Pretend She's Here Read online

  “Oh, we’re not going to keep you locked up,” she said, letting out a small laugh. A genuine smile touched her lips. She squeezed my hand.

  “Good,” I said. “Thank you! When can I leave?”

  “Well, you’re not leaving.”

  “But …” I said, confused. “You said you’re not going to keep me locked up.”

  “Of course we’re not. This is your bedroom. We took the precaution of putting a solid lock on the door and bricking up the window. That’s for your own good. But once you’re calmer, when you’re ready, you can join us. The rest of the house is yours. Everything is yours. You can run outside, come to the store with me, we’ll get you into school, you can write poems for the literary magazine. You will love this part of Maine. It’s small-town America, so quaint, and I can’t wait for you to discover why we chose to move here. Lizzie would be over the moon. And so will you. You’ll love exploring it.”

  “When?” I asked. This confirmed it: She was totally crazy to think I’d stick around. The second I got out of this house I’d run for help so fast.

  “When I’m sure you understand the situation.”

  “What situation?” I asked.

  She was still holding my hand. She stroked the back of it with her thumb, stared into my eyes with something like compassion. “Your mother drinks,” she said. “Everyone knows.”

  I felt shocked, as if she’d slapped me. “She doesn’t. She stopped.”

  “She’ll start again,” Mrs. Porter said. “This will make her.”

  “The fact you took me?”

  “She will think you ran away. Kids do, all the time. Especially kids from alcoholic homes. Remember when you ran away last time? Your mother brought it on herself.”

  “That was different,” I said, panicking at the memory. “She’s sober now. Nearly fourteen months now!”

  “Some of us never drank to begin with. I’ll never understand,” she said, “how the good mothers lose their children and the bad mothers get to keep theirs.”

  I was trembling with fury. I wanted to attack her for implying my mother wasn’t good. I felt like telling her things Lizzie had said about her, times Lizzie had gotten mad and spilled family secrets. She wasn’t the perfect mother. But I held the words inside.

  “I’d be a better mother to you,” Mrs. Porter said.

  “No one could be better than mine,” I said.

  “Is that how you felt in seventh grade? Your parents didn’t know where you were for twenty-four hours.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” I said, looking away. My parents had been so worried, they had called the police. My uncle Derry was on the force then, and he had done his best to keep it quiet once they found me. Lizzie had broken down and come clean, and they had found me in Mame’s attic—Mame had left her home to move into assisted living. Her house was for sale—empty but safe, the perfect place to hide out.

  “I know how hurt and worried you were about your mother, even before you ran away,” Mrs. Porter was saying. “You’d come to our house, all those nights you stayed over. I knew you were suffering, that you were upset about her drinking—oh, when I think back, I would have done anything to help you.”

  “You did help me,” I whispered. “You were … my other family. You were there for me.”

  “So let us be your family now,” she said.

  “We can go back to the way it was,” I said, thinking quickly. “I can be Lizzie’s friend—your friend. I know we fell out of touch, but I’ll fix that. I’ll visit, all the time. I can spend time here during vacations, and on weekends …”

  “That’s not enough,” she said. “Because Lizzie was here every day.”

  “But I’m not Lizzie.”

  “You can be—you already are, to me. And, oh, I know I can be a good mother to you. Lizzie told me how despairing you were, how your mother hid bottles in her car, under her bed, in the toilet tank. She told me how much pain you were in, your mother slurring her words, embarrassing you in front of your friends.”

  “She doesn’t do that anymore.”

  Mrs. Porter’s eyes looked so sad. “Do you hear yourself? You were mortified. Alcoholism runs in families, you know. You’ve probably inherited the addiction gene. I can guide you.”

  “I’ll never drink,” I said.

  “That’s right. Because I’ll be a good example. You’ll see how you can have fun, get through life without alcohol.”

  “But I can’t stay. You have to let me go.”

  “Please don’t make this worse. You say you love them. Your ‘family,’” she said, putting the word in air quotes, as if they weren’t that at all.

