“All right,” says Annabelle, backing up a little. “Okay.”
“I don’t owe you shit, not after what you did to Hannah.”
“Waverley started it,” Annabelle says.
“She’s right,” Waverley says. “I did.”
“But you finished it, K.T.,” Annabelle says. “Remember? If you hadn’t ratted, Ho-Bag Hannah would still be here.”
“Damn straight,” says Waverley.
“It wasn’t like that,” says K.T., “and you know it.”
“You are such a liar,” Annabelle says. “No wonder you don’t have any friends.”
“Emily?” Carey says again. “Emily?”
Déjà vu, Emily thinks. Déjà vu all over again.
As soon as Paul went screeching out of her driveway in his truck, she knew she had made an irreversible error. When the phone rang a half hour later, Mr. Beam answered. He refused to let Emily talk to Paul, even though she tugged on his arm and cried and begged. He laid into Paul for ruining his daughter’s life.
After her parents had gone to bed, Emily slipped downstairs, picked up the phone in the kitchen, and dialed the Wagoners’ number.
Carey, not Paul, answered. “Happy birthday, Emily.”
“I wish,” said Emily. “Can I talk to Paul, please?”
“He’s locked in his room, and he won’t come out. My parents just went to bed. What happened?”
For a whole minute, Emily didn’t say anything. She kept picturing the letter in the back pocket of Paul’s jeans. Carey stayed on the line, and Emily put her hand over the tiny holes in the phone in case Mr. or Mrs. Wagoner picked up. Neither one of them did. The silence ticked away. Emily could hear Carey put down the phone, and in another minute, Paul said her name.
“Emily.”
“Paul.”
“Thanks, Carey,” Paul whispered. “I’ve got it now.” He waited for a second before he spoke. “Why? Why wouldn’t you let me in?”
“It was my dad,” Emily lied. “He’s such an asshole.” A light flipped on in the foyer. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Someone’s coming.” It was her mother; she could tell by the slide of her slippers.
“I wanted to talk to them in person,” said Paul. “I wanted to ask you this, and them, too, so I’ll just say it now. Let’s get married.”
Emily could hear the smile in Paul’s voice as her mother walked into view. In her thin nightgown, with the light behind her, Emily could see right through her. She was wearing granny underwear, and her breasts sagged.
“Tell him goodbye,” said Mrs. Beam. “Hang up right now, or I’ll go get your father.”
“I’ve got to go,” she told Paul. “I’ll see you Monday at school, okay?”
“Yeah,” said Paul, and he hung up.
For most of Sunday morning, Emily lay in bed, thinking about Paul, wondering how well she knew him. Her mom and dad decided not to go to church, and Emily wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t want to run into the Wagoners or because they wanted to keep an eye on her. Just before eleven, her mom left for the grocery store, and her dad came in from the garage, where he’d been changing the oil in his car. Emily listened for him to get in the shower and called Paul’s house, but no one answered.
All day, she waited for an opportunity to try again, but there wasn’t one. Sunday afternoon, it snowed for a while, but all that was left on the ground early Monday morning was the dust of it, not nearly enough to cancel school. The alarm clock sounded at 6:15 a.m. like always, and Emily got herself ready to catch the bus.
She hears Carey’s voice. “If you’re still there, Emily, say something.”
A huddle of girls has formed outside the bathroom door, watching, listening. It is wrong, but she can’t help it: Emily hangs up the phone.
K.T. and Annabelle are in full face-off mode. Because K.T. is so much taller, it makes Annabelle look even more like a troll.
“Just because I’m not friends with you,” K.T. is saying, “doesn’t mean I don’t have any friends. I choose my friends carefully; they have to be people I can trust. Emily Beam is my friend, and she had nothing to do with it. I roped her into the story. And she has nothing to do with Hannah, either, so leave Emily out of it. You bullied Hannah. I saw the notes. It was no secret to Hannah who was behind them. Who the hell are you to tell another girl what to do with her body?”
“Come on, Annabelle,” Waverley says. “Let’s go.”
“I might not have loved Hannah every minute of every day,” says K.T., “but at least I treated her like a person. You treated her like a dog.”
Annabelle turns to Emily. “You’d better watch out,” she says. “I wouldn’t trust your dear ol’ roomie for a second. Oh, and, by the way, I’m really glad you’re not an orphan.”
Waverley grabs Annabelle’s arm and escorts her into their room. The door slams shut, and the girls in the hall disperse.
K.T. looks at Emily. “I went to Dr. Ingold because I was worried about Hannah. Just the same as I was with you. We girls are so good at hiding our pain.” K.T. picks up her book bag and cello case and walks down the hall to Room 15, leaving Emily alone.
The Doctor
The doctor was a woman.
She wore a smock of white.
And in the glow of evening,
she prayed with all her might.
She prayed for little children.
She prayed for all the land,
and for an angel not yet born,
tiny as a hand.
Emily Beam, March 15, 1995
There’s no sleeping Wednesday night. Emily’s head has never spun like this. All in one day she has been campused, exposed, possessed, waylaid, betrayed, vilified, protected, defended, and extraordinarily productive, poetry-wise.
