The Letting Go

by Deborah Markus

  “God, you’re an idiot,” M said.

  I don’t usually show her this journal, but I’m still having a hard time talking and it was easier than trying to explain.

  “Set the record straight, please, writer-girl,” she went on, standing up and smacking my notebook down on the bed next to me. “I’m not afraid of you getting angry at me. You can scream at me all day, if that’s what you want to do. Throw something while you’re at it. Something light, at least.”

  “Okay,” I said carefully. I meant about the me-being-angry bit, not the part about throwing things, but she didn’t give me time to explain.

  “I’m not even afraid you’ll break up with me. No,” she said, catching my expression. “I’m not. If that were really what you wanted. If you were getting tired of my brand of craziness. Or if you wanted to explore the possibilities now that you’re free. I could hardly blame you for that. I’d be miserable and enraged and probably throw some things myself, but I’d survive. I’m good at that.”

  She sat down next to me, hard.

  “Get it right,” she said. “What I’m worried about is you just kind of slipping away. Not leaving me. Just leaving. I know what to do when someone breaks up with me. I don’t know what to do when you’re right there but you’re not really there.”

  She smiled a little, reminiscently. “I think I liked it better when you were screaming at me to leave you the hell alone all the time.”

  “The good old days.”

  “She swore to me you were an accident. Maybe you were. She certainly waited long enough to have you.

  “I think she was lying. Just that once, she lied to me. I’m sure she told herself she was protecting my feelings. Really she was protecting herself.

  “I think really she was desperate to have another baby, one nobody could ever take away from her.

  “Why else would she have named you after me?”

  “She says she thought about me all the time, and she did but in a way she didn’t. She thought about the baby who was taken away from her. She didn’t think of me as someone who could ever grow up.

  “I think she got the shock of her life when I got in touch with her. I’d been such an abstract idea. The Baby. The child she hadn’t been allowed to keep. Now, all of a sudden, here I was. A person. Someone who could walk and talk and ask her questions.

  “Of course she said she was thrilled to see me.”

  “Why Emily?”

  Everybody’s name has a story behind it. Emily Dickinson was named after her mother. Her sister Lavinia was named after an aunt. Even when a name is brand-new for that family, there’s a reason for it. It’s a favorite character in a book or a movie. It’s a politician or a war hero. Sometimes it’s a place. (Some places are better than others. Madison, okay. Minneapolis, not so much.) Sometimes it’s completely made up, because the mom wants to make sure no one else in the world has that name.

  “I don’t know,” my sister said. “I never thought to ask.” She smiled at me.

  She smiled at me every time I asked her a question. Fondly. Proudly, even—look at that smart little girl over there.

  It made me sick, but she was the only one I could ask anything.

  “I guess she just liked it,” she said. “She liked it enough to keep using it, anyway.”

  “I’m not avoiding you, and I’m not going all True Love Waits. I just feel like I’m never going to be warm again.”

  “Oh, Emily.”

  She put her arms around me, and all I could feel was a wish that she’d brought a heavy blanket with her while she was at it.

  “My hands are freezing, and my feet have been a little numb since—since we got back that night.”

  “Tell Ms. Lurie. Maybe you should talk to the doctor again.”

  I shook my head. “She said I’m fine. Ms. Lurie says so, too. Physically, I mean. Here. Feel.” I pushed one of her sleeves up and put my hands on her bare arm.

  M frowned. “They’re not cold. Not even a little.”

  “I know. I’m perfectly warm. Perfectly normal, temperature-wise. I just can’t feel it.”

  “We had—dates. I don’t know how else to put it.” She laughed jaggedly. “When I got in touch with her, I expected—I don’t know what I expected, exactly. I just knew this wasn’t it. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.”

  “She called me by my name and she cried.

  “It felt like such an act. Not like she was faking it, but like she was excited that she could finally play the role she’d been waiting to perform for so long.”

  How much of it was true?

  Maybe it’s not fair for me to question anything she told me. She’s the one who was there. And she knew my mother better than I did, in a way. Maybe in a lot of ways.

  I spent more time with her, but I wasn’t exactly gathering information. I was just alive. And not old enough to be particularly aware.

  She had conversations with her. That’s more than I ever got to do.

  I can’t believe I’m sitting here feeling guilty about doubting the truthfulness of a murderer.

  And I really can’t believe I find myself feeling sorry for her sometimes.

  When I’m not busy having nightmares that she’s still alive.

  “So you blackmailed her.”

  She just stared through the darkness at me.

  Don’t make her angry, a sensible voice that wasn’t my own whispered silently.

  “It wasn’t blackmail. She gave me money because she wanted to. A lot of money. She’s the one who offered in the first place. She said it was my birthright.

  “She loved that part, I think. Taking money she’d inherited from her parents and giving it to the child they’d made her give up. The child who would have shamed them by her very existence.

