And We Stay (19 page)

On December 12, Paul walked down the hall to the library, believing deeply in life, in the power of youth, wanting for Emily to believe in those things, too. And she didn’t, not at the time, not with the fervency that he did. In the dust under her running feet, there is a message that she couldn’t hear then:
life, life, life
.

On Thursday night, as soon as dinner is over, Emily falls into a deep sleep while K.T. listens to classical music and plays the
air-cello. Madame Colche drops by—Amber does, too—but even though she tries, Emily cannot wake up. The cups of coffee she drank in place of dessert can’t keep up with her need for sleep. In one dream, a white cloud floats toward her in a sunlit field and hovers, delivering paper snowflakes with lines from poems written on them. When she wakes Friday morning, she can still remember some of the phrases, but it’s 7:45, so she has only enough time to rush into the bathroom and chug down a cup of K.T.’s home brew before class begins.

When Emily told K.T. about that snowy day in Boston, she admitted that she stole the Harvard sweatshirt from the campus bookstore, walked straight out with it on under her coat. She got back to Aunt Cindy’s house in Belmont by taking the red-line T to the end of the line. Yes, her mother yelled at her and punished her with therapy and grounded her for the rest of their time in Boston, but where was she going to go? That kind of grounded was nothing compared to the kind of grounded she felt sitting in the recovery room with two other girls, waiting for the better part of the anesthesia to wear off. For K.T., Emily assessed it as a snapshot, a single image, like a parody of a brochure for a private girls’ school: one white girl, one black girl, and one Latino girl, all colors of the rainbow represented, slumped in chairs, the useless blood trickling out of them.

“Did you talk to each other?” K.T. asked.

“No,” Emily said. “We should have, though.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Emily thought for a moment. “Because the voices in our heads had already started up.”

Emily Beam,
March 17, 1995

FRIDAY NIGHT, BEFORE SHE FALLS ASLEEP, EMILY READS THROUGH THE
poems in her notebook. In the nine weeks that she’s been here, she’s completed twenty-seven, plus twice that many fragments and half-finished poems and, of course, there’s the hidden one under her mattress that she wrote eighteen days ago, which now feels like eighteen hundred days.

When Emily Dickinson died, her younger sister, Lavinia, burned all of her correspondence, as Emily had requested. But Vinnie, as Emily called her, was stunned to discover among her sister’s papers nearly two thousand poems bundled into booklets. All those years of living in the house together, and Emily had kept them to herself. Vinnie read the poems. She thought they deserved an audience, and so she took it upon herself to get her sister’s work published.

Emily Beam isn’t sure how to feel about Vinnie’s decision. On the one hand, she is grateful, because otherwise, she would never have heard of Emily Dickinson. On the other hand, here she is, with her own private stash of poems not meant for anyone’s eyes, though other eyes have seen them. She finds the folded-up flyer at the back of her notebook, the one announcing the poetry contest. With her black pen, Emily puts Xs through all of the blanks on the entry form. She
marks through the contest deadline—Monday, March 20—and scratches all the way across the paper, like a six-year-old who’s just learned to spell his first bad word,
POETRY SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
After she balls up the paper and throws it in the trash can, she lies flat on her back and falls asleep, exclamation points rolling through her brain on little wheels.

On Saturday morning she wakes with numb lips. In a dream, she has been kissing Paul under a scratchy blanket in a cold, abandoned barn. K.T. is in the bathroom, where Emily will have to go in a minute. So far, she has avoided conversation with Annabelle and Waverley, though she has passed them in the hall and smiled a fake smile, which they return with their own fake smiles. In the dim light, when Emily reaches into the top drawer of her dresser for a clean pair of underwear, her fingertips meet an unexpected fabric. Emily pulls out the white cotton dress just as K.T. kicks open the door with her foot. Emily tucks the dress behind her.

“I wish we could go for a walk today,” K.T. says. “I’d like to see that eagle again.”

When K.T. isn’t looking, Emily stuffs the dress back in the drawer.

“Yeah, me too,” says Emily.

“If you get lonely this afternoon, come visit. I’ll be in the music room practicing. Vivaldi is kicking my ass.” K.T. wraps her wet blond hair up into a topknot. “Blond Buddha.”

Emily laughs. “Hey, I’m skipping breakfast this morning. You were right about the coffee in the dining room. It
is
full of dreams.”

