And We Stay (13 page)

Emily makes a deal with herself. She will walk outside. If she can see a hundred stars, she will call Carey. It is no longer raining, and stars pop out in every direction, hundreds of accusatory eyes. She counts in French, for practice, then she dashes up the lieberry steps, where she can see through the window that Five-Minute Girl is still talking. Emily runs back to Hart Hall, but Waverley is on the phone, practically making out with the receiver. In her room, Emily paces. When K.T. returns just before the 10:40 check-in, Waverley is still on the phone, and even if she weren’t, it would be too late to call the Wagoners’ house.

Emily lies on her bed and tries to slow down her heart, envying K.T., who falls asleep as soon as she pulls the covers up to her chin. For two hours, Emily stares through the dark at the ceiling. K.T. is snoring, but over her loud breathing, the sound of a boy’s name takes its late-night toll.

Pall.

Pall.

Pall.

Emily tries to follow the sound down into sleep, but Carey’s face keeps getting in the way. Paul drove Carey to school every day. So how does she get to school now? The bus doesn’t run all the way out to the Wagoners’ farm. And
what music did Paul and Carey listen to on that final ride together?

Paul loved music. He was always introducing Emily to bands she’d never heard of. It is weird to think that Paul’s favorite groups are making music that he will never hear. It is weird to think of Paul’s mom and dad and Carey all riding to therapy. In what car? Not Paul’s truck. What happened to Paul’s truck? Emily pictures it parked on the side of the barn, rust on the passenger’s door, frost on the windshield. It’s been seventy-eight days, seventy-eight nights, almost twice as long as the flood Emily and Paul learned about so long ago in Sunday school, since Paul sat behind the wheel. Emily reaches out for her notebook and flashlight.

Emily Beam,
February 28, 1995

HOW HAD EMILY DICKINSON PUT IT?

Something like that. Seventy-eight midnights, and the feeling of shame over the choices she’s made—over the one big choice—refuses to leave her. Her heart is anchored by it, her head stuffed full of what-ifs.

What if there had been another boy at school who wanted to tell her his secrets?

What if horse-loving Allison had loved Paul instead?

When Paul drove her to the abandoned barn, what if she’d said no, like she’d sworn on a Bible she would?

And there was, of course, the fact that she could have just left town without telling him she was going. Why did that never occur to her? He would have been angry—no doubt about it—but he would still be alive, and he never would have brought the gun to school.

What if Gigi had been sick in bed on that Sunday and had
had to stay home from church so that Paul couldn’t have ever snuck into her room in the first place? Surely Gigi wouldn’t mind being sick if it meant that her grandson would live. And if Paul were alive, Emily wouldn’t feel so cut open, so cut up, so cut down.

So sew. Either way you spell it, on its own, the word looks wrong. Emily could write a poem about it, about how
sew
needs a subject, an object. About how a girl needs a duty to lock her in place.
So
if she sits at a desk, scrawls words on paper, are the words as lonely as she, or do they
sow
seeds into a soul across time, across centuries? Was Emily Dickinson ever able to thread the words together in such a way that she was beyond the need for stitches?

Emily reaches for the book on her bedside table and pulls the covers up over her head. She turns to Poem 812, the one she read to Paul before she knew for sure she was pregnant, and holds the flashlight over it.

On a Saturday in early December, five days before their trip to McDonald’s, Emily and Paul sat in the truck in the Beams’ driveway looking at the house, which Emily’s father had decorated earlier that day with white lights that framed the front door and all of the windows.

“The whole Christmas thing,” Paul said. “It’s too much.”

“Too much of what?” Emily asked.

“Too much of everything.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Paul sighed and pulled her closer. “People go overboard. They make things more complicated than they have to be. Even something beautiful like Christmas.”

“Oh, Paul, that makes me sad.”

“It makes me sad, too. I don’t want to feel sad. There’s all this light. I should feel happy, right?”

“Feelings are feelings,” she said, repeating something her grandmother used to say. “There isn’t a rightness or a wrongness to them. They just are.”

“We raise trees on our farm. Saplings. How do they make it?”

“You help them,” Emily said. “They wouldn’t survive without you.”

One of Paul’s responsibilities was to measure the width of the Christmas trees, an act that resembled hugging.

“Then I go and cut them down,” he said. “I mean, my parents talked to us a long time ago about what we do and why it’s good and how the trees give back to the air and the cycle of it and all, but still.”

“I want you to listen to something,” said Emily, reaching into her backpack for her English book. “It was written around 1864, but to me, it seems like it could have been written right now.” She read Paul the Emily Dickinson poem that she’d studied in class that week.

