Pretend She's Here

by Luanne Rice

  “Switch with me,” Hideki said. He was sitting beside her.

  “Being this far back in the SUV makes it really bad for me,” she said. “I feel it swaying.”

  “You can have my seat,” I said, trying to be noble.

  That was what she’d wanted all along. She didn’t even demur. Mr. Donoghue pulled over, and Angelique, without a word or even a thank-you, passed me to sit beside Casey. As soon as she got there, she put her head on his shoulder. I climbed into the last row, sitting beside Hideki. In the cargo space were three Gibson guitar cases and a slightly battered amp.

  “Are these yours?” I asked Hideki. The rumble of the tires on the rutted country road drowned out the conversation from the front.

  “No way,” Hideki said. “I only wish I could own guitars like these. They’re Casey’s dad’s.”

  “That’s right; he plays music,” I said, thinking of what Casey had told me.

  “That’s one way to put it. Haven’t you ever heard of Dylan Thomas Revisited? Their song ‘Do Not Go Gentle’?”

  The tune came into my head. Both Mick and our dad loved the band DTR, and “Do Not Go Gentle” was one of the first songs Mick had taught Dad to play on his fiftieth-birthday Stratocaster. Mick always said the band’s front man was a genius guitar player and he was our dad’s favorite songwriter. Dad said it was a sin that musical tastes had changed and the band had fallen off the charts. That songwriter was obviously Mr. Donoghue. And Casey had mentioned how the family finances had changed when his success had faded. I wished so badly that I could tell my family about meeting Mr. Donoghue. They would have thought it was amazing.

  One by one, we dropped everyone off. Mark got out first, walking down a long drive lined with snow-frosted spruce trees and marked with a banner: BENJAMIN FAMILY CHRISTMAS TREE FARM.

  Hideki and Carole both lived about a mile away, on a street lined with Victorian houses. When they got out, I noticed a small sign in front of one beautiful blue house with a steep roof and ornate gingerbread cutouts around the eaves: PAMELA R. DEAN, MD, FAMILY PRACTICE. So, Carole’s mother had her office in their home. It felt weird to know she was the Porters’ doctor—and therefore mine. I had never loved my pediatrician before—I had mainly thought of him as the man who gave me shots—but in that moment, I felt a pang. Everything from my old life was gone, even Dr. Croft.

  When the car stopped next, Angelique didn’t get out. She stayed cuddled against Casey, whispering in his ear, letting out that trilling little laugh of hers. Her gaze slid my way, and I reddened, positive her whispers were about me. Or maybe she just wanted me to see that she was close to Casey. Finally, she got up to leave.

  Once she did, Casey half turned toward me.

  “C’mon up here,” he said. “You don’t have to sit all the way in back.”

  “I like keeping the guitars company,” I said.

  “My kind of person,” Mr. Donoghue said, driving off again. “She doesn’t want the equipment to be lonely.” His brogue reminded me of Glen Hansard’s—Bea and I were obsessed with the movie Once, about street musicians in Dublin, and it comforted me to hear Mr. Donoghue talk. But it was killing me not to be able to tell my family about him, not to be able to imitate his voice to Bea.

  He tuned the radio to a bluegrass station, and we listened the rest of the way home. Outside the car, snow began to come down heavily again. His headlights were on; I saw their bright reflection in the driving flakes. We turned onto Passamaquoddy Road, where our houses were. Before he could stop and drop me off at the Porters’ driveway, I spoke up quickly.

  “I’ll get off at yours,” I said. “That way you won’t have to pull in twice, and it’s right next door.”

  Mr. Donoghue did what I asked, driving through deep, not-yet-plowed snow, ice chunks crunching beneath the tires. We stopped at the side of the Donoghues’s house. When he and Casey started to unload his suitcase, the guitars, amps, and bags of gear, I helped.

  Up close, I saw how run-down the house really was. The porch roof sagged, the concrete step was cracked, the paint had almost completely peeled off the shingles. Casey’s mother’s empty beehives ran in a row along a garden mounded with snow. Again, I felt a jolt to see them—they reminded me of the apiary at school. Mr. Donoghue unlocked the front door, and when we stepped inside, it felt almost as cold as outside. I saw my breath in the air.