Emily finishes her test on chemical reactions later that morning with minutes to spare. Carefully, she reaches into her book bag so as not to disturb the dress that is wrapped in the Harvard sweatshirt and fishes around for the book of Dickinson poems. She opens it to Poem 17, but the metaphor is too ambiguous. She does not know, either, what to do with the dress. French doesn’t meet on Saturday mornings, and Amber isn’t in her room in Sweetser Hall when Emily goes looking for her after U.S. History, the last class of the day. When Emily unzips her book bag, a sleeve of the dress flutters out of the sweatshirt and into the sudden light like a kaleidoscope of butterflies, and she has to zip it back again. She walks to the security desk in the administration building and checks the sign-out sheet for Amber’s name, but it’s not there.

On her way back to 15 Hart Hall, Emily notices that Madame Colche’s porch light is still on from the night before. As she’s looking at it, the light winks at her. Three times. Emily walks across the quad and knocks on the door.

“I need a favor,” Emily says when Madame Colche opens it.

“Come in, dear.”

Madame Colche gestures to a chair in the parlor, and Emily sits.

“I’m campused till Wednesday, as you know. But, if it’s at all possible, I really need to tour the Emily Dickinson House before then. I know you’re a member of the Society, so I thought, well, that you might be able to help me out.”

“Can you explain to me the sense of urgency? The house
has stood for one hundred fifty years. Surely it can last another few days. And you’ve been here for how many now?”

“Sixty-three.”

“En français, s’il vous plaît.”

Emily thinks for a second.
“Soixante-trois.”
She takes a deep breath. “I’m working on a poem for the contest. It’s about Emily Dickinson writing a poem, and I want to see the place, the exact spot, where she wrote.”

“I see.”

“The idea just came to me last night, and the contest deadline is Monday, so …”

“Isn’t there a photograph of Emily’s bedroom in the book I gave you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And also a close-up of the desk where she wrote most of her poems, if I’m not mistaken. Do you not think, under the circumstances, that these will suffice?”

“I’ll know what it looks like,” says Emily, “but I won’t know what it
feels
like. And feelings are the most important things.”

“Being campused is a serious punishment. I doubt that in this case, Dr. Ingold will be sympathetic to the superiority of feeling over fact. Now, on Wednesday, when you are free to roam about, I’ll be more than happy to take you on a private tour of the house.”

“That would be very nice,” Emily says.

“En français, s’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle Beam.”

“Ça serait gentil.”

“Très bon!”
says Madame Colche, hopping up with a clap of her hands.
“C’est un beau samedi, n’est-ce pas?”

“Yes,” says Emily in English, rising from her chair. “Yes, it’s a beautiful Saturday.”

Outside, the sun has come out, and as Madame Colche closes her front door, Emily wishes she were on the bench across from the big yellow house at 280 Main Street, soaking up the early spring. Her stomach is growling, so she heads to the dining room.

After she gets her tray, she looks around for Amber. K.T. is sitting with the members of the string quartet, and she waves Emily over.

“I think you all know each other,” K.T. says. The girls and Emily exchange their hellos.

“How’s Vivaldi?” Emily asks. “Is it
The Four Seasons
that you’re working on?”

Ms. Albright had played the class a CD of Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons
. Before she met K.T., it was the only piece of classical music Emily could name other than
The Nutcracker
and
Swan Lake
.

“Yes, and ‘Winter’ is a bitch,” says Lucy, a violinist.

Emily laughs. “I’m ready for spring, too.”

“Only three days away,” K.T. says.

“For now we have to drink our warmth,” says Jillian, the other violinist, rising from the table. “Anyone want more coffee?”

After lunch, Emily finds a bench in the quad and turns her face to the sun, but the spot does not offer the same delicious feeling as the bench on Main Street. With her book bag still in tow, Emily walks across the lawn to the edge of
campus. The stone wall is too high to climb, but she ducks inside a circle of tall boxwoods and reaches into the zippered pocket for a cigarette and a pack of matches.

It’s time
, she thinks.
Time to make something happen instead of waiting for it
. She puts the cigarette in her mouth. The breeze is light, and the cigarette ignites on the first try. She inhales and exhales slowly, wondering if meditating is something like this. Her mind begins to buzz as if full of bees. Honeybees that pollinate, bouncing from blossom to blossom. Emily Dickinson loved her bees.
We—Bee and I—live by the quaffing
, she wrote in Poem 230. So many poems with bees in them. Dr. Ingold was right; Emily Dickinson spent hours in her garden.