Once she found me in the kitchen, crying because a cabinet door was open. I wasn’t one of those kids who can’t stand it if everything isn’t exactly as it should be. I didn’t care that a door was open. I’d just never really noticed this one before, and now it was swinging on its hinges in a way that seemed menacing to me. It was low to the ground and I couldn’t see all the way to the back, and that made this cabinet seem suddenly full of dark possibilities.
My mother probably wouldn’t have been able to understand this even if I’d attempted to put it into words. She didn’t try too hard to sort out what the problem was. Instead, she just sat down on the floor with me and made the can of baking powder talk, and then she sprinkled flour on her hair and cried, “Oh no! I’m old!” Then she smelled the bottle of vanilla extract and pretended to faint at the wonderful scent, and made me smell it, too, and watched me faint, and then we beat a little of it into butter and sugar and cut the gritty sweetness into shapes and ate them as if they were cookies when really they were a million times better.
In the memories I have of her, my mother seems more like another child than an authority figure. How could I ever be afraid of her?
I remember her being afraid once. I was very little and I must have been moving much too quickly toward much too much traffic. I remember squealing in delight when my mother scooped me up so quickly and so hard that we both nearly went flying. I giggled, and then was puzzled that my mother was hitching with sobs rather than laughter, clutching me hard enough to hurt.
If you wanted a hug that much, you could always just ask for one, I remember thinking, baffled.
Maybe it never happened. There’s no one to ask now.
Meeting a bird this morning, I began to flee. He saw it and sung.
I ought to be able to calm down a bit now. Hawthorne isn’t going to close. The detective hasn’t come back demanding to talk to me. The student population of Hawthorne is lower than it was a month ago, but it seems to have leveled off. The ones who stayed are doing a pretty good imitation of their pre-murder selves.
I ought to be able to get some work done, and maybe even sleep now and then.
M, however, is trying to make me as crazy as she is.
She seemed to take my presence in the library that night as some sort of invitation. Which is ridiculous, considering how I spoke to her the last time we ran into one another in that room.
And excuse me, but I’ve been working alone late at night in the library for a lot longer than she’s even been at Hawthorne. Probably longer than she spent at the last three schools she went to, wherever they are. It’s just something I do. I’m specifically there to not run into people.
It was a million o’clock at night and everyone in the world was asleep and I was obviously only in the library because I wanted to be alone, so naturally M strutted in like she owned the damned place.
I glared at her as best I could on short notice.
“Care for a little company?” she asked.
That girl could not take a hint if you carved it into a gold brick and threw it at her head.
“No.”
She smiled, surveying the grand, organized mess of propped-open books before me. She was wearing the same white nightgown she had on the night of the alarm, or maybe a lacier cousin.
“‘No room! No room!’ ‘There’s plenty of room!’ ” she said in a strange singsong, pulling back a chair.
“Have you been drinking?” I asked coldly.
She laughed. “I’m quoting, silly. Don’t you like Alice in Wonderland ?”
“Never met her,” I said, trying to look completely occupied by my books.
“So what are you working on tonight?” she continued.
“Writing.”
“Excellent. You’ve certainly nailed that whole brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit thing.”
I tried to catch my train of thought, but it had sped off into the night at the first approach of M’s ridiculous chatter. Oblivious to my scowl, she pulled one of my books toward her—the most expensive of the bunch, of course.
“Ooh, more indecipherable handwriting,” she said approvingly, leafing through it. I mean, it wasn’t as if I could possibly have wanted it open to a particular page, or as if these books were arranged so I could look at them in an order I preferred. I’d just scattered them this way to be decorative.
I didn’t bother saying that, much as I wanted to. She would have given me a straight-faced artistic assessment of my arrangement.
Instead, I paper-clipped my loose notes together, put them in one of the books as a page marker, and began closing and stacking the rest of the volumes.
They were of all shapes and sizes, and they resented my efforts to make them neat and portable. It’d taken two trips to lug them all in here in the first place.
“You know, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this,” M said, poring over the volume she’d chosen. “I swear I can make out a word or two here and there.”
I snorted. “That’s her earliest work,” I said.
“So?”
“So her handwriting still looks like handwriting. You can tell she’s trying really hard to make it neat and pretty.” Honesty compelled me to add, “Some of the later stuff is actually even easier to read. It’s loopy and weird, but at least it’s big and round.”
Reluctantly, I showed her an example in a volume heavy enough to break someone’s foot and possibly the floor as well. “You’d never know it was the same writer,” M said, looking at the page. “It’s so different. And strange. It looks—sorry to say this about the great poet—kind of goofy.” She glanced back at the volume she’d appropriated, then at mine again. “The letters are huge,” she said. “Was she having trouble seeing or something?”
“She did have eye problems for a while, when she was younger. But yeah, she might have been having trouble seeing smaller print when she wrote these. I mean, she was in her forties.”