  Casey walked over to a thermostat; he turned it up, and I heard the furnace click on.

  “Good job saving on heat,” his dad said. “But keep it up a few extra degrees when it’s this cold. Remember the pipes last year?”

  “Okay, Dad,” Casey said. He went to a cast-iron stove standing in front of a big stone fireplace. He opened the door, stacked a pile of sticks and logs, and lit the pile with a match. The kindling caught and crackled.

  I looked around. The room was full of furniture, paintings, books, thick wool rugs, and a long rustic pine bar. There was a stand-up piano in the corner, surrounded by a trumpet, a mandolin, two acoustic guitars, and one electric guitar, all set up on stands and ready to be played. Things were a little shabby, but in a cozy, well-loved way.

  “Thanks,” Mr. Donoghue said, gesturing for me to put the guitar cases near the other instruments. “Not a bad week in New York, but it’s great to be home.”

  “How’d it go, Dad?” Casey asked.

  “Pretty good. We sold out the pub half the nights. Not the biggest take we’ve ever had, but better luck next time. We sure could have used a good mando player, though. Jamie is retiring, and I swear, in his heart he’s halfway left the band. You know what that means,” he said to Casey. “There’ll be a spot for you.”

  “After I graduate,” Casey said. “I’m joining for sure.”

  “Well, two and a half years till then. Four years of college after that. But I’ll wait, buddy. That’s the reason I do these gigs.”

  “I know, to pay for my college. I’d rather have you home,” Casey said.

  “Well, then think of the electric bill, and the heat, and …”

  “I get it, Dad,” Casey said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Mr. Donoghue said, and I thought I saw strain in his face. Were they really hard up for money? He turned to me then, and smiled. “How about you? Are you a musician?”

  “No,” I said. “Far from it. I have no musical talent. But I love to listen.”

  “Everyone has music inside them,” Mr. Donoghue said. “It’s just a matter of letting it out, young lady … what is your name?”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Casey said. “This is Lizzie Porter.”

  “Nice to meet you, Lizzie.”

  “You too,” I said. “My dad loves your music. He thinks your band name is amazing—Bob Dylan meets Dylan Thomas.”

  “Oh ho!” he said. “Cool. He never mentioned it, and I never pegged John for a bluegrass guy.”

  My stomach dropped. I meant my real dad. What if Mr. Donoghue said something to Mr. Porter now? I tried to think fast, to come up with a way to cover my mistake. “Um, I thought Dylan Thomas was Welsh, not Irish,” I said.

  “It’s true, but Wales is just a ferry ride from Ireland—it always felt like home when I played there. And Casey’s mom started reading him A Child’s Christmas in Wales when he was one. So, the band name was in her honor.” He paused, bowed his head for an instant, then looked up, smiling at me. “C’mon. We’ll get you playing something. Just a few notes before you go home.”

  “I really should go.”

  “Call your parents. They’ll say it’s fine.”

  “I forgot to charge my phone.”

  He handed me a landline. Reluctantly I dialed. Mrs. Porter answered.

  “Hi, Mom,” I forced myself to say. “Um, I’m at Casey’s.”

  “I know you are,” she said. “I saw Sean pick you up at school, and I watched you go into the house. I’m sure you’re behaving.”

  “I am,” I said. “Is it okay if I stay for a little while? To listen to music?”

&n
bsp; “A little while,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Which instrument do you like?” Casey asked as soon as I hung up.

  “All of them,” I said, looking at the shining brass, the burnished wood. But one stood out for me—it made me think of Mick and my dad. “Guitar,” I said.

  “Use this one,” Mr. Donoghue said, taking a rich golden Gibson acoustic from its stand, thrusting it into my hand. “It’s the first guitar I bought with my own money.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Donoghue,” I said.

  “Ha,” he said. “That makes me feel old. Call me Sean. Everyone does.”

  Right; that’s what Mrs. Porter had called him. “Sean,” I said, trying it out.

