And We Stay (14 page)

Amber dumps her things—a dirty canvas bag and a large sketchbook—into a chair. “I’m going to get coffee,” she says. “You need a refill?”

“I’m good,” Emily says. In her notebook, she jots down a couple of lines and tucks it back inside her book bag. When K.T. arrives, and then Amber, the three girls make polite conversation about the dorm Amber lives in, Sweetser Hall, which was where K.T. lived last year with an exchange student from India.

“Jhodi never understood why Americans make such a big deal over the Indian/Native American thing,” K.T. says. “The
whole political-correctness issue wasn’t in her repertoire. ‘What’s in a name?’ and all that. She had the coolest accent ever.”

“Political correctness is just another name for American excess.”

Emily can’t help but smile. Amber sounds like Paul.

“Before you know it,” Amber says, “we’ll be calling the homeless ‘domestically challenged.’ Look at Christmas, which now starts the day after Halloween. Look at the Big Gulp. Our country is so screwed up. Speaking of which, are we still going to Chicago?”

“It’s a thing for French,” Emily explains to K.T.

“You can come with us,” Amber says. “We’re taking the train to look at some art. Right, Emily?”

“Right.”

“You know,” says Amber. “We could go to Chicago. For real, I mean. The train station’s just a few blocks from here.”

“Right,” Emily says again.

“I’m serious. What are you two gals doing for spring break?”

K.T. and Emily look at each other.

“Whatever,” says Amber. “Hey, Emily, maybe we can work on this during lunch. I’ll meet you in Madame Colche’s classroom at twelve-thirty.
Ça va?
”

“Ça va,”
Emily says.

Amber rises from the table, grabbing her stuff. “I’ll catch you European Americans later.”

When Amber is out of earshot, Emily says, “That girl is one bumped pumpkin.”

“Pot, meet kettle, kettle, meet pot.”

“You’re really on a roll this morning, K.T.”

“Not compared to Amber. I didn’t know you two were friends.”

“We’re not,” Emily says.

“It’s okay for you to have friends other than me. Not that I have any friends other than you, but …”

“What about the girls in the quartet?”

“Oh, they’re great. But they’re all seniors, and they’ll graduate before you know it, and then there I am again. Bereft. Like with Jhodi. I guess I shouldn’t have put all of my ‘friend eggs’ in her basket.”

Like me and Terra
, Emily thinks.

“But Jhodi was really smart. And funny. And humble. She had seen so much more than the rest of us. After the novelty of having her around wore off for everyone else, she and I became close.”

“I bet you miss her.”

“I do. We talked about … stuff. And she was homesick the whole time she was here, but she stuck it out because she was only here for nine months. ‘Only as long,’ she would say, ‘as it takes to make a human.’ ”

“I’m sorry you miss her,” Emily says. “I’m sorry you got stuck with me.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. But I’m still sorry about it.”

“She and I agreed that feelings are the most important things,” says K.T. “Much more important than facts.”

“
Sorry
is a feeling, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got to go practice. See you in the p.m.?”

“Okay,” Emily says.

“Are you really?” K.T. asks.

“Am I really what?”

“Okay.”

Emily nods. “I’m getting there,” she says. She sips her coffee as K.T. takes her tray to the conveyor belt and heads back out into the cold of morning. In a few minutes, Emily follows the same path, wondering where the bread crumbs are that will lead her back to the girl she used to be.

Emily Beam,
March 1, 1995

EMILY AND AMBER ARE CALLED BY MADAME COLCHE TO DO THEIR
presentation first, which, once again, arouses Emily’s suspicion that her French teacher is up to something. During lunch, the two girls decided that Amber would do the talking about the journey to Chicago. While she does, Emily stands beside her, holding up pictures of the paintings they visit at the museum. Emily’s job is to explain the journey back to Amherst. They take a side trip to the small town of Winesburg, Ohio, to visit Terra, whom Emily calls her
très bonne amie
even though Terra has no idea that Emily is now a boarding-school girl.

Or maybe she does know. If she’s called the house, her mom or dad would have told her, but Emily is too ashamed to call Terra herself. Terra was as far from a ho-bag as you could get. She would never approve of what Emily has done.

That evening, Emily walks to the drugstore and, using up the last of her money, she buys three packs of cigarettes, which she will hide in the pockets of the bathrobe she never wears (her going-away gift from Aunt Cindy), and eight greeting cards celebrating friendship, which she doles out to K.T. over the next two weeks. Emily counts the days of March in animals—rabbit, rabbit; squirrel, squirrel; cow,
cow; dog, dog; dead dog, dead dog—and takes care to offer up, each morning with coffee, spoonfuls of emotion. The feelings that she would otherwise give to her poems, she gives to K.T. in conversation, the Hart Hall phone mocking her with its silence every single time she passes it by. If she were to walk by Paul’s grave, that’s how it would be, too. Her footsteps find their metered pace up and down the now-familiar path.

