“That isn’t the point. Stop sounding like a four-year-old.”
“What is the point?” And look who was talking like a four-year-old first. You’re not my real family.
“I’m trying to give you the whole picture, and you keep fixating on irrelevant details.”
“Fine.” I shoved my numb hands under my sweater, against my bare skin. The stab of cold nearly made me shriek, but I couldn’t feel any improvement in my fingers. I couldn’t feel much of anything. “You want me to look at the whole picture? Well, let’s see. You got to grow up and make choices. You made horrible ones.” I gave a broken kind of laugh. “To put it mildly. You chose to come back and destroy my life before I got the chance to have one. You’ve been following me around ever since, making sure I’m completely alone in the world. And now you sound like you’re waiting for me to thank you.”
I expected rage—I almost would have welcomed it at this point—but instead she just shook her head sorrowfully. “Don’t you get it, Emily?”
Don’t call me that.
“We’re all alone. Every man is an island. The only way out of loneliness is to be able to trust someone, and I wanted you to grow up knowing what I had to learn the hard way: you can’t trust anyone.”
“You want me to trust you.”
“Do I?”
“Don’t you?” God, there we were being four years old again.
“I want you to know the truth, that’s all.”
“About you?”
“About everyone. Everyone betrays you in the end. Not just now and then, or accidentally, or because you did something to them first. Always. Everyone. People will always hurt you if you give them even half a chance.”
I thought this was all I’d ever wished for.
A sister looking out for me. The truth about what happened. Someone I could talk to without having to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.
I had tried not to think too much as I slipped out of Hawthorne and down that dark road. I was hoping that if I just kept moving, I wouldn’t have to think. Wouldn’t even be able to, if I got cold and out of breath enough.
It didn’t work like that. I couldn’t stop wondering what lay ahead. How long before I got hungry enough to beg or scavenge. How far I’d be able to walk until I had to sleep. What I would have to do to keep myself safe when I did need to sleep.
These considerations were nothing compared to how it felt when, try as I would to hold them back, thoughts I’d left behind forced their way to the front of my mind. I saw M coming to my room in the morning, full of love and mischief and a million new ideas about our future. I knew exactly how her face would look as she read my letter.
I’d already seen it look that way once. That night in the library when I tried to save her.
I thought this was all the misery one night could hold.
And then she brought me her truth.
“Enough.”
M closed her hand gently around mine, managing to stop my pen without messing up my page.
“No arguing. Your eyes are bulging, and your shoulders are hunched all the way up to your ears. They have been for an hour now, at least. That has to hurt.”
“I just—”
“Later.” She didn’t move her hand. “You don’t have to write everything in the world this minute.”
“Tell me one thing, then.”
“I’ll tell you anything you want. You know that.”
She kept saying things like that. Implying a terrible intimacy between us.
“You don’t believe in loving or trusting anyone. You think everyone hurts everyone.”
“Well?”
“So why me?”
“Why you what?”
“Why care if I had to go through the same pain you say you did? According to your philosophy, I’m just one more horrible person, right? So why would my feelings matter any?”
There was a long silence. I had time to wonder, clinically, if I’d angered her.
“I’ve already told you,” she said at last. “You’re the only one I ever loved. The only one I let myself love.”
I’m carrying everything she refused to pick up.
I feel crazy because she was convinced of her own sanity.
She murdered our mother in a leisurely fashion, and mine are the hands that will never wash clean.
She’s buried, and I’m the one who can’t stop feeling cold.
“She never let me see you. She wouldn’t even show me pictures. But she told me how old you were, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you. So little. So innocent. I loved you right from the start, before I ever saw you.
“I knew I had to save you, the way I wish someone had saved me.”
“You can’t use that word. Don’t you dare use that word.”
“You think because of what I’ve done I don’t know what love means?”
Her hand touched mine in the dark.
“Careful,” she added as I wrenched my hand away and almost sent myself rolling down the slope. “You don’t want to fall.”
That sounded better than continuing this conversation.
“You’re out of your mind,” I said. “You can’t even keep your craziness straight.”
“Love isn’t crazy.”
“Remember that fucked-up mission statement you just played for me? You ruled love out! You’ve been trying to rule it out of my life for as long as I can remember!”
“You’re talking about two different things. I never said love was crazy. I said it was a bad idea. A dangerous thing. A weapon you hand to someone right before you paint a target on yourself. You have to see the truth in that.”
I couldn’t speak.
“It’s too late for me,” she continued. “I learned too late. I’m still weak. Not as much as most people, but I have my soft spots in spite of all my best efforts.
“I wanted better for you. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.
“I did it all for you, Emily.”
I wish I could doubt her sincerity.
