Pretend She's Here

by Luanne Rice

  He leaned down slightly, his warm lips brushing my forehead.

  “This is my favorite place,” he whispered.

  “It’s a magical room,” I said. “I can feel your mother here.”

  “So can I, but I didn’t mean the room. I mean standing next to you.”

  My heart flipped. He reached for my hand, linked fingers with me. I stood taller, our faces nearly meeting. Distant, from within the house, I heard voices. I froze. Footsteps, and people talking, Mr. Donoghue and a woman. Casey and I stepped apart.

  When I saw their faces peek around the door, I wasn’t surprised. It was as if I was expecting it.

  “Hello, Casey,” Mrs. Porter said. “Hi, Lizzie.”

  “Hello,” Casey said.

  “Lizzie, I need you home,” she said. “Sorry to break up the party.”

  “Here,” Casey said as I walked out of the room, pressing a jar of the darkest honey into my hand. I glanced at the handwritten label: Wild Thyme.

  “Your mother’s writing?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Yes, that’s Sinead’s,” Mr. Donoghue said.

  “Oh, I wish I could have known her,” Mrs. Porter said, taking the jar from my hand. “You must miss her so.”

  And then we were in our winter jackets, saying good-bye, walking out the back door into the driveway. She waited until we were away from the house lights; then she marched a few steps ahead of me, not saying a word. I felt the anger pouring off her back. When we rounded the bend into the drive, she smashed the jar down onto the ice-covered craggy rock ledge. I watched the precious nectar ooze into a shallow granite gully, then coagulate in the freezing cold.

  “I don’t want that in our house,” she said. “She was a bad mother, a horrible mother. That stuff would only remind me of how unfair it is, how terrible people think they can get away with everything, how life is just handed to them.”

  “She died,” I said. “Life was taken from her. And I don’t think she was a bad mother. She loved Casey.”

  “Not as much as I loved my daughter,” Mrs. Porter said, her voice rising, then breaking. She crouched down as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. Her shoulders heaved with sobs.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, kneeling beside her, putting my arm around her shoulder because, in spite of everything, I couldn’t bear to see her agony.

  “I just wanted you home,” she said through thick tears. “That’s why I went to get you. I’m sorry about the honey. The strongest feeling just … came over me. I began to think I can’t trust you. That’s such a horrible feeling, Lizzie. You can’t even imagine.”

  My whole body tensed because I knew how dangerous her strongest feelings could be. I saw the broken glass from the jar glinting in lamplight filtering through the trees from Casey’s house. The edges were knife-sharp clear blades. The honey looked as if it had frozen solid, just like the blood in my veins.

  Hello. It’s me, and I’m fine. You might think I have problems, or whatever, but I don’t. Mom, you’re the one with the problem. I hope you get help. I love you all but I am doing great without you, so don’t worry. Emily.

  That was the note Mrs. Porter wrote for me, four days after the two-month-anniversary news stories. I typed it, and I sent it. My whole body was fluttery, like my goose bumps were on the inside, because suddenly I had hope. Unwittingly, Mrs. Porter had handed me a secret clue: I would never say or whatever. The phrase was one of my pet peeves.

  When Bea was fourteen and Lizzie and I were thirteen, my mother dropped the three of us off at the mall to go Christmas shopping. The parking lot was so full she couldn’t find a spot. Or maybe she just wanted to keep us in the car a little longer. We kept driving up and down the rows.

  “Look at all these cars,” she said. “All the out-of-state plates.”

  “Mom, we’re not on a road trip,” Bea said. Whenever our family drove long distances, we’d play a game to see if we could spot all fifty states.

  “No. But a major interstate highway goes right by here, and there’s the Sub Base in Groton, with Navy people from all over the country,” Mom said. “Someone could take you, whisk you away, and we might never find you.”

  “You’re really not being fair to the Navy, but we’ll be careful,” Bea said.

  All I wanted was to get out of there so Lizzie and I could run to the food court and see who was there.