  “Of course I do,” I said. “More than anything.”

  “Then you’ll realize that the only way to protect them is to accept this as your home. To be my other daughter. To be Lizzie.”

  “How will that protect them?” I asked.

  “Because if you don’t do this, if you try to run away, I will hurt your father and every one of your brothers and sisters. And I will kill your mother.”

  “No!” I said, sliced with horror. I jumped up, and pain shot through my ankle. “Mrs. Porter!”

  “I don’t want to hear you call me that again,” she said.

  “Take it back,” I begged. “Say you didn’t mean it! Please!”

  “But I do,” she said. “I hope you never find out how deeply I do mean it. Do you want to test me?”

  I couldn’t speak. How could this be Lizzie’s mom, the woman I’d felt so close to for so long? I shook, unable to believe this was happening.

  “You would never do this, Mrs. Porter,” I said. “I know you—this isn’t you!”

  “I don’t want to do it,” she said, her voice cracking. “But you don’t know what it’s been like—her seat at the table empty. Her bed unslept in. You can’t imagine how much I want to hold her, get her back … There is nothing worse, Emily!”

  There—she’d used my real name. We were back in reality, and my whole body shaking, I gave her a hug. I rested my head on her shoulder, remembering the old kindness and warmth between us.

  “That’s right, I’m Emily,” I said.

  She pushed me away, shook her head violently.

  “I need you to be Lizzie. I’ve thought this through. People will think it was an accident. That you disappeared, and your mother started drinking again and fell. Hit her head. It’s so easy to do when you’re unsteady—you should know, it happened to you, on the hillside. And who would blame your mother for going back to the bottle? Her youngest daughter runs away.”

  “I would never do that again.”

  “She doesn’t know that. Not for sure, not after last time. She has no clue where you are.” She paused. “But it doesn’t really matter. Whether you left on your own or some other way, you’re gone. At first, that will be painful. And it will be worse if you force me to hurt her. Murder her.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “I’ll do it without thinking twice.” She sounded resolute, and even though I couldn’t believe it, I knew she meant it.

  I closed my eyes and saw my mother’s face. The look in her blue eyes was pure anguish—an imprint of the last time I’d seen her. Why had I fought with her? Why had the last words I’d said to her been see you never?

  “Do you understand the situation now?” Mrs. Porter asked. “How serious I am?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Then let me see you eat the soup I made you. Made you with love. A sip at least.” She dipped the spoon into the soup, lifted it to my mouth. “Eat the soup so I won’t hurt your mother,” she said.

  I opened my mouth and tried not to gag while she fed me like a baby.

  “Another,” she said.

  “I can do it myself,” I said, taking the spoon from her. I ate until half the soup was gone.

  “There,” she said. “Now, one more thing. The most important.”

  “What?”

  “Are you sure you unde
rstand that I mean what I say? That if I have to, I will go to Black Hall and do what needs to be done?”

  “Yes,” I said, terrified.

  “Then say it. Let me hear you. Call me by the right name. If only you knew how much I need this.”

  I knew what she meant, but I couldn’t open my mouth.

  “What is my name?” she asked, a hard edge in her voice.

  All I could think of was putting a shield between her and my family, the people I adored. It was one word. A single syllable. I thought of it as saving them from being hurt, my mother from being killed.

  “Mom,” I whispered, feeling sick.

  Mrs. Porter hugged me.

  That night, my mind raced and my eyes felt zapped by a thousand tiny electric wires. Lying awake, staring at the ceiling, I realized that they’d been drugging my food before. That had to explain the deep sleeps.

  Now, because I had called Mrs. Porter “Mom,” they must have felt they didn’t have to control me that way anymore.

  I used to lose sleep over three things: homework, the play I was writing, and boys. Namely, Dan Jenkins. I would obsess over him, and when I got to school, I’d tell Lizzie everything I’d been thinking about. But right now I was too scared to even think of Dan, and Lizzie wasn’t here to tell anyway.

