“Yes,” M said. “It’s fascinating. I know it sounds awful—”
“It is awful.”
“Well, people don’t get to be saints by living long, peaceful, boring lives, you know.”
I thought about the man Ms. Lurie had found this morning. The man who wasn’t going to be living any kind of life now, boring or otherwise.
“It isn’t just about saints,” M said, in a sort of determinedly matter-of-fact voice. I got the sense that her thoughts had gone the same direction mine had, and she was hauling them back. “My project here, I mean. I’m not religious. I study all kinds of myths and legends. The point for me is what they mean—why people still love them and think about them and pray to them, even when they’re bizarre.”
“Or disgusting,” I said.
“Not everything in Lucy’s story is gross,” M said. “She’s a symbol of resistance.”
“How is mailing your eyeballs to somebody resistance?”
“Well, it is how she resisted marrying the guy. But that’s not the only story about her. Some versions of her life don’t even mention it. It just shows up in paintings a lot because that’s the kind of thing that makes a picture more interesting.”
“How nice,” I said. M was wearing jeans and a pale peach blouse that matched her skin so perfectly it took a minute to see she was wearing anything at all. And she was still barefoot. Maybe she preferred that. “Are you dressed? Can we go?”
“Almost. I need another layer,” she said, wandering back to her closet. No hurry in her steps. Looking at her, you’d think it was just another morning at the lovely Hawthorne Academy.
I turned away again, this time fixing my eyes on the floor. “Lucy’s a symbol of resistance,” M said again. I heard her sliding hangers around. “She didn’t want to get married, so she didn’t, even when her fiancé threatened her. She wouldn’t make sacrifices to the Roman emperor because she was a Christian, so they tried to punish her by making her work in a brothel. That happens to a lot of female saints, by the way. Usually they manage to stay miraculously pure. But Lucy wouldn’t go, and they couldn’t make her. Look.”
She was standing next to me again—does she move more quickly than most people, or am I just not used to anyone being close to me? She pointed to another picture on her door—not one of her own creations, but a postcard from a museum. “See? They’re trying to drag her away with a herd of oxen, and she’s not budging.”
I couldn’t help smiling a little. The men around her were furious, muscles straining as they struggled to get the cows all going in the same direction. Cattle as far as the eye could see, all lashed together and then lashed to Lucy. And there she knelt, looking so impossibly patient and immovable that she might have been a granite statue.
“So it’s not such a horrible story after all, is it,” M said rather than asked. “That’s why I like her. She doesn’t let anyone push her around or change her mind. She stands up for what she believes in.”
M may not be religious, but she sounded pretty fervent when she said that. “Why does that matter so much to you?” I asked. “What do you believe in?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was still barefoot, but she had a bright red sweater over her blouse now. It looked like the one in the picture she’d painted of herself as Saint Lucy. “I’m still figuring that out. But while I do, I’m not just going to go along with whatever they tell me to.”
They were her parents, I assumed. Or maybe just the world in general.
We looked at each other. I knew I had to say something. It was time to be snarky and cruel, so we could get on with this horrible morning and M could get over any idea she might have that we could be besties.
I didn’t want to.
I wanted to stay in this strange room with this strange girl and listen to more creepy inspirational stories about people who might or might not have lived and died a long time ago.
Ms. Lurie might have been right to worry that M’s pictures would scare her other students, but just now this room was the closest thing to a haven I’d ever seen.
What was I doing? Or not doing, which was just as bad?
I had no right to words like haven. I was stuck with phrases like oh, look—murder and yes, again.
M was looking at me curiously, and I realized the silence had stretched to an awkward length.
“Are you going to put on shoes or anything?” I asked.
She glanced down. “Oh, yes. Thanks. Sometimes I forget I’m barefoot.”
She went to her chest of drawers and started rummaging through an inordinate number of socks. She must really hate doing laundry.
“So, what happened to Lucy?” I asked. “Did they give up on the whole brothel thing when a herd of cattle couldn’t budge her?”
M smiled over her shoulder. “Yes. They decided to burn her at the stake right where she was standing instead.”
“That’s a little extreme.”
“Well, this was ancient Rome.”
I decided to take her word for it. That’s not a time period that’s ever interested me.
“It didn’t work, though,” she continued, sitting down on her bed to pull on a peculiar pair of socks. They looked like something you’d wear hiking, except for all the lace. “The fire kept going out.”
“So they let her go free?”
“Oh no. By then it was a point of pride. They had to defeat her.”
There was that vague, oppressive they again.
“So what did they do?”
“Nothing very exciting. That’s the thing about saints. They’re like James Bond.”
“What?” I almost laughed. This morning was getting weirder by the minute.
“Well, you know. Their enemies are always planning these elaborate, dramatic schemes, and it never works. It’s like if someone would just take out a gun and shoot James Bond—”
“—we wouldn’t have any movies.”
