And We Stay (20 page)

Could a favorite white dress find its way back to the place it loved the most? What if Amber didn’t steal it? What if there really were ghosts who returned to tidy up on earth? Emily takes one last drag on the cigarette and snuffs it out on the pebbles before climbing back through the boxwoods. As if she owns the place, she walks around the lieberry and out the side gate and runs all the way to the bench on Main Street.

Empty but awash in sunlight, the bench looks happy to see her. Surely, it has been waiting; surely, it has missed her company. Emily sits and lights another cigarette. A man and woman with a baby stroller pass by and shoot her two equally dirty looks.
“Allez-vous faire foutre,”
she says, but not loudly enough for the couple to hear. “Fuck you” was the first French phrase she learned at Grenfell County High School. Not from her teacher, of course.

As she smokes, three old ladies struggle up the steps to
the Emily Dickinson House. The front door opens, and, one by one, they disappear inside. Down the street, a girl comes barreling toward her, a canvas bag bouncing at her hip.

“I am so mad at you,” Emily says when Amber gets close enough to hear.

“Do you have it?” says Amber, panting.

“Yeah.”

“What about the slip of paper?”

“I put it back in the pocket.”

“What does it say?”

“It says, ‘Amber Atkins is evil.’ Don’t you even care that I’m here where I shouldn’t be?”

Amber laughs and sits down on the edge of the bench, dropping the large bag, full of art supplies, on the ground. “You can hate me, but you can also love me.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I went to your room to find you, I caught Annabelle Wycoff leaving it.”

“Was K.T. there?”

“No,” Amber says, “K.T. was not there.”

“Just like when you snuck in with the dress, right? What the hell? Why doesn’t this school believe in locks?”

“Guess what Annabelle had in her hands?”

Emily’s heart jumps into her throat as Amber bends down and opens her bag.

“Oh, my God,” says Emily.

Amber holds up Emily’s poetry notebook. “I recognized it. From breakfast that day. So I wrestled it out of her greedy little hands.”

With one deep inhale, Emily crushes the rest of the cigarette
under her boot. “I thought I put it in my book bag first thing this morning! Give me that!” She flips through it, page after page. She counts. They’re all there, even the loose ones.

“You can thank me,” Amber says.

“I can,” says Emily, “but I won’t.”

Amber shakes her head. “So what’s the plan?”

Emily straightens her shoulders and points to the yellow brick house across the street. “I’m going to leave it in the yard once all the people leave.”

“Well, I could have done that.”

“Exactly!”

Emily and Amber watch as a man photographs two smiling young women on the front porch.

“This might be tricky,” Amber says.

“No shit. Right now, there are five people inside, maybe more. Plus the docents and that family wandering around in the garden.”

“I think it would be easier if you went inside and, like, left it in the bedroom when no one was looking.”

“What if they have a docent standing in the bedroom the whole time?” Emily asks.

“They don’t need a docent when they’ve got that scary-ass mannequin watching your every move.”

Emily stares Amber down until Amber looks away. “I want to know why you stole it. Look, I’ve stolen things, too, all right?”

Amber bends her head so that her hair veils her face. “I like the challenge. And I did it for you.”

“For me?”

“Because you didn’t tell on me about the lipstick—”

“So because I don’t tell on you for almost stealing, you thank me by stealing. That makes no sense.”

“No,” says Amber, shaking the hair from her eyes. “What I mean is, I could tell that first night that you had lost something. Something white. And I was right because when you talked about visiting your friend in Ohio in front of the class, you blinked a lot.”

“I did?”

“I was about to hand you my sunglasses, you blinked so much. I thought you were about to start bawling. Whatever it was you’d lost, I could tell you wouldn’t be getting it back.”

Emily scans Amber’s face for a glimpse of Paul. Hadn’t he said something like that once, something about loss? Hadn’t he tried to blink it away?

“God, Amber,” says Emily. “You really freak me out sometimes, you know that?”

Amber holds up her hands. “I’m just saying.”

“Well, stop. Stop saying. Don’t you have any other friends who’ve lost shit? What about Harriet from French or those Goth girls you sit with at lunch? There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re losers. And I mean that in the literal sense.”

Amber tucks her hair behind her ears. “Look, Emily, I have plenty of friends. But none of them are poets. You need to be in that house. It’s crazy, I know, for me to say that, but I know you need to stand for a minute in that room. There’s something otherworldly in there. Call it a ghost, call it whatever you want, but it’s there.”

“If I go,” says Emily, “will you sit here and wait for me?”

“Why do you think I brought my paints? I’m going to
do the house and give it to you as a token of my deep and abiding appreciation. And the painting shall be called—drumroll, please—
The White House
.”

“But it’s yellow,” says Emily.

Amber rolls her eyes. “Beam. You’ll never make it as a poet if you’re that literal.”

By three o’clock, Emily has smoked her last two cigarettes and has walked to the drugstore in the middle of town. It’s the same girl behind the counter as last time, and she hands Emily, along with a pack, three books of matches. Emily smokes another one on the way back to the bench, where Amber sits in full sun with her canvas and palette. Emily’s head buzzes with nicotine and adrenaline and images of bees. The visitors to the Emily Dickinson House keep coming and going. At four-fifteen, by Emily and Amber’s count, there are nine people inside and a few more wandering around in the garden.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to pull this off,” Emily says. “I had no idea Emily Dickinson was so popular.”

“Are you kidding?” says Amber. “That’s how ASG gets half of its students—by advertising itself as the school that educated America’s greatest poet. Hey, and soon they can brag that it educated America’s two greatest poets.”

“You didn’t look in my notebook, did you?”

“I glanced at a page or two. Will you remember me when you’re famous?”