  “So, no, it wasn’t blackmail. If anything, it was her trying to control me. She thought we’d have an understanding. ‘I’ve given you so much. I love you so much. It wasn’t my fault they took you away from me. So let’s just keep you our little secret, shall we?’ ”

  Her eyes gleamed in the tiny glare of light she kept such careful control over.

  “She’s the one who wanted the lies, the secrecy. Not me.

  “Sure, it all started with her parents. But she didn’t have to go along with what they wanted. This wasn’t the 1950s. She had choices. She was just too much of a coward to make the ones that would have kept me in her life.

  “Then I gave her a second chance, and she still said no.”

  “Emily, she’s gone. I promise.”

  Ms. Lurie was holding my hands tightly, and all the lights were on. It hurt my eyes, but I still wanted more.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, and I’m not mistaken. Believe me. The news report was quite specific.

  “You’re going to have to live with what she’s done. I can’t take that away from you, no matter how much I’d like to. But she’s never going to do anything else, to you or to anyone.

  “You need to believe that, Emily. She isn’t some kind of revenant. She was a terribly hurt, terribly angry person who destroyed a lot of lives, and now her own life is over and you need to live yours.”

  I know.

  “Can I keep the light on when you go?” Ms. Lurie hates wasting electricity.

  Ms. Lurie smiled. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “No, I want you to. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow. You should walk while you can.”

  “Would you like to come with me?”

  I thought about that. It was four in the morning, but it wasn’t as if I’d be getting more sleep any time soon. I didn’t even want to.

  We’re the ones having them and we’re the ones who make them, so why are nightmares so terrible? Why do we hurt ourselves like this?

  It doesn’t make sense.

  My sister torturing other people doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ll bet she never had a bad dream in her life.

  Maybe that isn’t fair. Maybe it was all a nightmare for her, too. />
  Still she haunts me, phantomwise …

  She said that at one point. To me. About me.

  I know it’s from a poem but I don’t know which one. I don’t want to.

  It better not be Dickinson, that’s all.

  “Emily?”

  “Yes,” I said, and then, “Do we have to talk?”

  She gave my hands a parting squeeze and then stood up, dropping a swift kiss on my forehead. “No, and you don’t have to brush your hair first. Just don’t forget your boots, please.”

  “She kept telling me how complicated it all was. She wanted to have a relationship with me—she’d always wanted that. She’d never stopped missing me. She celebrated my birthday every year, she said. She got coffee and a fancy pastry at the priciest bakery she could find, and then she bought a piece of jewelry she imagined I might like. Never wore it, either. Just set it aside.”

  I don’t remember my mother wearing any jewelry. Was I just too young to notice? I seem to remember thinking she was so pretty that she didn’t need to wear jewelry, but maybe I only thought that later. Her wedding ring was always on her hand, but it seemed as much a part of her as her hair.

  “She kept it in a box she never showed anyone, and she gave it all to me the first time we met. She had great taste, I’ll give her that much. Must have been those frustrated artistic impulses coming to the surface.

  “And she spent a small fortune. If she hadn’t given me all that money, I could have survived a long time anyway on what I would have made selling the jewelry.”

  I looked for a gleam of gold around her neck or in her ears. She noticed and smiled, holding her hand into the light. A pretty ring, gold with a single pearl.

  “Happy birthday,” she said. “Sweet sixteen.”

  “What’s a revenant?”

  It was much too early and dark and cold even for Ms. Lurie to be out, but we were stumbling along anyway, bundled up in hasty layers, looking like mummies who didn’t own mirrors. M would have been appalled.

  “Someone who returns from the dead,” Ms. Lurie said. “Usually someone whose life was misspent, and who comes back to haunt her family.”

  “So far as she was concerned, the damage had already been done. The chance for her to be my mother in any meaningful sense had been lost a long time ago.

  “She’d never told her husband about me. But explaining to him would have been a piece of cake compared to trying to tell you the good news.”

  She could have. She could have told me.

  When you’re that young, the world is completely insane anyway. Nothing makes sense. So why not add a little more weirdness to the mix?

  I’d been terrified by an open cupboard door, for hell’s sake. I probably would have handled something really strange just fine.

  Guess what, honey? You have a sister!

  Parents have to say that kind of thing all the time. They’re just usually talking about a younger sibling.

  She could have told me.

  I guess telling my father would have been a lot more complicated. That’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to bring up before the wedding, not ten years after.

  “Where did you go?”

  “What?”

  “When you were—talking to each other. Where were you?”

  “Oh. Out, mostly. She’d meet me somewhere. Odd little restaurants or cafés. Places where she could feel pretty sure she wouldn’t see anyone she knew.”

  Oh.

  “I did come over once or twice. Toward the end. I really laid on the guilt, and she finally agreed. Just once or twice. Late. Like a lover. When her husband was out of town and you were up in your room and the neighbors were sound asleep. Their windows were dark, at least.