This really was her idea of being that older sister I’d always wanted.
“She wouldn’t let me be any other kind of sister to you, Emily.”
Her tone was venomous.
“We couldn’t be anything like a real family.” She gave an astonished-sounding laugh. “She’d made sure of that right from the beginning. Never telling anyone about me—not even the man she was marrying. Naming you Emily. She said it was so she could say my name every day. It just also happened to make it impossibly awkward for her to ever introduce both of us to the same person. ‘This is my daughter Emily. And this is my daughter Emily. Long story. Care for a cup of tea?’
“Think about that, Emily. That’s who our mother was. That’s what she did to us. That’s what she did to me—and I think she really believed it when she said she loved me.”
She kept saying none of it had been about revenge. Acting shocked that I would even use that word.
Funny how not-revenge can look an awful lot like the perfect revenge.
I’m going to take your child away from you and make sure she spends the rest of her life alone, unloved and unloving.
But first I’ll let her find what’s left of you.
This night would never end.
We’d go around and around forever. Each of us convinced we knew what love really was. Each of us wanting to protect that one special person who’d slipped through our defenses and won our hearts.
We’d still be here arguing when Ms. Lurie went for her walk. When M found my letter. When the sun rose and the world woke.
We’d be here forever.
Or until she lost her patience and—what? Lashed out at me?
If I’d had no one but me to worry about that night, I think I wouldn’t have cared what she did next.
If there weren’t anyone else to worry about, I wouldn’t have been out there in the first place.
“Of course you were angry. I mean, of course you are angry. But—”
I
stumbled then. I hadn’t spoken much during this conversation, and now I knew why.
It turns out that it’s really hard to manage more than a short sentence or two when you’re talking to someone who needs it explained to her that as a matter of fact, hacking up your mother isn’t okay no matter how sad she made you.
“Emily.” Her voice was frustrated. “This wasn’t about being angry. God, why can’t you understand? I was protecting you from someone who had already destroyed one innocent child’s life.”
Someone would come looking for me.
Someone would find her.
I’d been lying by omission all my life. Now I had to commit my first big out-loud one.
“All right,” I said. “I understand.”
Either I was more convincing than I sounded to my own ears, or she was hearing what she wanted to hear.
At any rate, she believed me.
I wanted to live.
I was freezing and stiff and I could barely move, barely think. I felt like I’d been thrown into hell. There was no world outside the tiny ring of light she controlled. There was only unending darkness.
But I suddenly felt more convinced than I ever had that there was a world of light somewhere, a place full of risks and warmth and joy.
I knew there was such a place. I’d seen it.
And more than anything, I wanted to be in it.
I wanted to live. Finally.
But if I couldn’t spend another moment there myself, I could at least protect the one who’d shown it to me.
That would be a life well spent, indeed.
So I did what I had to do.
She trusted me, so I lied to her.
“You have to be kidding me.”
M tore the page out of my notebook. I sighed and took it out of her hand and began taping it back in.
“Are you honestly telling me you feel guilty for lying? To a murderer?”
I shook my head, looking down at my work.
“You do.”
“Just let me do this, M. Please.”
She raised her voice, almost to a shout. “Where the hell is that happily ever after I ordered?”
“I understand,” I said, and she smiled as if she’d been waiting all her life to hear me say that.
For all I know, she had.
“But there’s something else I need to know,” I went on.
“Anything,” she said.
“I’m sorry I’m having such a hard time. I’m making you spell everything out.”
She smiled again, practically beaming.
“I’m happy to be able to explain,” she said. “I’m so happy that I can finally tell you all this.”
I made her happy.
I made her happy.
“There’s something I don’t get,” I began again. “I mean, everything you’ve said makes sense now.”
“But?”
Her voice was warm, a little teasing. She sounded like we were at one of the slumber parties we never got to have together.
I breathed in deeply, as quietly as I could.
“I still don’t understand how Stephen James fits into all this.”
“You’re not her. You’re not anything like her. You’re not connected to her.
“Yes, all right, you can’t stop thinking about her right now. That’s because you spent your whole life as the target of some record-setting stalking.
“That’s all it means. Don’t let it mean anything else.
“I’m not kidding, Emily. This part’s on you. Don’t you dare let her keep defining your life now that you’re finally free. It’s my life, too, you know, and I say she can’t come in.
“We’re going to make a life of our own. It’s going to be amazing. You’re not going to believe how fantastic it is. No one will. We’ll be the platonic ideal of happiness. Total strangers are going to travel thousands of miles to try to catch a glimpse of what the perfect life looks like.
“We won’t let them anywhere near us, of course. But every now and then we’ll post pictures of our perfection, just to be nice.
