The Letting Go

by Deborah Markus

  I didn’t bother shutting the front door behind me.

  The little sitting room was empty.

  No visitors. No friends. No family.

  I stood for a minute, thinking.

  I would have liked to see the kitchen, but there was no scent of cakes baking or bread rising.

  There was nowhere, nothing for me on this floor.

  I went to the stairs Maggie always climbed to ask Miss Emily if she would see a visitor.

  Dark and narrow, and steeper than I’d expected.

  I started up. Slowly—my boots were hard-soled and would have rung out against the wood like the angel of death himself if I wasn’t careful.

  Dark, dark steps, curving around a bit as I reached the top—and then the last step was light, and the floor before me a warm, light-colored wood.

  There was a door to my right, but I passed it without pausing. I knew my way.

  The second door—that was hers. Off-white wood interrupting the white-patterned wallpaper on either side.

  I paused.

  If I knocked, would she call for me to come in, thinking I was Maggie?

  But no—she knew every sound that had a rightful place in this house. She would know the knock of a stranger.

  Knocking wasn’t the point now.

  I put my hand on the white doorknob. Then I stood and listened.

  A musical voice murmured behind that door.

  Was someone there with her already? Had I come too late?

  No—she was alone. I knew it, the way we always know things in dreams.

  Maybe she was singing to herself. Or trying a line of poetry aloud.

  Maybe she was talking to a mouse, or the tree outside her window.

  Now laughter rippled out to me.

  Her friends and family said her voice was soft and low and often breathless, but that laugh was silvery and strong.

  I wanted to hear her voice for myself, without any barrier between us.

  I wanted to see the red hair the coroner was so surprised by—hair without a single strand of silver, though she was in her fifties when she died.

  I wanted to see if she really did wear that white dress every day.

  As if in reply to my thoughts, her voice sang out—so loud and clear it almost knocked me down.

  I’m “wife”—I’ve finished that—

  That other state—

  I’m Czar—I’m “Woman” now—

  The one poem of Dickinson’s I’ve never liked because I’m so sick of all the arguing over whether she had the right to say any such thing, whether she was actually talking about someone else being a wife, whether it meant she was having an affair or mocking the married or ironically celebrating her own perpetual spinsterhood.

  Hearing her now, I knew there was no bitterness, no sarcasm intended. Not just now, anyway.

  This was the open rejoicing of someone claiming and being claimed.

  This was a love song.

  And if I opened the door between us, I would destroy the singer.

  As if in agreement, the paint on that door slipped silently from the virginal white it had been a moment ago to a black that matched the stairs.

  I turned and fled, not caring about the noise I might make, only caring that I didn’t fall.

  I reached the front door and ran outside into what was now night.

  A death-blow is a life-blow to some

  Dear M:

  First: will you please make sure Ms. Lurie gets the note on my desk—the one that says I’m leaving Hawthorne of my own free will, and asking her to give my things to charity?

  I would have gotten rid of them myself, but there wasn’t time.

  I hope that covers the legal aspect of things. I don’t want to get her into any kind of trouble. She’s had to deal with too much already on my account.

  I hope that makes sure she doesn’t have anything else to worry about so far as I’m concerned. I hope I’m protecting her as well as you.

  I’d tell you not to grab a keepsake while you’re in here, but that doesn’t seem your style anyway.

  Go ahead and tell everyone who I am, or rather who I was. I’m nobody now.

  I will never touch another penny of the money that was left to me. I have the clothes on my back and the boots on my feet and a lot less hair on my head than I did the last time you saw me.

  I’m hoping all this will make me pretty damned hard to keep an eye on.

  This isn’t just about saving you. God knows it’s that. But it’s saving me, too. It’s being honest, finally.

  If I have to live loveless and alone, I’m going to stop pretending that I’m just another eccentric millionaire being a bitch to the world because I can afford to.

  I’ve had to act for so many years like someone who enjoys being mean. Putting people off so that it wouldn’t show if I cared about someone, and no one would be tempted to care about me.

  I’m tired. I’m so tired. I can’t do it anymore.

  We both know what will happen if I don’t.

  I can end this now by doing what I should have done a long time ago. Becoming just another filthy, faceless wanderer that no one cares about and everyone’s a little afraid of.

  There are other endings I could aim for. But as tired as I am, I don’t want that. Even if I did, I wouldn’t do that to you. But maybe you’ll be glad to hear I don’t want to do that to me, either.

  Becoming nobody is my only escape and I’m taking it.

  Yes, M, I love you and you know very well that’s why I have to leave. And yes, I do know how that’s making you feel. I’ve had the ones I love torn away from me all my life.

  The only reason I would ever do this to you is that I can’t stand the thought of what will happen if I don’t. I’m asking you to imagine how I’m feeling now, and ask yourself how you’d feel if our positions were reversed.

  You’re not a reasonable person and that’s part of why I love you, but even you have to admit I’m right about this.

  Or don’t. I can’t tell you what to do.

