The Letting Go

by Deborah Markus

  “I just came in to say hi.” She shook her head and pulled one of the dimity curtains closed. “Muscle memory is kind of an idiot.”

  I didn’t know they’d been friends.

  “We hung out a little,” M went on. Apparently, I wasn’t required to talk in order to hold up my side of this conversation. “Her art was—is—really good. Completely different from mine, of course. Well, it would have to be. The whole point of photography is to show you what’s there. My pictures are all about what would be there if I had my way.”

  She wasn’t smiling now.

  “She took a few pictures of me.” M laughed a little. “She said I could have one but I said it would only be fair if we traded and I got to draw a picture of her. She said yes and then she kept making excuses to get out of it.”

  M lifted her chin and looked out the window. Now that they’ve turned the clocks back for fall, the sun starts to set really early.

  “I guess I’ll never get that picture now.”

  Her voice was quite steady.

  “There was a waiting list to get into Hawthorne when I first applied, did you know that? I had time to get kicked out of two more schools before I finally got to come here.” She tried to laugh again but it didn’t quite work. “Who’d have guessed that waiting list would start running in the wrong direction?”

  “I have to go,” I muttered, and hurried down the hall.

  I didn’t want to hear her start speculating as to who might be at the top of that new waiting list.

  I’d only been planning to wash my hands and brush my hair. Instead, I took an extra-long shower and used the last of Madison’s deep conditioner. She writes her name on everything she owns with a thick black marker. I’m waiting for her to branch out and add THIS MEANS YOU or I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING.

  Which picture did M wish she had now? The one she wanted to draw? Or the one Alyssa took of her?

  Anyway. I wish she’d stay in her own room and quit moping around where she doesn’t belong.

  Tell L—when I was a baby father used to take me to mill for my health. I was then in consumption!

  One of the big Dickinson biographers says he doesn’t think this actually happened. He says nobody else in the family mentions Emily being “in consumption” when she was a baby, or taking any trips to a flour mill, and that’s the kind of thing that naturally made its way into diaries and letters.

  Also, Dickinson’s father was always fussing about her health. If she felt a bit under the weather, or if it was very hot or very cold out, he thought she should stay home and be ladylike. He tended in that direction, anyway, when it came to his wife and daughters.

  I don’t think Dickinson is lying, but that doesn’t mean what she’s saying is true.

  Once I read a story about a woman whose father gave her a picture book when she was little—some kind of strange fairy tale. Her father read it to her and laughed with her about it. She remembered joking with him all through her childhood about one character in particular they found especially funny.

  Then she grew up and decided to read the book again and noticed that it had been published the year after her father died. He’d never read the book at all, to her or to anyone else. He’d never lived long enough to laugh about it.

  It was just the kind of book she knew he would have loved, so she’d imagined he’d had the chance to, never realizing she’d made up a story of her own in the process.

  I’ve certainly never done that kind of thing with my father. I can’t remember him reading to me. I can barely remember a thing about him. I’m afraid to even try.

  What if I start making things up without knowing I’m doing it?

  People talk about memory like it’s a storehouse of everything we’ve ever heard or seen. Sometimes you have to move a lot of new stuff aside to find what you’re looking for, but it’s bound to be in there somewhere if you look hard enough.

  But really, memory is a thief passing herself off as an eager-to-please shop clerk. You come in looking for something, and she says she doesn’t have it in stock. You look disappointed and she says, Oh, hang on, maybe we have it in the back. Wait right here, I’ll check. She leaves for a few minutes, and then comes back carrying the very thing you were looking for. Is this all right? And it’s perfect. And you smile, and she smiles, and you pay for it and leave, not knowing that what you’re carrying away was stolen—the clerk broke into the shop across the street when no one was looking.

  “Memory” makes things up all the time if you push it too hard.

  Memory is untrustworthy even when it isn’t lying.

  I remember finding my mother.

  I don’t remember why I woke up that night—a bad dream, or maybe I was just thirsty or lonely. But she didn’t come when I called, so I went to look for her.

  I found her, and I didn’t understand what I’d found.

  I know this memory is true because even the strangers who wrote about it say it happened. But I don’t remember the next morning, when apparently our housekeeper showed up and found us together.

  I remember the police, but I don’t remember anything they said to me or if I said anything to them.

  I do remember something that may not have happened. I remember being in the hospital, being taken care of by very kind nurses. I was surprised, because I wasn’t the one who’d been hurt. For a long time, I believed that the reason my mother died was that the wrong person got taken to the hospital.

  I remember wishing I knew who to be angry at about that. I remember feeling guilty. And then when I was older I remember thinking that I must have been being treated for shock. That would make sense, given that I’d just spent several hours huddled next to a corpse.

  No one else seems to think it happened, though. The newspaper articles don’t mention it, and neither do the books. Well, the articles might not have bothered, but the authors of those books were famished for details—and when they couldn’t find enough, they were happy to fill in blank space with greedy speculation.