  “She thought she had everything under control. She thought she was protecting herself.”

  “She had everything the way she wanted it. Rich handsome husband. Cute respectable legitimate baby girl. Stability. Peace.

  “I was a threat to all of that.”

  “I realized she didn’t love me. She just loved the idea of being my secret mother.

  “But she had a real daughter now. She didn’t need me in her life. I’d just get in the way.

  “Even getting back at her parents wouldn’t be worth it now. It was too late for that.

  “I’d complicate things unbearably for her, now.”

  “People believed in them, even really recently. It’s amazing. There was a family in New England in the late nineteenth century—the late 1800s, this was—who thought their teenage daughter was coming back from the grave and feeding off her brother. The townspeople dug her body up and burned her heart and liver and fed her brother the ashes. They thought that would cure him.”

  M looked a little green. “And … did it?”

  “Oh no. He died a few months later.”

  She took a deep breath. “Emily, you know I want you to be happy. And I know you want to give the Dickinson research a break for a while, and I think that’s fine. Probably a good idea, even. But do you really think this new interest is, well, healthy?”

  “I don’t see how revenants are any different from those saint stories of yours.”

  “Give me a minute and I’ll write you a list. A long list.”

  “She thought we should just do what we’d been doing. Talking, privately. Seeing each other on the sly. You know—when she had nothing better to do and could get away from her real family.

  “She’d keep giving me money no one would miss, and trinkets no one knew she owned.

  “She didn’t understand what more I could want from her.”

  All those conversations in the dining room after Stephen James was killed. Listening to my Hawthorne sisters complain about their nice, annoying, blessedly boring parents. Hearing M coolly mock her decidedly unboring mother.

  Feeling jealous that I’d never be able to do anything as ordinary as find some imperfection in my own.

  Did I think about this that night, or is it only striking me now?

  Either way, I guess I got what I wished for.

  “This was never about revenge. Is that really what you think? Don’t you understand?”

  If I’d been able to breathe, I might have laughed. She sounded so indignant.

  So much trouble and blood, and here I was being stupid.

  “Have you heard a word I’ve said? I was trying to protect you.”

  Memories shift and I have to write this one down. I’m the only one who can.

  I can feel things slipping away from me already.

  “Don’t forget you’ve got me. My memory’s pretty good.”

  I know, and I’m glad she was there because I don’t think I could have brought myself to tell her everything.

  What if she blamed me? What if she hated me?

  What if she didn’t want to be anywhere near me after that?

  She can leave. She can do anything she wants.

  Why does she still want me?

  “I’ve already told you you’re an idiot. I’ll tell you again as often as you need me to.”

  “Thanks.”

  M kissed me, gently. “Any warmer?”

  “A little.”

  “So all of this was just revenge? I stole our mother from you, so you stole her back?”

  “How is killing everyone I ever loved protecting me?”

  My hair isn’t really long enough to braid—it barely was before I took the scissors to it that night—but M likes to try anyway. I think it’s partly because she can’t stand not having everything around her be decorative, and partly because it’s a way of being close that doesn’t make me freeze up or jump a mile. I like how it feels when she touches my hair, even if she pulls it a bit sometimes.

  “I know what you mean,” she murmured, trying to make a French braid happen.

  “But it isn’t right. I’d be able to believe that somebody else did what she did. I just can’t believe my own mother would.”

  “Of course not. We all want our mother
s to be boring. That’s certainly my mother’s only redeeming quality.” M gave up her attempts at braiding and pulled out the sharp, tiny pair of scissors she’d already used to even up what was left of my hair. “I wonder how you’d look with bangs,” she murmured, pulling and pushing my hair around.

  “Why do I keep thinking so much about that part of it?” I asked. “Her part? Considering everything else I know now, why do I keep thinking about what my mother did?”

  “Because she’s your mother and you thought you knew her and it turns out you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t think I knew her at all. I didn’t know anything about her except that she was my mother.”

  “That’s its own kind of knowing.”

  She seemed surprised that I needed so much explained to me.

  “I didn’t want you to have to go through what I went through.”

  “Not having our mother? Or my own father? Or anyone to call my own? I did go through that. I’ve been completely alone my whole life—more alone than you ever were. All thanks to you.”

  I could barely see her, but her voice expressed what must have been on her face: total disbelief. “How can you possibly say that?”

  I was numb from sitting in the dark cold for so long, listening to this nightmare. I was wrapped in terror.

  “You were adopted,” I said. “You got to have a family.”

  “They weren’t my family. Not my real family.”

  “What do you mean? Just because they weren’t related to you, why shouldn’t they count for something? They still wanted you. Were they mean to you? Did they hurt you?” Did they leave corpses around for you to trip over in the dark?

  “No, they weren’t ‘mean.’ ” Her tone was mocking. “They weren’t anything. Not to me.”

  “But didn’t they care about you? Why did they adopt you if—”