Pretend She's Here

by Luanne Rice

  Or had we returned to her old bedroom in her old house? That thought made my heart lurch. Had we looped around, back from Maine, gone home to Connecticut? Were we in the Porters’ old house back in my hometown?

  The steeple clock struck ten, and so—very distantly—did what I recognized as the grandfather clock that used to stand in their front hall. But instead of coming from downstairs, where the foyer had been in relation to Lizzie’s old room, the sound of the chiming bell echoed from up above.

  Was it ten in the morning? There was a window in the alcove between Lizzie’s desk and bureau, but the familiar blue velvet curtains were drawn, and no light came through. Could it be ten at night? Was it the same day I’d been taken or the next? Or even the day after that? How much time had passed?

  I noticed a plate of food on the bedside table—a cheese sandwich, an apple, and a bottle of Snapple. I was starving, but my mouth tasted terrible and I had to brush my teeth. If this was Lizzie’s room, the bathroom would be to the left, just past the closet. I tried to turn on my side, to get up. Pain shot through my left ankle. My foot felt heavy. I lifted it slightly: I had a support boot on. I kicked with my good leg, to move the covers, and realized my right foot was knotted to a long line tied loosely to the bedpost. My hands were no longer bound.

  I climbed out of bed. It was hard to walk, with one foot in the boot and the other hitched to the bed, so I hopped as far as the line would let me go—luckily into the bathroom, about ten feet away. Surrealism continued to reign. Lizzie had been allowed to redecorate her own bathroom back home, and it was reproduced here, exactly: black marble counter and wash basin, black-tiled shower, a ruby-red stained glass window embedded with black-and-white lilies, black towels, Lizzie’s favorite Paris Nights soap and body wash, her purple toothbrush and—I couldn’t believe it—the pink toothbrush I had always left at her house because I slept over so often.

  I started to brush my teeth, then stopped. What if the water was drugged? Or what if they had sprinkled a sedative on the toothbrush? I turned off the faucet and looked in the mirror in total shock.

  My hair was black. This wasn’t the wig—it was my true, normally reddish-blond hair dyed nearly blue-black, the same color as Lizzie’s, with a Lizzie-like tendril curling down my unbruised cheek. And my blue eyes were green. I reached up, gingerly touched my eyeball, and the surface shifted. That made me jump and screech out loud. Someone had inserted contact lenses.

  There was a dark purple bruise on my left temple and cheekbone. I ripped off the gauze bandage on my forehead and saw butterfly stitches. A small patch of my hair, around the cut, had been shaved. It looked ugly.

  I continued to stare at myself. I was wearing Lizzie’s orange-and-black Halloween nightgown—the flannel soft from so many washes, the colors of bats and pumpkins faded and bleeding into each other. Someone had darkened my eyebrows and drawn Lizzie’s little mole on my cheek. I wet my thumb and rubbed the color off my cheek and brows.

  That got me started. I wanted to undo every change. I turned on the shower, threw the nightgown on the floor, ripped the Velcro straps to remove the boot, and stepped into the hot water. I doused my hair with Lizzie’s shampoo, scrubbed my head so hard my scalp felt raw. Lizzie and I had been known to streak our hair pink, green, and purple. The color had always washed out. I watched the drain, waiting for the black streaks to rinse off, but the water ran clear.

  When I stepped out and dried myself with her towel, I looked in the mirror and saw that my hair was still black. Total horror—it must have been permanent dye.

  In a way, that was weird, because I had always wished I had dark hair. Lizzie had it, and so did most of my brothers and sisters. Our family was “black Irish”—our ancestors came from Kerry and had the same coloring of the Spanish whose Armada had once landed on that west coast. Somehow only Iggy and I wound up with light hair. At least we had the same blue eyes as everyone else. Only now mine were green.

  I had never worn contacts before. It made me squeamish to reach my fingertips into my eyes, but I steeled myself and forced myself to do it. I threw the soft green plastic discs into the toilet. I flexed my ankle. Putting pressure on it hurt, but I knew it wasn’t broken. The rope was soaked and chafed my skin.