“Exactly. The whole point of the saints is to have their cool stories. Whenever the governors or emperors or whoever get annoyed enough to finally just run a sword through somebody, it works. That’s what happened to Lucy.”
“That’s it?” It seemed a little anticlimactic.
“Yep.”
“But—why would God work so hard to save her from the brothel and the burning and all that, and then just let her bleed to death?”
“I don’t know.” M was sitting comfortably—in socks but still no shoes—smiling at me. “Mysterious ways and all that, I guess.”
Dust is the only Secret—
Death—the only One
You cannot find out all about
In his “native town.”
Nobody knew “his Father—”
Never was A Boy—
Had’nt any playmates,
Or “Early history”—
I’d been afraid I wouldn’t seem convincingly upset when I talked to the detective. I mean, of course I’m not happy about what happened, but I’m not the kind of shocked everyone else is. Surely he’d notice the difference.
Turns out I had nothing to worry about.
I knocked on the door when they told me to. Ms. Lurie said, “Come in,” and my hands began to shake so hard I almost couldn’t manage the doorknob.
Ms. Lurie’s office is tiny. Her desk and chairs take up most of the available space, but it’s rescued from being claustrophobic by all the windows. Even on dreary days, Ms. Lurie’s office feels like the focus of all the light in the world.
There was plenty of sunshine on this cruelly bright autumn morning, but still the room had never seemed smaller. I felt as if I were pushing my way into an occupied coffin.
“Hello, Emily,” Ms. Lurie said.
Hawthorne isn’t the kind of school where you get called in to talk to Ms. Lurie because of misbehavior. She likes to talk to all of us as often as she can—to hear any news we might want to share, or just to say hello.
I don’t know if it just seems as if I get called in more oft
en than the others, or if Ms. Lurie really is putting out extra effort in response to how hard I’m always pulling away.
It’s difficult for even me to act hateable in Ms. Lurie’s office. She doesn’t seem to know or care that a work desk ought to be separate from food and other messy concerns of everyday life. She reminds me of Miss Temple from Jane Eyre, the way she treats her students like guests when we come to her room. Not that there’s ever seedcake—Ms. Lurie doesn’t approve of refined flour—but she always offers a little something lovely and special to anyone who comes in: delicate rosewater pastilles, artfully sliced fruit, a cup of fragrant tea.
Apparently the detective preferred coffee.
Had she brought a coffee maker in for him, or had I just never noticed it in there before? But a coffee maker always smells like coffee even when it isn’t in use. Kind of like how smokers always smell like cigarettes.
“Emily,” Ms. Lurie said again, in an even gentler tone than usual. “Do sit down, dear.”
Ms. Lurie’s hair is long and straight and silver. Her face is tan and lined from all the time she spends outside.
She was sitting where she always sits, and he was near her—a little back, a little apart. Present, but obviously not wanting to seem intrusive.
I couldn’t look at him. I thought about that other Emily thinking I’m a writer, and I thought this proved her wrong, because a real writer would have been busy taking in details so she could scribble every stitch of his tired gray suit down in a notebook she kept just for such occasions.
This isn’t that kind of notebook.
I didn’t quite kick the chair Ms. Lurie nodded for me to take, but there was nothing graceful about how I hooked it with my booted toe and then pulled it into place beneath me with a shove of my ankle.
If I didn’t look at the detective, he didn’t exist.
Not knowing this, he spoke to me.
“I’m—” and he said a name that I forgot almost before I heard it. I’m usually good with names. I find them easier to manage than faces. But I couldn’t hold on to this one, probably because I didn’t want to.
I don’t want one more name for my collection.
There was a small silence after the detective tried to tell me who he was. If they were waiting for me to fill it, they’d have to wait longer than they could afford to spend on one student.
“This is a difficult morning for all of us,” Ms. Lurie said, and I realized I’d clenched my hands so tightly in my lap that they were white around the knuckles and starting to ache from the pressure. It was better than the shaking, though.
“We don’t want to make this any harder for you, dear,” Ms. Lurie went on, and I thought about how she might be the only person in the world who can say “dear” a hundred times a day and seem to mean it every time. “But if you feel up to answering a few questions, it would be a tremendous help.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said. My voice was a rasp, and I cleared my throat roughly and added, “About what happened. Just what you told us.”
“No, of course not,” she said, but the detective was speaking, too.
“We’re trying to get more information about the victim,” he said.
I tried to think about his voice rather than what he was saying. He sounded tired.
Had he been startled awake this morning, too, or was he already on duty when Ms. Lurie called the police?
Are detectives picked at random from whoever happens to be around when something awful happens, or do they get cases based on the sort of work they’ve done before?
All things considered, I should know more about police procedure.
All things considered, I should remember this particular conversation better.
It’s muddled in my head, and that’s strange when if I wanted to I could recite, practically word for word, so many scarier conversations.
Of course there’s no way of knowing that for sure. Memory is a trickster god, and nothing makes him laugh harder than silly mortals claiming he works for us. But at least I feel as if I still have those conversations caught in my mind.
