The Letting Go

by Deborah Markus

  If I were any good at buying pretty clothes, I wouldn’t be the person who dresses, as M so tactfully puts it, like a stray rain cloud at midnight.

  Jewelry? She’d think I was proposing.

  Everything I could think of was too big or too small or just plain inadequate. What do you buy for the girl who is everything?

  I know her as well as she knows me—okay, other than the whole reading-true-crime-books-about-my-life-before-we-even-met aspect of our relationship—and still I couldn’t think of a thing to get her; and she came up with about a million presents for me, and hinted that she’d restrained herself.

  It was all really good, too. She made it look easy.

  “I’m sorry my handwriting isn’t as good as yours.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Nobody’s handwriting is as good as mine.”

  She opened that envelope pretty eagerly for someone who kept insisting she didn’t want anything.

  I’d been thinking of ordering some nice thick parchmenty paper and copying out some of my favorite Dickinson poems and letters—original punctuation and capitalization, of course. I’d have used different colored inks to show different moods, and maybe annotated them a little. Not the usual kind of annotation, where the editor talks about what she thinks Dickinson was talking about. Just about why I chose the particular poem or letter, and why it feels as if Dickinson were talking to or about me. Or M. Or us.

  I didn’t, in the end. Partly because no matter how neat I try to be, my writing just isn’t that pretty. It’s legible, but no one could call it decorative. And a gift should be pretty.

  I can work on that. I could write really slowly and throw in some curlicues. I’d fooled around with a bit of that on normal paper, and it had actually come out looking okay.

  But I was so obsessed with Dickinson for so long. She was kind of my job. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’m really tired just now. I want to come back to her when I feel like it, because I feel like it.

  She’ll never stop being the writer I love most, and I hate to betray someone who was there for me when pretty much no one else was—but that’s just it. I want to have some time to build up good associations with her. I think that’ll be easier when I’m more firmly established in a life where I’m allowed to have good associations with anyone.

  It would be a little painful just now to go back through the poems that meant so much to me and have to think about why they meant so much.

  She did write an awful lot about death.

  Anyway, if I’d done a project like this because I had to, all in a rush—because I had to figure out something to give M for Christmas—my favorite writer would have felt like a chore. And I don’t want that.

  Maybe I can do this project for M’s birthday. That gives me some time. And I have the feeling it’s going to take me a while to relax into shopping for her. It’ll be good to have a backup plan in place.

  “Are these the kind of coupons where you promise to wash my car any time I want?”

  “You don’t have a car.”

  “It’s the thought that counts.”

  “They’re not that kind of coupon. They’re—truths. You can read them whenever you want and know they’re true even when I’m having a hard time talking.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t make fun of my handwriting,” I warned again as she opened the stapled-together booklet to the first page.

  “Please shut up. I’m trying to have a special moment here.”

  She paused, and then read aloud. “‘You’re beautiful.’ ” And then she actually blushed. A lot. I made M blush. “Oh.”

  “Keep reading.” I’d been kind of dreading this, but now it was turning out to be fun.

  She turned to the next one. “‘I’m glad you were pushy.’ I was never pushy.”

  “You were only pushy.”

  “Well, somebody had to be.”

  “I said that. In writing. Come on, read some more.”

  “‘I wanted to keep that first rose you gave me, but I was afraid to.’ ‘I kept the second one even though I was afraid to.’ ‘Flowers you draw are the only flowers I want.’ ”

  Her voice was a little rough now.

  “‘Having the chance to be with you is more happiness than I ever dreamed would be possible. It’s more happiness than normal people ever get a chance at.’ ”

  That was the last one she read out loud. She finished the rest in silence, and I didn’t keep copies so I don’t remember what the rest of them said.

  Doesn’t matter if I don’t know, as long as she does.

  “Thanks a lot,” she said in a thick voice. “Brat. I spent a fortune on you, and now I feel like a complete loser.”

  “You’re not. I love everything you got me. Don’t you dare take any of it back.” I clutched the life-sized stuffed panther so I could feel it purr again. “I just didn’t know how to do that for you yet. I told you I’d be bad at this at first.”

  She said nothing. “I promise I’ll buy you normal stuff from now on,” I added. “I’ll have time to figure that out by the time the next big holiday comes around.”

  “Yes. You will. And I’ll be happy to give you lessons. And plenty of subtle hints.”

  “Not too subtle.”

  “No worries.”

  Ms. Lurie made a fire—a big real one with big real logs—in the fireplace in the lounge. She kept it going all day and into the night. Even though the weather wasn’t that cold, it was nice to wrap up in blankets on the couch and stare at the fire and pretend it was real winter. Cozy.

  Ms. Lurie was in her office with a pot of tea, talking Christmas on the phone with her various daughters. None of them were able to make the trip this year and she hadn’t wanted to leave Hawthorne. I feel guilty about that, but she insists that’s what she would have done anyway. She doesn’t like to play favorites, and she can’t be four different places at once.