  I put on Lizzie’s nightgown again and limped back into the bedroom. I looked around for the clothes I’d been wearing—no sign of them. My cell phone had been in the pocket of my army jacket. Would the Porters have realized it was there, thrown it away? If I could just find it, I would call home. I wouldn’t know where to tell them I was, but I was pretty sure they could track me using GPS.

  I tore through Lizzie’s closet. Her style was totally different than mine. She loved clothes that were dark and sleek, always brand-new because her parents had money, while mine were a colorful melting pot of pure quirk: hand-me-downs from my older sisters, Anne and Bea, and the occasional ModCloth splurge. Lizzie loved black anything, I went for polka dots, cotton prints, flowers, and stripes.

  “Zany, baby,” Lizzie would say, teasing me when I’d show up for a night out in Bea’s cast-off red-checked dress, a scarlet cable-knit cardigan knitted by Anne, the hand-tooled brown leather belt Mick had forgotten in his closet when he’d left for college, and my very own teal-blue canvas flats. Meanwhile Lizzie would be sultry and gorgeous in black leggings, a black jacket, and silver-studded motorcycle boots.

  I knew every single thing in her closet by heart. The coats and sweaters, the silk blouses, Mame’s old black velvet opera cape; they all smelled like Lizzie’s lemongrass shampoo and Mame’s faded L’Air du Temps perfume. In spite of my situation, I half swooned from missing my best friend, but I forced myself to concentrate. No sign of my jacket. I raced to her bureau, ransacked the drawers.

  There was nothing of mine. My cell phone—gone.

  I tried the doorknob. I already knew it would be locked. The steeple clock ticked loudly. It was 10:45—still no idea whether a.m or p.m. I pressed my ear to the door, listened for any sound. Nothing but silence. That was good. I had no interest in seeing any Porter ever again.

  I had to escape, but I still felt so weak from last night, I was afraid I wouldn’t get far. I needed my strength, so I wolfed down the cheese sandwich and apple. Swiss cheese, of course—Lizzie’s favorite.

  I felt better after eating, almost supercharged, determined to find a way out. There had to be one.

  The window. Even if it was bolted shut, I’d break the glass. I walked across the room, pulled back the curtains.

  There was no window, no glass. Only a cinder block wall.

  That’s when absolute panic hit me. I wasn’t just locked in—I was walled-in. The Porters had built me a prison. I started pacing the room.

  Framed photos stood on Lizzie’s bureau. Three had me in them—standing next to Lizzie in the back row of our middle school soccer team, a selfie of the two of us on the beach the week before she’d died, and one of me and Dan at play rehearsal when I hadn’t known she was taking our picture.

  And then a lightning bolt struck: the box of Mame’s photos. That would be my salvation. It was full of a million Porter family pictures, but it also had a hiding spot with three of Mame’s secret things, one of which would help me get away.

  Lizzie had been Mame’s oldest and favorite grandchild. Sometimes when I slept over, Lizzie and I would have dinner at Mame’s instead of the Porters’, and Mame would talk to us for hours on end, telling stories about when she had been young, hilarious and crazy adventures no one, not even Lizzie’s mother, knew about: things you would never imagine an old lady having done.

  We especially loved when Mame talked about Hubert, the love of her life. They had met when they were older, after they’d been married to other people. They wanted to be together, but he lived in France and she lived in Connecticut. As much as they adored each other, neither wanted to move across the ocean, far away from their kids and grandchildren. Instead, they talked on the phone every day.

  Hubert had given Mame w
hat she called a “dedicated cell phone”—because they were dedicated to each other, because it was set up to make international calls, but also because she only used it to call him.

  Lizzie had kept Mame’s box on the top shelf of her closet. I dragged the desk chair over and clambered up. There were notebooks, winter hats, scarves, an old laptop, plastic bags full of folded sweaters, and a bunch of other stuff, but no sign of Mame’s box.

  I kept looking, as if maybe I’d missed it, but there was only so long you could search through a small top shelf without knowing you weren’t going to find what you were looking for. Maybe her parents had thrown the box out. Her mother had sometimes seemed a little jealous of how close Lizzie felt to Mame.

