“I want to be with you, of course.”
Maybe that “of course” pushed it over the top.
More likely she never would have trusted me. Not completely.
She wanted so much to have me be that one exception to Emily Madwoman’s Universal Law of Human Depravity. She wanted me to be the perfect child she’d reared up in the cold darkness of truth. She wanted me to not only forgive her for murdering our mother, but thank her for it.
She wanted to believe in me more than anything, and so of course she couldn’t.
“I see.”
Her tone had become warm, even eager, when she’d started to think I was on her side. Now she was back to sounding the way she had in the beginning: cool, clinical, a little mocking.
“I always made sure you never had the chance to hurt me.”
“I—”
“Don’t.” She held up one hand. “Don’t throw me any nonsense about how you’d never do that.”
“Maybe I thought you could be different from everyone else. With my help.”
I laughed, trying to sound natural. “I am different,” I said. “Haven’t you read the books?”
She was so much taller than I am.
I hadn’t noticed at first. I had other things on my mind.
She stood up now, and she was the size of an avenging angel.
“Tell me the truth,” she said.
I stared up at her. I wanted to stand up, too, but I barely felt safe sitting. Gravity is always stronger in the dark.
She didn’t seem to notice. She was absentmindedly strong and sure. She loomed over me, and she made standing on that slope look easy.
“Don’t you dare lie to me. I’ve been lied to my whole life.”
“No, you haven’t,” I said before I could stop myself.
Even when my words infuriated her, she always seemed fascinated by whatever I had to say.
Her eyes certainly widened at that sentence. Her whole body focused on me, like a cat who wants to pounce while she has the chance but can’t help watching the bird play first.
There are people whose interest I’d just as soon not catch, but right at the end I really had hers.
“Nobody lied to you. People told you truths you didn’t want to hear. That isn’t the same thing.”
“I was the one who told the truth.”
She was snarling at me now.
“Our mother wanted me to stay in the shadows. She snuck around behind her husband’s back to see me. She acted like I was a criminal just by existing.
“Fine. That’s what she wanted? That’s what I gave her.
“She chose that truth. Not me.
“She wanted to live a lie. I wouldn’t let her.”
She’d killed my father almost as an afterthought. She never even mentioned her own.
I guess she didn’t care enough to look for him, and our mother never said who he was.
“I thought you’d be different,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I thought you’d understand.
“You of all people I thought would understand.”
I couldn’t stay sitting anymore, never mind how iffy the ground under my feet was.
Not when my sister was standing above me looking stunned and betrayed.
“Why?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I needed to.
“Why did you think that? How could you?”
I was struggling to my feet and she was moving toward me. There wasn’t much space between us as it was, but she was closing that gap.
“I wanted to take you with me.”
I think she did. I think she had a dream and I was in it.
“I wanted you to understand.”
I was just beginning to get up. This was the end and I was going to face it on my feet, even if she proceeded to knock me down.
Maybe she would have.
My foot slipped and I fell back, hard; and then I started to slide into darkness.
It’s amazing to me that no matter how hideous things get, there’s always room for a little more terror.
I could see two things in that near-perfect darkness.
The first was my sister’s face, wearing an expression I’ll never forget and will spend the rest of my life trying to interpret.
She looked deathly pale, and she was reaching toward me.
“Torture is illegal, you know.”
At least she wasn’t trying to break another of my pens.
“It’s allowed if you’re the one doing it to yourself.”
“Please—”
“I’m almost finished. I promise.”
She couldn’t quite reach me, and I’d have died before I took her hand. If that had been the only thing in the world that could save me, I would have accepted death instead.
I didn’t want to die, but now I knew there were worse things, and taking her hand would have been one of them.
I know that’s true because that’s what was going through my mind in so many words as I slipped and she reached toward me and I couldn’t tell if she was reaching to pull or to push.
I really couldn’t tell.
It was dark and she was crazy.
Sometimes I hate the idea that there’s a God because then what does that say about his world? And sometimes I hope more than anything there’s a God so I can ask him: What really happened?
That’s the only way I’ll know for sure.
“It has to be okay. You have to be okay with this. This is the happy ending either way. Not just for you, but for her.”
“How is plummeting to her death happy?”
“If she was trying to help you, she gave her life to save yours. That shove she gave you on her way down—that’s why you didn’t go tumbling after her. If that’s what she was hoping for, she knew it worked. She fell alone. That’s her redemption.”
“But—”
“She kept saying everything she did was about protecting you. Well, she finally got it right.”
“But I wouldn’t have needed protecting if it hadn’t been for her.”
“You really think she’d understand that?”