  Miss Miller was playing around in the kitchen, so that left just M and me bundled up in front of the fire.

  “I don’t remember believing in him,” I said. “I guess I probably did when I was little. That seems like the kind of thing that—I think my mother would have told me the usual story.”

  “Mine, too. I was furious when she finally told me the truth.”

  “Emily Dickinson believed in him. Even when she was our age, she wrote letters to her friends about what Santa had put in her stocking. She was always kind of a kid, even when she grew up.”

  “I like that.”

  “Me, too.” I paused. “Aunt Paulette couldn’t be bothered with fairy tales. Anyway, if she was the one paying for Christmas, she was going to make sure she got full credit for it.”

  “She sounds like such a lovely woman. Remind me to write a will when I turn eighteen so I can leave her out of it.”

  “She wasn’t all awful. Okay, I guess she mostly was. But I mean, she did get a tree and presents and stuff when I lived with her. No stockings—I don’t know why. Too personal, I guess. But presents. And lots of candy.” I smiled. “And then she’d yell at me for eating too much of it.”

  “Charming.”

  “She actually managed to give me some pretty good presents. By accident. She knew I loved reading, so she’d go to the bookstore and tell them how old I was and that I was a girl and then buy whatever they told her to. Same thing at the toy store.”

  “My mother is actually a superb shopper. She doesn’t have to know someone at all—God knows she doesn’t know me—but she can always find a terrifyingly perfect gift for any occasion. She’s got a real knack. I’ve told her she should go into business for herself. There are people who’ll pay plenty to have someone else do their shopping for them. But she just thinks I’m making fun of her.”

  “Can’t imagine where she’d get an idea like that.”

  “No clue.”

  We were quiet for a minute. Fires are good things to have around to fill in pauses. They give you something to look at and listen to, but they
don’t interrupt when you want to start talking again.

  “After I started going to boarding school,” I said finally, slowly, “Aunt Paulette made excuses about why I couldn’t come back on holiday breaks. Why I had to stay at school all the time. She never used to travel, but she suddenly started taking all these long trips during the summer, and over winter breaks.”

  M didn’t say anything. She pushed a little closer, very gently, and snuggled her head against my shoulder.

  “At first she sent me little presents. For my birthday and for Christmas. I’d always try to send her some kind of thank-you letter, but I could never figure out what to write. So then she just started sending cards, and eventually even that kind of fizzled out. We haven’t spoken in years now.”

  “Doesn’t she ever even call you? She is your guardian. And your aunt. She could at least pretend that means something.”

  “She isn’t my guardian anymore. No one is. And—I don’t think either of us would know what to say. She never liked me, even before she might have figured out she should be afraid to get close to me. I don’t blame her for pulling away.”

  “I do.”

  I thought about it, and then smiled a little. “I guess I do, too.”

  M shivered and pulled another blanket over us. “There’s a long tradition of telling creepy stories at Christmastime,” she said. “That’s why Dickens wrote about all those ghosts. But the stories weren’t supposed to be this scary.”

  After M dozed off on my shoulder, I took a look at a book she’d given me. “I scoped out your shelves,” she’d said. “If you already have this and you’ve got it hidden away somewhere, I’ll have to throttle you.”

  I didn’t. I’d never even heard of it. “‘Revelations of Divine Love,’ ” I’d read slowly. “Um.”

  “I know it sounds preachy, but I swear it’s not,” M said. “I’m not trying to convert you or anything. Especially when I’m still figuring out what I think is true.”

  “Good,” I said cautiously.

  “She’s not a saint exactly,” M went on. “The woman who wrote this. But she’s like a saint. She has a feast day and everything. Maybe she’s halfway to being a saint. I’m a little fuzzy on the details.”

  “You’re really selling her, though.”

  She took the book out of my hand and thwacked me on the upper arm with it. “The point is, she went through some really awful stuff,” she said. “She was terribly sick for three days—so sick everyone thought she was going to die. But she lived. And she had all these amazing visions. So she wrote them down. She thought what she’d seen might help other people, too.” She handed the book back to me. “The visions were all about how to be happy even when horrible things happen. Or especially when, I guess.”

  “Not that you’re trying to make a point or anything.”

  “Point?”

  I began flipping through the book. “Don’t just look at random bits in the middle,” M said impatiently. “Start with the first page.”

  I turned to the first page of the first chapter. “The very first page,” M said. “Oh, give me that.”

  She grabbed the book out of my hand again and opened it to the apparently really important page. “Here.”

  She’d handwritten something beautifully—calligraphed it, so it looked appropriately old for a book written hundreds of years ago. “Read it to me,” she demanded.

  I was tempted to start reciting from the text of the book itself, but then she would have killed me and that wouldn’t be a merry Christmas for anybody. So I dutifully read her own gorgeous writing aloud. “‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ ” I smiled. “That’s pretty.”

  “She says it a lot. In the book. It’s kind of famous.”

