“‘I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ ”
“Emily.”
The winding road up to Hawthorne isn’t lit. I guess they figure anyone out on it at night knows what they’re doing. Or maybe it’s just too hard to put lights in on steep curves like that. Too risky for the people doing the work.
There was a scrap of moon, but it was on its way down.
Of course I hoped it was M behind me.
Of course it wasn’t.
“Emily,” the voice said again. “It is you, isn’t it?”
I guess I’ve been terrified—terrorized—for so long that I couldn’t feel afraid anymore.
It didn’t happen all that long ago and still it’s a fight to go back and find what I was really feeling. Not what I should have felt, or what I guess I must have felt, but the truth.
I keep thinking about it exactly when I don’t want to, and then not being able to pin it down when I do.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
M looked miserable. “Because I read somewhere that people only remember dreams when they wake up in the middle of them,” she said. “That the kindest thing anyone can do is not wake someone up when they’re having a nightmare.”
I thought about that. She’d been in my room with me when I fell asleep, but had had to leave soon after. Rules.
“Did it work?” she asked anxiously.
I nodded. “I don’t remember any of my dreams from last night,” I said. “Just the one I had right before I woke up.”
“What was that one about?”
“A tidal wave,” I said.
“Oh.”
“That’s new for me, actually.”
“Oh.” She paused. “Well, I guess it’s good you’re branching out.”
I guess I was afraid. Not so much emotionally as reflexively. Intellectually. Knowing that whatever was happening couldn’t be good.
But honestly, I think what I really felt was anger.
No—anger is too strong. Annoyance. Irritation. Agitated resignation.
Let’s get this over with, already.
I think that’s true.
“It’s not fair that Ms. Lurie doesn’t let us room together.”
I didn’t say anything, but I smiled over my toast.
I’m back on normal food, mostly. Miss Miller still sends plenty of treats my way, but they’re not the main course anymore. Ms. Lurie just smiles. I know she still thinks white flour is out to kill us all, but she also knows how to pick her battles.
I’m still not quite up to facing the dining room, but Ms. Lurie lets M and me have our meals in her office, or sometimes on the porch.
“I mean, I’ll be eighteen soon. So will you. And we’re going to live together.” A pause. “Aren’t we?”
I pretended I had to think about that.
She rapped me on the knuckle with a teaspoon, hard enough to sting. It was worth it to see her fret.
I’m a little relieved that Ms. Lurie is being the bossy grown-up and gently but firmly insisting that There’s Plenty Of Time For That When We’re Older And We’re Too Young To Make A Commitment Now.
“You got married young,” M muttered rebelliously. “How old were you, anyway?”
“Twenty-two,” Ms. Lurie said, smiling. “Not exactly a child bride, but yes, very young.”
M pouted. I’m sure she was hoping Ms. Lurie had been eighteen years and one day old the day she popped a veil on her head and slipped on the plain gold band she still wears.
“It was a different time,” Ms. Lurie went on. “And yes, it was hard to wait even that long. But I’m glad I did. And I certainly don’t think it would have been a good idea for us to have moved in together at the tender age of seventeen.”
I tried to imagine Ms. Lurie as an eager teenager. It wasn’t hard, actually.
“I’m not being a prude, M,” Ms. Lurie said. “And so far as your personalities are concerned, I think you two are exceptionally well suited for one another. But you have your whole lives ahead of you. There’s no need to rush into anything. And frankly, I think you’ll appreciate each other that much more if you have to wait a little while.”
She looked at me inquiringly, and I smiled.
M noticed and punched me on the arm. “Traitor.”
“M,” Ms. Lurie said severely, but I just smiled a bit more.
M may never understand how rich it feels to be allowed to take my time at this.
“Of course it’s you. I knew it would be someday.”
I couldn’t speak.
“I guess I’m surprised you didn’t come out sooner. Alone, I mean. Like this.”
She stepped closer. In the mostly dark, her hair contrasted sharply with her pale skin.
“Oh, Emily,” she said. “How you’ve grown.”
I tell M that the nightmares I’ve been having are about my family, but really it’s a little more complicated than that.
Each one is just a bit different than the others when it comes to the specifics, but the basic idea is the same.
It’s simple: I’m very young. I’m in a house. It’s always a bright day, and the light pours in through the windows. I’m coloring or playing or holding a fresh-baked cookie someone’s given me, with extra napkins so I don’t ruin my clothes.
Everything is very clean and light and comfortable. The floor is polished wood, and I’m sitting on a bright-colored, braided rug.
I’m alone in the room, but I know there’s someone nearby. A mother will come soon and shake her head over the mess I’ve made. Or a car will pull into the driveway—who? Mother, father, sister, cousin?
Everything is fine, everything is warm and peaceful and very dull, and I’m trying not to panic. But I know I need to hide.
It’s not supposed to be like this.
