The Letting Go

by Deborah Markus

  And then, a few months later, she changed her mind. At least in verse. She decided that however terrifying our ideas might be, they’re “a softer woe” than an immutable fact.

  I couldn’t understand that at first. Isn’t there something cavernously terrifying about never knowing what happened to someone who simply wandered off one day in winter and never returned?

  But of course that still offers the possibility of keeping hope alive. Depending on your personality, hope might be the most valuable companion you could have.

  I don’t know how much hope anyone in Dickinson’s family could have had. Her uncle was an elderly man. He’d slipped on some ice and hit his head a few days before he disappeared. What kind of happy ending could there be to that story?

  I mean, assuming that anything’s better than death, the best-case scenarios seem to be either that he got kidnapped by someone who forgot to ask for ransom, or he changed his name and started a new life somewhere else, leaving his family to wonder for the rest of their lives.

  That first idea is unlikely; the second makes him a total jerk.

  Which I guess would be better than him being dead, if you prefer hating a living man to loving a dead one.

  But maybe hope means being able to believe in magic. Maybe Dickinson just decided she’d rather be able to think, We don’t know what happened to him. He could be all right somehow, somewhere. As long as we don’t know, he might be fine. Which is prettier than, My uncle disappeared into the cold one winter night, and he almost certainly died, alone and far from the people he loved. The most we can hope is that it was quick and painless.

  No.

  I just can’t understand not wanting to know for sure what happened, and how—and especially why.

  Then again, in terms of living in hope:

  Let’s say I had to live exactly the same life I do now. I’m still at Hawthorne and I still don’t have any friends because I lack that crucial warmth most people call a heart. But in this life, I don’t know where my parents are or why I’m not with them. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. I don’t know if they left me for selfish reasons or if they’re forced to stay away from me.

  Would it be any different, any better, if I could live in the painful wonder of hoping to be able to find them someday?

  Would there be some comfort in knitting stories night after night about my jet-set parents, my kidnapped parents, my secret-agent parents, my superhero parents, my witness-protection-program parents, my brainwashed-into-a-creepy-charismatic-cult parents?

  Wouldn’t that be preferable to “My parents were murdered, and I know all about how it happened but no one knows why”?

  Which is the real point, I guess. I have half a certainty, which is like being given half an apple when you’re starving: you’re supposed to be grateful, you try to be grateful, but you can’t because it just isn’t enough and you can’t pretend it is.

  No one could.

  +phrase

  I found the +words to every

  thought

  I ever had—but One—

  And that—defies me—

  As a Hand did try to

  chalk the Sun

  M left a picture taped to my door.

  It was a flower. A black rose.

  Penciled underneath it, she had written: For you, Goth Girl—a flower that will never die.

  I knew I should take it down and rip it up and leave the pieces taped on her door, but I couldn’t.

  That frightened me. I can’t remember the last time I felt too weak to haul out the requisite sum of nastiness.

  But I couldn’t destroy that picture.

  She made it for me. And it was beautiful.

  She’d obviously spent a lot more time on it than she did on that silly blue ribbon, which was actually pretty good for something dashed off on a hike.

  And since no one’s ever going to read this: I wanted to keep that flower. I wanted to put it away somewhere safe the way girls in silly novels press the flowers from their prom corsages.

  But of course I couldn’t do that, either.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I left it on the door.

  If anyone noticed, no one said anything. M didn’t act any different. Ms. Lurie seems to be smiling at me more warmly lately, but it’s hard to tell with her.

  After a day or two, the picture was gone, but another one had been left in its place. It was another black rose, but this one was wilting and droopy. The handwriting beneath this one said: I told you to change the water, silly girl.

  One of the dark petals had fallen off and lay in a half-crumpled heap near the bottom of the page.

  I looked around. The hall was empty. No windows were in sight.

  Anyone who could see me in here would have to have magical powers, and if that were the case they’d already know the worst.

  I took the wilted flower off my door, quickly, and I brought it into my room and taped it inside this notebook.

  It’s on a page of its own in the middle, so if I lose my nerve I can always take it out and destroy it without losing any writing or making it obvious something was there.

  If there’s a rule-maker reading over my shoulder, I’m already screwed.

  Judge Lord was with us a few days since, and told me that the joy we most revere we profane in taking. I wish that was wrong.

  M keeps trying to catch my eye. She hasn’t said anything to me at the table or tried to corner me in my room again. But I can tell she’s kind of watching me.

  I did accidentally meet her gaze once, when she made one of her usual bizarre remarks at lunch. I looked up while everyone was making the kind of noise she provokes, and she was looking right at me.

  I guess I would have expected some kind of crudely triumphant expression—ha! made you take it!—or something equally crass. Instead, she looked serious. Inquiring. Earnest, if that’s a word that could ever be associated with M.

  She wanted to know what had happened to that second picture, and there was no way I was going to tell her. But I also wasn’t up to my usual lies.

  I just looked down again, quickly.

  I stared at my plate for approximately seven years.