After she finished reading, Paul took the book from Emily’s hand and kissed her palm.

“I like the way it sounds in your voice,” he said, “but I don’t get it.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“I’m too dumb,” he said, shaking his head.

“You understand trees.” Emily kissed Paul’s forehead. “You’re not dumb. Poems grow just like trees. You’ll see.”

But he hadn’t seen. He hadn’t given himself time to see.

The night they sat in Emily’s driveway, Emily tried to teach Paul something. What if she’d succeeded? What if
there’d been some bit of knowledge set firmly down on pages that would have saved him?

“Dickinson’s talking here”—she pointed out to Paul in the book—“about the transitory nature of light.”

“I’m with you so far,” he said.

She angled the book so that Paul could look. “Light visits less often than darkness. Most of the time, we’re living in the dark.”

“So true.”

“The first word of the poem is like a seed,” Emily said, thinking of the one that was likely growing inside of her. “And the last word of the poem is what that seed becomes. The rest of the poem is the poet changing that first word into something else. The word grows into something new, just like a seed grows into a tree.”

“So light becomes a sacrament.”

“Yes, exactly!”

“Okay, see? That’s the problem. I’m not sure what a sacrament is. I told you I was stupid.”

“I’m not sure I know, either,” Emily said. “But I think it’s something holy.”

A sacrament, Emily knows now because she’s looked it up, is a visible sign of God’s grace. Emily Dickinson scoured her small corner of the universe in search of such signs. She lived in a time and place governed by Puritan values. To renounce Christianity publicly, as Dickinson did in front of her entire school, was to banish herself from society. She refused to call herself a Christian because she did not want to lie. Science, not faith, was her guiding light. Experimentation led to proof. Logic and reason were what she held dear.

But if that was so, then why were so many of Emily Dickinson’s poems like little searchlights for God?

Walking to the dining room for breakfast, K.T. by her side, Emily considers what she is searching for other than a way out of her skin. As they scuttle over the pebbles, Emily hears lost rhymes rearranging themselves.

Maybe Emily Dickinson also heard poems under her shoes. Maybe she let this one stay so some other girl who came along could scoop it up, hold it in her palm.

“Rabbit, rabbit,” says K.T.

Emily looks at her sideways.

“It’s the first of March. Earth to Emily …”

“Is that another ASGism?”

“Seriously,” K.T. says. “What rock have you been living under?”

“A really heavy one.”

“You say it for good luck. It’s supposed to be the first thing you say when you wake up on the first of the month.”

Emily frowns. “Rabbit, rabbit?”

“Yeah.”

“I think that might be a Vermont thing.”

“No,” says K.T., “it’s an all-over thing. Why is the rock so heavy?”

“I need coffee,” Emily says. “I can’t talk without coffee.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Sometimes I wish I were a little girl again.”

“Are you homesick?” K.T. asks. “It’s okay if you are. It happens here, especially in the winter.”

“I’m not homesick,” says Emily. “I’m nostalgic.”

“I get that way at times,” K.T. says. “Like when I want my mom here so she can tuck me in at night and wake me up in the morning. I hate alarms. Do you ever miss playing with dolls?”

Emily pictures her Cabbage Patch, Barbie, and Madame Alexander dolls in boxes under her bed at home. “No,” she says.

“I think I’d rather play with them than with boys.”

“You’re funny.”

“I’m totally serious,” says K.T. “At the Snow Ball, as I was standing there talking to this guy, who was kind of an asshole, I started thinking about it.”

“Why was he an asshole?”

“He never took his eyes off my boobs.”

Emily smiles. “Get used to it, K.T.”

“Oh, I’m used to it. I’ve had these things for ages. I’d give anything to be flat again.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, really. I want to go back. Being a kid teaches you that you’re the queen of your forest, and then whammo. You have to pack up your toys and start playing games with real people. I’m not so sure we’re ready yet. I think we should play with our toys for just a little longer.”

As they enter the dining room, Emily loses her appetite over the smell of sausage. “I’m just going to have coffee today,” she tells K.T. “I’ll meet you at our table.” But the table is occupied, and Emily has to sit at one of the tables in the middle. While she’s waiting for K.T., she opens up her poetry notebook just as Amber Atkins comes from behind and taps her on the shoulder.

“We need to finish our presentation,” says Amber. “Is it okay if I sit here?”

“It’s a free country,” Emily says, adopting the official ASG attitude of a junior to a sophomore. At Grenfell County High School, the classes mingled more freely, but maybe that had more to do with boys and girls flirting than anything else.