I did know that I needed her to leave.
“I won’t push you to go,” she added, “but I think it might be a very good idea.”
I tried to nod neutrally—to show I’d heard without coming across as agreeing to her request.
She seemed to get it. “Will you promise me you’ll at least think about it?”
I nodded again, harder. “Yes,” I whispered.
Please just go.
“Thank you, Emily,” she said, and stood up. “Oof. I’m feeling my age. Sit for ten minutes and my legs fall asleep.” She smiled at me. “Why don’t I take this plate down, and you can bring the tea things later. No rush.”
“Thank you.” I wasn’t sure I was audible; but a minute later I was alone in my room with an almost-empty teapot.
Dear Emily,—Are you there, and shall you always stay there, and is it not dear Emily any more, but Mrs. Ford of Connecticut, and must we stay alone, and will you not come back with the birds and the butterflies, when the days grow long and warm?
Dickinson wasn’t just single all her life; she was terrified of marriage.
I think she was, and the letters seem to back me up.
I don’t blame her. Marriage must have been pretty horrible back then, at least if you were a woman. You signed away so many freedoms. No money of your own. Your time, your whole life, was claimed by someone else—and if that someone was abusive, who was to stop him?
And then there was the fear you might die in childbirth, or survive only to see your children die, at birth or a few years later.
All those things happened to plenty of women Dickinson knew.
People seem to feel sorry for her because she never got married—they pity the old-maid poet, and think of her genius as some kind of consolation prize for a solitary life.
I think the woman who liked to write at three in the morning and stay in her room and not see anyone she didn’t feel like seeing—who loved to love children as long as they were other people’s children whom she could lavish with treats and loving notes from a safe distance—I think she knew exactly what she was doing. And what she was doing was saying No, thank you to a life she didn’t want.
She had choices, and she chose to be alone.
She was happy alone.
People can be happy alone.
There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows Being up—
Then covers the Abyss with trance—
So Memory can step
Around—Across—opon it—
As One within A Swoon—
Goes steady—where an Open Eye—
Would spill Him—Bone by Bone—
I went to Dickinson’s house again last night.
Maggie/Margaret the maid admitted me to the small sitting room, and again I waited an age for some response.
I felt unusually nervous—almost panicked—and I realized I was terrified Dickinson would agree to see me.
I stood up to leave the house before it was too late, but there were already footsteps coming down the stairs.
I was never so relieved to see Maggie’s sensible black dress and white apron.
She didn’t speak, just offered me the tray—covered this time.
I lifted the lid and there was a flower. A black rose.
It was real, but so beautiful—such a perfect bud, just beginning to open—that if it hadn’t been for the perfumy scent I would have sworn it was silk.
Under it was an envelope. It looked to be stuffed with as much paper as it could hold.
Open Me Carefully was written on the envelope.
The handwriting was familiar, but it wasn’t Dickinson’s.
Maggie watched me expectantly.
I just stood there, staring at those words written in the hand of a girl who was fond of wearing long white gowns but who certainly didn’t live in the nineteenth century or write poetry.
“Well, Miss?” Maggie had work to do. She couldn’t stand here all day holding a silly tray.
I put the lid of the tray back down on the flower and the unopened letter. I could have sworn they vanished just as I started to lower the lid, but of course there was no way to know that.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and I ran from the house and woke up in my bed, heart pounding so hard I thought it would jump out of my body.
The autumn nights are cooler now, but my sheets were drenched with sweat.
It felt like a long time before I could stop shaking.
The difference between Despair
And fear—is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck—
And when the Wreck has
been—
Good.
Good.
That’s done, then.
Finished. Finally.
All right.
It had to happen and I’m glad to have it over with.
It’s over.
I’ll never have to do this again.
There is a finished
feeling
Experienced at Graves—
A leisure of the Future—
A Wilderness of Size—
I couldn’t sleep after that dream, so I got up and tried to work.
My room was too damned claustrophobic after I’d spent so many hours there in a row.
Anyway, I had to air all the bedclothes out properly before I could try to sleep again, and that takes up all available space.
And maybe I knew what had to happen and just wanted to get it over with.
Three times—we parted—
Breath—and I—
M came and found me in the library in the middle of the night again.
Maybe anyone but M would have asked how I was feeling after my big blowup and subsequent absence from the dinner table.
Maybe M would have asked after the feelings of anyone but me.
I being me and M being M, she simply sauntered in casual as a cat and said, “You know, one of these days you’re going to burn this place down with all your midnight-oil burning.”
She looked over my shoulder at my laptop’s screen, not even pretending not to stare. “Goodness,” she said. “That looks dire.”
It was. It was a facsimile I’d found of the Sunday school newsletter Dickinson’s uncle gave her a subscription to when she was seven. Even the font looked grim.