  But deep down, I didn’t believe that was true. Mrs. Porter had loved her mother—I’d seen them together plenty of times, and when Mame had broken her hip, Mrs. Porter had given up her private nursing jobs to take care of Mame until she’d gone into assisted living.

  To keep myself from feeling completely crushed over not finding the box, I told myself the phone had probably long since lost its charge. I had no idea if the kind of phone programmed for international calls could make local ones. They probably couldn’t. I told myself that even if the Porters hadn’t discarded the photos, they’d most likely gone through the box, found the hiding place. Maybe that’s why the box wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

  But in spite of all that, I kept looking. Trust your instincts, my brother Patrick would tell me. When in doubt, trust your gut over your mind. It will never fail you.

  Ha-ha, I’d say to him. That’s why I make honors and you don’t. I use my mind.

  Ha-ha, he’d say back. Wait till something happens—you’ll know what it is, and you’ll remember what I said.

  Well, something was happening now. And I did remember what he said. Every instinct was telling me that if this was Lizzie’s room, exactly as it had been, the box was still here. Just because I had last seen it in her closet didn’t mean she hadn’t moved it.

  But where? That’s what I had to figure out.

  The energy I’d gotten after eating drained away, and I felt as if I were dissolving. My mind began to buzz, the way it did when I stayed up late studying, when I was exhausted from thinking too hard. Every step I took was more like a stumble. I had to keep looking for the phone, but I was afraid my knees were going to give out. I aimed toward the bed and fell hard onto the mussed-up sheets.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead. You must be hungry,” Mrs. Porter said, walking into the room with a tray. It was the first time I’d seen her enter the room. The steeple clock had struck twelve a little while before. My head felt thick, and my sense of time was upside down.

  “Is it day or night?” I asked.

  “Do you think I’d be feeding you breakfast at night?” she asked with a little laugh. She pursed her lips with amusement.

  “I slept till noon?” I asked, shocked. I’d never done that before.

  The food smelled good, and my stomach growled. I sat on the edge of the bed and refused to look at her. And there was no way I was going to eat in front of her.

  “Your tummy was so upset on the car ride,” she said. “I wanted to make one of your favorites, but I think it’s better to stay mild for now. Toast, chicken soup, tea. You love my soup, my special touches. Just a squeeze of lime, a snip of cilantro, but today I didn’t use as much as usual. I’m afraid citrus might be too acidic for the moment.”

  I stared at my knees. I heard her place the tray on the desk, felt the bed press down as she sat beside me.

  “For both our sakes, I’m going to talk to you honestly,” she said. “As much as it pains me to go backward. To call you by that ‘other’ name. Emily.” She spit my name out as if it tasted bad.

  I refused to acknowledge she was there. My stomach rumbled, and I hoped she didn’t hear. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing how much I wanted to eat that soup.

  “I miss my daughter,” she said. “I know you miss her, too. Those letters you wrote after she …” Mrs. Porter paused, seeming to search for the right word. “Was gone. They meant the world to us. To me. She thought of you as a second sister. I thought of you as a third daughter.”

  I forced myself to say something, to try to appeal to her rational side, if she had one. “It’s true, you were my other family,” I said. “But I have a mother, Mrs. Porter. And a father, and my own sisters and brothers.”

  “You said it yourself—we were your other family. And you needed it, considering your mother.”

  I bristled. “She’s better now.”

  Mrs. Porter sighed. “I know you want to believe that. But she doesn’t deserve you, after all the harm she’s done. Her drinking. She’s an alcoholic! And I need you more than she does. Your parents have six other children. I am not saying you are not special. Anything but. Every child is unique. I’m sure your mother felt about you just as strongly as she did about her first baby.”

  “She does,” I said, choking up.

  “But she will go on, I promise you. You live with us now,” Mrs. Porter said.

  “No, I don’t! I can’t!”

  “Emily—and this is the last time you will hear that name—you will get used to it. You have to. So will they.”

  “NO! You know that’s not true.”