  When Brianna started talking to M, I was able to glance up again without feeling too conspicuous. M wasn’t looking at me, but there was a shy, pleased smile on her face that had nothing to do with Brianna’s remarks.

  M was doing a better job than I was of pretending that the conversation in audible words was the only one going on at our table, but I still felt terrified.

  Still do.

  This isn’t how things are supposed to be.

  Pardon my sanity, Mrs. Holland, in a world insane.

  Thinking about M is driving me crazy. More crazy, she’d probably say. As if she’s some world expert on sanity.

  It’s really hot today and I don’t feel like staying cooped up in my room. I’d like to go for a walk, maybe read under one of the huger Hawthorne trees, but I don’t want to risk her following me again.

  And, anyway, I’ve been much too self-indulgent. Slipping up all over the place when I should be reining myself in harder than ever.

  I need to focus on working. Focus on Dickinson.

  Dickinson is safe.

  Dickinson was a genius from out of nowhere.

  Nobody else in her family wrote poetry, or much of anything at all; and then along came Emily and poetry would never be the same.

  Sometimes I think about the idea of her father not happening to meet her mother, not proposing a couple of months later, not being as persistent as he needed to be to make that marriage finally happen. Not being in the mood on the night that made Emily finally happen.

  All those circumstances had to come together just right.

  And of course all the earlier twigs on the family tree had to be in just the right place, too.

  Thinking about it too hard makes me dizzy. Retroactively terrified. A single slip and the world is lighter by one genius.

&
nbsp; I know if that were the case someone else’s work would have moved in to fill the vacuum in my life. I wouldn’t just sit around moping: “If only there were an Emily. And a Dickinson.” I’d find someone else safe to love.

  But who? Sure, there are other writers I like, even love, but nobody else has ever given me the sense of kinship I’ve found in Emily Dickinson. Not just her poetry, but her letters, her life.

  She was born, against all odds. Everyone played their part, and all’s well in my otherwise empty world.

  The biographies all start off talking about her grandfather. Biographies always start off talking about grandparents, but Dickinson’s grandfather would have been famous anyway. He helped found Amherst College and then went bankrupt trying to keep it afloat.

  That’s very interesting; but when I think about her grandparents, I can’t help thinking more about his wife Lucretia, aka Grandmother Gunn.

  Grandmother Gunn had such a terrible temper that her grandkids used her as an excuse. You couldn’t just run around slamming doors in old New England, no matter how bad a mood you were in. But if you slammed that door and then cried out, “It’s not me—it’s my Grandmother Gunn!” —well, then you might get a laugh, and then you’d be safe.

  After her husband died, none of Grandmother Gunn’s children would let her move in with them. Maybe that doesn’t sound so odd now, but back then, a widowed granny could expect to find a home with some family member rather than having to live all alone in her old age. Lucretia practically begged to be taken in, but apparently her kids had all had quite enough of her company. They’d survived a childhood with her; they weren’t interested in spending their adult years listening to her nagging. They had lives to lead, work to do, children of their own to boss around.

  Poor Lucretia. How horrified she’d be to know that she’s remembered as the bad-tempered grandmother of a genius who made fun of her.

  I have two grandmothers of my own. One of them and her husband—my mother’s parents—moved to New York City right after it all happened.

  Whenever I try to drag some kind of memory up, I imagine them as thin, stiff, silent people. That’s probably because they used to send me cards now and then—very formal, polite, expensive ones, with only their signatures added to the preprinted greetings inside.

  I used to feel bad for them, and then I felt kind of mad at them, and now I try not to think about them at all.

  Either they figured out the rules and are following them, or they didn’t and just don’t want anything to do with me.

  Do I pity them? Should I?

  Whatever their lives are now, they chose at least some of their loneliness.

  My other grandfather died before I was born, which was probably just as well for everyone involved. His wife, my Grandma Jean Louise, moved to Florida to live in the sunshine with other grandmothers. She went there when I was about two years old, which I suppose I could take personally since it does seem as if she didn’t want to play with me even when that was a perfectly safe thing to do; but I guess her health had been bad for a while, and she had friends who had moved there and swore she’d have a great time if she joined them.

  I do pity her. For one thing, the only thing sadder than having your son murdered would be having your only surviving child be Aunt Paulette. And also, Grandma Jean Louise always remembers me on birthdays and Christmas and the occasional random holiday.

  I would dearly love to know what her reasoning process is in this respect. Sometimes she’ll send me a St. Patrick’s Day card—but not every year, and we’re not even Irish. Once she sent me Fourth of July greetings, which I’m willing to bet are not easy to find.

  I find this baffling and overly intriguing.

  I kind of love her craziness.

  I don’t think she knows the rules, if only because I can’t imagine them fitting into her mindset. Not that I know what that is, exactly. But she just doesn’t seem like the kind of person who could comprehend why I have to live like this.

  She certainly doesn’t come across as the kind of brave she’d have to be to understand what happens to anyone I care about and still send me presents, which she does every birthday and Christmas. Not actual physical presents, but checks.

  When I was much younger, I loved being allowed to cash these and then buy whatever I wanted to, and I always wrote some stupid note back.

