“I guess I am.”
“When are you going to tell Ms. Lurie?”
“What?” She sat up, looking at me indignantly. “I’m not going to tell anyone. Not unless you want to, of course, and you’ve made it pretty clear you don’t.”
“But—”
“What?”
“What are you going to do?”
“You keep asking that,” M said. “And I keep not knowing what you mean. I don’t plan to do anything. I’ve already done it. I needed to tell you. Now I have.”
I shook my head. “And then what? We just—stay here?”
“Where else?”
“You’re crazy,” I explained again, since she seemed to have forgotten. “We just stay here, pretending to be normal—”
“Neither of us has ever done that, my lovely Emily.”
That pushed the breath right out of me for a minute. I got it back and managed, “Staying here like nothing’s changed, both of us knowing who I really am—”
“Why does that change anything? It’s only one more person than knew about you a week ago. And it stops here. I’m not going to betray you, and no one else is paying the kind of attention it would take to figure it out. They’re not even looking.”
I shook my head.
I couldn’t speak.
It was going to happen again.
“Emily?”
It was going to happen again, and this time I knew enough to expect it. This time it would really be my fault. This time—
“Emily.”
M was kneeling awkwardly in front of me on the bed. She was holding my hands with one of her hands and smoothing my hair with the other.
No one’s allowed to touch me.
“Emily. Listen to me.”
I had to leave. Tonight. Now.
I could barely breathe, I didn’t even know if I could walk, but I had to—
“Emily.” Her voice pushed aside the roaring in my head. “You’ve been very strong and very practical for a long time, and I need you to be both now, all right? I need you to try to breathe and be calm.”
I need you.
Oh, God.
“Listen to me, Emily,” M said. Her voice was strong and calm and instructive, as if she were explaining another saint’s origin story to me. “You’re not alone anymore. I’m not letting you be alone.”
I stared at her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do.”
“You could get hurt. You don’t understand—”
“I do. I told you. I read that book. Whoever did—all those terrible things—doesn’t want you to have anyone to care about.”
“Then you know—”
“I don’t know any such thing. I only know I’m not leaving you.”
She lowered her head slightly and kissed my clenched hands.
“We’re in this together.”
Impossibility, like Wine
Exhilarates the Man
Who tastes it
She’s insane.
She genuinely thinks we can be together. Somehow. Somewhere.
She knows every aspect of my curse, and she sees it as just another challenge to be overcome, a new geography to navigate.
Lunatic. Lunatic.
I heard a well-known rap, and a friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet, still woods,—and I wanted to exceedingly—
Dickinson doesn’t say who she wanted to go riding off into the woods with that afternoon when she was nineteen. She does say that he stayed a long time arguing against her refusals. “He said I could, and should go,” she boasts. But she wouldn’t.
She cried after he left, but she wouldn’t ride with him.
She felt as if she couldn’t go with him, but she doesn’t say why.
I don’t really care much who she might or might not have loved, but I often wonder about the young man who loved her. He must have been someone out of the ordinary himself, to fall for such an unconventional woman as Emily Dickinson.
Who was the man captivated by her strange, fierce, brilliant face, and by her way of saying baffling things in breathless little bursts?
Who was the beloved friend who came so often to see this otherworldly teenager that his knock was “a well-known rap”?
From all the jails the boys and girls
Ecstatically leap—
“How?”
“‘How’ isn’t important right now. What’s important is ‘that.’ ”
“There can’t be any ‘that’ until we figure out how.”
“Says who?”
“We’ve been dating for thirty seconds and you’re already driving me crazy.”
She kissed my hands again, lingeringly this time. “I’m very talented.”
The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—
Dickinson shut her door on so many people. She let just a few in—literally, once she started staying in her room—and kept even those she loved at a sort of distance. Letters aplenty, flowers and poems for those who might need or enjoy them; but a glimpse, a touch, a visit? Too much. Don’t ask it.
She was lucky to have so many people who loved her enough that they were willing to abide by any terms she set just to be a tiny part of her life.
M is beautiful and strong and gets whatever she wants. She could have anyone. She could have everyone.
But she wants me.
“Just tell me why,” I said. “Give me one reason I’d be worth the work even if my life were normal.”
“I can’t,” M said. “How I feel has nothing to do with reason.”
“Right. You saw me across a crowded room and knew I was your happily ever after.”
“Something like that.”
“M, for once in your life, be serious.”
She looked me in the eye. “I saw you in the hallway that night when the alarm went off. All the other girls were buzzing around like bees without a queen, and you were just standing there, calm and strong and purposeful. You looked like you could climb a mountain or run fifty miles and you were just waiting to hear which was needed.”