“For now, you’re going to finish doing what you need to do. Then, when you’re ready, you’re going to write all kinds of words that have nothing to do with her. Beautiful words. Words everyone will want to read not because of what happened to you, but because you’re that good.
“Meanwhile, I’m going to paint you so you can see how gorgeous you are.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m listening.”
“Well,” she said, shifting carefully to get a bit more comfortable. “It had been a long time since—well, since you’d heard from me.”
I nodded faintly, glad she didn’t seem to expect much of a reply to that.
“And it was your last year at Hawthorne.”
I hated hearing that name in her voice. My home. My one safe place, however temporary.
“This was the year you’d have to make serious plans for your future.”
“And you wanted to make sure I made the right kind of plans.” I struggled not to sound sarcastic or accusatory.
Apparently I didn’t quite succeed. “This is important, Emily,” she said. She sounded like a teacher disappointed in her student—so promising at first, and suddenly so slow.
“I know. I’m sorry. I just—”
“Do you know? Do you really understand?”
“I—”
“This isn’t a game, Emily.” She sounded stern now. “This is life. You’re just about to begin yours. It’s important you start off on the right foot.”
My older sister, giving me a pep talk as I prepare to embark on adulthood. If Hawthorne ever starts having graduation ceremonies, maybe she can give the commencement speech.
“I don’t get it,” I managed. “I’m sorry.”
“What is it you don’t get?” Her voice was purposely patient, barely under control.
“What does all this have to do with Stephen James?”
And all control was gone.
“My God, Emily!” she exploded. “Why are you so fixated on him? Why do you keep saying his name? He doesn’t matter! He could be anybody! He could be nobody! He is nobody, so far as I’m concerned!”
She looked at me and made a visible effort to rein in her temper. “Stephen James—” she said, “since you insist on calling him that—is just a symbol. A warning. A reminder.”
“A memento mori,” I said cautiously.
She sighed. “Not exactly. But”—magnanimously—“sure. If that’s easier for you to understand, think about it that way. Not exactly ‘remember you must die,’ but remember what can happen if you slip. If you trust. If you let the wrong one in. If you let anyone in.”
I nodded again to keep her from screaming again.
“You shouldn’t have to make the mistakes I did.”
English wasn’t English anymore if she could use it like this.
“I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
I’d been driving myself crazy trying to figure it out.
Now here it was, and my mistake had been not going quite crazy enough.
She made the rules that governed my life and then she got bored and destroyed them.
Were there others? Murders I didn’t hear about, or didn’t think twice about if I did hear about them?
Did she tell herself it was important to keep her hand in, just in case?
I didn’t ask.
I could have. I could have taken just the right tone, and she would have explained how it had all been for me, she was just trying to protect me, and how could she do that if she didn’t keep her wits and weapons sharp? She never knew when she might have to act on my behalf again, after all. She couldn’t afford to get rusty.
Or maybe she would have found that very idea beneath her. Maybe she thought practice murders would profane her noble mission.
I didn’t ask.
I didn’t want to know.
She was telling me the truth. Finally someone was tell
ing me all the truth I’d ever wanted.
If this was what being set free felt like, I wanted to go back to living in my prison of rules.
Stephen James had died because I’d never really been able to keep people like him safe in the first place.
Maybe that should have been a relief.
“I wish—”
“What?”
“I guess I wish you’d—I don’t know. Told me what was going on. Like you are now. Contacted me somehow.”
“I just told you, silly. That’s exactly what I did.”
I hoped that, wherever Stephen James was, he couldn’t hear himself being talked about like this.
“Yes, but—”
“I did what I could with what I had. You had to be the one to make the next move.”
I went too far.
She could believe a lot, now that she thought I was the eager younger sister she’d always wanted, but she wasn’t going to buy just anything. Not quite yet.
This was too much too soon.
Maybe I could have gotten away with it a little later.
“And now?”
“Now?”
“Well. I made that next move. I came out. I found you. I learned the truth.”
“Yes.” So softly I could barely hear her. Lovingly.
“So, now what?”
“I suppose that’s up to you.”
“Me?”
“Is there someone else here?”
“You dreamed about her again, didn’t you.”
She didn’t even bother with a question mark.
Was I supposed to apologize?
“I just can’t believe she’s gone.”
About anyone else, that would have sounded desperately sad. Here, it was just desperate.
“It’s up to you,” she said. “What do you want now?”
I wanted M. I wanted life. I wanted anywhere but here.
I wanted to not know any of this. I wanted to go back to not knowing why my life was the way it was. To having rules. I wanted to go back to being an only child whose life was bad enough that total strangers wanted to read and write about it.
The Letting Go Page 24