“Go away,” I said mechanically. Her perfume was new, or at least new to me.
“Or what?”
I opened my mouth to give her detailed instructions on how exactly one can, just for a change of pace, go jump in a lake. Instead I found myself saying, “Or I’ll tell you the kind of story Dickinson got to fall asleep to when she was a little girl.”
M’s eyes gleamed. She sat down in the chair next to mine and curled up, elf-like. “I’ll give you five dollars and all my desserts for a month if you read some to me,” she said.
And if at any time you regret you received me, or I prove a different fabric to that you supposed, you must banish me.
Both my thumbs are covered in tiny red crescents from me digging my fingernails into them.
How could I have done that?
Instead of leaving the library—instead of never being there in the first place—I sat there and told her stories. Exactly the kind of stories she loves.
I told M the story—written for little New England children long ago—about a young man standing on the gallows, about to hang for his crimes. As they put the rope around his neck, he begged to speak once more to his mother. When she hugged him, he bit off a piece of her ear and told her that if only she’d raised him better, he wouldn’t be about to die.
“It’s true,” M said when she managed to stop laughing. “If she’d only kept her son tied up in the cellar with nothing but bread and water once a day to sustain him, he’d never have been able to do anything wrong.”
And then there was the story about the three-year-old boy who died after falling into a barrel of boiling water.
“Because
that’s the kind of thing you want to have lying around when you’ve got a toddler on the premises,” M said.
“Well, they didn’t have washing machines back then,” I pointed out.
“She could have sent him to play outside while she did the laundry.”
“But then he might have gotten lost or eaten by a lion or something.”
M looked at me with polite incredulity. “Yes, the lions of New England are famously ferocious.”
“Okay, a bear. Look, that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
The point was that this wasn’t just any three-year-old boy. All his life—
“All his life? All three long years of it?”
“Quit interrupting.”
—he’d wanted to be a missionary. But now he was going to die too young to fulfill his dream. He had sixty cents saved up, and with his dying breath he begged his mother to give it to the missionaries. She agreed. He bit the dust.
“That did not happen,” M said, uncurling herself. She stood up and stood behind me, shoving my hands away from the computer so she could scroll up and down the pages. “This is the kind of story they wrote for little kids?”
“You’re one to talk,” I managed. She’d touched my hands. Pushed them, but still. “This was two hundred years ago. Children really did die from that kind of accident. It happened to a kid Dickinson’s aunt knew. What’s your aunt’s excuse for terrorizing you at bedtime?”
“She didn’t terrorize me,” M said, still focused on the virtual pages in front of her. She was leaning close to me, but apparently only I noticed. Her breathing seemed normal, anyway. “And, anyway, I wasn’t seven when she told me those stories.”
She paused, thinking. “Well, all right, I was. But the stories didn’t scare me, because they didn’t seem real.”
“You keep saying these stories don’t seem real.”
“Not now, no. Back then, they must have scared the cranberries out of those poor kids.”
“‘Cranberries’?”
“Something else my aunt taught me. She didn’t mind the big swear words, but she really hated minor-league ones like ‘crap.’ ” She leaned in still closer to the screen. “Okay, this is just awful.”
“What?”
“Whatever preacher wrote this is telling little kids that they’d better be good or they’re going to hell. And it could be any minute now. Very sweet.”
M started reading aloud in a low, stern voice. “‘And sometimes too, when you stand by the new made grave of some one of your playmates, and see the coffin let down into that narrow house, and hear the minister warn you to prepare for death—’ ”
It shouldn’t have been enough to drop me off the planet, unless I was already ready to fall.
She didn’t notice anything wrong at first. She just broke off, laughing incredulously. “I mean, come on. Pile it on a little heavier, why don’t you? The grave of just one of your little buddies? Because, you know, of course there’ll be plenty of those funerals to choose from—”
I think I made some sound. She stopped again, looking at me.
“Emily?” she asked, all laughter gone from her voice.
The room was closing in and
The house was dark and when I tried to find her
She liked cologne and sweet shampoo but that night she smelled like
I remembered myself.
I remembered the rules.
I remembered who M was and what she could be if I let her.
I stood up and shoved M aside. Hard.
I heard her gasp.
I shut the laptop hard enough that I should have been worried I’d shattered the screen, and I picked it up and tucked it under one arm.
M stared at me. She wasn’t quite standing up—more leaning against one of the tables. Her expression was bewildered and concerned.
Why couldn’t she be angry? Or even just hurt?
Why did she always have to be so damned worried about me?
It didn’t matter. I was good at this now.
“Shut up,” I said very quietly.
She opened her mouth and I said in the same soft tone, “I’m not joking. I’m not bluffing. If you ever say another word to me, I’ll leave Hawthorne that same day.”
Now her face looked as white and huge-eyed as it had when I’d screamed at Lucy.