  Casey had lit the stove. Flames rippled from the rolled-up newspaper to bundles of oak twigs, catching the split logs, throwing a wall of heat into the room. He walked over to get his mandolin. He moved gracefully, sidestepping a sofa and low coffee table.

  “How do you do it, get around so well?” I asked. I felt embarrassed to ask the question, but the way Casey had called me Emily, not even knowing it was my real name, had broken the normal barrier I’d feel asking something so personal.

  “Shadowlands,” he said. “That’s what my vision is like. I can see shapes, anything big. It’s the small things I miss. Like, I can see you, the actual you—shoulders, arms, the fact you have long hair.” When he said that, he reached over and lightly brushed the ends, his fingers tracing my shoulder. “But I can’t see the color, or your face. Or what you’re wearing.”

  I think I levitated. If he couldn’t see Lizzie’s clothes, her black hair, her green eyes, that meant I didn’t have to be in disguise with him. He was talking to me, Emily. If he could have seen my face in that instant, he would have witnessed the biggest grin—the only real smile—I’d had since being taken.

  “Let’s see how you hold the guitar,” he said.

  “But you play mandolin.”

  “My mother taught me guitar first.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You said she played in Kerry.”

  “Definitely. Her grandmother told her music would inspire the bees to make more honey. So she’d sit on a rock near their hives and play songs.”

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  “It did, yes. They worked faster than we could collect it. So, come on, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  I wanted to hear more about his mother, about the bees. I had my left hand on the neck of the guitar, my right hand ready to strum. Casey reached over, helped me place the fingers on my left hand on the strings.

  “First, the strings,” he said. “From the fattest to the thinnest, from low to high: E-A-D-G-B-E. Just think, ‘Eat A Darn Good Breakfast Every Day.’ ‘Day’ is an extra word, but you get the idea and the saying will help you remember.”

  I plucked each string individually, hearing the clear note. It made me feel proud—my first thought was I couldn’t wait to show Mick. He had once promised to teach me, but we were so far apart in age, he was always busy with older-brother things. Then I remembered I couldn’t show him now. Or maybe ever.

  “The vertical spaces between the fine metal lines on the neck are called frets,” Casey explained. “Chords are triangles. You put your fingers on three different strings at the correct frets, strum, and you have a chord. Go ahead.”

  The metal strings dug into the soft pads of my left fingers, surprisingly sharp, and I let go.

  Casey smiled. “You need calluses. You’ll get them, the more you practice. Just take it easy now, let me hear you.”

  I nodded and strummed harder than I’d intended.

  “That’s an E chord,” he said encouragingly. He readjusted my finger pattern on the neck, and I strummed again with slightly more control.

  “There—an A.”

  He showed me D, which was a little harder, an E minor, which was really easy, and a C and G, but by then I got mixed up, trying to remember everything, and by the movement of his hands over mine, his warm breath on my cheek, and the way he closed his eyes when I strummed each chord.

  “You’re getting it,” he said.

  “I have a long way to go,” I said.

  “Not really,” he said. “Our songs are really simple, with a typical chord progression, A-E-D.”

  “But the melodies are so much more complicated!”

  “Well, we riff on them, and Hideki completely slays on guitar solos. And Angelique’s fiddle always takes the song somewhere else completely.”

  I hesitated, going back and forth on whether or not I should ask, but I had to know. “Are you two going out?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  He was very quiet for a minute. “No,” he said after a while. “We used to.”

  “I thought, by the way she wanted to sit with you … that you were, or that she wanted to.”

  “She broke up with me,” he said. “So I don’t really think that’s the case.”

  She wants you back, I wanted to say, but I had the feeling he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  “I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing,” I said. “If I reminded you of being hurt.”

  “It’s been since the summer,” he said. “It was bad back then, but I’m over it.” The way he said it so fast made me wonder if he really was. “How about you? Are you with anyone? From before you came here?”

  “No,” I said, thinking of my unrequited crush on Dan. “Not at all.”

  “It’s funny,” he said. “Earlier today, when I said your voice sounded familiar in a different way?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was almost going to ask, are you on the run?”

  “The what?” I asked, my spine freezing.