“Elderly,” M agreed. She looked back at what she now clearly considered to be her very own book and flipped a page or two. “What the hell ?”
“What?”
“What happened here?”
“Here” was a page spread covered with nothing but ruthless black scribbles. The paper the poem had been written on had been torn in two, the pieces then placed carefully back together for the photographer to record.
“Her brother’s girlfriend did that,” I said.
“Great howler monkeys,” M said. “What, did she have anger management issues or something?”
“The brother was married, but he was fooling around with the woman who first typed up the poems,” I said. “This was a poem Dickinson wrote about her brother’s wife and how wonderful she was. So the girlfriend—mistress—kind of flipped out.”
“Oh. Well. My goodness. How sordid. And creepy.”
We both stared at the mutilated page in silence. “Why didn’t she just throw it away?” M asked. “She obviously wanted to get rid of it.”
“There were poems on the back she didn’t want to lose,” I said.
“Wait—how do we know what the poem was about if this chippy crossed it all out?”
I smiled in spite of myself. Chippy. “Dickinson had sent a copy of the poem to the wife already,” I explained. “And the wife hung on to it her whole life.”
“I’ll bet,” M said.
“What do you mean?”
“If a brilliant woman wrote me a love poem, I’d get it as a tattoo. And make them copy her handwriting onto my skin while they were at it.”
“It wasn’t a love poem,” I protested. “It was just …”
“A like poem?”
“She talks about her being a sister,” I said.
“Mmm.”
M’s utterly unconvinced tone was even more annoying than her voice usually is.
“Look,” I snapped. “If someone had the hots for me, I’d be pretty pissed if they couldn’t think of something a little more romantic than that to say.”
> M looked up at me. Her expression was startled and also something I couldn’t figure out. I certainly wasn’t about to waste time trying.
I’d wasted enough time tonight.
“Since I obviously can’t get any work done now,” I said, gathering what books I could reach, “I’m going to try to get some sleep. And in case I haven’t mentioned it—”
“Wait,” M said. “Let me guess.” She closed her eyes tightly and pressed her fingers to her temples, as if concentrating. “Should I … leave you alone until the end of time?”
“Just fuck off already, M,” I said. “Don’t tell me no one’s ever said that to you before.”
“I’m usually the one saying it, actually.”
“Good. At least you know what the words mean, even if you’re not used to hearing them from this angle.”
“Emily—”
“No,” I said, and went back to my room as quickly as I could, considering how many damned heavy books I was juggling and also considering that no matter how much I wanted or needed to, I couldn’t stomp my feet and I certainly couldn’t slam my door. Ms. Lurie is very patient, but even she wouldn’t put up with me slamming around in the wee hours of the morning.
M still has one of my books, damn it.
Why do I always
Why does she always
The book you mention, I have not met.
Other than Dickinson, I mostly read junk.
I mean, I like some of the smart stuff. I’m not as insane about Shakespeare as Dickinson was, but I like Othello and The Tempest. I love Jane Eyre (which she loved, too) and Anna Karenina (which I have no idea if she ever read or not).
I know I’m supposed to like Jane Austen, but she makes me fidget.
I think I like Wuthering Heights, but it kind of freaks me out.
But most of what I love to read is just nonsense. Silly books about teenagers with silly problems. Vampire romances. Star Trek novels.
M would mock me endlessly if she knew I’m not even reading them ironically. I want them all to be true.
I want the world to be that place.
I don’t need a book to have exquisite prose or make some searing point. I just want it to make me fall in love—with a character, a story, a town; it doesn’t matter to me, I just want to get to feel like someone else for a little while.
I read a lot of books that are way too young for me. I love the Ramona books. You know nothing too bad can ever happen on Klickitat Street.
My friends are books, and books are my friends.
Sometimes I jot things down in the margins so I can do some of the talking.
Dickinson thought of books as people, too. Her niece Martha said she talked about characters as if they were neighbors and friends rather than imaginary creatures.
Dickinson also read a lot of junk. I’m not saying that to be mean. I’ve checked. For every great novel or play she talks about in her letters, there are always two or three she mentions that are out of print because no one cares about them anymore.
I like that. It gives me something in common with a genius.
Her dad had mixed feelings about her reading habits. “He buys me many Books—but begs me not to read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind,” she wrote to a friend.
Her brother Austin bought her books, too. He brought home a boring novel called Kavanagh once and hid it in the piano, because their dad said Emily couldn’t read it.
She did anyway. I’m not sure if she took it out of the piano first, or read it right at the keyboard while pretending to practice her scales.
I read that book to see what all the fuss was about. The copy I got called it “an early lesbian romance.”
All I can say is, if lesbianism consists of teenaged girls talking about carrier pigeons and kissing each other on the forehead, it’s a lot less exciting than it’s been made out to be.
For each extatic instant
We must an anguish pay
M didn’t even bring my book back to me. She just left it in the library, on the same table I had been working at. Propped open, which is absolutely terrible for the spine.