  Now my eyelids were glued open because of what Mrs. Porter said she would do to my mother. I veered back and forth between refusing to believe she really would and remembering the sharp tone in her voice when she’d said the word murder. Besides, I had never imagined she could ever do this: take me, lock me in a dungeon. So maybe she was capable of other terrible things.

  Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. The cinder block room felt so claustrophobic I thought I would pass out. I nearly wished for the drugs so I could sleep through this horror, but I didn’t really. I needed my head to be clear so I could escape, or at least hear the voices when people came to rescue me.

  I wanted my cell phone so badly, I felt crazed. I imagined texting my brothers and sisters. And Jordan and Alicia: I thought of how I had turned my back on them that last day at school. What would have happened if I’d gone with them? My fingers clenched hard, and my whole body ached with the desire for my phone.

  I was having a panic attack. I clawed the blankets off me, jumped out of bed. I turned on the light and walked around and around the room, my hands on the walls, feeling for any opening, a way out. Was this how a tiger, newly captured from the wild and thrown into a zoo, felt? I wanted to roar.

  I wanted to break through the concrete, smash into the fresh air, and run until my muscles burned and my feet were tattered. Once I got out of this house, there were so many possibilities: I could run to a neighbor’s, to the police, or all the way home. I could warn my mother, and be with my family, and we would all save each other.

  Mrs. Porter had planted another worry in my mind. She had said my mother would start drinking again.

  This is the weird thing: When you have a mother who drinks, you love her more than ever, maybe more than other kids love theirs. Partly because sometimes you also hate her, and the emotions swing back and forth, and you feel so guilty. The Magic Mountain of Mom, Tommy called it.

  “It’s an amusement park,” he said to me one day about two years ago when I was really upset about something she’d done. “And not always fun. You know how you sometimes get too scared on Batman?”

  I nodded. Roller coasters in general weren’t my favorite, and Batman was one of the wildest.

  “But then there’s the water park, and you love that. Or Balloon Race—nice and gentle—going on it at night, swinging up high, looking down at all the beautiful lights. I remember how you never wanted to get off that one.”

  “But she’s our mom—not a bunch of dumb rides,” I’d said. “Plus you’re out of the house now. Did grad school erase your memory of what it’s like?”

  “Of course it didn’t,” he said, his arm around me. “Listen, Em. The Magic Mountain is also a book. An amazing novel by Thomas Mann. I read it last spring. It’s about Europe before World War I. A young guy, Hans, who goes to a sanitarium in the Alps. But it hit me because it reminded me of home, of us. Of her. Hans is sick, he’s in this beautiful place, and he just can’t get better. There’s a blizzard dream, and witches and wizards, this cousin who’s nearly as close to Hans as a brother. Closeness and secrets …”

  “Like all of us,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s one of the worst parts about Mom’s drinking,” Tommy said. “The way it forces us to keep secrets.”

  “But you’re away,” I said again. “You can escape it.”

  “You can’t escape love, Em. And I love her, the way you do. The thing is, as bad as it feels when she’s drunk …”

  “She falls, she sounds weird, she smells,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “All that. And it’s embarrassing, because as much as we try to keep the secret and protect her, everyone knows. But there are the other times.”

  It was true. Our mom gave the best hugs in the world. She was thin but not too thin, and her hugs were warm and soft. Even with seven kids, she made each of us feel she always had time for whatever we needed. She saw what was special in each of us. When she was sober, her blue eyes sparkled. When she wasn’t, they had a dull, faraway look, as if her truest wishes in life had passed her by.

  On days when she wasn’t drinking, she surprised us constantly. She was the champion of spur of the moment. So many Saturday mornings she’d tell us to get in the car, and we’d go off on adventures. Once she took us to Vermont, to search for wildflowers on Sugarbush. She’d brought us each a tiny watercolor kit, and we’d sat in the shade painting lady’s slippers, bloodroot, and trillium. Another time we drove to New London, hopped on the high-speed ferry, and spent the day biking around Block Island. We had an ongoing contest, to try all the clam chowder in New England, till we found the best—at the Black Pearl, in Newport, Rhode Island.

