“You do?”
Emily takes a deep breath. “You found the letter.”
“Yeah,” Carey says. “In the pocket of Paul’s pants.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
“What’s the point? It would just have made everyone sadder than they already are,” Carey says.
“That was nice of you,” says Emily.
“I didn’t do it for them.”
“How did you know the letter was there?”
“I didn’t,” Carey says. “I went into Paul’s room the night after he died, looking for something, anything, I don’t know. His clothes were lying there on the floor, waiting for him to take them to the laundry room. It was so final. He wouldn’t be back to do that, so I did it for him, and that’s how I found it.”
Emily knows what she must say. It’s not the nicest way to handle it, but Emily has had enough of nice. Look where nice has gotten her.
“I wouldn’t have gotten back together with Paul,” Emily says. “I know it says so in the letter, but I don’t think I could have. I hurt him beyond repair. Burn the letter, Carey. Okay? Burn it.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Why not?”
“It was something Paul touched.”
“Then send it to me and I’ll burn it.”
“No,” Carey says. “I can do it. He was my big brother.”
“Please don’t tell anyone, ever, that I was pregnant. Please.”
“I won’t. Like I said, it would just bring more hurt. We all knew you had broken up with him. It was because of the baby, I know, but do you think that’s why he—?”
“I don’t know, Carey. But it might be. In which case maybe you should tell your parents. At least it might take some of the confusion out of it. And some of the guilt.”
“None of us believe that Paul planned to kill himself,” says Carey. “We’ve talked to the therapist. We’ve talked to Ms. Albright. It was an impulse. And that’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it is.” Emily starts to cry. “I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me. Paul was a really good person. And a really good boyfriend, too. I miss him.”
“I miss him, too.”
“Maybe we can get together and talk when I come home for spring break?”
“I don’t hate you,” Carey says. “And, yes, let’s. And, Emily, your secret is safe. I promise. Paul would have wanted it that way.”
Emily knows she will always remember Paul, but she isn’t sure where it is he will stay. She hopes he’ll stay in her head. She will need room in her heart for other things, other people. She tells Carey goodbye for now and walks back down the hall to the room, where K.T. is about to jump out of her skin. She hands Emily a piece of notebook paper.
Dear Poet,
Your poem “Mother, Once Removed” has been entered into the Emily Dickinson Poetry Contest.
Love,
Your Friends on Hart Hall
Emily rushes over to the bed and runs her hand under the mattress. She looks under the bed. The poem is gone. She dumps the contents of the trash can on the floor. The balled-up entry form is gone, too, the one she marked all over.
“Annabelle and Waverley,” Emily tells K.T. “Payback time. Amber saw Annabelle coming out of our room today. She stole my poem.”
“Which one?”
“My secret one. God, I am so screwed. They’re going to broadcast it to the entire school.”
“Maybe not,” K.T. says. “What’s the poem about?”
“My abortion.” On a sheet of paper, she jots down some of the lines she remembers and shows them to K.T.
“I don’t think you need to worry,” K.T. says. “If they think they’ve got something on you, you can just be mysterious and say it’s all metaphor.”
Emily laughs a little laugh.
“Who knows? Maybe they were trying to be nice,” K.T. says. “Turn over a new leaf. It can happen.”
“Annabelle was snooping around in my room,” says Emily. “I don’t think she was doing that to be nice.”
“Well, if you win, the pizza’s on you for the rest of the year.”
“I won’t win,” says Emily. “I’m not the winning type.”
K.T. offers a sad smile. “You can probably get the poem pulled out of the contest if you want to, right? But maybe you don’t want to.”
“I think I’ve written better ones,” Emily says. “Clearer ones. Tell me the truth. Do you think I’m a bad person for what I did?”
“Well, Emily Beam Me Up Scotty, here’s what I think. If God made us in His image, then maybe we have a right to play God when we can’t find Him anywhere. But we will find Him, eventually. It’s what my pastor told us after Caroline died.”
“He sounds smart.”
“She,” K.T. says. “Yeah, Reverend Fairfax is brilliant. She went to Harvard. Where you will go, too. Especially if you win the contest. You never know—Annabelle and Waverley might have done you a huge favor.”
“They were doing it to be mean,” Emily says.
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“Well, Doubt is my middle name.”
“What is your middle name?”
“Elizabeth.”
“Oooo. Can I start calling you ‘e. e.’?”
Emily laughs. “Please don’t.”
“e. e. beam.” K.T. claps her hands. “How about ‘eeb’?”
