The Everafter Page 18

  dead. The question is, do we want to risk trying again and

  again to save ourselves? We could end up killing Sandra,

  too."

  This is a horrifying idea. I can't believe I didn't realize

  it back when I was trying to save Gabe. That wild shot hit

  me, but it was only inches away from hitting Sandra instead.

  I tell Gabe, "There's no way I'm going to risk that happening.

  I know that whatever time Sandra has left to live will be

  shadowed by what she saw her mother do to us, but I want

  her to live. I know she'll make the world a better place."

  "You did, too," Gabe tells me.

  I'm taken off guard by the compliment. It's the nicest

  thing anyone's ever said to me. "You, too," I say, meaning

  it. "But our chance at that has passed. I don't want to spend

  eternity trying to change what's already happened. I want

  to move on."

  I'm ready.

  M4

  Ready to allow what might have been to remain a

  mystery. Ready to check out the After. Ready to find out

  if immortality will "unveil a third event to me," as Emily

  Dickinson said.

  Maybe I can hang out with her in the After .. - her and

  my mother and Gabe's father, all of us really understanding

  what life and death mean.

  "I want to move on with you," Gabe tells me.

  We float there for a moment uncertainly. "Do you know

  how to get to the After?" Gabe finally asks.

  "Do you?"

  "No."

  Tammy said we'd be able to do it when the time was

  right. I think it's like everything else. We just let ourselves

  be there."

  And suddenly that's what we're doing. Everything hums

  and buzzes with peaceful electricity. Warmth without heat,

  satisfaction without gain, being everything and nothing all

  at once . . . and losing language. I feel it slipping away from

  me, but I don't miss it as it floats off on a wave, my life ond

  all its wtn I time.

  MS

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  epilogue

  APPLICATION ESSAY

  Comple:e a personal statement below. Your essay

  should answer one of the following questions In 500

  words o' less:

  1. Why do you feel that Oregon University is the

  right college for you?

  2. Writs about a person who has been significant to

  you, and explain how they have had an impact on

  you.

  3. Describe the most significant obstacle you have

  encountered and how you have managed to convert

  that into a positive experience.

  I was always a Robert Frost kind of girl. My best friend,

  Madison, wasn't. Emily Dickinson was her favorite poet. I

  never understood why until Maddy died.

  Much of Frost's poetry has a rhythm or rhyme that has

  always pleased and comforted me. When he begged me to

  think aboui "The Road Not Taken," I believed in the power

  to choose. When he observed, "Some say the world will end

  in fire, / Sane say in ice" I never minded wondering which

  would be the case because he also reminded me that I have

  " . . . miles ta go before I sleep."

  Emily Dickinson, however, I used to consider downright

  weird. Her poems were too focused on death. Full of pain and

  even occasionally cynicism, they left me feeling hopeless.

  My actitude about all that changed, though, when

  Madison died. When I turned to Robert Frost's poetry for

  comfort, I found none. His assertion that he had "miles to

  go before I sleep" frightened me. After all, I was facing miles

  of life without Madison. My world had ended in fire, and I

  was left wondering whether I could have prevented Madison's

  death if I'd traveled a different road on the day she

  died. And then, in the poem "Out, out—" Frost hit me with

  a callous truth. Of a dead boy's family and friends, he wrote,

  "And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to

  their affairs." All around me, so many people seemed to

  be treating Maddy's death that way. Dates were made for

  dances, and teachers went on assigning homework.

  In the midst of my grief, it was Emily Dickinson who

  comforted me. When I read her poetry, it was almost as

  if she were in the room with me. Don't ask me whether I

  mean Madison or the poet. I'm not sure. Perhaps they both

  were.

  There were moments when I was reading Dickinson

  when I was horrified. I wasn't sure if the "he" in the following

  poem meant Death or God:

  He stuns you by degrees—

  . . . Deals— One— imperial— Thunderbolt—

  That scalps your naked Soul—

  I wondered if Madison fblt she'd been dealt an "imperial

  thunderbolt" as she lay dying on the entryway floor of my

  house. I certainly felt as if my naked soul had been scalped.

  The horror these lines made me feel kept me reading more

  of Dickinson's poetry, and I discovered Dickinson understood

  what I was feeling:

  Tbe last Night that Sbe lived

  It "was a Common Night

  Except tbe Dying— this to Us

  Made Nature different

  We noticed smallest things' —

  Things overlooked before

  By this great light upon otir Minds

  Italicized— as 'twere.

  Dickinson expressed so well the way that Maddy's death

  has italicized her life upon my heart: her smile, her support,

  our Halloween antics, and our late-night sleepovers. These

  small things, so overlooked before, are etched upon my

  heart, where Maddy will go on living tor as long as I do.

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  HarogCotiina Publishers

  acknowledgments

  Thanks many times over to my daughter and husband for

  putting up with me during the writing, revising, and editing

  of this novel. I also want to thank my parents, sister, and

  brother-in-law. Your support through the last few years has

  been invaluable.

  April, Ann, Deb, Kay, Lori, Ruth, and Tim: You really

  are the World's Greatest Critique Group; I'd have been lost

  if you hadn't adopted me. Special thanks to Donna Dunlap

  for being the first reader of this manuscript and encouraging

  me to keep up with it. I'm grateful to John Olstad for

  looking over my physics sections. Any of the mathematical

  incompatibilities between Einstein's theory of relativity and

  the theories of quantum mechanics that still appear in this

  novel are due to my use of poetic license; he gave me fair

  warning.

  I'm grateful to my agents, Josh and Tracy Adams, for

  believing in this novel. I'd also like to thank my editor,

  Donna Bray, for pushing me to make this a better book, and

  Ruta Rimas, her assistant, for helping to guide me through

  this process.

  About the Author

  AMY HUNTLY. a high school English teacher, makes her debut as

  a novelist with THE EVERAFTER. She lives in East Lansing. Michigan,

  with her husband and daughter. She blogs about writing at

  www.writebraine
rs.blogspot.com.

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