  My dad loved her. After us kids were in bed, I’d hear my parents put on music, and if I snuck to the top of the stairs and looked down, I’d see them slow-dancing. He knew she loved anything with shamrocks on it, and he’d bring home shamrock earrings, shamrock bracelets, a green hoodie with a white shamrock on the front, a special edition St. Patrick’s Day Boston Celtics jersey. I hated when he watched her too closely, as if gauging whether she had taken a drink or not. Sometimes he’d hug her and I’d hear him sniff the air. It made me cringe, partly because I did those things myself.

  But then she went to rehab and got sober—I mean, it’s supposed to be One Day at a Time, but this time she meant it for good, and ever since she came home, she went to a meeting every day. When she’d made it one year without a drink, she had stood in front of her home group to pick up her coin—we all went to hear her qualify. That means standing up in front of the room and telling your story: what happened, what it was like, and what it’s like now.

  “The afternoon of my daughter’s dress rehearsal, I had a vodka and soda,” Mom had said. “She had both written and performed in the play, and I was so proud of her. I was going to pick her up, and we were going to celebrate with pizza. I thought, maybe another drink, start the celebration early. I told myself it was no big deal—two drinks never really affected me. Then I had another, but I told myself it was fine, because I was sipping it slowly.

  “The next thing I knew, I was passed out in bed. I had missed my daughter’s play and left her standing outside school waiting—but that was the gift. Because I know I’d planned to drive. When I woke up, I had the car keys in my hand. I’d been on my way out the door. I could have killed Emily. Or someone else’s kids. It had been bad before, but that was the moment for me. It brought me to my knees, and I knew I was done. By the grace of God, I haven’t picked up a drink since.”

  Everyone cheered, our family louder than anyone. I didn’t think I could love her more than before, but I did. I do. So she can’t drink; she just can’t. Mrs. Porter can’t be right, that thi
nking I ran away could drive my mother back to the bottle.

  I couldn’t let that happen.

  But how could I stop it?

  The only thing I could prevent was Mrs. Porter going to Black Hall to kill her. And there was only one way to do that: go along with whatever Mrs. Porter wanted.

  Sleep had been my refuge those first days, but now it was gone.

  I spent every free moment—which is to say EVERY moment—looking for Mame’s box. Day spilled into night, or maybe it was the other way around. Time lost meaning. It was either moving very slow or very fast. I had gone through a looking glass that even Alice couldn’t have dreamt up.

  Whenever Mrs. Porter wasn’t serving me food or taking away the plates, I scoured the room, looking for Mame’s cell phone. I removed each book from the shelves, repeatedly looked through the bureau drawers. I took Lizzie’s laptop down from the closet shelf, but it didn’t boot up; the screen didn’t even flicker. I couldn’t find the power cord to charge it. I went through the pockets of her clothes. Scents and memories of her came back to me. They would start to reassure me, and then I would panic again.

  I tried to pretend this was a play. I had written it and was acting the lead role. My writing had never strayed into the dystopian before, but this play was about the last girl in the world. Or maybe she just thought she was. The apocalypse had come, and she’d barricaded herself in this bunker. Outside, the sun was blocked by the earth’s dust, exploded into a brown cloud when a meteorite the size of Florida crashed into and pulverized the Berkshires. Maybe the girl’s family was still alive, and as soon as the particles cleared the air, she had to find a way back to them.

  That version of the play gave me a feeling of bravery: I was here by choice. I was just waiting for the air to clear, for the sun to come back, and then I would undertake the journey.

  Another version of the play took away all power.

  The girl had been kidnapped. She was trapped, being held captive, in an underground cinder block room. The kidnappers were her best friend’s family. The clock struck every single hour, but she lost track of time. She spent all day every day scouring the chamber for a box of old photos that probably didn’t matter anyway. Her ankle and head hurt, from when she tried to escape, but the worst part was her bleeding fingers: from trying to claw through the concrete, chip away at the mortar.