And We Stay (15 page)

EMILY WRITES UNTIL HER HAND IS NUMB FROM THE COLD. THE WIND
has picked up, and her coat is in the lieberry. She checks her watch: two-thirty. Trigonometry class has started. She is going to fail a math test, but that is the least of her worries. She hurries back to campus, taking what she hopes is a shortcut through a park with a small lake. Sweetser Park, it’s called, the same name as Amber Atkins’s dorm. A lone swan floats, its neck folded into its white feathers. Around the lake, early daffodils curtsy and bow.

In the letter she gave to Paul, Emily had written that she loved him. She had sworn it. Yes, they had broken up for now, but she would come back to Grenfell County after her sentence in Boston was over, and they would see each other at school, and she would keep him in her heart until it was reasonable for them to be together again. But there was nothing reasonable about the heart, nothing at all. In truth, she wrote these things because she thought they were what Paul wanted to hear. How silly that letter would sound to her now. It makes her shudder.

In the cold air of winter, Emily and Paul walked out the back door of Paul’s house under clouds brimming with snow. They entered the woods, scuffling over the fallen leaves, and
Emily broke the news. She told Paul that she was leaving for a few weeks. She told him that her parents were making her have an abortion.

“Oh,” he said, nodding too fast. “Oh.”

“What?”

“So you want an abortion.”

“No.” She paused. “Yes.”

“Which one?”

“Yes,” said Emily.

“Why?”

Emily widened her eyes. “Because I want a life.”

“What’s inside of you,” said Paul, reaching out toward her stomach, “
is
a life.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. I want to grow up and travel and meet people and—”

“Other guys?”

“Other people,” said Emily. “Not just guys. But, Paul, we won’t be together forever.”

“Why not?”

“We just won’t be. It’s natural. It happens.”

“Not to everybody. Your parents started dating in high school.”

“Yeah,” said Emily, “and yours didn’t.”

“You want to go to college so you can get away from me,” said Paul.

“That’s not true. You have nothing to do with it.”

“And
that’s
not true. Not anymore.” He touched her stomach. “This is ours. This is us.”

“No,” said Emily, “this is me.”

“What would your parents say if you wanted to keep it?”

“Are you kidding? They would say no way.”

“Have you asked them?”

“No. What’s the point? I know what they’d say.”

“But it’s your body,” said Paul. “It’s your decision.”

“But they gave my body life.”

“That doesn’t mean they own you.”

“They own me till I’m eighteen,” said Emily. “That’s their argument.” But her parents had said no such thing.

“That’s a faulty argument,” said Paul.

“Yeah, to me and you it is, but—”

“Why are you taking their side?”

“I’m not!”

“Yes, you are!”

“Paul,” said Emily in a quiet voice, “grow up.”

Paul covered his face with his hands. “Are you breaking up with me?”

Emily waited until his hands dropped to his sides before she answered. “Yes.”

“But you love me,” said Paul.

“I do. But I don’t want a baby.”

“You don’t think I’m smart enough to be a dad,” he said.

“It has nothing to do with that.”

“Aha! So I’m right—you don’t think I’m smart.”

“Paul, please.” She reached for his hand, and he let her take it.

“I’m coming over to your house tonight.”

“No, you’re not,” said Emily.

“Yes, I am. We’re going to talk to them. It’s awful what they’re asking you to do. They might have given you life, but
this is going to destroy you. I know this. I know you well enough to know that down the road—”

“Just stop. Please.”

“I’m coming over,” he said, squeezing her hand, “and we’re going to sit down with your parents and talk. There. Is that grown-up enough for you? Is that smart enough for you?”

“Don’t waste your time,” said Emily. “They won’t answer the door.”

“I don’t care,” said Paul, pulling his hand away. “I’ll bust open a window.”

“They’ll call the police.”

“The police love me, remember?”

“I wish that night at Cole’s house had never happened. We were stupid,” said Emily. Then she handed him the letter, and when Paul opened it and saw what was there—what he already knew—he lifted his head and screamed at the sky, and then he tried to hand the paper back.

“Why did you even need to write it all down if you knew you were going to tell me in person?”

“In case you weren’t here—”

“You mean that if I hadn’t been home, you would have broken up with me in a
letter
?”

Paul waved the stationery in her face, but Emily refused to take it. “You know what?” she said. “This wouldn’t be happening if you’d worn a condom.”

He stuffed the letter in his back pocket and grabbed her by the shoulders. Emily lost her footing, falling backward into leaves that had once been gold.

“Oh, so it’s my fault!” he yelled down at her.

“No, it’s
our
fault!”

“Wrong! It’s
your
fault!”

“How is it
my
fault?”

Paul’s gray eyes turned to steel. “You could have just given me a blow job. You know that, Emily? How easy life would be if you’d just done it.”

Emily let herself drop back onto the leaves. Even if Paul hadn’t pushed her, she would have ended up flat on the ground. It was true: if she’d done what Paul wanted, she would be a free girl. But now she was bound to her body.

“You would never say that if you loved me,” said Emily, lifting herself up. “You don’t love me. You really don’t.”

Paul looked down at a rock and jabbed at it with the toe of his work boot before he picked it up and tossed it up and down, measuring the weight of it. He was going to throw the rock at her; Emily was sure of it. She scrambled to her feet and took off running to where her mom’s car was parked. Paul started to follow her, then stopped at the top of the driveway. He was sobbing now, but he was still holding the rock. He waited until Emily was in the driver’s seat, waited until she was watching, before he raised the rock high with both hands and brought it down full force on top of his head.

With shaking hands, Emily put the key in the ignition. Through the windshield she saw Paul crumple to the ground, palms pressed to his scalp. Then she turned the key, put the pedal to the metal, and flew home.