  “There was something on the morning news,” he said. “A girl who went missing, maybe ran away. It caught my attention, because her name is Emily, and I thought of the song. That’s probably why, when they played a clip of her talking, she sounded like you. Crazy, right?”

  “Crazy,” I said. My voice came out in a croak.

  “My mistake,” he said. “I tend to listen extra hard—I guess because I love music so much and, I don’t know, to make up for other things. You and that girl really do sound alike.”

  “What a coincidence,” I whispered, almost afraid to have him hear and register my voice.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  All I had to do was let the truth spill out. We could tell his dad, the police cars could arrive silently so Mrs. Porter wouldn’t hear.

  But she saw everything. Shadowlands, Casey had said. I knew what he meant. Mrs. Porter lived in my mind, and she existed in reality, too—constantly in the shadows just out of sight. I was positive she was watching out the kitchen window—or maybe she was hovering just outside the Donoghues’s house, behind the sycamore tree, eyes trained on me now.

  Wind whistled, coming through cracks in the door, making a loose shutter clunk against the house—boom, boom, boom, over and over again. The stove had started to heat up, and the furnace was humming in the basement, and Casey was sitting so close beside me.

  I had the feeling that if he looked at me right then I would tell him everything. And he did—he glanced over. I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I couldn’t nod, I couldn’t shake my head, I couldn’t move.

  “Are you that girl?” he asked, frowning. The question hung in the air between us. Seconds of silence ticked on. I tried to shake my head no, but I was frozen. Finally, as if he thought he must have sounded foolish, he gave me a hesitant grin. “I’m so sorry. Of course you’re not,” he said. “You wouldn’t be living with the Porters if you were.”

  Casey went back to music. I practiced the chords. A-E-D, A-E-D, over and over. He hummed along at first, then picked up his mandolin and began to play, so it actually started to sound like a song. I concentrated on the triangles, my fingers on the strings until my breathing calmed down and I was pretty sure my heart wouldn�
��t fly out of my chest.

  I made up lyrics in my head—is this how it was for Lizzie, writing a poem? I didn’t know. For that moment, I was myself again: Emily Lonergan. I had no idea what Lizzie would hear in the melody, but running through my mind, in time to the chords, were the words:

  You heard my voice, you know my name,

  Lizzie and I are not the same,

  I wish you could look at me and see

  I’m Emily, I’m Emily.

  “I want to show you something,” Casey said after we had played for a while. He replaced our instruments in the stands. Then he led me down the hallway to the kitchen. Everything was old-fashioned: a yellowing enamel stove, a refrigerator with a motor that hummed as if it were about to give out, a big farmhouse sink.

  A framed photo of a young woman and a little blond boy hung over the long oak table. The woman’s hair was dark, cut very short. They were holding hands standing in front of the beehives, beaming at the camera. I recognized Casey right away. He looked about six years old, and his hair was curly and much lighter, but he had the same mesmerizing turquoise eyes. I knew that the woman was Casey’s mother, and I could tell by the way they smiled that they loved the person taking the picture, and I knew that was Casey’s father.

  Casey opened a door at the kitchen’s far end, and we walked into a small room. It was dark. I couldn’t see. He reached overhead, pulled a cord that turned on a light, and I nearly gasped.

  We stood in a room of gold. The walls were lined with shelves, floor to ceiling, and each contained jar after jar of honey. The colors ranged from deep amber to pale lemon, with every shade of yellow in between. A corner of one shelf held a frame still loaded with honeycombs. I stared at the waxy hexagonal cells, knowing that Casey and his mother had extracted the nectar from them. One cell contained the remains of a dead bee, its black-and-yellow body preserved in wax.

  “This guy didn’t make it,” I said.

  “There’s always loss,” he said.

  Did he mean in the world of honey, or in life? Either way, I agreed, and I nodded. The room was small. The jars were sealed, but the air smelled sweet. Was it from the sugar? I was standing so close to Casey, I caught the scent of his soap. He was tall. The top of my head came to his collarbone. I wanted to stand on tiptoes and bury my face in his neck. I tilted my head back to look up at him.