Oh—and she WROTE in the damned thing.
That’s a damned expensive book and it’s part of a two-volume set. I’ll have to pay for both again to replace it.
At least she used pencil. I think I’d have to stab her in her sleep if she’d marked it up in ink.
And she wrote in the margin, way off to one side.
I didn’t even notice right away, because it’s the book that’s just photos of Dickinson’s handwritten pages. A little scribbling off to one side didn’t stick out at first, especially since the words were a little like something Dickinson would write.
I don’t frighten easily.
I stared at the book, pausing mid-reach.
Then I pulled my hands back and went to my room for a pencil.
She’d left plenty of room under her remark for a reply.
Of course I could should have taken the book to my room, erased her message, and pretended not to have seen it, but that wouldn’t exactly be credible—not when she’d practically hung a neon arrow over it. And she was the type to pester me if she didn’t get a reply, possibly at the dinner table where it would be more awkward to try to get away from her.
Plus my book was ruined already, so why not go all the way?
My handwriting isn’t as pretty as M’s, so I printed my words carefully.
What’s that supposed to mean?
Then I left the book and left the room and tried to work and failed. Instead I paced and paced and paced.
What was I doing? What was I doing?
The hummingbird was trapped inside me again and I couldn’t say which one of us was more frantic.
A fragment of a phrase kept going through my head and for once it wasn’t Dickinson. It was Shakespeare.
If it were done when ’tis done … if it were done when ’tis done …
I knew Macbeth kept muttering that to himself but I couldn’t remember why, so I sat down long enough to look it up.
It’s when he’s trying to decide if he should murder someone.
(Spoiler: he does.)
I slammed the book shut and slammed my door open and went back to the library to get my stupid book back.
I was going to just bring it back to the shelf where it belonged, but she’d written an answer.
It means that I don’t care how nasty you pretend
to be. I’m not some dumb bunny who scampers off
when you say “boo.”
Every rule I’d ever learned fell out of my head as I picked up the pencil again.
Geese are the ones you’re supposed to say boo to,
not bunnies.
I dropped the pencil and ran for my room as if chased by ghosts.
I don’t know how to explain myself, if anyone asks.
I should have stayed in my room all night—and the next day and maybe the next—but I went to dinner at the proper time as if I were a proper person.
She didn’t say anything to me, or give any sign of knowing we were having a slow, silent conversation. She was bland and airy and witty, just as usual.
I left the table the second I could and went to take a very long bath.
I should have burned the library down after that—the whole house, even—but of course I went back and looked at the book.
I’ll take your word for that, writer-girl. Anyway,
I’m not a goose or a bunny.
I felt a dangerous glow at being called “writer-girl” in print.
This is an expensive book. Stop writing in it.
I went back to my room and went to bed but not to sleep. For once I didn’t care.
First thing in the morning, before the sun had even finished rising, I went to the library.
It looked as if she’d hauled out the charcoal pencil again. She’d drawn beautiful 3-D block letters an inch tall:
MAKE ME
I’ve read abo
ut people shouting with laughter, but I’ve never heard it and I’ve certainly never done it myself. Before today.
Then sanity returned and my hands started to shake and I felt so cold so suddenly I almost checked behind me to see if someone had thrown ice water.
I slammed the book shut without marking the page.
It’s back on my shelf now, sitting next to its innocent partner.
I can’t believe I let M mess up my pretty books.
From now on, if I work in the library I’m going to be completely portable. If I can’t pick it up and run in one sweep, I’ll just have to do without.
God only knows what she’ll ruin next if I give her half a chance.
Who could be motherless who has a mother’s grave within confiding reach?
I didn’t allow myself dinner for two nights after the book incident and I put myself on half rations the rest of the time, which was a good double punishment because being so ravenous made it harder than ever to sleep.
I wanted to make it three nights in a row to make sure I remembered the rules from now on and because three is a good strong number, but at breakfast on the third day Ms. Lurie asked if everything was “all right dear” and I didn’t want to risk drawing attention to myself now of all times. So tonight I made myself go to the dining room and load up my plate with everything I like least.
Ms. Lurie has taken one of the smaller tables out of the dining room, so I still can’t sit by myself. So even the one possible benefit of the great Hawthorne exodus has been denied me.
“I love my family, but they’re driving me nuts,” Brianna said. “Every morning and every night, my mom needs to hear my voice. ‘Are you okay? Is everything okay?’ It’s taking everything I’ve got not to say, ‘I was until you asked me for the hundredth time today.’ ”
“Well, they’re worried,” Natasha-the-playwright said. “I mean, we can’t really blame them for that.”
“But could she maybe mix it up a little? Ask how I’m doing, how the painting’s coming along, what I think I’d like to work on next. Heck, ask me what I had for dinner. That would be an exciting change.”
The Letting Go Page 10