  “We’ll watch out for strangers and creepy types,” I said.

  “We promise,” Bea said, hand on the door handle, ready to bolt to meet James.

  “Listen to me,” my mother said. “It’s not the suspicious-looking ones I’m afraid of. It’s the friendly Santa Claus. Or the lady with pretty blond hair, in a blue coat, with a cute puppy on a leash. Maybe even someone you know. Someone familiar, who looks nice. She’s the one who you have to watch for.”

  I was pretty sure my mother had been drinking that day because when she said she’s it came out “sheez.”

  Bea, Lizzie, and I finally escaped and tore into the mall.

  “The lady in the blue coat!” Bea said.

  “Ha-ha, that’s so random I’m crying,” Lizzie said.

  “Raise your hand if buffalo wings have had a positive impact on your life,” I said.

  Lizzie and I both raised our hands, and finally got to the food court, where bunches of Black Hall, Niantic, and Waterford kids had taken over tables. We sat with our friend Jordan and her boyfriend, Eric Milne, plus Tilly, Alicia, Monica Noyes, and Miguel Santos. James wasn’t there yet, so Bea sat with us.

  Lizzie and I fortified ourselves with buffalo wings and cheese fries, and Bea swiped a wing. Jordan nibbled around the perimeter of a black bean veggie burger.

  “When you’re a vegan and haven’t mentioned it in the last hour,” Eric said.

  “You’re so ignorant it should be illegal, or whatever,” Jordan said, leaning over to kiss him.

  Bea made a gag face. Jordan said or whatever constantly, and it annoyed us; it made her sound as if she was negating the thing she had just said.

  Holiday music surrounded us, putting us in the mood to spend all our money on stuff. Bea’s and my lists were longer than anyone’s—no one else had six siblings.

  Just as I was taking a perfect bite combination of wing and blue cheese, Bea leaned forward.

  “This is not happening,” she said.

  “What?” Lizzie asked.

  “Do not turn around,” Bea said.

  But of course we did, and carrying their trays to the table right next to us was a guy with a buzz cut and a blond woman in a blue coat.

  “Is this even real life, I feel like I’m on the set of a horror movie,” Lizzie said.

  “Or whatever,” Bea said, and I laughed so hard blue cheese went up my nose.

  Sitting in the basement bedroom, running the email I had just sent over and over in my head, I came up with two gigantic hopes and sent the strongest, most powerful vibes I could to Bea and my mother:

  1) That Bea would tell my parents how much I hated and would never under any circumstances but coercion say the phrase or whatever.

  2) That Bea or my mother would remember the story about the nice, familiar blond lady in the blue coat, and even though Mrs. Porter didn’t have blond hair, we had always thought she was nice. And she was definitely familiar.

  And there was a third hope, too.

  It had to do with Casey. I went upstairs, pretending I wanted a snack. I took an apple and ate it while standing at the kitchen window, looking toward his house. It was much easier to see, now that the leaves were off the trees. The moon had risen, casting a ghostly glow on the big old place. Smoke wisped from the chimney, dissolving in the clear air.

  The living room curtains were open, and I could see him sitting in the same spot where he had started teaching me guitar. He held the mandolin, head bowed as he picked the strings.

  Was he playing the “Emily” song? Was he still trying to figure out whether he’d heard my voice on the TV? I
knew I could never imagine what that was like for him. He’d said something about his other senses being sharpened. I closed my eyes and tried to pay more attention to my own. When I did, the apple tasted more intense. I felt heat rising from the radiator and warming my arms. I smelled gross beef stew cooking for dinner.

  And I heard music.

  Across the yards, through the window glass and distilled by the cold winter air, the strains of mandolin notes filled me. Yes, he was playing “Emily.” Yes, he was thinking of me. With my eyes still shut, I pretended that he knew exactly who I was and would save me. I hoped and wished he would help me get away without Mrs. Porter knowing.

  He would help me get home.

  Sunday was a double day.