Someone is standing just outside the door, touching the knob gently. About to come in. Any second now.
This isn’t mine. This doesn’t belong to me.
The door opens and I’m still sitting there, frozen.
I used to have this dream quite often, and I always woke up just as the door began to open. I never got to see who was coming in.
I do now.
“I’ve thought about this moment so often,” she said. “Gone over every detail in my mind. How you’d look. What I’d say. Real life is never quite how you expect it to be, is it?”
We stood facing one another in the night.
There’s only so much adjusting your eyes can do in that kind of darkness. She had to have been as blind as I was, but she seemed perfectly at ease.
“Well.” She held something up and I flinched, but it was just a cell phone. She touched it and a light sprang out, shining right into my eyes.
“Come on,” she said, ignoring my cry of pain. She turned the light away toward the downward slope of the mountain at our side.
“Come and sit with me,” she said. “Down here. We have a lot to talk about, and with my luck the only waking soul in town will bring their car right here and interrupt our visit.”
She held the light so it showed the earth and rock and trees, and turned herself sideways and began to edge her way down. “Come on,” she repeated.
I didn’t move. “Who are you?” I said.
It was barely a whisper, but in these silent hills it carried like a shout.
She stopped and turned the light so it was shining on her. Not right in her face, but a little across it.
She smiled.
“Emily,” she said.
“Oh, there’s a resemblance,” she said. “A little more light and you’d see it just fine.” She laughed. “Or maybe you don’t remember her face well enough.”
“I remember.”
She shrugged as if it weren’t terribly important and started making her way down the slope again. “Maybe I look more like my father, then. Come on. Carefully. Just a little way, and then we can sit down and we won’t have to worry about anyone bothering us.”
&
nbsp; I can’t say she forced me.
If she had a weapon, I couldn’t see it. And she certainly didn’t threaten me.
But I couldn’t run from her any more than I could stop hearing when she spoke to me.
She’d only have gone back to waiting for me.
And she was right: I had to come out sooner or later.
“There you are.” M sat down next to me as I huddled, knees to chin, against a tree. “Hey.”
I nodded.
“Are you cold? You look cold.”
I shook my head.
“Are you okay? You look okay.”
I smiled a little. “Just okay?”
“Well, I’m biased.”
We sat in silence. I wanted to close my eyes but I was afraid it would seem rude.
After a minute, M said, “I grew you something.”
“Excuse me?”
She handed me a small sheaf of greenery with a few purple fuzzy spots on the ends. “Lavender,” she said proudly. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty more where this came from. It grows better if you pick some now and then. Ms. Lurie made me promise to keep it in a pot because otherwise it’ll take over the whole world, but I can put it outside sometimes to get sunshine, as long as it behaves itself.”
Dickinson used to do that. Babysit her plants. Bring them inside when she worried they’d be too cold. In New England, that was a regular possibility.
M said, “It’s supposed to have healing properties.”
I gave her a skeptical look.
She exhaled loudly. “Fine. It’s pretty and it smells good. All right?”
I smiled. “Thank you.”
We were quiet again, and then: “Do you want to be alone? It’s okay if you want me to go. I won’t be hurt. Shattered, but not hurt.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m just not up to talking much right now.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I have to admit, the nonstop chatter was really starting to get to me.”
I nodded.
“That was sarcasm, in case you—”
“M, I love you. Now could you please shut up for a minute?”
“Of course.”
I put up with her anxious, watchful, resolute silence as long as I could stand it. “M—”
“Look, I’m worried about you, all right?”
“I know. But I’m really okay.”
“Well, I’m not. I’ve never worried about anyone but myself before. It’s exhausting.”
I leaned back against the tree, shifting against the roots. I was getting a little stiff and uncomfortable, but I didn’t want her to think I was going inside to get away from her.
She paused and added, “That was my way of saying I’ve never been in love before. Just in case you were wondering.”
“Where to start?”
The light was between us, closer to her.
Her hair was lighter than mine, but much darker than my mother’s.
“This is as much your story as it is mine. So, tell me: What have you always wanted to know? What have you wondered about the most?”
“Why.”
She looked at me. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not!”
“Of course you are. You’ve always wondered who.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“It is and it isn’t. But there’s something else you’ve always wondered, and you’re afraid to admit it. You don’t want to sound like a coward.”
It was ridiculous how much that stung. As though this were the time to feel insulted.
“All right,” I said. “I wondered why not me. Why, since you—whoever you were—obviously hated me so much, why you didn’t just kill me and get it over with.”
“I see. And of course that would go hand in hand with wondering why I hated you so much in the first place.”
I didn’t answer.
“Oh, my dear Emily. I wish there had been some way to talk to you sooner. I could have told you that you were the only one I didn’t hate.”
I’ve read about people feeling physically ill—feeling like throwing up—for purely emotional reasons. I always thought it was just an exaggeration.