  A distant look entered her eyes. “When she was born,” she said, “I used to check to make sure she was breathing. Every night, standing over her crib. She was such a healthy baby, but that didn’t matter. I loved her so much, I had no idea such love was possible. Babies are so tiny, and you think they’re fragile. But then … they grow, and they keep breathing, and after a while you forget to worry.”

  I listened to Mrs. Porter’s voice. It was thin, as thready as spiderwebs, and she stood up from the bed and began to pace slowly around the room, as if she was sleepwalking.

  “When she got sick, I refused to believe it could be bad. It just wasn’t possible. She was my child, my beloved girl, and she was strong, and she was good. Every checkup, her entire life, showed how healthy she was. Her illness … it came on so fast.”

  “I remember,” I said, tearing up to think of those weeks when Lizzie went from shining bright as a star to dimming away, fading out of the sky.

  “Time slowed down,” Mrs. Porter said.

  “It did,” I said. “When things got really bad with her, when we knew she wasn’t going to get better, I heard every single second of the day tick by in my head. I wanted to hold on to each one, make it last longer so she would stay.” But of course she didn’t. Losing Lizzie was an explosion. It had ripped through me, left a hole where my heart used to be. The part of me that had a best friend was gone, destroyed.

  “When the doctor told me she had days—not years, not her whole life—I wanted to die before she did. It was the simplest wish I’d ever had,” Mrs. Porter said.

  I looked up at her. “But you have another daughter. She needs you,” I said.

  “I love Chloe; there is no doubt about that. And she is so dear—you saw how she colored her hair and how she curls that one section, just like her big sister. To help me, to try to keep Lizzie alive in our lives.”

  “Lizzie is in your life,” I said. “Talk to her, the way I do. She’ll never leave.”

  “That’s a nice thought, but you don’t understand. She was your friend, not your daughter. For so long, since those last days in the hospital, I’ve thought there is no way I could be on this earth without her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “I thought I would have to die. I wanted to.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “And then I thought—I have to bring her back,” she said.

  “I wish more than anything that was possible,” I said.

  “But it is possible. With you.”

  I shook my head. “You already found out, Chloe can’t be Lizzie. And neither can I,” I said, my voice shaking. “No one can. There�
�s only one Lizzie! You’re not being fair to her to think you can just replace her!”

  “You were so close, the two of you,” Mrs. Porter said. “Hearing your voice right now brings hers back to me. You know, if I close my eyes, your voices merge together, and after a while I hear only hers.”

  “But it’s me talking!”

  “‘Me,’” she said. “What a funny word. Who is ‘me,’ who are ‘you,’ after all? I suppose it depends on who is asking the question. To me, you are Lizzie. Maybe we started too soon, calling you by that name as soon as we got on the road. I honestly thought it would make things easier.”

  “Easier?” I shouted.

  “Please don’t raise your voice to me,” Mrs. Porter said, rage in her eyes, a look I’d never seen on her before. “I’ve cooked a nice meal for you. I’ve taken care of you—stitched that cut in your head, put a bandage on your ankle. And I will continue. I will treat you like my own child because you are my own child now. I need you. Haven’t I explained that?”

  She was crazy, that was the only explanation. She had lost her mind.

  “Do you understand?” she asked, insistent.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.” I stared into her face, trying to see the Mrs. Porter I had known. I searched for the gentle mom of my best friend, and I swear I saw a glimmer of her, of the sane and kind person I’d known and trusted for so long. The anger had left her eyes, replaced by sorrow.

  “I don’t believe you want to do this to me,” I said. “You know me. My mom is your friend. You wouldn’t want to put her through this. Or my dad, either. Or Tommy, Mick, Anne …”

  “I don’t want to hear their names,” she said.

  “… Iggy,” I continued.

  “You have one sibling now. That’s Chloe.”

  “… Patrick, Bea …” I caught my breath. “I’m closer to Bea than anyone, even Lizzie.”

  “Stop it.”

  “They’re my family. They’re the people I love.”

  Her eyes narrowed. I felt maybe I was getting through to her. I reached out and grabbed her hand. “You don’t want to keep me in this cell; it’s like a jail. If you care about me at all, you would know what a horrible thing that is.”