  That’s what Patrick called any day with the same numbers—like June 11, September 22, the 33rd day of summer, our grandparents’ 55th anniversary. He believed double days were lucky, but I didn’t feel that way. Today was the sixty-sixth day since I’d been taken.

  Sending the email had given me hope, but that hope was lost this morning. My family would never notice the or whatever, and the rest of what I had written would just make them feel worse. I imagined the Porters whispering about what they would have to do to me. Mr. Porter had barely looked at me since that day of the news stories, since he’d asked his wife that question. I felt as if he wanted to stop thinking of me as a person; I was just a problem.

  Late that morning, the landline rang.

  “Oh, hello, Carole,” Mrs. Porter said. “Yes, just a minute.” She handed me the phone.

  “Hello?” I said as Mrs. Porter stood right there listening.

  “I’ve totally given up texting you since you never get my messages, so I got your family’s landline number from my mom,” Carole said. “Want to meet up?”

  “Meet up?” I asked, watching Mrs. Porter’s reaction. She nodded with a head tilt as if waiting to hear more. “And do what?”

  “Go to Boston and escape the woods, ha-ha, but forget that. Want to come over?”

  “Uh,” I said. Then, to Mrs. Porter, “Can I go to Carole’s?”

  “Have her come here,” she said.

  An hour later, Carole’s mom dropped her off. Mrs. Porter hurried out to the car to talk. She hadn’t worn a jacket, so she stood in the driveway, arms wrapped around herself against the bitter cold. I heard laughter, and it struck me—it sounded as if she and Dr. Dean were friends.

  I hadn’t quite imagined Mrs. Porter having any friends up here. How was actual friendship possible when you were living a lie?

  Carole and I made grilled cheese sandwiches—the best kind, fried in a skillet with butter, the bread soft and the crusts crispy brown—and ate them in the living room in front of the TV, watching the first Mockingjay on demand. I couldn’t pay attention. Carole was a bigger fan than I was, plus I felt weirded-out sitting with her on the same couch where Lizzie and I had watched the exact same movie together.

  The furnace rumbled on and off; the house got claustrophobic, so we decided to go outside. Mrs. Porter stood at the window pretending to do the dishes but actually watching us. The snow was deep. Out by the road, the plows had left piles that were taller than we were.

  “Snow fort!” I said.

  “Never built one,” she said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “City girl, baby. I grew up on Beacon Hill. We probably would have stayed in Boston forever if my parents hadn’t gotten divorced. Then my mom had to do the independent-woman thing and relocate here.”

  “That’s a pretty cool thing to do,” I said. “But it must have been hard, leaving your friends.”

  “Massively,” she said.

  “Me too, from when I lived in Black Hall before.” I could say that because it was a true part of the Lizzie story.

  I ran to the garage, grabbed two shovels, and handed one to Carole. I had excellent snow-fort technique, taught to me over my entire lifetime by older brothers and sisters. Tommy had shown us how to cut hard-packed snow into cubes, pile them up in a square. Mick had instructed us how to tunnel through short-enough sections so we wouldn’t get buried if the fort collapsed. Anne used chunks of ice and stray icicles to build castle-like crenellations and window ornaments, and Iggy was great at using the shovel handle to carve out precisely arched windows at eye level. Patrick, Bea, and I built snow chairs and tables inside and stockpiled snowballs in case of attack.

  “This is beautiful,” Carole said, admiring our work when we were done. “Like a sandcastle, but in the snow.”

  “If there was a neighboring fort, we could have a snowball fight,” I said.

  “Well, the only neighbor is Casey Donoghue,” she said. “I’m sure he’d love it, but he wouldn’t see well enough to hit us.”

  “Do you know what happened to his eyes?” I asked, looking toward his house.

  “An infection when he was a baby,” she said. “It was rare, came on really fast, and even though his parents took him to the hospital right away, some damage was done.”

  “I thought it had something to do with his mother not getting good medical care, not getting vaccinations or taking care of herself, when she was pregnant with him,” I said, remembering all the things Mrs. Porter had said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Carole said. “She was an awesome mom. She did everything possible.”