“How about just Emily?”
“Just Emily. Kind of like Madonna, but humbler. Yeah, that’s perfect for you.”
“You might have to call me Exit Emily after tomorrow.”
K.T. walks over to Emily’s bed and sits down beside her. “They’ll want to keep you,” she says. “You’re an ASG girl through and through. They’re going to want you to stay.”
Clouds
Girl curled up
in a brown field
watching the sky:
I will die
too, she thinks
with all of my
memories
huddled like quilts
on a messy bed
I’ll be remade
a cloud changing
shape
unicorn
cornucopia
piano
My mother and father
will ask God
where I am
but He cannot
find a lone child
in the vast
white parade
Too many clouds
shifting fast
in the millions
of miles of
blue everlasting
Emily Beam, March 19, 1995
On Sunday morning, Emily wakes to a cold, hard rain. K.T. is still asleep. Emily checks the clock. They still have time to get to the dining room before breakfast ends, before she is summoned to Dr. Ingold’s office to accept her punishment.
She gets out of bed and shakes K.T.’s shoulder. “I’m hungry,” she says. “And I’m scared. Let’s go eat.”
K.T. rolls over. “Two minutes,” she says. She flips on the radio, and the girls get dressed to classical music. Back in Grenfell County, Emily didn’t care for Mozart and Beethoven and all those powder-wigged composers, but she is learning to respect the complexity of their work. K.T. is teaching her about music, just as she is teaching K.T. about Emily Dickinson.
“All right, Poet Girl,” says K.T. “I’m ready, so grab that umbrella, and leave those other boots behind. You’re going to need your rain boots.” Emily does as K.T. says, but as they push through the heavy door of their dorm and onto the quad, the rain turns to snow.
“No way!” yells Emily.
“It’s snowing!” shouts K.T. “One day before spring!” She grabs Emily’s hand, and they jump up a
nd down like children out of school, which brings to mind mittens and sleds, Boston and history, Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” and Dickinson’s alabaster chambers. By the time Emily and K.T. have finished breakfast, the snow has covered the pebbly sidewalks and the tallest stubs of grass. On the way back to 15 Hart Hall, they pass girls making snow angels, and without a word to one another, K.T. and Emily lie on their backs side by side, sliding their arms and legs back and forth.
The hard part, as any girl knows, is standing back up without ruining your angel. K.T. makes a mess of hers and laughs. “Oh, look, Em,” she says, pointing. “Yours is perfect.” Emily turns around to admire the mark she has made on the whiteness. She smiles at the metaphor. I am a poet, she thinks to herself. Oh, my God, I really am. She lifts her face to the sky, the snow soft as kisses. She and K.T. walk back to Hart Hall with upturned faces, holding on to one another’s hands for balance.
When they pass 12 Hart Hall, Emily knocks on the door and pokes her head in. Annabelle and Waverley are sitting on their beds.
“Hey, girls!” Emily waves. “Thank you! That was super, super nice of you. I hope I win!” She closes the door, and she and K.T. fall into a fit of giggles. When they open their own door, they squeal with delight. A large canvas rests on Emily’s desk. The painting of a yellow house with white columns manages to be both realistic and impressionistic.
“Amber painted it,” Emily says.
“How in the heck did she do that so fast? It’s amazing.”
“Amber, my crazy friend.”
“So what does that make me?” K.T. asks, raising her eyebrows. “I’m your crazy friend, too, right?”
“No,” Emily says.
“Knock, knock,” says Madame Colche, standing at the open door. “Dr. Ingold is ready for you, Emily. You’d better bring some work with you in case you have to wait.”
Emily slings her book bag over her shoulder. Before she follows her French teacher down the stairs, Emily kisses K.T. on the cheek and says, “You’re not my crazy friend. You’re my best friend.”
• • •
But best friends can be separated by miles and miles, Emily thinks as she walks with Madame Colche to Dr. Ingold’s office.
Wintertime keeps hanging
To every twig and blade
Hiding all the green
So girls can’t find their way.
In silence, she is ushered in to sit in the high-backed chair. Her spine straight as a pencil, Emily focuses her gaze past Dr. Ingold’s head, waiting for the cuckoo to pop out and tell her what she already knows, that in one minute, it will be ten o’clock. At least she knows something. Madame Colche sits in a chair by the window, her elegant hands folded neatly in her lap. With a stern voice, Dr. Ingold doles out Emily’s jail sentence, which will be delivered to her parents in a phone call from the headmistress. No, Emily Elizabeth Beam will not be expelled, but she is campused for the rest of the year. No dances with boys’ schools, no strolls down Main Street, no cemeteries, no drugstores, no smoking, no Emily Dickinson House. She is assigned to ten hours a week of unpaid work with the grounds crew, keeping the lawns and campus flower beds looking fresh all spring long.