“M—”
“And then, in the lounge, while everyone else was weeping and whispering and setting their collective hair on fire, you sat like the Rock of Gibraltar. Utterly still and composed. You weren’t like anyone else I’d ever seen, and I wanted to know if you were like that all the way down. I gave you the kind of smiles that used to get all my algebra problems done for me without even a ‘please,’ and they bounced off you like stones skipping across a lake.”
I shook my head speechlessly.
“I was used to being able to charm the socks off people first try, and for all you noticed I could have been on another planet.”
“So you liked me because I wasn’t impressed by you.”
“I liked you because you were hot,” she corrected. “I kept after you because I wanted to see if I could impress you.”
“M!”
“You asked.”
M could have someone beautiful and tender and safe. But she wants me; and if that means giving up the world and everyone else in it, she’ll do it.
“You’re insane,” I said.
“Flatterer.”
“I’m serious. You have no idea what you’re talking about. What you’ll have to give up.”
“Even if that were true, ignorance isn’t the same as insanity.”
“Will you stop it?”
“Stop what?”
I’ve spent my life being vicious because I have to, but this is the first time I can remember actually wanting to slap some sense into someone. “You’re bandying semantics while I’m trying to talk about reality.”
“You know I’ve never let anyone tell me what to do.”
“This isn’t about me not being the boss of you, idiot! This is about life and death!”
M smiled into my eyes. “You’ve got them in the right order, anyway. That’s a start.”
“M—”
“No,” she said in a voice that was both immovable object and irresistible force. “Facts of death later. Fact of life first.”
I stared at her. “M—we can’t.” I could barely whisper all of a sudden. “We really, really can’t.”
“We can, and what’s more, we will. We have to. This is one night we know we have, one night we’ve been given. We’re taking it. And then no matter what happens, no one can ever take this away from us.”
She paused and then added, “Think of it this way. If this really is risky behavior, we’ve already pushed our luck too far. Just my being here. Just me doing this”—she swooped in for a swift kiss on my cheek—“and you not punching my lights out for it. Right?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Whatever’s going to happen would have happened anyway. So—” she grabbed the pillow out of my clenched hands and tossed it across the room “—let’s get some beautiful memories out of this, if we can’t get anything else.”
Is it that words are suddenly small, or that we are suddenly large, that they cease to suffice us …?
Dickinson could have married if she wanted to.
She was asked. She loved and was loved. But she said no when he asked.
For whatever reason, she preferred love letters to lovemaking.
Of course, marriage for her would have meant death—maybe not death from childbirth, since she was old enough to feel safely past any such risk by the time the proposal came along, but a death of the life she’d built so carefully, death of her quiet uninterrupted days, death maybe even of her poetry-writing.
So she kept her passion on the page and said yes to life and no to marriage.
There were rumors later that she was caught once on her drawing-room sofa in the passionate embrace of the man who’d proposed to her, and that she was very happy to be there.
I hope those rumors are true.
Tell Him night finished before we finished
“Have you really never touched anyone?”
“Of course I haven’t!”
M smiled. “Not even someone you really didn’t like?”
Come slowly, Eden!
“You’re rich,” she said. “And I will be, one of these days. My parents would never cut me off without a cent. People Would Talk. They can only stand that when they’re the ones doing the Talking.”
“What does money have to do with anything?”
“It means we can afford all the bodyguards in the world. Millions of them.” She smiled. “So many that the entire population of our town would be us and the people we’ve hired to keep us safe.”
“It’s not about keeping us safe. I’m not the one who’ll need a bodyguard.”
“More for me, then.”
“And, anyway, how do we know we could trust them? How can we trust anyone?”
“Then we’ll have alarm systems. A house like a stone castle. A moat.”
“Oh, come on. A moat?”
“Why not? People used to have them because they used to need them. We need one now. Kind of a silly time to be worried what the neighbors will think.”
“There’s nothing silly about any of this. And I’m not worrying about the neighbors. We can’t have neighbors, remember? And all the moats in the world won’t keep out a bullet.”
M’s expression grew serious. “Shooting from a distance doesn’t seem your murderer’s style,” she said.
It was dizzying how calmly she could talk about this.
I’d been trying to shake that calm all night. I’d spelled out the rules of terror. I’d catechized her on the insistent brutality I grew up with, and she’d answered with unblinking serenity.
Where did she learn that kind of courage? Or is there a certain brand of audacity some people are just born with?
“You’re forgetting Stephen James,” I said.
“That wasn’t from a distance,” she reminded me. “Anyway, we still don’t know that was connected to everything else.”
“How could it not be? How can this not all be tied together somehow?”
“If it is, maybe that’s good news.”
