Pretend She's Here(14)

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 thinking 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.

My fingers really were bleeding. My fingernails were bent backward, and I had left shreds of them in the lines of cement between the blocks. It was slightly softer there, and I’d thought if I could dislodge even one section, I could scrunch my shoulders and suck in my gut and crawl through. But I hadn’t managed to create even a crack. Instead, I’d just mangled my fingers, which hurt all the time, more than I thought was possible.

When the steeple clock chimed five, I was on my hands and knees, once again pulling out the books on the bottom shelves to see if Mame’s photos were hiding there. That’s when it hit me: This was just a re-creation of Lizzie’s bedroom, not the real thing, and of course the Porters would have found the box, discovered the cell phone, taken it out of my reach.

Mame’s phone was gone. The hope was gone.

This wasn’t a play: It was my life.




Once I gave up hope, I stopped caring what day it was. The hours and days just blurred together anyway, and all that mattered was that I was still here. No one had come to rescue me.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner: day five. Breakfast, lunch, dinner: day six, day seven, day eight. Breakfast, lunch, dinner: Who cared? The meals ticked by.

Mrs. Porter was the only person I saw. I had no idea where Chloe and Mr. Porter might be. It seemed that she and I were the only ones in the house. She sat with me while I ate. I was too hungry to refuse. I figured that even if she sedated me again it wouldn’t matter. I was still in that room. But there were no more drugs. And even though I thanked her for the food, said thank you, Mom, she didn’t let me roam free through the house or go outside.

I guess she wasn’t yet convinced that I understood the situation.

But I did.

I still couldn’t reconcile this Mrs. Porter with the one I used to know, but I’d started to realize she had changed. She had lost Lizzie, and her mad grief had turned her into a monster. Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde.

I kept wondering: What if she doesn’t wait for me to bolt? What if she hurts my family anyway? If there was no one to go home to, wouldn’t that stop me from wanting to return to Connecticut? It would destroy me so much I might forget who I was. I might want to wipe out my own memory.

But all I wanted to do was remember. I thought about my family all the time. Their names were my prayers. We were Catholic. We only went to church about one Sunday a month. When we did, we sat in the same pew each time, four rows back from the altar on the left. Now that the older kids were away at college, they only came on Christmas and Easter.

“Do you think they go to Mass on campus?” my dad asked my mom once.

“That’s up to them. They do their own thing,” my mom said.

We weren’t exactly strict when it came to religion. I never told anyone that I wished I could have a vision, like the kids at Fatima, seeing the Virgin Mary and having her speak to them directly. Everyone would have laughed at me.