But the way she looked at me just then made me very glad I hadn’t eaten anything recently.
In that strange spot of light in the darkness, she gave me a look that was pure warmth. Her smile was one of deepest affection.
“Emily. My little namesake.”
Don’t call me that.
“You’re the only one I loved.”
Stop.
“You always have been.”
“Don’t apologize, dear. Please. I need you to stop apologizing for something you didn’t do.”
“I lied. I lied to you, and then to that detective. I lied to everyone.”
“I’m not sure lying is the word I’d choose. ‘Lying’ sounds malicious. You didn’t have a great deal of choice, did you? You were afraid, and very much alone.” She smiled, and gently smoothed what was left of my hair. “Not to mention young.”
“What if I’d told you the truth? Told you my real name before? What would you have done?”
Ms. Lurie paused. “I have to admit, I don’t know. It’s hard to say now, after the fact. I can think of a few possibilities. But none of them include closing the door on a girl who needed this place more than anyone ever has.”
“I don’t see any reason to think she was lying to me. What she said checked out, and the things I couldn’t check were plausible. They fit in with everything else she’d told me.”
She shook her head in the darkness, as if arguing with herself.
“She was perfectly honest as long as she was talking. It was only her silences that lied.”
M picked up Brianna’s package. “Aren’t you ever going to open this stupid thing?”
“It isn’t Christmas yet.”
“You’ll have plenty to open on Christmas. I promise. And I don’t want any competition. Come on. Let’s see what’s in here.”
She was about to start tearing off the ribbon and paper herself. I took the package out of her hands. “Stop that. It’s mine.”
“Then open it.”
“When I’m ready.”
“Emily, for heaven’s sake—Santa isn’t going to get mad at you if you jump the gun on this one. I promise. If he were that strict, I’d have been put on an all-coal diet years ago.”
I looked at her. “Are you jealous?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You are jealous.”
“Well, of course I’m jealous! Somebody smart and gorgeous gave you a present, and now you’re treating it like some kind of holy relic.”
“I’m not. It’s just—kind of a first.”
M looked mortified. “Oh. Right. Crap. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“Except now I’m really jealous.”
I smiled. “Don’t be.”
“Should I return some of the stuff I got you? I got you a lot of stuff. Is that—is it all going to be too much?”
“Probably.”
“Oh.”
“M, I’m kidding. I’m just—don’t be mad if I’m bad at this kind of thing at first, okay?”
“Don’t worry about it. And, anyway, I can pace myself. I can give you some of the gifts on Christmas, and some on New Year’s, and some on Valentine’s Day, and some on your birthday, and some on Arbor Day …”
Did my father ever know?
Did she tell him who she was, at the end?
I don’t know. I was afraid to ask.
Ms. Lurie still wants me to see a therapist.
She says I shouldn’t have to deal with “all this” by myself; and when I say I don’t, she softens and says that’s true, dear, but sometimes there’s all the difference in the world between a caring friend and someone who knows how to help.
I know she wants to help. I’m sure she’s probably right.
But I’m just so tired of talking about all this. Even on paper. T
his story exhausts me. I’m tired of telling it. I’m tired of being it.
Maybe I could just sit in companionable silence with a trained professional who would occasionally say, “I know, right?” and “So, that happened,” in a meaningful voice.
I don’t think therapy works that way, though.
“She was really young. Younger than you are now.
“She didn’t want an abortion and she didn’t want to marry the guy. She wouldn’t even say who he was. I think once she knew she was pregnant, he became kind of beside the point.
“She’d never gotten along with her parents. They didn’t fight or anything—not before this happened, anyway. They just kind of lived their separate lives.
“They didn’t have anything in common, she and her parents. I think they must have been baffled by her. They were stuffy and stodgy and conventional, and she was kind of spiky and fearless and rebellious. Used to be, anyway.
“She said she felt like a changeling. She couldn’t even honestly hate them—she just didn’t understand them. And they didn’t understand her, though I’m sure they thought they loved her in their own meaningless way.
“Having a baby would mean having a real family at last.”
M’s worried sick and terrified because I said I needed to be alone for a while today. I promised her I was just going to walk around a bit and then go back to my room and read something silly, but the fact that I wasn’t doing anything special only made her feel worse.
“I’ll be quiet.”
“It isn’t that. I just need to be by myself a little.”
I could have said that I wanted to do some secret online shopping, but these days I’m a terrible liar.
Now that it’s something I can choose, solitude has lost its terror. It feels precious, even.
Maybe I’m the kind of person who just naturally likes being alone, but I never had the chance to figure that out for myself.
“She didn’t tell anyone for a long time. Months. She was practically showing by the time she said anything. She said at first she wanted to be sure, and then she wanted to be sure they couldn’t even try to make her end it. She thought after that it would all be up to her.
The Letting Go Page 21