“Good?”
“The world is full of random death. If the rules, as you call them, have changed that much, your life isn’t any different from anyone else’s.”
I gave that the look it deserved. “No different at all? Other than the body count, you mean?”
“Well—you’re rich enough to really overpay our cleaning lady.”
I bring an unaccustomed wine
To lips long parching
—Next to mine—
I’m tired of wishing for the ones who were taken from me, and the ones who were never allowed to be. I’m sick of wanting someone to take care of me.
I want to take care of someone now.
Not the way I’ve always tried had to—by pushing away before they can get close enough to get hurt. I want to care the way other people get to.
I want to draw someone close to me and shield her from harm.
I want to draw her very close indeed and never even think of harm.
But how?
“Come unto me.”
Beloved commandment! The darling obeyed it.
In a pause between dreaming and fighting, we heard the front door softly open and shut.
“Ms. Lurie,” I said. “I didn’t know it was that late.”
M smiled. “Not late,” she said. “Early.”
If the whole English language had only three words, M would use two of them to argue with the third.
“How long does she usually stay out?” she asked.
“At least an hour. It takes time to really understand a morning, she says.”
“Our lovely Ms. Lurie.” M stretched. “We have one more hour, then.”
“Not quite. You have to go before she gets back. We can’t risk her seeing you leave.”
“She wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“M, please. Don’t fight me on this.”
She sighed. “Forty-five minutes, then.”
“Half an hour.”
“Thirty-seven minutes, and that’s my last offer.”
It ended up being fifty-two.
To thank you would profane you—there are moments when even gratitude is a desecration.
Ms. Lurie brought me breakfast at nine o’clock. I didn’t know I was famished until I saw the food. It was simpler than usual—just bread, but a beautiful rich egg bread next to tiny glass dishes of butter and honey and jam.
“Are you all right?” Ms. Lurie asked.
I tried to slow down a bit. “Sorry,” I muttered around too big a bite.
She laughed. “No need to apologize,” she said. “I’m just glad to see you have an appetite.”
I was glad I could pretend to be too busy chewing to answer that.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked.
I had to remind myself that she asks that every morning. I shook my head vigorously. “Not a wink,” I said. “I’m going to crash any minute now.”
Ms. Lurie looked surprised and concerned. “Really? Do you feel well? Do you need me to call—”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just—I think I might sleep through lunch, if that’s all right.”
Now she looked really worried. “I’ll leave something outside your door, if you like,” she said. “That way I won’t disturb you if you’re sleeping, and you don’t have to starve if you’re not.”
“Thank you.” I wanted to say a lot more than that, but of course I couldn’t. “Thank you, Ms. Lurie.”
She smiled, a little puzzled. “Of course, dear.”
We often say “how beautiful!” But when we mean it, we can mean no more.
A dream personified.
Of course I couldn’t sleep. Of course I can’t now.
Half of me can’t believe last night happened—any of it, all of it—and the other half is too terrified not to believe it.
“Give me thine heart” is too perempt
ory a courtship for earth, however irresistible in Heaven.
Can M possibly be right?
Will we—can we—be different?
Can knowing what we’re up against be enough?
Of course we don’t really know.
We know what has happened, and so we know what threatens to happen next; but we don’t know why, and we obviously don’t know who.
We could never have anything like a normal life.
M insists she didn’t want one even before she met me.
But she ought to be able to do the kind of normal things even outlandish M might want to do. She ought to be able to go to college. Her art is brilliant, and she ought to be able to learn from the best so she can get even better.
She ought to be able to travel, like they did in the olden days, when young men would wander moodily around Europe looking at Great Art and learning that they really weren’t so Great themselves after all.
Except M is great. Or will be, anyway.
Unless she never gets the chance to be.
How can she have a career if she’s in a permanent state of hiding?
And where could we hide, really, that would be secure? A bomb shelter? A prison cell? An airplane that never has to land? Antarctica?
How could I look at her every day knowing what she was giving up for me?
Not for you. For me.
You know what I mean.
I don’t. I’m not giving up anything. I’m taking what I want. That’s all I ever do. Stop pretending you’re so special.
When she was here insisting she had all the answers, I almost believed we might be possible; but now I’m alone and the truth keeps beating its way in.
This can’t work.
The only important thing now is protecting her, assuming that’s still possible.
Danger is not at first, for then we are unconscious, but in the after, slower days.
This time I went inside Dickinson’s house without bothering to knock.
I knew there was no one to answer anyway.
When I put my hand to the knob, I saw that the door was already open. Swinging just a bit ajar.
I pushed. It was heavier than I’d expected, but I got it open and went into the foyer.
The Letting Go Page 19