Emily waited until his hands dropped to his sides before she answered. “Yes.”
“But you love me,” said Paul.
“I do. But I don’t want a baby.”
“You don’t think I’m smart enough to be a dad,” he said.
“It has nothing to do with that.”
“Aha! So I’m right—you don’t think I’m smart.”
“Paul, please.” She reached for his hand, and he let her take it.
“I’m coming over to your house tonight.”
“No, you’re not,” said Emily.
“Yes, I am. We’re going to talk to them. It’s awful what they’re asking you to do. They might have given you life, but this is going to destroy you. I know this. I know you well enough to know that down the road—”
“Just stop. Please.”
“I’m coming over,” he said, squeezing her hand, “and we’re going to sit down with your parents and talk. There. Is that grown-up enough for you? Is that smart enough for you?”
“Don’t waste your time,” said Emily. “They won’t answer the door.”
“I don’t care,” said Paul, pulling his hand away. “I’ll bust open a window.”
“They’ll call the police.”
“The police love me, remember?”
“I wish that night at Cole’s house had never happened. We were stupid,” said Emily. Then she handed him the letter, and when Paul opened it and saw what was there—what he already knew—he lifted his head and screamed at the sky, and then he tried to hand the paper back.
“Why did you even need to write it all down if you knew you were going to tell me in person?”
“In case you weren’t here—”
“You mean that if I hadn’t been home, you would have broken up with me in a letter?”
Paul waved the stationery in her face, but Emily refused to take it. “You know what?” she said. “This wouldn’t be happening if you’d worn a condom.”
He stuffed the letter in his back pocket and grabbed her by the shoulders. Emily lost her footing, falling backward into leaves that had once been gold.
“Oh, so it’s my fault!” he yelled down at her.
“No, it’s our fault!”
“Wrong! It’s your fault!”
“How is it my fault?”
Paul’s gray eyes turned to steel. “You could have just given me a blow job. You know that, Emily? How easy life would be if you’d just done it.”
Emily let herself drop back onto the leaves. Even if Paul hadn’t pushed her, she would have ended up flat on the ground. It was true: if she’d done what Paul wanted, she would be a free girl. But now she was bound to her body.
“You would never say that if you loved me,” said Emily, lifting herself up. “You don’t love me. You really don’t.”
Paul looked down at a rock and jabbed at it with the toe of his work boot before he picked it up and tossed it up and down, measuring the weight of it. He was going to throw the rock at her; Emily was sure of it. She scrambled to her feet and took off running to where her mom’s car was parked. Paul started to follow her, then stopped at the top of the driveway. He was sobbing now, but he was still holding the rock. He waited until Emily was in the driver’s seat, waited until she was watching, before he raised the rock high with both hands and brought it down full force on top of his head.
With shaking hands, Emily put the key in the ignition. Through the windshield she saw Paul crumple to the ground, palms pressed to his scalp. Then she turned the key, put the pedal to the metal, and flew home.
Now, Emily walks and does not fly. She walks a straight line through the front gates of the Amherst School for Girls. She crosses the quad to the lieberry to retrieve her coat. She halfway expects an army of adults to be circled around the carrel where she was sitting two hours ago, but all she finds is a note pinned to it, dashed off in slanted cursive on school stationery. Emily Beam, Please report ASAP to the headmistress.
• • •
The door to Dr. Ingold’s office is wood with stained-glass panels. When Emily knocks, she isn’t sure that anyone can hear, her fist no match for the door’s thickness. Moments later, the door creaks open and a woman emerges. It is not Dr. Ingold, whom Emily met on the day she moved in, but a younger version of her, a lean woman in a white blouse and a gray skirt who introduces herself as Ms. Ledbetter, Dr. Ingold’s assistant.
“Dr. Ingold will be glad to hear that you’re safe,” says Ms. Ledbetter, gesturing toward a chair covered in velvet. “Please. Sit. She’s on the telephone. I’ll let her know you’re here.”
Emily has waited on the other side of closed doors before. Like on that Saturday night when she should have been at Frank’s Tuscan Villa celebrating her birthday. All the way up in her room, Emily heard Paul’s truck screech to a halt in front of the house at seven o’clock, three hours after she had last seen him. Within seconds, Paul was ringing the doorbell. She ran downstairs, skidding into the entrance hall just as her father was reaching for the doorknob.
“Don’t answer it,” she said.
In that instant, Emily and her father understood each other. She was asking to be protected. Even though she might protest and rebel later, he would stand by her in that way.
Her father reached for her hand and held tight while Paul pounded on the wood, rang the doorbell over and over. Emily’s mother came running into the foyer and grabbed on to Emily’s other hand. When Paul realized no one was going to let him in, he pressed his finger on the bell and held it there for so long that the doorbell burned itself out, the wail of a poor man’s ambulance.