  When that stopped, Grandma Jean Louise seemed to wonder what she’d done wrong. I think for a while she thought maybe the checks were too impersonal. At any rate, she went through a quiet flurry of sending every kind of gift card imaginable, some of them ridiculously unsuitable for a child. Nothing bad or inappropriate, just—random. Odd. Who gives a ten-year-old a gift certificate from an online tea leaf emporium, or an eleven-year-old a gift code good for one free cactus?

  It was as if she gave up on getting me to actually use the cards, and was just hoping for any kind of response at all.

  Eventually, she went back to checks. She keeps loyally sending them to me, one every birthday and a slightly larger one for Christmas.

  Every May and every December I wonder if this is the year she’ll give up on a granddaughter who is obviously rude and ungrateful. I feel kind of awful every time I see the familiar handwriting on yet another envelope, and I also realize how much I’d hate it if she stopped trying.

  I try not to even open them, but of course I can’t resist.

  There’s always a bit of a note—a few words hoping I’m well and assuring me she’s just fine. Her pen must be one of those thick, felt-tipped ones. The writing’s a little hard to read, but I manage.

  I hate not being able to accept that money. I mean, I have everything I need, but it would be fun to go shopping with cash somebody else wanted to give me and then write a letter about what I decided to get and how much I liked it.

  How does she feel? Does she wonder if this time, maybe, I’ll finally start acting like we’re actually related and I’m a civilized human being?

  Maybe she understands.

  But she can’t. That would be horrible. I don’t want her to have to think about life in those terms. She’s been through enough.

  But how is it possible to look at everything that’s happened and not draw the obvious conclusion?

  I can’t be the one imagining things.

  My whole life would be a mistake. Everything I’ve done. How I treat everyone—it wouldn’t be noble and self-sacrificing, or ruthlessly pragmatic. It would be wrong and unnecessary and just plain mean.

  That can’t be possible.

  I may not be a genius like Dickinson, but I’m not an idiot, either.

  There’s no way I’m wrong about this.

  And there’s no way my grandmother knows the rules.

  Maybe that’s just me believing something I want to believe.

  But I can’t imagine her doing the kind of things I imagine Florida grandmothers doing—going for gentle morning walks, playing cards with friends, gossiping endlessly—and having in the back of her mind the idea that a killer decided for some reason to put me in the center of several extremely thorough murders.

  Probably she never even heard about Violet and Zoë.

  I want to believe that. I want to think she thinks my mother and father died the way they did because sometimes horrible things just happen, that’s all.

  I want her to feel safe.

  To die—takes just a

  little while—

  They say it does’nt hurt—

  It’s only fainter—by degrees—

  And then—it’s out of sight—

  I swear I’m going to have to order in supplies and hole up in this room until the year ends. If Ms. Lurie says anything, I’ll tell her I’m taking my Dickinson project to the next level.

  Not that Dickinson ever refused to come downstairs for meals, but what Ms. Lurie doesn’t know won’t kill her.

  Breakfast today was nothing but Stephen James. What a lovely way to start the morning.

 
Katia the poet, who is still a Hawthorne girl in spite of her parents’ best efforts to lure her to London, brought a copy of the local paper to the table. There already was a let’s-get-this-body-in-the-ground funeral for Stephen James, but now a bunch of artists are having some kind of celebration of his life and work.

  “We should ask Ms. Lurie if we can go,” Lucy said after reading the entire article aloud at a volume that couldn’t be escaped. “I think it would be nice.”

  “I think it would be creepy as hell,” Brianna said.

  “Amen,” M murmured, and she and Brianna exchanged a small, surprised smile.

  Lucy’s tone shifted from compassion to righteousness. “I just think it would be nice if we had some association with him other than—”

  “—the fact that he turned up dead on our doorstep,” M finished.

  Lucy glared at her. “Well, yes. And if nothing else, I would think a fellow artist would be interested in his work.”

  “I’m not a fellow artist,” M said. “Stephen James was a professional. I haven’t sold a single picture. Maybe I never will.”

  “Don’t be so down on yourself,” Lucy said encouragingly.

  “I’m not,” M said. “I’m just not sure the world is worthy of my work.”

  Brianna went into a loud, coughing recovery from a mixture of laughter and a poorly timed sip of tea, and Lucy retreated into lemon-faced silence.

  I thought it was safe to try to eat again, but unfortunately we were sharing a table with Anxious Girl. (Yes, I know her real name, but I’m not going to use it unless she comes up with a more distinguishing characteristic. Anything would do at this point.)

  “Maybe we should go, though,” she said. “I mean, maybe it would be good for our emotional recovery.”

  If more than three people at a table roll their eyes at the same time, it’s audible. I can put that on my list of Things I Learned At Hawthorne, if I ever decide to make one.

  “I’m not sure I’d have phrased it quite like that,” Natasha-the-playwright said tactfully. “But I have to admit, I’m interested. I mean, the poor guy had a life. I kind of hate the fact that when I think about him at all, he’s just ‘that dead guy.’ ”