  Typhoid Emily was especially excitable in that department. It even had a sequel, What Ever Happened to Typhoid Emily?, in which, with no facts to go on, the author ponders whether certain grisly murders could have somehow been me-related. The fact that I’d have had to be in Moscow one day and Lima the next didn’t trouble her in the slightest. My murders being so magically brutal and varied makes anything possible, I suppose.

  And of course their being so relentlessly unsolved makes them endlessly fascinating to a certain kind of mind, in spite of what Child of Terror describes as “a surprisingly low body count, considering the level of interest the case continues to inspire.”

  Well, Lizzie Borden only did or didn’t murder two people, and we’re still talking about her a hundred years later.

  So: given that “level of interest,” if I’d been brought to the hospital, surely one of those authors would have mentioned it. They’d have tried to get one of the doctors or nurses or janitors to say something, anything, about my visit. So maybe—likely—it never happened.

  (But I remember it.)

  Aunt Paulette didn’t seem to know about it, either. One night when I was very young and very sick, Aunt Paulette said that if my fever got any higher she’d have to take me to the hospital.

  She sounded annoyed rather than worried by that prospect.

  At least that’s how I remember it.

  “Which hospital?” I asked. “The one I went to before?” I hoped so. They’d been nice to me. I’d rather be there than at Aunt Paulette’s house any day.

  “What are you talking about?” Aunt Paulette asked irritably.

  “I don’t know the name of it,” I said. I didn’t want to say when exactly I’d gone there. Aunt Paulette didn’t like to talk about that part of my life. It made her even more unpleasant than usual.

  I couldn’t exactly blame her for not enjoying the subject, but it made things awkward at times. As if we didn’t have a hard enough time getting along, back when she co
uld be said to be half trying.

  “Well, you’ve never been to the hospital before, so far as I know,” Aunt Paulette said. “Unless you mean when you were born.”

  “No, not then,” I said. “I don’t remember that.”

  Aunt Paulette laughed. “No, you don’t,” she said, in a tone I considered rather rude. She didn’t have to make it sound as if everyone else remembered their birthday and only I was stupid enough to have forgotten such an event.

  “Why are people born in hospitals?” I asked, to change the subject slightly.

  “To make sure they’re safe,” Aunt Paulette said.

  “Who? The babies?”

  “Everyone.”

  “But what’s not safe about being born?”

  “Stop asking ridiculous questions,” Aunt Paulette snapped, and she took my temperature again.

  Aunt Paulette is certainly in no danger from me.

  Maybe she just didn’t know I’d been taken to the hospital after what happened to my mother, or maybe she didn’t care enough to remember since it hadn’t involved Aunt Paulette herself.

  (But I remember it.)

  But Aunt Paulette was the one who took care of me until my father got back from his business trip. If she’d had to pick me up from the hospital, wouldn’t it have been stuck in her memory—if only because making that special trip would have given her one more thing to complain about? (“The parking there—!”)

  I don’t remember anyone driving me anywhere.

  I remember being in the hospital and being scared to be there at first and then being scared to leave; and I remember being at Aunt Paulette’s house and not understanding why, since Aunt Paulette hated having her routine broken up by visitors.

  I remember it.

  How can I remember it so well if it didn’t really happen?

  Why doesn’t anyone else remember it if it did?

  Ask that lady with the storybook and the dead dad, I guess.

  I don’t remember my father coming home, but I remember him bringing me back to the house. Our house.

  Would he really have done that? Brought me back to where I found her?

  Maybe he just didn’t know what else to do.

  I’ve read about how important it is for tragedy-kids to have as much routine and normalcy as they can get, but it still seems a bit much to expect me to go back to that house. Even after they’d cleaned it.

  (I wonder who had to clean it?)

  It feels real, in my memory. I remember the angle of the sunlight as I stood on the front porch. I remember stiffening up and wanting to scream but not being able to. I was able to cling to one of the pillars so fiercely that they couldn’t make me go inside no matter how hard they tried. They’d have had to hurt me.

  And then I remember being at Aunt Paulette’s house and not liking it there since Aunt Paulette so obviously didn’t like having me there.

  I don’t remember the night my father was killed. I don’t even remember being told about it. I certainly don’t remember who told me.

  I just remember knowing.

  It feels as if I’ve always known. As if he was always meant to be a temporary fixture in my life, while my mother’s death still comes as a shock almost every day, though I’ve had more time to get used to the idea.

  I don’t know why.

  Maybe fathers seem like less than “real” parents, at least compared to mothers.

  Maybe I just spent less time with him in general, so his absence was less of a shock when it became permanent. He took a lot of business trips. I was in the habit of thinking of him as someone who went away.

  Maybe my father had always seemed to be mine conditionally—on loan from the outside world, from the work I didn’t understand that took him away so often and so long—while my mother had only ever been mine. If she had a life away from me I never knew it. She was more my home than the house I grew up in ever was. She was my world.

  Who can expect to lose that?

  I can wade Grief—

  Whole Pools of it—

  I’m used to that—

  I’ve never questioned my life, never burningly wondered who could be doing this to me.

  Why should I have? Whatever you grow up with is just how things are.