  “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

  “So now this makes sense.” M took a small velvet box out of her skirt pocket and held it out.

  “Oh, breathe,” she added impatiently. “It’s not a ring, idiot. I’m not even sure I want to go steady with you.”

  “It must be bad luck to lie on Christmas.”

  “I’ll take my chances. Okay, look.” She snapped the box open. “See? Just a necklace. Nothing scary. I hope you’ll like it even if you stop liking me.”

  A necklace didn’t sound so bad. It would take a little getting used to, though. I’ve never worn jewelry before. My ears aren’t even pierced.

  “It says—”

  “I can read, M.”

  I took the box. The pendant inside was looped oddly—not a ring exactly, but a Möbius strip. I’ve always liked those.

  All shall be well, it read continuously. All shall be well.

  “So, no symbolism or anything.”

  “Not a bit.”

  I didn’t know M had woken up. Her head was just as heavy on my shoulder, her breathing just as even.

  And then she said, “Are you asleep?”

  I smiled. “Yes.”

  “Good. That makes two of us.”

  “It does.” I paused a moment, then added, “I’ve been thinking about that, actually.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “The two of us.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “I mean—who we are.” I was quiet for another second. This was harder to say than I’d expected. “I was thinking about changing my name. My first one, this time.”

  M sat up a little straighter, considering. “Maybe we both should,” she said. “There are an awful lot of Emilys littering the landscape.”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant just the two of us, or if she was including my sister in that calculation. Or Dickinson. Or all the Emilys our age whose mothers had somehow separately decided to name their daughters a sweet old-fashioned name that they just happened to like and that then just happened to become the most popular name on those lists M checked that made her sick of being just another Emily.

  As if she ever could be.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “I’m always right.” She sat up all the way now, stretching. “Should we tell Ms. Lurie about our nefarious plans?”

  “Not just yet,” I said. “I don’t want to move right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway,” I added as she rearranged the blanket around us, “I have the feeling that as long as we’re at Hawthorne, we’ll always be Emily.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Emily Dickinson’s role in this book was an afterthought.

  I had my premise. I knew my main character was a damaged, angry, terribly lonely young woman. I had a picture of the impish, insightful woman who would lead her to love and redemption. And, rare for me, I even had the setting. Hawthorne Academy would be a sort of “unschool” hiding in the hills of Topanga and named after my favorite writer’s favorite writer (Shirley Jackson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, respectively).

  I outlined the plot from beginning to end. I pitched the premise to my agent and received an enthusiastic response. I was ready to begin what felt like a promising project.

  The only thing I didn’t have was a working title.

  I knew that a lot of titles are modified or changed completely by editors. That was fine. I’d just be sure not to get too attached to whatever handful of words I chose.

  But I did have to choose something. And I was drawing a blank.

  Our tiny apartment has a lot of books. At the time, most of them were not by or about Emily Dickinson. So it was just luck that a volume of her poems happened to be near at hand.

  I started thumbing through it in search of a disposable title. Eventually, I decided that “The Letting Go” was good enough to begin with.

  And since I was naming my novel after a line from Dickinson, I thought my narrator should be interested in the poet. I added “Don’t forget to make main character obsessed with Dickinson” to my notes.

  I spent the next few weeks wrestling with important plot issues such as where to leave the body of Stephen James, who should find it, and exactly how many b
rutal murders had to occur in my narrator’s past (too few and she wouldn’t be able to figure out “the rules”; too many and I would spend all of what should have been my writing time cheering myself up with chocolate).

  Then I hit a point in my writing where I realized that I should, as I put it to myself, do a little research on Dickinson. As luck would have it, I already owned a biography.

  Perfect. A biography and one collection of the poems. I was all set.

  It sounded like Dickinson’s ingredient list for a prairie: you just need “a clover and one bee.”

  Dickinson was joking. And it turned out I was kidding myself.

  The absolutely certain facts we have about Dickinson’s life are few, simple, and (mostly) rather dull. The letters and poems she left behind are numerous, enigmatic, and fascinating. The gap between those two statements has been filled with more books than any reasonable person would ever try to read, write, or own.

  I am not a reasonable person, a hypothesis I confirmed in the course of writing The Letting Go.

  As someone whose modest ambition was to learn everything possible about the life and times of the greatest American poet, my timing was excellent. Informative, engaging works addressing All Things Dickinson were coming out on a regular basis. And thanks to e-technology, old works were now accessible even to amateur scholars who had no access to university stacks. Noting the significant disagreements possible when it came to spelling, punctuation, capitalization, word choice, and line breaks, I realized that a driven reader/writer/researcher such as Emily Stone would most certainly base her quotations on the poet’s original manuscripts. Which I therefore did myself, with great pleasure and the occasional eyestrain-induced headache.

  For anyone who has fallen as far in love with Dickinson as Emily Stone did (and I devoutly hope you have happier reasons for doing so), here is a list of some of the books I found helpful and enjoyable:

  Emily Dickinson by Cynthia Griffin Wolff