Silence.
“It’s as happy as it could get, is what I’m saying. For her.”
She didn’t say anything as she fell. She didn’t even cry out.
We were both moving in a confusion of darkness and unforgiving slopes and surfaces, and then I was still and she was falling and she didn’t make a sound.
I heard her fall for what seemed like forever, but she’d spoken her last words without getting the chance to plan them.
I sat absolutely still.
I was curled so tight I might as well have been just another rock on that slope.
I listened until there was nothing more to hear, and then I sat in that particular silence.
“What if she wasn’t trying to save me?”
“Then she fell because she was being evil. Karma is its own kind of happy ending.”
“Not for her.”
“If she was trying to kill you, she didn’t deserve to be happy.”
“You said it was a happy ending for her no matter what she was thinking.”
“I lied.”
I haven’t told anyone this part.
Alone in that darkness, I wanted to let go and follow her.
I’d lost that brief, glowing sense of life as something beautiful and precious.
I didn’t want to live with knowing what she’d told me. I didn’t see the point.
I didn’t want to live with the memory of her falling.
I didn’t see how the world could ever be light or warm, ever again.
I sat in the darkness.
I wouldn’t even have to move, really. No need for a big dramatic leap. I could just relax.
The end would be as easy as letting go.
That’s when I saw something. Just above, where she and I had met and she’d told me her name and I’d thought she was calling mine.
There was a flicker of mov
ement and a flash of light. Blinding whiteness.
“Emily?”
“I couldn’t have gone after her. I couldn’t help her. I would have died, too, if I’d tried.”
“That’s true. Even if you’d had the equipment and the expertise, there was absolutely nothing you could have done under the circumstances. By the time you’d started, it would already have been too late for her. You’d have been risking your life for nothing.”
“I know.”
Ms. Lurie looked at me shrewdly. “And do you believe that?”
“No.”
I don’t know if I would have hidden from her voice if I could have gotten away with it.
It was a moot point anyway. M knew I was there.
She’d left Hawthorne not that long after I did. I hadn’t been as quiet as I thought when I’d slipped out, and, anyway, she’d half expected me to attempt some kind of escape.
She’d caught up, quietly. We’d have seen her if my sister hadn’t made us tuck ourselves away on that slope.
She’d been listening and trying, with what was probably her lifetime’s supply of discretion, to figure out what the best thing to do was. Would speaking up help me, or put us both at risk? But what if listening in silence wasn’t any safer?
She’d just about made up her mind to speak up—though she still wasn’t sure what on earth she’d have said—when everything happened very quickly and there was no one left to talk to but me.
“Emily? Oh, God—are you all right? Do you need help?”
That’s what got me moving. That’s the only reason I started moving, carefully, and calling out a caution when all I wanted to do forever was stay in the darkness where I belonged.
If I hadn’t made that short, weary, stiff-limbed climb and told her that’s what I was doing and made her stay right there where she was, she would have tried to help me. With the absolute, blind, impractical determination that had sent her looking for me in the same frivolous nightgown she’d been wearing the night we met, she’d have tried to climb down and save me.
And she damned well would have gotten us both killed.
So I felt my way by inches and made my way up.
I had to tell her to stop shining her light right in my damned face for hell’s sake.
“Oh, Emily!”
“Just stay there. Shine that just in front of me, so I’ve got a path.”
I was going by feel, but I figured it would calm her down to have something definite to do.
Her arms around me almost knocked me over. “Emily. God. Oh, God. You’re safe.”
I couldn’t move.
“You heard? You heard her?”
She nodded.
“You know what happened? Everything?” Who I was? Who she was?
“Yes.”
Her arms were still around me, and that was a shock even on that night.
“Let’s go home. Let’s get you warm. My God, you’re freezing.”
“But—”
“We’ll figure it all out there. First things first.”
Ms. Lurie was awake when we got there. That helped.
She didn’t scold, and she didn’t ask to hear the whole story. She didn’t ask anything right then, except, “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” That helped a lot.
She brought me into her own room and ran me a bath in her own deep, claw-footed tub, with lots of bubbles for privacy.
That should have been wonderful. At the time, I could barely feel it. I just kept thinking about what I had to do.
“Ms. Lurie …”
“Take this.” A steaming hot mug of tea.
“I have to tell you something.”
“I know, dear. But it can wait.”
“It’s waited too long.”
“Is someone in trouble? Is there something I need to do right away?”
I thought about that loud, voiceless fall.
“I don’t know.”
She told the police that a couple of her students had been foolish enough to be out very late and had seen a woman on the side of the road, walking and then falling.