Dr. Ingold’s office has a cuckoo clock that sings on the quarter hour. No one in Grenfell County that Emily knows of has a cuckoo clock. It reminds her of Hansel and Gretel. Just as Dr. Ingold opens the door, the bird pops out and cuckoos three times. Dr. Ingold shakes Emily’s hand and offers her a seat in a high wooden chair that looks like it came from an old church. Emily sits, nestling deeper inside her coat. One of the windows is partway open, and she can hear the train announcing its arrival into Amherst.
Dr. Ingold searches Emily’s eyes before she speaks.
“I imagine that you had a good reason for leaving campus without permission.”
“I did,” Emily says. “I had to find Emily Dickinson’s grave.”
Dr. Ingold raises one eyebrow. “Go on.”
Behind Dr. Ingold’s desk hangs a painting of a girl sitting on a stool by a window that overlooks the ocean. The girl leans toward the water, one foot poised to go.
“This is going to be hard to explain,” Emily says. “It’s like my brain has been hijacked.”
“I’m intrigued,” Dr. Ingold says.
“I’m intrigued, too,” Emily says. “I don’t know what has taken it over or where it’s taking me or whether I’ll ever get my real brain back.”
“You know, Emily, that we’re going to have to send you home if you can’t live with the rules here. They weren’t put in place to confine you. They were put in place to make you feel secure. To give you some boundaries to guide you, to help you choose wisely, not only now but for the rest of your life.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And they are especially necessary for a girl who has so much to sort through.”
Emily looks out the window at the shuddering limbs of a maple.
“Tell me, do you like your classes?”
“I do,” Emily says. “Well, except for math.”
“What’s the problem with math?”
“Mrs. Frame is a good teacher. It’s just that the subject is, I don’t know …”
Dr. Ingold waits for her to finish the sentence, but she can’t.
“How are you and K.T. Montgomery getting along?”
“She’s nice,” says Emily. “I like her a lot.”
&nb
sp; Dr. Ingold scribbles something on the pad of paper in front of her. “As you know, Emily, we all want it to work out for you here. I am well aware that you failed to report for a Sunday dinner last month. K.T. was terribly worried.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So I’m going to campus you for a week, starting now. That means no leaving the campus until next Wednesday, the twenty-second. And if you break another major rule, we’ll have to call your parents and discuss whether ASG is the best fit for you.”
Emily nods.
“Do you understand, Emily? Are we clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll explain to Madame Colche what lured you away from French, and I’ll let Mrs. Frame know why you weren’t in class—again. I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear that this time, you didn’t lock yourself away in a water closet.” Dr. Ingold offers Emily a small smile from the left corner of her mouth. “It’s almost time for afternoon athletics, so I’ll excuse you to go to your room to change clothes.”
“Thank you,” Emily says, rising from her tall chair, which, she realizes now, was chosen to make the girl sitting in it feel small.
“A letter arrived for you today,” Dr. Ingold says. “The sender wasn’t aware of your box number, so it ended up in our office.” She lifts an envelope from her desk and hands it to Emily, who recognizes the handwriting immediately.
Dr. Ingold watches her. “Did you know that Emily Dickinson had hair almost the exact color as yours?”
“No,” Emily says, touching the windblown strands of auburn that have escaped from her ponytail. “The photograph of her—”
“The daguerreotype, you mean. Photography had yet to be invented.”
“The daguerreotype. It makes her hair look black.”
“Our mutual friend wasn’t nearly as dark as people have made her out to be. She spent hours in her garden. It was her favorite place. Remember that, please.”
“I will,” Emily says.
“I’m here—all of us are—if you need us.”
This should be the motto that goes on all of the ASG brochures: “We’re here if you need us.” If Emily had a dollar for every time someone has said that to her, she could buy out the drugstore’s entire supply of greeting cards and replace them with her own unsentimental, Dickinson-like sentiments.
DNA
I spend my days at Boarding School
Steeling up my spine,
Keeping faith but in myself
And books that draw the line
Between the world of spirit &
The world of proven fact,
Truths that I can measure &
Depend on to exact
The finest points of being what
God set me up to be:
A genetic composition of
Irrationality.
Emily Beam, March 15, 1995
Because she can’t go for her evening walk, Emily travels straight from the dining room to the lieberry with a bag full of books, a head full of thoughts, and the still-unopened letter from Ms. Albright. She wants a cigarette, but she does not want to see K.T., who ratted on her about missing Sunday dinner. No wonder K.T.’s favorite childhood book was Harriet the Spy.
Emily Dickinson’s roommate at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary was a spy, too. That spy wrote letters to friends at home reporting on the heathen Emily, a bad apple in danger of spoiling the barrel. The girls at the school were asked to keep their doors open at all times and to tell a teacher if another girl was ill. Back then, sickness could be deadly. But did doubt count as a disease? Did loneliness rank as an illness? Was a girl with sadness in her soul destined both for hell and dismissal?
Maybe I should just go ahead and leave, Emily Beam thinks. Hop a train out of Amherst and wind my way back to Grenfell County and hole up in my bedroom for the next fifty years. She opens the creamy white envelope from Ms. Albright.