  I can tell you this: I want you to live and be happy, but I’d rather you lived and were unhappy than spent one more blissful day with me and then met the kind of end I know will be waiting for you if we stay together. Even if the latter meant that, technically, you were happy your whole life. I’m not a philosopher, or some kind of emotional mathematician. Given the little choice I have in the matter, I’d rather you were long-lived and miserable.

  Do you understand that?

  I wandered out of my bedroom one night when I was four years old. I was looking for my mother. You know what I found.

  You know I can’t let that happen again.

  I want you to be happy, but I need you to be.

  NOTEBOOK 2

  Enough Dickinson quotes. I can speak for myself now.

  Okay, I didn’t say I could do it all at once.

  “It’s … fireworks,” I guessed. “In December, so everyone’s surprised to see them.”

  M took her picture out of my hands long enough to roll it up loosely and smack me over the head with it. “It’s a plant,” she said, unrolling it and handing it back. “A local one. You might have seen it yourself, if you could be bothered to look at the slutty flowers once in a while. Look. The stems grow in red clusters, and then there are tiny yellow blossoms right at the top—see?”

  “That was my next guess,” I said.

  “The common name is live-forever,” she said. “They sprout up in dead, gray, rocky places where nothing should be able to survive.”

  “So, not a metaphor or anything.”

  There was a rap at the door. “Come in,” I said.

  M tugged the picture out of my hands again, dropped it on the bed next to me, and threw her arms around me in a dramatic embrace that was all show and minimal contact. “Kiss me, you fool,” she said loudly, just as Ms. Lurie opened the door.

  “Hello, girls,” she said.

  “Ms. Lurie, make her stop,” I said.


  “M, kindly try to control yourself.”

  M laid a delicate hand on her heart and widened her eyes, a perfect portrait of innocent indignation.

  “Oh, please,” I said. “There have to be sexual harassment laws in place for times like this.”

  “There are, as a matter of fact,” Ms. Lurie said. “I’m happy to say I’ve never had to enforce them.”

  “First time for everything,” M said as Ms. Lurie nudged her gently aside and sat down on the edge of my bed. She looked at me intently for a minute, and then put her hand on my forehead and smoothed my hair back from my face.

  “How do you feel, dear?”

  I want to write what happened in order, neatly and accurately. I keep trying and I can’t. It won’t come out that way. Everything keeps clamoring to be told all at once.

  I’m just going to write whatever screams the loudest and worry about the order later.

  Ms. Lurie says I need to spend a lot more time knowing I’m safe before I can feel convinced I really am. “Time really will help,” she said yesterday. “I know it’s a ridiculous oversimplification to say ‘time heals all wounds,’ but there is a reason we have that saying.”

  “They say that ‘Time assuages,’ ” I muttered. “Time never did assuage—”

  “Emily,” Ms. Lurie said. “You told me you were working on using your own words now. No more hiding behind someone else’s, remember?”

  “I know.”

  She put her hand on mine and I took a deep breath and reminded myself that was all right now, I didn’t have to wrench away and I certainly didn’t have to spit an insult at her.

  “Old habits die hard,” she said gently.

  It shouldn’t have been so cold—it’s southern California and it doesn’t get that cold here, does it, even in the mountains, tell someone from Minnesota or New York how cold it was that night and listen to them laugh—but it was cold, I know it was, I felt it.

  Sometimes I think I’ll never be warm again, especially at night.

  Ms. Lurie gave me her heating pad and her hot-water bottle and permission to flip a finger at the drought and spend as much time in a tub full of hot water as I need, whenever I need to. She calls it that: need, not want, and that helps. A little.

  I still feel guilty, though.

  Not just about the water. Everything.

  M must have been so much colder. She only had a nightgown on.

  And boots. At least she put on boots.

  “Don’t forget the flashlight,” she said.

  “You weren’t wearing a flashlight.”

  “You know what I mean. I didn’t just run out after you. I’m a lot more practical than you give me credit for.”

  “All right,” I said. “I think you are fully ten percent practical.”

  “Which is nine percent more practical than you thought I was before?”

  “More like twenty.”

  Cold. Cold.

  We were sitting very still and the ground was damp and the cold seeped into our bones and replaced them.

  “They found her,” she told me, but it didn’t seem true, it couldn’t be.

  “You’re safe,” she said, and that couldn’t be true either.

  “Emily, I promise.”

  “Hey,” Brianna said.

  “Oh. Hi.”

  I was on the porch, bundled against the pale winter sunlight. After a minute, Brianna sat down next to me on the step. Not too close. Just on the same step.

  “Hey,” she said again.

  I think it was okay not to know what to say in reply. Anyway, she didn’t seem to blame me.

  “So, you’re staying at Hawthorne for Christmas,” she said.

  I nodded. It still felt terrifyingly strange not to come back with something sharp and cutting, but it was hard to find the energy even to nod.

  “I kind of—well. Here.” She put a small, brightly wrapped package between us.