“Shut up,” Emily says, checking her watch. “All right. I
can’t wait any longer. I’m going in.” She stands and throws her book bag over her shoulder. “You’ll be here, right? Just in case I get arrested?”

Amber knights Emily on the shoulder with her paintbrush. “Get thee to the White House.”

Emily crosses the street and opens the iron gate. The steps to the front door are worn from over a hundred and fifty years of coming and going. Between the scrolls of two Ionic columns on the porch, a bird has built a nest. Emily opens the door, painted forest green, and hands a woman with a pouf of white hair her ASG student ID, which gets her in for free.

“Another Emily,” the woman says. She has on lipstick the color of cotton candy and a sweet smile to match. She reminds Emily of Paul’s grandmother. “Are you a poet, too?”

“Not really,” Emily says.

“It is so lovely to see you girls taking advantage of this house,” the woman says, handing her a brochure. “Now, what we offer is a self-guided tour. After you walk through the house, exit through the back door if you’d like to see Miss Emily’s garden. There’s a volunteer in the gift shop at the rear of the house who can point you in the right direction.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Emily, eying the steps curving upward.

“You only have fifteen minutes before we close, but enjoy your visit. And don’t be surprised if you see Miss Emily,” the woman says with a wink. “She’s been spotted before at this time of day.”

The light of day’s end slants through the windows of the dining room. Across the hall is a dark parlor. The curtains are drawn, and a piano announces its sad silence, photographs in
frames sitting on top of it. Emily leans in to study them so as not to appear too eager to wind her way up to the poet’s bedroom. She can hear voices on the stairs, footsteps coming down. An old man with a cane and a woman on his arm talk intimately with one another and then with the woman at the front door. There is a rise of laughter, then more talking. Emily takes her chance and slips upstairs.

The room down the hall is just like the pictures, neat and spare, with a small bed dressed in a clean, white coverlet. The mannequin in the corner isn’t naked; it wears a brown dress with long, puffy sleeves. Emily walks over to the two windows facing the front yard. In between the giant evergreens, she can see Amber across the street on the bench. Emily turns to the desk, a simple, wooden table on elegant legs. The desk’s surface is so small that there’s room only for an elbow and a single sheet of paper. Just as she is lowering herself into the desk chair, the woman from downstairs appears in the doorway.

“I forgot to tell you not to sit on any of the furniture,” the woman says, not unkindly. “But it’s tempting, isn’t it?”

Emily jerks herself up. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s a sweet room. You can understand why she spent so much time in here.”

Emily nods. “Is there a bathroom I can use?”

“Downstairs by the gift shop,” the woman says, pointing. “You’ll see it on your way out.”

Emily thanks her, leaving the woman standing by the mannequin, and hurries down the cascade of steps. She finds the bathroom, turns on the light, and locks herself inside. She unzips her book bag, reaching for the sweatshirt, but
it seems all wrong, to leave the dress in a room with no windows. She closes the lid of the toilet and sits down to think. After a moment, she gets up and turns the light off and sits down again.

She hears the voice of the cloud-haired woman sweep by, announcing that the house will be closing in five minutes. Emily squints at her watch. A door somewhere to her right slams; the wooden floors outside of the bathroom creak with fast steps. Keys jangle, and then another door, a nearer one, clicks closed. Emily realizes that she’s been holding her breath. With a silent exhale, she thinks of Amber sitting across the street on the bench.
Let her sit
, Emily thinks.
Let her paint her weird little heart out
.

Long after the sounds of other people in the house have ceased, Emily unlocks the door. She can tell from the shadows on the Oriental rug that it is still light outside, so she makes her way (baby steps!) to the parlor and crouches down on the floor by the piano bench, away from the windows, even though the curtains are drawn. No house has ever been as quiet as this one.

Emily reaches up with her right hand and brushes her fingers across the ivory keys. Wasn’t Vinnie the pianist in the family? Emily presses her index finger down, and a note trembles forth. What would Ms. Albright say? And Madame Colche, who would no doubt approve of her choice of the parlor as the place to hide out until dark. But K.T. will be worried, and Amber, too, though at least Amber knows where she is.

What would Paul say, who at one time believed that a fallen leaf just might be able to reattach itself to its mother
branch? How could it be the same Paul who, a decade later in his school library, had looked at the gun in his hands as if it had fallen straight from the sky? That was part of what had frightened Emily so much—that all of a sudden, with the gun in his hands, Paul seemed to possess an alien’s awareness or maybe even the secret to the universe, and in the split second before she dropped to her knees, Emily thought,
Holy shit, Paul is right, and I am wrong, and
I’m
the one who doesn’t get it
, and she didn’t know what to say, the right words did not come, and God was not with her, as she’d believed all her life that He would be.

For a flash of a second, she saw the Paul she had given herself to in his soft gray eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. He was crying.

“I know,” said Emily. “I know.”

“I meant what I said on the phone Saturday night. I want to get married. Emily, please, marry me.”

With the gun in his hand, she was afraid to say no. She nodded.

“You’re lying,” Paul said.

Emily shifted her eyes to the book on the floor. “Yes,” she whispered. “I am.”

“You don’t love me,” said Paul. “You don’t love me.”

She is so ashamed of herself that she couldn’t tell K.T. what she said next, but she can say it now. She speaks the words aloud, tasting them for a second awful time.

“It wouldn’t be fair. To the baby, I mean. A mother and father should love one another for the baby’s sake, Paul.”

Pall. Pall. Pall.

Emily will hear these words forever. She
used
the life
growing inside her. She had used it to save her own skin. That was what she said, and all she said, before the silence strangled her and Ms. Albright appeared, and Paul ran away, not from Ms. Albright, who offered Paul her hand, but from Emily, who didn’t.