Dear Emily,
I was so sad to discover that we wouldn’t be together for the duration. Your mother told me where you were, and I looked it up in a reference book I have on the shelf here at home. It sounds like such a wonderful school, and I know you’ll find opportunities there that we aren’t able to offer you here. Take advantage of those silver linings, and write back when you have time to tell me what they are.
Fondly, Ms. Albright.
P.S. Please tell Emily D. I said hello. I’m sure something of her lingers there.
Emily grabs for her throat, unable for a moment to breathe. She tears off her coat, unlaces her boots, and, in a flash of anger, throws one across the lieberry just as Amber Atkins peeks around the corner of a bookshelf. Another spy? Emily rises from her carrel and heads over to where she saw Amber lower herself into the stacks, but no one is there. Emily walks downstairs to the water fountain in her socks and takes a long drink. When she returns to her desk, K.T. is sitting at it.
“I’ve been looking for you,” K.T. says.
“Well, you found me,” says Emily.
“What happened?”
Emily looks down at her feet. “I don’t want to wear shoes anymore,” she says. “None of them fit.”
“Listen, Emily. I had to tell Dr. Ingold. When you didn’t show up for dinner that Sunday, I thought, well, honestly, I was afraid you’d gone off and hurt yourself. I know it’s crazy now, but at the time, it seemed like a very real possibility. You stayed home from the St. Mark’s dance that Saturday night. You asked me for matches. I had this horrible image of you setting yourself on fire.” K.T. pauses. “You cry out in your sleep.”
“I do?”
“At least once a night. I know something bad has happened to you, and maybe I even have an idea of what it was from reading your poems—”
“I wish I’d never showed those to you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“That’s what I wanted to burn—my notebook, not my body.”
K.T.’s chin quivers, and she swallows before she speaks. “A good friend from home committed suicide two years ago. That’s why I go to school here and not in Vermont.”
Emily steadies herself on the side of the carrel. “I wish you’d told me that,” she says. “I wish you’d told me the first hour I got here.”
“Why? What have you ever told me?”
“I told you a lot! I told you with my poems!”
“I’d rather you tell me to my face. Look, I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Sure.” Emily watches K.T. leave. She gathers the boots and slowly, very slowly, puts them back on her feet.
Absinthe
inspired by the Edgar Degas painting, c. 1875–1876
In a café in Paris
a woman sags
to the limelight
of loss. But what
went missing
what got tossed
to the gutter?
Not her blouse
of spilled ruffles
not the prick of a pearl
or predator hat.
Even her shadow
has glued itself
to her absence.
To the gravitas
lure of her absinthe.
To absinthe.
A man wants
to pin her
to canvas blank
as the night.
But she’s limped
there already
slippers tight
and all wrong.
A girl looking deep
should find the one
who’s long gone.
Emily Beam, March 15, 1995
The telephone on the second floor of Hart Hall rings just after ten. Annabelle Wycoff answers. When the girl on the other end of the line asks for Emily Beam, Annabelle tells her that Emily is in the library. Annabelle also shares her concern f
or Emily, their resident orphan. The girl on the phone tells Annabelle that she must be mistaken. Emily’s mom and dad are fine—she saw them at church on Sunday.
When Emily arrives at the top of the stairs, Annabelle is waiting for her, holding the receiver out as if it were a fish she’d just caught. “Phone call, Emily.”
“Who is it?”
“I knew your parents didn’t ski,” says Annabelle.
Emily puts the phone up to her ear. “Mom?” But she knows it isn’t her mother, or Aunt Cindy; she talked to both of them on Sunday afternoon.
“Hey, Emily,” says Carey. “Is this a bad time?”
Annabelle crosses her arms and plants herself, looking like the troll who guarded the billy-goat bridge.
Emily turns away and talks quietly into the phone. “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t called you back. There just aren’t enough phones for all of us girls, I guess.”
“Your friend said you were in the library.”
“Yeah,” says Emily. “I study there.”
“I haven’t been back in the one at school yet. Mr. Burton invited me to come and have a look around when no one else was in there, but I didn’t want to.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“They cleaned everything up, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I’m sure it looks just the same as it always has,” Carey says, “but it won’t feel the same, to be in there.”
Emily gets it. The library would no longer smell like the inside of books. It would smell like disinfectant and Band-Aids.
Annabelle gives her a little wave, and Emily waves back with her middle finger. To Carey she says, “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
Carey talks on as girls travel to and from the bathroom. Just as K.T. emerges from the stairwell and Waverley comes out of the room, Annabelle announces what she has learned: “The orphan story was bullshit.”
Emily gives K.T. a pleading look.
“Emily?” Carey asks. “Are you there?”
Annabelle takes a step toward K.T. and says, “You owe me an explanation, Keller True Montgomery.”
“I don’t owe you a damn thing,” K.T. says. “Because you were so obviously desperate for some drama in your life, you took what I said seriously. It was a joke, Annabelle. I can’t believe you fell for it.”
And We Stay Page 11