  “It’s just something stupid,” she said. “You don’t have to like it or anything.”

  “Good,” I tried to say. I’m not sure I managed. My heart was pounding so hard it sounded to me like it was firing bullets.

  “You okay?”

  I shook my head. I tried to smile, but it probably looked pretty weird. “Not for a while now, no.”

  That came out, anyway. “Yeah,” Brianna said. “I get that.”

  We sat together quietly for a minute, waiting for the terror to pass.

  “I—” I started, and then tried again. “I didn’t. You know. Get you anything or anything.”

  Brianna laughed just a little. “I kind of wasn’t expecting you to.”

  “Good.” That came out right this time, and she laughed again.

  “You owe me two gifts next year, though,” she said.

  She didn’t ask why or what. None of them have. They just know something happened and I’m different now.

  That’s enough. Enough for me, but even enough for them, so far as I can tell.

  I’m not used to enough.

  I hadn’t gotten far.

  It was weird o’clock in the morning—too late for anyone to still be awake, too early for Ms. Lurie to be out on her walk yet.

  I hadn’t gone far. I was still getting used to walking. And being outside. It had been so long.

  It was very dark and very cold and the road was smooth under my boots but I couldn’t use much of it. There’s no such thing as sidewalk in this part of the mountains, and just enough room on the road for cars. There’s a bit of space pretending to care about bicyclists, but I know enough not to trust it. Cyclists are killed in broad daylight around here.

  Maybe I should have been hoping to be sent tumbling down the side of the mountain by a car, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking about dying. I wasn’t afraid of death, but I wasn’t looking for it, either.

  I was just moving.

  And then I stopped.

  “This isn’t about school anymore, Emily,” Ms. Lurie said.

  We were sitting in her office, and I couldn’t help thinking about the last time we were here and who had been with us.

  I’m through with detectives now. That’s something.

  They’ve all been very kind and I know they’re doing the best they can, but I’m glad to be finished talking to them.

  “This isn’t about ‘Oh, it’s June, time for you to graduate and get out of my house,’ ” she went on. “Hawthorne has never been an ordinary school, and I take great pride in knowing that its students are far from ordinary.”

  She caught my expression and smiled ruefully. “I know that’s a bit of an understatement in this case.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “My point is, we’ve always been able to stretch for our students, to work with whatever their needs are. There are girls who have spent five years here instead of four. Or they came here for their senior year of high school and then stayed on another year after that, because what they were working on didn’t fit neatly into the usual chronology. Whether they called those last twelve months a gap year or an internship, we were happy to have them, and proud to be part of that crucial aspect of their development.”

  I gazed at my teacup. It was beautiful without seeming frighteningly fragile.

  “At any rate. I want this to be said in so many words so we don’t have to worry about it later. This is your home now, Emily. Not just for the rest of the school year. For however long you want it to be.

  “Easy,” she added. “I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t think that would come as a shock. Surely I’ve made it clear—”

  “How can you possibly want me here?” I said. “How can you ever want to see me again?”

  It was her turn to look startled, and saddened. “Why wouldn’t I?” she asked. “Do you imagine I blame you for what’s happened to you?”

  “Maybe not blame, exactly, but—”

  “Associate,” Ms. Lurie finished for me. “No, Emily. I don’t. If I were the kind of person who did that, I would ha
ve sold this house after my husband died. Or closed Hawthorne when Stephen James was killed.”

  I flinched.

  “I don’t blame others for how they feel,” she said. “I only ask that my own feelings be respected. And I’m sorry to disappoint you, Emily”—and her smile was anything but disappointed—“but the sight of you has no negative connotations for these old eyes. None whatsoever.”

  In response to my face, which must have looked like The Portrait Of A Doubting Lady, she asked, “Am I assuming too much? Maybe Hawthorne has terrible associations for you?”

  “No,” I said. “No, of course not.”

  She waited.

  “I’m just—not really used to having this kind of conversation.”

  Ms. Lurie smiled.

  I hadn’t seen or heard anything, but I stopped anyway.

  Which was stupid, I suppose.

  But someone was there, where no one was supposed to be, and I could either face that or keep going with God only knew what behind me.

  I don’t know why it’s so important, but I want the record to state that I stopped and turned around before I heard my name spoken.

  “You smoke.”

  “I wasn’t smoking.”

  “No, but you have. You’re a smoker. I could smell it.”

  A smile in the dark. “Well. I guess that makes me an official bad guy, doesn’t it?”

  “Even if you go on to university—and I know it’s a lot to think about now, but I hope at some point you’ll consider it—this will be your home. This is the place you can come back to.”

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

  “Emily.” Ms. Lurie looked at me sternly.

  “That wasn’t Dickinson.”

  “I want to hear what you think, not Robert Frost. Especially not Robert Frost being bitter and sarcastic.” She paused. “Do you remember the rest of it? What the wife says in reply?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t even known it was Frost. I thought it was just a saying, something to put on inspirational postcards.