enters the bathroom, Annabelle Wycoff is standing at the mirror.
“Well, Miss Emily, you’ve made it through. February is the worst.”
“Good thing it’s not a leap year,” Emily says.
“Baby steps,” says Annabelle.
Screw those, Emily thinks. Whatever happened to leaps?
“Before you know it, exams will be here, and the seniors will graduate, and then we juniors will rule the school.”
Emily does not want to think about hard tests or ruling the school. She is not a leader. She is a follower, always has been, and it suits her fine.
“Have you joined any clubs yet? We can always use an alternate on the debate team. Getting involved would definitely help.”
“That’s a great idea.” Emily turns on the water full-force and scrubs her teeth so hard that she can’t hear Annabelle talking, though Emily watches her mouth moving in the mirror. As Emily is rinsing, Annabelle’s roommate, Waverley, rushes in but stops short when she sees Emily.
“Hi, Emily,” Waverley says. “I hate that you didn’t go to St. Mark’s with us.”
“Next time,” Emily says.
“There are so many cute boys.” Waverley mock-fans herself like a Southern belle.
Emily forces a smile. “Yeah, K.T.’s going to set me up.”
Annabelle claps her hands together. “Oooo! Who with?”
“Some guy who plays the cello.”
“Sam? Oh, Sam’s adorable,” Waverley says. “Very soulful.”
Emily raises her eyebrows, and Annabelle and Waverley giggle.
“You’re adorable, too,” Annabelle says. “We’re so glad Hannah got kicked out.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Waverley, checking her artfully messy ponytail in the mirror. “She was such a W-H-O-R-E.”
So what does that make me? Emily wonders. Before she went to her first high-school party, Emily’s mother warned her about being alone with boys. She told her that boys saw parties as golden opportunities to rack up bragging rights. When boys scored with girls, they were called players, but when girls scored with boys, they were called whores. It wasn’t fair, her mother said, but neither was life.
“Hey,” says Annabelle. “The girl who called for you last week. Was she a friend from home?”
“Yeah.”
“She sounded nice.”
“She is,” Emily says.
“I bet she misses you a lot.”
“She does, but she knows I’m at a good place.”
“The best place,” Waverley says. “And don’t you forget it.”
“I won’t. Well, I’ve got homework to do.”
High-pitched goodbyes echo off the tiles as Emily hurries down the hall. She glances at the phone, vowing to call Carey back on the more private phone in the lieberry after study period ends.
But at ten o’clock, another girl is already there in the telephone alcove. “Five minutes,” she mouths to Emily, holding up spread-out fingers. Emily stands at the water fountain taking sip after sip, trying to be patient for five minutes. What does Carey want to talk to her about? Does she know something new about Paul? If she does, is Emily sure she wants to hear it? Secrets can be more powerful than guns. Sometimes, after secrets are no longer secret, countless lives can be toppled—an entire city of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cats and dogs, you name it, blindsided by words.
&nb
sp; Emily makes a deal with herself. She will walk outside. If she can see a hundred stars, she will call Carey. It is no longer raining, and stars pop out in every direction, hundreds of accusatory eyes. She counts in French, for practice, then she dashes up the lieberry steps, where she can see through the window that Five-Minute Girl is still talking. Emily runs back to Hart Hall, but Waverley is on the phone, practically making out with the receiver. In her room, Emily paces. When K.T. returns just before the 10:40 check-in, Waverley is still on the phone, and even if she weren’t, it would be too late to call the Wagoners’ house.
Emily lies on her bed and tries to slow down her heart, envying K.T., who falls asleep as soon as she pulls the covers up to her chin. For two hours, Emily stares through the dark at the ceiling. K.T. is snoring, but over her loud breathing, the sound of a boy’s name takes its late-night toll.
Pall.
Pall.
Pall.
Emily tries to follow the sound down into sleep, but Carey’s face keeps getting in the way. Paul drove Carey to school every day. So how does she get to school now? The bus doesn’t run all the way out to the Wagoners’ farm. And what music did Paul and Carey listen to on that final ride together?
Paul loved music. He was always introducing Emily to bands she’d never heard of. It is weird to think that Paul’s favorite groups are making music that he will never hear. It is weird to think of Paul’s mom and dad and Carey all riding to therapy. In what car? Not Paul’s truck. What happened to Paul’s truck? Emily pictures it parked on the side of the barn, rust on the passenger’s door, frost on the windshield. It’s been seventy-eight days, seventy-eight nights, almost twice as long as the flood Emily and Paul learned about so long ago in Sunday school, since Paul sat behind the wheel. Emily reaches out for her notebook and flashlight.
A New Solar System
The sad mother
the sadder father
the saddest daughter
the saddest saddest brother
have holed
themselves off
from one
another
They are each
their own
planet
and outer
space
is
vast
vaster
infinite
Emily Beam, February 28, 1995
How had Emily Dickinson put it?
Good Morning—Midnight—
I’m coming Home—
Day—got tired of Me
Something like that. Seventy-eight midnights, and the feeling of shame over the choices she’s made—over the one big choice—refuses to leave her. Her heart is anchored by it, her head stuffed full of what-ifs.
What if there had been another boy at school who wanted to tell her his secrets?