  Once again, Mrs. Porter’s craziness shone through, her skewed vision of what a mother should be, of how she was the only one who truly measured up.

  “You and Casey seem close. I can’t help noticing,” Carole said.

  I smiled and couldn’t help blushing, lightly tossing a snowball at her. She threw a big, fluffy clump up in the air, and powder sprayed down on us.

  “Look at his house,” she said. “It’s so sad, the way it’s gotten.”

  I stared at the elegant old place: the tall windows, the porch columns. One black shutter on the second floor hung loose on a broken hinge, creaking and slamming in the wind.

  “After his mom died, their honey business did, too,” I said.

  “Yeah, she was an incredible person. She was super talented, nice to everyone, ran the whole show. His dad being a musician, and all.” She sighed. “Artists don’t always notice mundane things like falling-apart houses. See, I get that, and I feel sorry for Casey. Did I mention my dad is a sculptor?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He has pieces in the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Tate Modern, but he didn’t know how to change a lightbulb. Or maybe he just didn’t notice the hall was dark. He’s famous, and mostly sweet, but my mom got tired of doing everything.” Carole paused. “I mean, she’s a doctor, it’s not like she has all this free time. So they broke up. Now that we live a million miles away, they’re friends—he visits every few weeks, they go out to dinner. It’s so contrary.”

  “That sounds really hard. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, I look at families like yours, so tight and together, and it kind of kills me—not that I’m not happy for you.”

  Like mine. “Thanks,” I said, my stomach twisting.

  “Casey has it harder than I do. I thought divorce was the worst, but having your mom die—I can’t even imagine.”

  “He said she died in September, a year ago,” I said.

  “I know, it’s so sad. He’s missing her so badly, and just think of all the things he’ll do in life that she’ll never know about,” Carole said. Lizzie came to mind, and I felt a rush of sorrow. I wanted to ask Carole how Casey’s mother had died, but she went on. “Did he ever tell you why they moved to town?” she asked.

  “He said they inherited the house.”

  “Okay, you know about Sarah Royston?”

  I remembered the woman from the portrait at the school. “The one the town’s named after?”

  Carole nodded. “Well, she was originally from Ireland, too, and it turns out she was Mrs. Donoghue’s great-great-aunt. Sarah had one daughter, Nora, who didn’t have any children, so when Nora died—she was n
inety-nine—she left this house to Casey’s mom. That’s why the Donoghues came to America.”

  “But I thought Sarah Royston lived in the school building,” I said, staring at Casey’s house.

  “She did until she had this conversion, later in life. She turned that big mansion into a home for wayward girls—that’s what they actually called it: the Royston Home for Wayward Girls. Girls who got pregnant, or were abused, who ran away, whose parents couldn’t afford to take care of them, who had to leave home for whatever mysterious reason—she gave them a place to live. And she built this house for herself and Nora.”

  “Girls who had to leave home,” I said, the words making me feel hollow.

  “That was Sarah’s story,” Carole said. “That’s why she had a soft spot for girls who couldn’t live with their families. She was forced to leave her home in Ireland.”

  “Who forced her?” I asked, my skin prickling.

  “You’ve asked the right person,” Carole said with a smile. “I did my term project on her last spring.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Her parents were dirt-poor, starving in the Famine, and needed money, so they sent her to America to work in the mills. They had a deal with Edward Sheffield—the mill owner—that she would work for him until she was twenty-five, and he’d send most of her wages back to her family in Ireland. Supposedly for her future.”

  “She had no choice?” I asked.

  “No. And it was really hard—standing in a sawmill with gigantic logs barreling down the river, below zero temperatures, no safety standards at all. People got cut by the saws, trapped between logs, even killed.” Carole paused for breath. “He was evil—he paid the lowest wages around, and he punished the workers. He beat them, withheld their pay. But Sarah was so smart, she figured out a way to make the production line run faster. Because she was making him so much money, he moved her into the office.”

  “Big of him,” I said.