And what to do about Carey, who is going to therapy and wants to tell Emily something? For some reason, Emily is more scared of her than of anyone.
Emily has been to therapy, in Boston, only her parents called it “counseling.” The man’s name was Dr. Ferris. “Like the wheel,” he said as he held out his clammy hand. Three times during the first week of the new year, Emily took the Boston subway, called “the T,” from her Aunt Cindy’s house in Belmont. The only way that Emily agreed to meet with Dr. Ferris was if she could go alone. She liked looking at the map of the public transportation system and figuring out how to get places she’d never been. Emily pretended she liked Dr. Ferris just so she could ride the T, which was crowded with faces she would never see again. It made her feel significant, important. For the first time, she looked forward to being an adult.
Dr. Ferris charged an outrageous amount to listen to Emily. Therapy was a complete waste all around because everything Emily told Dr. Ferris was a lie. She didn’t care. Her parents were acting—everyone was acting—like something was wrong with her, when it was Paul who was messed up in the head. She had made a mistake. That was part of it, wasn’t it? Make your mistakes while you’re young lest you ruin the world when you’re older.
“Baby steps,” said Dr. Ferris. “For a while, and in some situations, you’re going to feel as if you’re just now learning to walk. Does that make sense?”
“Not at all,” said Emily.
“It will be the same you, but there will be more to you—more weight, because of what you have been through—and so your legs might teeter for a while until they find a way to balance themselves.”
“My legs are fine,” said Emily.
“So,” said Dr. Ferris, “how are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling young. I’m feeling in charge of my life. I’m feeling like a brand-new girl.”
Dr. Ferris widened his eyes and nodded. “Tell me more.”
God, thought Emily, what a moron. How do you think I feel? I feel hollowed out, damned, caught in the middle of Wrong and Wronger. Emily wanted to laugh at the s
tupid smile on Dr. Ferris’s fat face. “Feelings pile on top of me like blankets,” she said.
“That’s an eloquent way of putting it,” Dr. Ferris said. “Keep going.”
“Well, let’s see. I had no idea my boyfriend was going to kill himself, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” said Dr. Ferris. “I’m not asking anything.”
Emily looked at the clock. “You’re trying to get me to say that it’s my fault Paul killed himself,” she said. “But I didn’t have that kind of power over Paul. He didn’t love me.”
“Was that how it was between the two of you, a fight for control over the other?”
Emily stared at him with her mouth open. “We didn’t sit around analyzing our relationship. We just lived, Dr. Ferris. You know, like teenagers do.”
“What we’re working toward here, Emily, is getting you out of the thicket of your confusion. That’s my job, you see, to try to get you to a place where you’ve gained a little perspective. Now. Tell me how Paul reacted when you told him you were pregnant.”
“He was actually very happy,” Emily said. “We were riding in his truck when I told him, and he pulled over to the side of the road and got out and jumped up and down.”
“Was that a reaction that you expected?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Would you like to tell me a little more about that?”
“No,” said Emily. “I wouldn’t.”
She sat there with her arms crossed while Dr. Ferris studied her.
“Then let’s talk about your experience at the doctor’s office, shall we?”
Emily lied about that, too.
The doctor they’d used was a woman, a friend of a friend of Aunt Cindy’s. On December 21, nine days after Paul died, Aunt Cindy drove Emily and her mother into the city early in the morning. The appointment was at 9:15 a.m. On the way to the doctor’s office, it started to snow, and Emily thought of Paul under the ground and cried quietly into the sleeve of her coat. She could not believe she hadn’t thought of it before. Paul, the last alive part of him, was inside of her. Emily put her free hand on her stomach and swallowed. “Stop,” she said from the backseat. “Stop the car.”
“What’s wrong, honey?” her mother said, turning. “Are you okay?”
Aunt Cindy eased the car to the shoulder.
“I don’t think I can do this,” Emily said through her tears. “It’s not right.”
“Emily,” her mother said. “We’ve made our decision, and it is right.”
“It’s the right thing for you,” Aunt Cindy added.
“How can you say that?” Emily said. “You don’t even know me.”
Mrs. Beam stretched out her hand to touch Emily’s cheek, but Emily pulled back. “Of course your aunt knows you,” she said. “She’s known you all your life.”
A truck whizzed by, and the car shook.
“I’ve known me all my life, too,” said Emily, “and I don’t even know me.”
“Shhh,” her mother said. “Shhh. The doctor will take care of everything.”
“No. We owe it to Paul,” Emily said. “We’re bad people, to be doing this.”
“We are not bad people,” said her mother. “We are caring people. We are practical people.”
“You have lived through a trauma,” said Aunt Cindy. “You have been scarred to the core of your being. Whoever you are—whoever you discover you are—you will need time to recover. Having a baby would add years to your recovery. And your discovery. Years.”
“Think on this,” said her mother. “What if you had the baby, and, when he grew up, he took a gun into his high school and threatened somebody with it? Or worse, killed somebody? Think on that, why don’t you?” Mrs. Beam turned around to face forward. “The lane’s clear. We can go now, Cindy.”