After Dr. Ingold finishes, Emily puts her head in her hands and sobs. Madame Colche almost has to carry her out of the office.
“Why don’t you find a quiet place to regroup?” she tells Emily. “I’ll let K.T. know.”
“I’ll be in the lieberry,” Emily says, gulping for air.
“Lieberry?”
“Oui. Remind me to explain it to you sometime.”
Emily’s knees shake all the way to her carrel. She is so relieved that she sits and cries out every tear inside of her. When she can see clearly, Emily reads back through the poems, changing a word here, a line break there. She will type up the poems and send copies in an envelope to Ms. Albright. It’s time. She walks over to a long table and spreads the poems out. It is a lot to take in, a lot to get over, and a lot to share with Ms. Albright, but for now, for the present, Emily keeps her words to herself. They are good, they are true, and they bear no one else’s touch but her own. No help from a psychiatrist or a teacher, no parent looking over her shoulder, offering suggestions. Emily Beam has gone it alone.
Or maybe halfway alone. She owes some of it to Paul. Emily moves thirty poems around like tiles—a white path she will walk across to a green world—and gives them their final order. She puts them in pairs so they can talk to one another: her little book is a love story, after all, and lovers argue and question; they give and take, sidestep and hide, retreat and advance. On paper, they reunite for the duration.
First “Blues.” Then “Buttons.”
“Seed” goes with “Sew,” (now that it’s found).
“Girl at a Bedroom Window” and “The Meeting.”
“The Traveling Show” with “Conception.”
“Pall” and “Mosaics.”
“Shroud” with “The Doctor.”
“Maze” and “Never Land.”
“The Safe Way” with “Little Sister.”
“Small Things” and “Pocket.”
“The Shell” and “Hold Up.”
“Poem of the Middle Heart” with “Me and You and God.”
“A New Solar System” with “Robin’s Egg.”
“Absinthe” and “Treasures.”
“Anthology” and “DNA.”
“Clouds” at the beginning, all by itself, and “Ashes” here at the end.
And the poem under her mattress, “Mother, Once Removed,” will stay removed. It may sit for weeks in a pile of mail, and whether it ends up on the bottom of a recycling bin or on the top of a heap, it is its own entity. Its own pocket in time. It does not have to define who Emily is, was, or will be.
Yes, Emily thinks, this is the right order; this is how they will go.
She binds the poems together with a blue ribbon and a title, Clouds.
This is how they will go.
This is how she will go: on.
The light almost speaking,
and March halfway gone,
the green fields beyond,
and the staying.
Acknowledgments
At the 2012 meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society, a possible new daguerreotype was brought to light. If confirmed as authentic, it will stand as only the second image of Dickinson known to exist. If you would like to see it or the more well-known image that haunts Emily Beam, visit emilydickinsonmuseum.org.
From this excellent website, I gathered details for my story and checked facts. I also used Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds by Lyndall Gordon; My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger; The Gardens of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr (with Louise Carter); and a delightful children’s book titled, simply, Emily by Michael Bedard, with illustrations by Barbara Cooney.
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Thomas H. Johnson) sat on my desk as I wrote. So thank you, Emily Dickinson, for your unforgettable voice and all of the words you have lent me.
I also extend my gratitude to
Jonathan Lyons, my hero-agent;
Michelle Poploff and Rebecca Short, my editors in shining armor;
Sally Hubbard Hawn, my go-to reader, always;
Polly Adkins, Stephanie O’Neill, Denise Stewart, and Ford Thomson, for their various inputs, as well as Alexandra King and the rest of the girls in Proal Heartwell’s 2011–2012 eighth-grade English class at Village School in Charlottesville, Virginia;
Jayne and Joel Hubbard, my parents;
and Steve Cobb, husband of gold, who makes my writing life possible.
About the Author
And We Stay is Jenny Hubbard’s second novel. Her first, Paper Covers Rock, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA De
but Award. A former English teacher, Jenny writes books and plays in her hometown of Salisbury, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, a high school math teacher, and their rescue dog, Oliver. You can find Jenny on Facebook, follow her (and Oliver) on Twitter at @HubbardWrites, and visit her website at jennyhubbard.com.
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