M was able to give her a good idea of where and when.
They looked, and eventually they found.
The news didn’t scream as loudly as I would have expected. People do fall down these mountains from time to time. She didn’t have any ID on her and so there was some puzzling over who she might be, but if they’ve figured it out nobody’s told me.
She never told me her last name.
For all I know she had it changed to our mother’s birth name, or maybe even her married name. Just to make a point.
Maybe she came up with something completely new, like I did.
At any rate, my last name’s staying where it is. I’m not going back.
The little girl whose loved ones kept getting murdered until she figured out how not to have any is going to have to stay an unsolved mystery, at least until after I die and these pages can be published safely. Just like I planned, but with a much more complete ending than I ever thought I’d be able to supply.
It still feels a little bit like lying to leave that little girl in the shadows, but I don’t see what else I can do.
Not if I want to live—really live. And I do.
“It doesn’t matter if she gets it after Christmas. Before New Year’s is still the holiday season. And she’ll be glad to hear from you whenever she gets it, dear. That’s what counts.”
I didn’t know what to say, but the card already had a message printed in it so I just scribbled Dear Grandma Jean Louise above that and Emily below.
I wanted to say “Love From,” but it seemed a little sudden.
I can always say that when I write her a thank-you letter and tell her what I spent her check on. When I finally cash it. I’m still working up the nerve, but M promised to nag me unbearably if I haven’t done it by the end of January.
Maybe if I just act like all those years never happened, she will, too, and we can just be grandmother and granddaughter as if we always had been.
And maybe I can ask her to tell me stories about my father. It would be nice to know more about him than his cause of death.
Not just yet, but soon.
“You didn’t have to get me anything. We already talked about that, remember? This is your practice Christmas. You’re still taking notes on how to be normal.”
“Thanks.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“And, anyway, I’m enjoying spoiling you rotten.”
I managed to get Ms. Lurie something, to both our great surprise. The fact that she likes bubble bath—and bath salts and scented soaps and all sorts of other bathy things I never would have thought to associate with strong, practical, no-nonsense Ms. Lurie—was one more weird revelation of that night.
I went online and ordered her some really pricey lavender bath stuff. A big basket full of jars and boxes and bottles of pale purple things. I have no idea what most of it’s for, but it was pretty and it smelled good when it arrived and I’m sure she can figure it out.
“Thank you, dear,” she said on Christmas morning. She looked a little stunned. Well, it was a pretty big basket. You could have fit a baby in there, with room to crawl around.
“It’s just—I used up all your bubble bath. When, you know, I came back.”
She laughed. “No, not quite all. But thank you. I won’t run out anytime soon now.”
It’s weird how easy it was to find something for someone I don’t know all that well. It was only right to give something to Miss Miller after all the baking she’s done for me, especially since she was spending Christmas at Hawthorne, too.
I gave it to her early in case she wanted to use it before or even during Christmas. (The woman does love to bake.) “I don’t know if this is something you’ll use, but it’s kind of pretty anyway,” I said clumsily as I handed her the heavy package. “And it’s really old.”
She looked startled, and then she tore
off the paper and saw the nineteenth-century cast-iron baking tin I’d found online. I hadn’t been sure what kind she might like, so I finally got one that was really pricey—there must be a reason for it to cost so much, right?—and old and rare and shaped like flowers, in case she just wanted to hang it up instead of actually baking with it.
I’d had huge second thoughts about that after it arrived and it was too late to change my mind or get her something else. Maybe it was weird to think she’d want to bake in something that old. Creepy or something. Germy?
Miss Miller didn’t think so. While I was trying to explain where I’d found it and what it was and why I’d thought of her, she teared up and gave me my first non-M hug since I was a baby, practically.
And then we had flower-shaped muffins—more like little cakes, really—on Christmas morning.
It was kind of embarrassing when she insisted on giving me partial credit for those, especially when she brought the tin out and Ms. Lurie oohed over it. Even M looked impressed, which surprised me. Well, she does like beautiful things, and it’s a legitimate antique.
Should I have gotten her one? But M hates cooking. At least I’m pretty sure she does. She set cornflakes on fire once.
That might have just been for fun, though. She was playing around with one of those little kitchen blowtorches. At the breakfast table.
How on earth do I shop for someone when that’s her idea of a good time?
“Anyway, I didn’t exactly get you this.”
I spent hours and hours online shopping. Or browsing, at least.
I couldn’t get her art supplies. I don’t know anything about them. And there’s a lot out there. How do I know what she’d really use? Anyway, she has plenty of money to buy that kind of thing for herself.
The Letting Go Page 25