Now, Emily walks and does not fly. She walks a straight line through the front gates of the Amherst School for Girls. She crosses the quad to the lieberry to retrieve her coat. She
halfway expects an army of adults to be circled around the carrel where she was sitting two hours ago, but all she finds is a note pinned to it, dashed off in slanted cursive on school stationery.
Emily Beam, Please report ASAP to the headmistress
.

The door to Dr. Ingold’s office is wood with stained-glass panels. When Emily knocks, she isn’t sure that anyone can hear, her fist no match for the door’s thickness. Moments later, the door creaks open and a woman emerges. It is not Dr. Ingold, whom Emily met on the day she moved in, but a younger version of her, a lean woman in a white blouse and a gray skirt who introduces herself as Ms. Ledbetter, Dr. Ingold’s assistant.

“Dr. Ingold will be glad to hear that you’re safe,” says Ms. Ledbetter, gesturing toward a chair covered in velvet. “Please. Sit. She’s on the telephone. I’ll let her know you’re here.”

Emily has waited on the other side of closed doors before. Like on that Saturday night when she should have been at Frank’s Tuscan Villa celebrating her birthday. All the way up in her room, Emily heard Paul’s truck screech to a halt in front of the house at seven o’clock, three hours after she had last seen him. Within seconds, Paul was ringing the doorbell. She ran downstairs, skidding into the entrance hall just as her father was reaching for the doorknob.

“Don’t answer it,” she said.

In that instant, Emily and her father understood each other. She was asking to be protected. Even though she might protest and rebel later, he would stand by her in that way.

Her father reached for her hand and held tight while Paul pounded on the wood, rang the doorbell over and over. Emily’s mother came running into the foyer and grabbed on to Emily’s other hand. When Paul realized no one was going to let him in, he pressed his finger on the bell and held it there for so long that the doorbell burned itself out, the wail of a poor man’s ambulance.

Dr. Ingold’s office has a cuckoo clock that sings on the quarter hour. No one in Grenfell County that Emily knows of has a cuckoo clock. It reminds her of Hansel and Gretel. Just as Dr. Ingold opens the door, the bird pops out and cuckoos three times. Dr. Ingold shakes Emily’s hand and offers her a seat in a high wooden chair that looks like it came from an old church. Emily sits, nestling deeper inside her coat. One of the windows is partway open, and she can hear the train announcing its arrival into Amherst.

Dr. Ingold searches Emily’s eyes before she speaks.

“I imagine that you had a good reason for leaving campus without permission.”

“I did,” Emily says. “I had to find Emily Dickinson’s grave.”

Dr. Ingold raises one eyebrow. “Go on.”

Behind Dr. Ingold’s desk hangs a painting of a girl sitting on a stool by a window that overlooks the ocean. The girl leans toward the water, one foot poised to go.

“This is going to be hard to explain,” Emily says. “It’s like my brain has been hijacked.”

“I’m intrigued,” Dr. Ingold says.

“I’m intrigued, too,” Emily says. “I don’t know what has taken it over or where it’s taking me or whether I’ll ever get my real brain back.”

“You know, Emily, that we’re going to have to send you home if you can’t live with the rules here. They weren’t put in place to confine you. They were put in place to make you feel secure. To give you some boundaries to guide you, to help you choose wisely, not only now but for the rest of your life.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And they are especially necessary for a girl who has so much to sort through.”

Emily looks out the window at the shuddering limbs of a maple.

“Tell me, do you like your classes?”

“I do,” Emily says. “Well, except for math.”

“What’s the problem with math?”

“Mrs. Frame is a good teacher. It’s just that the subject is, I don’t know …”

Dr. Ingold waits for her to finish the sentence, but she can’t.

“How are you and K.T. Montgomery getting along?”

“She’s nice,” says Emily. “I like her a lot.”

Dr. Ingold scribbles something on the pad of paper in front of her. “As you know, Emily, we all want it to work out for you here. I am well aware that you failed to report for a Sunday dinner last month. K.T. was terribly worried.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So I’m going to campus you for a week, starting now. That means no leaving the campus until next Wednesday, the twenty-second. And if you break another major rule, we’ll have to call your parents and discuss whether ASG is the best fit for you.”

Emily nods.

“Do you understand, Emily? Are we clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll explain to Madame Colche what lured you away from French, and I’ll let Mrs. Frame know why you weren’t in class—again. I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear that this time, you didn’t lock yourself away in a water closet.” Dr. Ingold offers Emily a small smile from the left corner of her mouth. “It’s almost time for afternoon athletics, so I’ll excuse you to go to your room to change clothes.”

“Thank you,” Emily says, rising from her tall chair, which, she realizes now, was chosen to make the girl sitting in it feel small.

“A letter arrived for you today,” Dr. Ingold says. “The sender wasn’t aware of your box number, so it ended up in our office.” She lifts an envelope from her desk and hands it to Emily, who recognizes the handwriting immediately.

Dr. Ingold watches her. “Did you know that Emily Dickinson had hair almost the exact color as yours?”

“No,” Emily says, touching the windblown strands of auburn that have escaped from her ponytail. “The photograph of her—”

“The daguerreotype, you mean. Photography had yet to be invented.”

“The daguerreotype. It makes her hair look black.”

“Our mutual friend wasn’t nearly as dark as people have made her out to be. She spent hours in her garden. It was her favorite place. Remember that, please.”

“I will,” Emily says.

“I’m here—all of us are—if you need us.”

This should be the motto that goes on all of the ASG brochures: “We’re here if you need us.” If Emily had a dollar for every time someone has said that to her, she could buy out the drugstore’s entire supply of greeting cards and replace them with her own unsentimental, Dickinson-like sentiments.