What if horse-loving Allison had loved Paul instead?
When Paul drove her to the abandoned barn, what if she’d said no, like she’d sworn on a Bible she would?
And there was, of course, the fact that she could have just left town without telling him she was going. Why did that never occur to her? He would have been angry—no doubt about it—but he would still be alive, and he never would have brought the gun to school.
What if Gigi had been sick in bed on that Sunday and had had to stay home from church so that Paul couldn’t have ever snuck into her room in the first place? Surely Gigi wouldn’t mind being sick if it meant that her grandson would live. And if Paul were alive, Emily wouldn’t feel so cut open, so cut up, so cut down.
So sew. Either way you spell it, on its own, the word looks wrong. Emily could write a poem about it, about how sew needs a subject, an object. About how a girl needs a duty to lock her in place. So if she sits at a desk, scrawls words on paper, are the words as lonely as she, or do they sow seeds into a soul across time, across centuries? Was Emily Dickinson ever able to thread the words together in such a way that she was beyond the need for stitches?
Emily reaches for the book on her bedside table and pulls the covers up over her head. She turns to Poem 812, the one she read to Paul before she knew for sure she was pregnant, and holds the flashlight over it.
On a Saturday in early December, five days before their trip to McDonald’s, Emily and Paul sat in the truck in the Beams’ driveway looking at the house, which Emily’s father had decorated earlier that day with white lights that framed the front door and all of the windows.
“The whole Christmas thing,” Paul said. “It’s too much.”
“Too much of what?” Emily asked.
“Too much of everything.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Paul sighed and pulled her closer. “People go overboard. They make things more complicated than they have to be. Even something beautiful like Christmas.”
“Oh, Paul, that makes me sad.”
“It makes me sad, too. I don’t want to feel sad. There’s all this light. I should feel happy, right?”
“Feelings are feelings,” she said, repeating something her grandmother used to say. “There isn’t a rightness or a wrongness to them. They just are.”
“We raise trees on our farm. Saplings. How do they make it?”
“You help them,” Emily said. “They wouldn’t survive without you.”
One of Paul’s responsibilities was to measure the width of the Christmas trees, an act that resembled hugging.
“Then I go and cut them down,” he said. “I mean, my parents talked to us a long time ago about what we do and why it’s good and how the trees give back to the air and the cycle of it and all, but still.”
“I want you to listen to something,” said Emily, reaching into her backpack for her English book. “It was written around 1864, but to me, it seems like it could have been written right now.” She read Paul the Emily Dickinson poem that she’d studied in class that week.
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period—
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.
Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay—
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.
After she finished reading, Paul took the book from Emily’s hand and kissed her palm.
“I like the way it sounds in your voice,” he said, “but I don’t get it.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“I’m too dumb,” he said, shaking his head.
“You understand trees.” Emily kissed Paul’s forehead. “You’re not dumb. Poems grow just like trees. You’ll see.”
But he hadn’t seen. He hadn’t given himself time to see.
The night they sat in Emily’s driveway, Emily tried to teach Paul something. What if she’d succeeded? What if there’d been some bit of knowledge set firmly down on pages that would have saved him?
“Dickinson’s talking here”—she pointed out to Paul in the book—“about the transitory nature of light.”
“I’m with you so far,” he said.
She angled the book so that Paul could look. “Light visits less often than darkness. Most of the time, we’re living in the dark.”
“So true.”
“The first word of the poem is like a seed,” Emily said, thinking of the one that was likely gro
wing inside of her. “And the last word of the poem is what that seed becomes. The rest of the poem is the poet changing that first word into something else. The word grows into something new, just like a seed grows into a tree.”
“So light becomes a sacrament.”
“Yes, exactly!”
“Okay, see? That’s the problem. I’m not sure what a sacrament is. I told you I was stupid.”
“I’m not sure I know, either,” Emily said. “But I think it’s something holy.”
A sacrament, Emily knows now because she’s looked it up, is a visible sign of God’s grace. Emily Dickinson scoured her small corner of the universe in search of such signs. She lived in a time and place governed by Puritan values. To renounce Christianity publicly, as Dickinson did in front of her entire school, was to banish herself from society. She refused to call herself a Christian because she did not want to lie. Science, not faith, was her guiding light. Experimentation led to proof. Logic and reason were what she held dear.
But if that was so, then why were so many of Emily Dickinson’s poems like little searchlights for God?
• • •
Walking to the dining room for breakfast, K.T. by her side, Emily considers what she is searching for other than a way out of her skin. As they scuttle over the pebbles, Emily hears lost rhymes rearranging themselves.
In my life I watched God take
Angels from my midst.
I pinned some jasmine to my breast,
Twined violets round my wrist
While I raged inside myself
Knowing what will be:
When God takes way more than He gives
He leaves the shell of me.
Maybe Emily Dickinson also heard poems under her shoes. Maybe she let this one stay so some other girl who came along could scoop it up, hold it in her palm.
“Rabbit, rabbit,” says K.T.
Emily looks at her sideways.
“It’s the first of March. Earth to Emily …”
“Is that another ASGism?”
“Seriously,” K.T. says. “What rock have you been living under?”
“A really heavy one.”
And We Stay Page 9
