And We Stay (23 page)

“No way!” yells Emily.

“It’s snowing!” shouts K.T. “One day before spring!” She grabs Emily’s hand, and they jump up and down like children out of school, which brings to mind mittens and sleds,
Boston and history, Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” and Dickinson’s alabaster chambers. By the time Emily and K.T. have finished breakfast, the snow has covered the pebbly sidewalks and the tallest stubs of grass. On the way back to 15 Hart Hall, they pass girls making snow angels, and without a word to one another, K.T. and Emily lie on their backs side by side, sliding their arms and legs back and forth.

The hard part, as any girl knows, is standing back up without ruining your angel. K.T. makes a mess of hers and laughs. “Oh, look, Em,” she says, pointing. “Yours is perfect.” Emily turns around to admire the mark she has made on the whiteness. She smiles at the metaphor.
I
am
a poet
, she thinks to herself.
Oh, my God, I really am
. She lifts her face to the sky, the snow soft as kisses. She and K.T. walk back to Hart Hall with upturned faces, holding on to one another’s hands for balance.

When they pass 12 Hart Hall, Emily knocks on the door and pokes her head in. Annabelle and Waverley are sitting on their beds.

“Hey, girls!” Emily waves. “Thank you! That was super, super nice of you. I hope I win!” She closes the door, and she and K.T. fall into a fit of giggles. When they open their own door, they squeal with delight. A large canvas rests on Emily’s desk. The painting of a yellow house with white columns manages to be both realistic and impressionistic.

“Amber painted it,” Emily says.

“How in the heck did she do that so fast? It’s amazing.”

“Amber, my crazy friend.”

“So what does that make me?” K.T. asks, raising her eyebrows. “I’m your crazy friend, too, right?”

“No,” Emily says.

“Knock, knock,” says Madame Colche, standing at the open door. “Dr. Ingold is ready for you, Emily. You’d better bring some work with you in case you have to wait.”

Emily slings her book bag over her shoulder. Before she follows her French teacher down the stairs, Emily kisses K.T. on the cheek and says, “You’re not my crazy friend. You’re my best friend.”

But best friends can be separated by miles and miles, Emily thinks as she walks with Madame Colche to Dr. Ingold’s office.

In silence, she is ushered in to sit in the high-backed chair. Her spine straight as a pencil, Emily focuses her gaze past Dr. Ingold’s head, waiting for the cuckoo to pop out and tell her what she already knows, that in one minute, it will be ten o’clock. At least she knows something. Madame Colche sits in a chair by the window, her elegant hands folded neatly in her lap. With a stern voice, Dr. Ingold doles out Emily’s jail sentence, which will be delivered to her parents in a phone call from the headmistress. No, Emily Elizabeth Beam will not be expelled, but she is campused for the rest of the year.
No dances with boys’ schools, no strolls down Main Street, no cemeteries, no drugstores, no smoking, no Emily Dickinson House. She is assigned to ten hours a week of unpaid work with the grounds crew, keeping the lawns and campus flower beds looking fresh all spring long.

After Dr. Ingold finishes, Emily puts her head in her hands and sobs. Madame Colche almost has to carry her out of the office.

“Why don’t you find a quiet place to regroup?” she tells Emily. “I’ll let K.T. know.”

“I’ll be in the lieberry,” Emily says, gulping for air.

“Lieberry?”

“
Oui
. Remind me to explain it to you sometime.”

Emily’s knees shake all the way to her carrel. She is so relieved that she sits and cries out every tear inside of her. When she can see clearly, Emily reads back through the poems, changing a word here, a line break there. She will type up the poems and send copies in an envelope to Ms. Albright. It’s time. She walks over to a long table and spreads the poems out. It is a lot to take in, a lot to get over, and a lot to share with Ms. Albright, but for now, for the present, Emily keeps her words to herself. They are good, they are true, and they bear no one else’s touch but her own. No help from a psychiatrist or a teacher, no parent looking over her shoulder, offering suggestions. Emily Beam has gone it alone.

Or maybe halfway alone. She owes some of it to Paul. Emily moves thirty poems around like tiles—a white path she will walk across to a green world—and gives them their final order. She puts them in pairs so they can talk to one
another: her little book is a love story, after all, and lovers argue and question; they give and take, sidestep and hide, retreat and advance. On paper, they reunite for the duration.

First “Blues.” Then “Buttons.”

“Seed” goes with “Sew,” (now that it’s found).

“Girl at a Bedroom Window” and “The Meeting.”

“The Traveling Show” with “Conception.”

“Pall” and “Mosaics.”

“Shroud” with “The Doctor.”

“Maze” and “Never Land.”

“The Safe Way” with “Little Sister.”

“Small Things” and “Pocket.”

“The Shell” and “Hold Up.”

“Poem of the Middle Heart” with “Me and You and God.”

“A New Solar System” with “Robin’s Egg.”

“Absinthe” and “Treasures.”

“Anthology” and “DNA.”

“Clouds” at the beginning, all by itself, and “Ashes” here at the end.

And the poem under her mattress, “Mother, Once Removed,” will stay removed. It may sit for weeks in a pile of mail, and whether it ends up on the bottom of a recycling bin or on the top of a heap, it is its own entity. Its own pocket in time. It does not have to define who Emily is, was, or will be.

Yes
, Emily thinks,
this is the right order; this is how they will go
.

She binds the poems together with a blue ribbon and a title,
Clouds
.

At the 2012 meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society, a possible new daguerreotype was brought to light. If confirmed as authentic, it will stand as only the second image of Dickinson known to exist. If you would like to see it or the more well-known image that haunts Emily Beam, visit
emily​dickinson​museum.​org
.

From this excellent website, I gathered details for my story and checked facts. I also used
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds
by Lyndall Gordon;
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson
by Alfred Habegger;
The Gardens of Emily Dickinson
by Judith Farr (with Louise Carter); and a delightful children’s book titled, simply,
Emily
by Michael Bedard, with illustrations by Barbara Cooney.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
(edited by Thomas H. Johnson) sat on my desk as I wrote. So thank you, Emily Dickinson, for your unforgettable voice and all of the words you have lent me.

I also extend my gratitude to

Jonathan Lyons, my hero-agent;

Michelle Poploff and Rebecca Short, my editors in shining armor;

Sally Hubbard Hawn, my go-to reader, always;

Polly Adkins, Stephanie O’Neill, Denise Stewart, and Ford Thomson, for their various inputs, as well as Alexandra King and the rest of the girls in Proal Heartwell’s 2011–2012 eighth-grade English class at Village School in Charlottesville, Virginia;

Jayne and Joel Hubbard, my parents;

and Steve Cobb, husband of gold, who makes my writing life possible.

And We Stay
is Jenny Hubbard’s second novel. Her first,
Paper Covers Rock
, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award. A former English teacher, Jenny writes books and plays in her hometown of Salisbury, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, a high school math teacher, and their rescue dog, Oliver. You can find Jenny on Facebook, follow her (and Oliver) on Twitter at
@HubbardWrites
, and visit her website at
jennyhubbard.com
.