On March 15, Emily buys a pack of crackers from the vending machine in the administration building and skips lunch. The outside temperature is still below freezing. In the lieberry, she huddles into her notebook, intending to write, but her hands are too cold to hold a pen for long. She exchanges it for one of the Dickinson biographies and sits on her hands to warm them. It is much easier to make sense of someone else’s life.

A phone rings in the lieberrians’s office, a sound that reminds Emily that she still hasn’t called Carey back. It is beginning to feel as if there are signs everywhere meant just for her. She reads that Emily Dickinson spent the most impressionable years of her youth, from age nine to age twenty-five, living not in the yellow brick house but in one on West Street.
No wonder
, Emily Beam thinks.
How could a girl escape
the darkness if she grew up on
West
Street?
Every day dies in the west. Emily Beam is convinced that if Emily Dickinson had grown up on East Street, she would have been a much cheerier person.

Not to mention the fact that her room on West Street—now called North Pleasant Street (yet another sign!)—perched itself in full view of the town cemetery. Back then, in the years before modern medicine and antibiotics, there would have been funerals in the graveyard all the time. When Emily Dickinson was fifteen, her cousin Sophie, one of her closest friends, was dying, and Emily was granted permission by the doctor to enter Sophie’s bedroom even though visitors were forbidden. She took off her shoes so as not to make noise, and when she gazed upon the face of her dying friend who could no longer speak, she was done in. She had to be dragged out of the room.

She did not and could not cry, she wrote in a letter to a friend. Sophie’s thoughts and feelings had been so like her own that once her friend was in the coffin with the lid closed, a finality too deep to fathom, Emily retreated into herself. She was taken out of Amherst Academy and sent to live with her Aunt Lavinia. In Boston.

Emily Beam slams the biography shut. As swiftly as possible, but without calling attention to herself, Emily walks out of the lieberry and around the side of the building and down an alley that drops her out onto Webster Street. She heads to Main Street, turning left at the sign pointing toward the center of town. In front of the police station, an old man bends down to pick up an errant sheet of newspaper. As he rights himself, he smiles at Emily.

“Do you know where North Pleasant Street is?” Emily asks.

“If you’d taken ten more steps, it would have bitten you,” the man says, pointing. “It’s the next block down. Turn right.”

She knows she is going to have to answer to Madame Colche and Dr. Ingold, and she’ll probably earn herself a bucketful of Hashes or get herself campused—as in no walking privileges for a while—but she has to get there today, not tomorrow or the next day. She can’t wait until this evening, because what if it rains? The clouds hang low, gray blankets over the blue sky, over the sun. She checks her watch—12:36—and walks fast. She knows from the biography that the house on Pleasant Street no longer stands, but she finds the cemetery, just a few blocks from Main Street, easily. A small sign points toward the Dickinson family plot in the center of the graveyard. Surrounded by an iron fence, the headstones mark the resting places of Emily; her sister, Lavinia; their parents; and their father’s parents.

Right away, Emily can tell which headstone is Emily’s. On top of it, people have left things: ribbons, roses, candles, feathers, a small china doll. Emily leans in to see what is carved into the marble.
Called Back
, it reads in block print, with Emily Dickinson’s birth date above it:
Dec. 10, 1830
.

Even though Emily Beam is already aware that she and the poet share a birthday, it still sends electricity through her, to see the date etched in stone. In 1977, another baby given the name of Emily was born, Emily Elizabeth Beam, who has grown up to believe that when you die, you die. End of story. Emily Dickinson’s story ended on May 15, 1886.

Because Emily Dickinson died of an illness, she expected to die. Paul didn’t. For him, death wasn’t in the picture at all. When Paul brought the gun to school, he wasn’t planning to use it, not on anyone. The morning had flipped over on top of him. Now he lived under a dogwood tree. The day he was buried, there were no buds in sight. But it is almost spring, and before the petals of a dogwood open fully, they look like little wings.

A sparrow, small and brown, swoops in and perches on top of the little china doll. For three breathless seconds, the bird pierces Emily Beam with its sharp, black eyes. Then it sings a high, clear song and flies away. Emily lowers herself on top of the ground and opens her notebook, her heart squeezed up like a fist.

Emily Beam,
March 15, 1995