Emily wiped her eyes and watched the flakes die, one by one, on the warm car windows. For a while, she counted them but stopped when the number got too large. What lived inside of her would die, too, on this day, like a snowflake. The only one of its kind.
Conception
She laid herself down in the velvet
of dark, the thin chirps of crickets
in the field outside the window,
the window he had opened,
the window he believed in.
When he lay down beside her,
the boy whispered truths
into the palm of her hand.
Do not leave, he said.
Do not go. Never cut me
out; if you do, you’ll feel
a sadness true as the trees.
He kissed her lifeline
and sealed his secrets there.
Emily Beam, March 16, 1995
Emily wakes to K.T. standing over her, gently shaking her arm.
“You cried out,” K.T. says.
“What time is it?”
“Four-fifteen.”
“Oh, God, K.T., I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” K.T. says. “I have a big Spanish test today I haven’t studied for yet anyway, and the moon is, like, blinding. It’s bright as day outside. If I make some coffee, will you drink some?”
“Sure,” says Emily. “I’m afraid to leave the room.”
“Why?”
“Lying to a cream puff whose life’s ambition is to be the leader of the free world could have in no way been a good idea.”
“Aw, she’s harmless. Don’t worry about her.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“Well, this time I mean it.”
“Annabelle intimidates me,” Emily says. “She’s got those narrow eyes and that topknot of black hair and that extra padding around her middle. She’s not a pastry. She’s Buddha.”
K.T. laughs. In fact, she can’t stop laughing, and Emily can’t help but laugh, too. After she catches her breath, she says, “And Buddha was the only human to ever achieve Enlightenment, so …”
“You really are the bumpiest pumpkin,” K.T. says.
“I probably am,” says Emily, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she feels her insides joining forces to say out loud what she hasn’t been able to say. “I guess I have reason to be.”
“What do you mean?” asks K.T.
Emily, breathing in and out, can almost smell the inside of Paul’s truck. “My boyfriend killed himself.”
“Oh, Emily,” says K.T. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“The one you told me about. Paul. The one who ran over the dog.”
“Yes.”
“Was Paul the one you got pregnant with?”
Emily’s hand goes to her stomach. “You didn’t say you knew.”
“The poem about the seed, well, it seemed pretty clear. It also seemed very private.”
“But I showed them to you,” says Emily.
“You did,” says K.T., “but I thought Madame Colche strong-armed you.”
“Maybe a little.”
“I can tell from the poems that you really loved him.”
“I’m not so sure,” Emily says. “I’m really not very sure of anything.”
“You notice what other people can’t see. And you feel things very deeply. I like those things about you,” says K.T.
Emily and K.T. talk until the moon sets, drinking coffee. When Emily tells K.T. about what happened in the school library, she tells her all of it. As she speaks, she speaks as honestly as she knows how, and another poem finds its way into being. “Shroud,” it is called, a prose poem and it goes like this:
In the waiting room, in the clinical glow, she hugs the silence, wraps it around her shoulders, a shawl. If she’d only known, she’d have chosen its eloquence years ago, its silver thread stitching together the days.
The stretch and pull of the noisy past smothers it. Music that doesn’t mean. Clichéd lyrics, oppressive downbeats. Screaming that suffocates melody. How could she have been so deaf to the symphonies of silence, to the seductive absence of voice?
K.T. listens long and carefully. When Emily finishes, K.T. tells her how her friend in Vermont left a suicide note on the kitchen table with only one word on it—love—and went upstairs and took a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. Now it is Emily’s turn to put her arms around K.T. While she waits for the crying to ebb, Emily wonders what Dickinson would have to say. Gazing at the thick book sitting on her bedside table, Emily composes it herself.
My Words stand by as Witness
Collected and in line—
America is dying
One Girl at a Time.
• • •
K.T. skips breakfast to study for her Spanish test, so Emily walks to the dining room alone, her toothbrush and toothpaste tucked away in her book bag next to The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. She will use the bathroom in the lieberry to avoid running into Annabelle and Waverley. If they could find a way to get rid of Ho-Bag Hannah, then maybe they could find a way to get rid of her, too. But her darkest secret is safe, safe under the mattress and safe with K.T. Not even Dr. Ingold knows about the abortion.
• • •
It was snowing harder when Emily and her mother emerged from the doctor’s office. The snowflakes were so large they looked fake. Aunt Cindy was waiting for them two blocks away in a coffee shop. As they walked along the nearly deserted sidewalk, Emily’s mother reached more than once for Emily’s hand, but the last thing Emily wanted to feel was a connection to her mother, so she stuffed her mittened hands inside the pockets of her coat.
Aunt Cindy was sitting at a table reading the newspaper and drinking coffee.
“See if there’s something you’d like to drink,” Aunt Cindy told Emily. “I wasn’t sure what you’d want.”
Emily turned and looked toward the counter. Beyond it, at the end of a narrow hall, was a door to the outside. Through its small window, Emily could see snow drifting down like a lacy veil.
And We Stay Page 12