And then when I try to think about this morning, which was only a few hours ago, it’s muddled. Muddy. Blank in places.
I know the detective told me the man’s name. Stephen James. Did I know him? Was that name at all familiar?
I shook my head hard. Maybe that looked suspicious, but I couldn’t help it. I don’t know that many people, and I’d remember that name.
“I didn’t know him,” I said to Ms. Lurie.
I remember saying that, because it was like that scene in Great Expectations, the one I always thought was annoying though I like the rest of the book: the scene where Miss Havisham is asking poor flustered Joe questions, and he keeps directing his answers to Pip because he can’t bring himself to speak to a great lady.
I couldn’t talk to this detective. Couldn’t even look at him.
I don’t remember if I told Ms. Pip Lurie that I would have remembered Stephen James’s name if I’d heard it before, because I always notice when people have a first name for their family name. I know it’s silly, but it catches my attention. It sounds as if someone just started listing names at random while they were filling out a birth certificate.
I don’t always like my new last name, but at least it sounds like a regular surname.
I hope I didn’t say any of this.
I’m sure I didn’t say anything about my new last name, or I’d probably still be in there answering questions.
I remember I didn’t want to look at the picture they showed me, but it turned out to be just an ordinary driver’s license photo, not how he looks now.
No I didn’t know him. No I’d never seen him. Not in town on one of our occasional weekend visits, not at a gallery showcasing his work, not anywhere. I’d never heard of him before today. I didn’t know anything about him.
I was asked terrifyingly ordinary questions and I answered them in the negative in what I can only hope was a reasonable tone, context considered.
I was probably only in Ms. Lurie’s office a few minutes. If she offered me a sweet or a drink, I didn’t accept it.
I’m not good at memorizing poetry, or anything else, but I’ve read enough Dickinson that lots of it has stuck in my head. It seems to me now that part of the reason I can’t remember the detective’s questions is that I could barely hear his words over Dickinson’s.
I don’t like the particular poem that was drowning everything else out. Like all of Dickinson’s poems, it doesn’t have a title. I think of it as the blood poem. And I don’t like it. But there are times it won’t leave me alone, and it was practically screaming at me this morning, if Dickinson’s words can ever scream.
The detective said, “His name was Stephen James,” and at first I was angry that people always do that, always say her name was after someone is killed when of course their name still is. Your name doesn’t end when your life does, or how would they know what to put on your headstone?
My mother’s name never changed a bit. Mine did. And which one of us is in the past tense now?
And then I kept hearing, The name—of it—is “Autumn”—The hue—of it—is Blood. Just those first two lines, the way sometimes just a few words of a song will start singing in your head over and over until you have to go listen to it all the way through to make it stop.
I tried to “play” the rest of the poem in my head to get rid of it, but I couldn’t remember it. Not in order. Just fragments here and there, about Great Globules in the Alleys and An Artery upon the Hill.
I was angry at myself, because the poem isn’t really about a blood-soaked town. It certainly isn’t about a murder. It’s about the leaves turning red in the fall, that’s all.
My mother was murdered in October, just like Stephen James, but in southern California the trees don’t have calendars and I don’t remember seeing any red leaves the day after she died.
You cannot fold a Flood—
And p
ut it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor—
I’m extremely stupid to be keeping this journal. “Keeping” in both senses: hanging on to what I’ve already written here, and adding to it now.
Maybe I’m looking for points. Moral credit. If I confess somewhere in the vicinity of Ms. Lurie, it counts and my conscience is clear. The truth is written somewhere in her school. I haven’t entirely omitted it from the record.
Oh, please.
Why do people act as if lying by leaving something out isn’t as bad as “really” lying by making something up?
If someone says something, it might be a lie. Everyone over the age of two knows that.
It’s impossible to look behind silence for all the lies that might be hiding there.
Over and over, like a Tune—
The Recollection plays—
I haven’t done anything wrong.
There’s nothing for me to “confess.”
I didn’t do anything.
I keep thinking about “The Tell-Tale Heart.” That’s what it was like, in the office with the detective and trusting, gentle Ms. Lurie. I can’t remember what they asked me because I could barely hear over the pounding of my own heart and the urge to scream, to tell—to stop being a walking, talking lie.
Yes, it was me. I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t know him. I don’t know who did it, or how, or why. But it’s me. I’m the one you want.
I answered their questions and I answered them honestly.
I looked right at Ms. Lurie and I lied and lied just by being here.
The truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth.
But what would it help to tell everything?
The police have never managed to find the murderer before. Why should things be any different now?
I’d have to admit I’ve been lying to Ms. Lurie all along. Using the truth to tell a lie.
I’d have to leave Hawthorne. Even if she didn’t make me—and of course she would—I’d have to go. I’d never see this room again. Never sit under a Hawthorne tree and look up at Hawthorne’s own particular sky. Never be taken such absolute care of.
The Letting Go Page 4