  I learned—I suppose I knew all along—that other people weren’t pursued like this. Other people got to have friends and families and homes.

  But even that fact of my set-apartness became part of my ordinary.

  This was just how life was.

  I followed the rules set down for me and tried not to think too far ahead.

  Nothing has changed

  Our share of night to bear—

  Our share of morning—

  The calmer things get around here, the worse my sleep is.

  Not that I’ve ever been very good at drifting off or whatever it is normal people are supposed to do, but it’s never been as bad as this. Even in the come-and-go patches of my life when nightmares are the norm, sleep has always been a given.

  Not anymore.

  Nowadays—nowanights—I lie in bed trying as patiently as I can to remember how to doze off. All around me, tucked away in their snug beds, my sister-students, as Ms. Lurie calls them, are locked away in slumber.

  In the morning, I’m not tired, exactly; I just feel as if I’ve lost something. And the world seems heavier.

  Last night I waited for sleep until 2:30 and then I gave up.

  There aren’t any rules about when we can be in the common areas—the lounge, the library, the dining room. Be thoughtful, Ms. Lurie says. Hawthorne is a place for you to work when and as you see fit, but please remember your sisters have to live with your choices.

  She must have said something like that approximately eight hundred times a day back when the girl population here was her four daughters. Or maybe only six hundred, since two of the sisters were twins.

  I wonder if my room is one of their original bedrooms.

  Do twins share a room? It must feel like plenty of space after sharing a womb.

  I didn’t really feel like working, but I didn’t want to stay in my room, either. It takes a lot to make me sick of it in here, and a lot is exactly how much time I’ve been spending in here lately. Too much. Even for me.

  I slipped into the hallway. Everyone else was asleep, of course. All lights were off, at any rate.

  I didn’t turn any on. I know my way around Hawthorne well enough to find my way in the dark. I like that. If no one can tell where I am, I might not be anywhere at all. Just an unusually restless shadow.

  I made my way to the library. It’s small—that is, it’s a pretty big room as Hawthorne measures things, but it wouldn’t be called a library anywhere but here. The books are just books, no labels or special bindings or stamps saying PROPERTY OF HAWTHORNE ACADEMY.

  I like to bring my own books and papers and work at one of the long, beat-up tables—more room to spread out than my spindly little desk offers.

  Tonight I only had my pen and paper and a few books grabbed at random, and it was just as well I hadn’t put together anything more organized or set my heart on getting any real work done because the light was already on and the library was occupied.

  Of course it was M.

  She looked up from her book quizzically. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?” she asked and glanced at the wall clock. “Goodness. Isn’t it past mine? I was just wondering why it was so quiet around here.”

  “What are you doing?” I snapped. I just wanted to be able to sleep. If I couldn’t, I wanted to work. If I couldn’t do that, I just wanted to feel safe in safely alone in the library, with the cozy old curtains closed tight against the darkness.

  “Knitting a sweater for my pet kangaroo,” M said. “What are you doing?”

  I was noticing that this was the only room in Hawthorne that always smelled just a little musty, and now it smelled lavender-musty. I was wishing there was any sum of money I could offer that would tempt M to just go away. I
was deciding that the best thing to do now would be to turn around and go right back to my own room, since I doubted M could be persuaded to return to hers.

  And then I looked at the book in her hands. In spite of all my best intentions, I found myself rolling my eyes. “Don’t read that,” I said.

  M raised an eyebrow. “You own the rights to Emily Dickinson, now, do you?”

  “No, I mean, don’t read that,” I clarified, gesturing at her book. “If you’re going to read Dickinson, at least read the real thing.”

  She shut the book, not bothering to mark her place, looked at the cover, and touched the name on it. “Looks like Dickinson to me,” she said.

  “They’re allowed to say it is,” I said.

  “Okay, now you’re sounding paranoid.”

  She had a point, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. “Open that book again,” I said. “Anywhere.”

  Obediently M turned to the beginning. I rolled my eyes again. “Not the introduction, half-wit,” I said.

  “You said—”

  “It’s a poetry collection. Obviously I meant a poem.”

  She shook her head, but flipped a few more pages. “Okay?”

  “Now look at the punctuation.”

  She looked at me as if I were a misplaced question mark, then looked back down at the page. “Looks fine to me.”

  “Exactly,” I said triumphantly. “That’s how you know it isn’t really Dickinson.”

  M just stared up at me, waiting. I thumped my books on the table and sat down next to her. “Look,” I said. “Here. Wait.”

  Fortunately, I’d grabbed a good edition of the complete poems. I thumbed through until I found the one M had turned to, and showed it to her in my book.

  “See?” I said. “No periods. No commas. No damned semicolons, that’s for sure. A real Emily Dickinson poem looks like it was written by someone who’s never heard of anything but dashes.” A bit of an exaggeration, but close enough to the truth to pass for it.

  M was glancing quickly back and forth between the supposedly same poems. “‘It struck me—every Day—’ ” she murmured. “Yes, I see what you mean. You have to slow down and really think about what she’s saying when it’s written like that.”