“I can do it,” I said. “I don’t have anyone to tell me not to, or to make me stay. It’s up to me. I could walk out right now if I wanted to. If you make me, I will.”
M said nothing and stood very still. She looked as if she’d have fallen if the table weren’t there to support her.
I thought about saying more, but there wasn’t any point. She either got it or she didn’t.
So I left the room, and left it at that.
So that’s over. That’s over with.
I should have done it a long time ago.
I never should have let things get so far in the first place.
I had no monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself; and when I try to organize, my little force explodes and leaves me bare and charred.
I almost didn’t go down to breakfast this morning, but Ms. Lurie would have said something and, anyway, I have to face it sooner or later. If I’m going to stay here.
Maybe I should leave early.
Of course I should. I shouldn’t even be here now.
But I’ll be eighteen in the spring, and that will make it much easier to find somewhere to live. I assume.
I’ve been planning to spend the time between my birthday and school letting out for summer looking at my options. Maybe asking one of my executors for help. They’re not exactly real estate agents, but still they must know more than I do about the practicalities of getting a little place of my own.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin if I left now.
I’ll do it if I have to, but I don’t think I do. Not just yet. I think it should be safe now.
I want to stay at Hawthorne
No, I’ll say it. In ink, at least. On hidden pages.
I want to stay at Hawthorne for as long as I can.
If I’m not even allowed to love a place, there’s no help or hope for me or for the world. I’ll have to spend the rest of my life hopping around like a fire walker on an endless bed of coals.
Maybe I’ll do that anyway. Once I leave Hawthorne. I can’t imagine caring where I live after I leave here.
But I want these last months. I paid for them. They’re mine.
M sat at my table at breakfast but she didn’t say anything. Not to me, of course—she never does when other people are around anyway—but not to anyone else, either.
And she didn’t eat. Didn’t even pretend to.
Brianna gave her a concerned look, but didn’t say anything.
I’m sure she will soon, if M doesn’t start covering her tracks a little better. Brianna doesn’t keep things to herself any more than M does.
Maybe she and M can run off and live happily ever after and I’ll never have to think about either of them again.
The little boy we laid away never fluctuates, and his dim society is companion still. But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.
Of all the people Dickinson loved who died toward the end of her life—her parents; two guys the biographers like to say she was in love with; one man she certainly was in love with; her writer-friend Helen Hunt Jackson, who knew how brilliant Dickinson was and begged her not to keep her genius to herself—the only one she couldn’t bear to lose was her nephew Gib.
Gib was eight years old. He was a caboose baby—much younger than his siblings, born when his poor mother was forty-four years old—and apparently spoiled rotten by everyone in sight.
When Gib was five years old, he bragged at school that he had a beautiful white calf of his very own. It didn’t exist in a strictly physical sense, so his conventional teacher tried to set him straight by telling him he’d go to hell for lying if he didn
’t shape up. When Dickinson heard that this had made Gib cry, she furiously dared the teacher to come and see the calf in question, who was grazing in Dickinson’s attic even as they spoke.
When Gib was seven years old, he barged into the room Dickinson was sitting in. “I want something,” he insisted. She kissed him and asked him what he’d like. “Oh, everything,” he said.
She gave him her everything. She gave him a visit when he was deathly sick and she hadn’t been in anyone’s house but her own in years.
She gave him her heart, and when he died he took it with him.
Violet looks like Gib to me, but other than the blonde hair I’m not sure anyone else would see it. Anyway, I don’t have a picture of her, so maybe the resemblance is all in my head.
Violet was a fierce, tree-climbing sort of girl. Her parents talked afterward about how sweet she was, how gentle with her little brother, and maybe that was true. But nobody in our second grade class would have called her sweet. Most of the kids were terrified of her.
She wasn’t a bully—she just knew her own mind. Most seven-year-olds don’t have much mind to know, but Violet was always fiercely purposeful. “We’re going to do this now,” she’d say, and it didn’t matter what anyone else said or wanted—that’s what they were going to do.
They didn’t have to. They could always have played with someone else if they didn’t want to do what Violet said. But no one lucky enough to be let into Violet’s company ever walked away willingly.
Violet was the first person who made me think things might be all right after my parents were killed.
Aunt Paulette had said in so many words that she’d only taken me in because it would be a disgrace to the family name to have me in foster care. No one at school wanted to play with me. They thought I was weird because of what had happened to my parents, and I wasn’t in any position to argue with them.
So when Violet started staring at me in class, I didn’t think much of it at first. I’d finished the too-easy addition problems we’d been given and was sitting quietly waiting for something to happen. I sighed and turned my head to look out the window, and that’s when I noticed Violet’s fierce gaze fixed on me. She didn’t look angry, just thoughtful and a little puzzled.
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