Pretend She's Here(22)

“That’s what’s killing me,” my mother said, a sob tumbling out. “I keep imagining what someone could be doing to her … I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s driving me out of my mind.”

They kept walking, my mom in the lead. The camera bounced, revealed a corner of Mrs. Porter’s red plaid jacket and then, in her other hand, a knife with a thick, sharp silver blade. She made a jabbing motion. I grabbed the phone from Chloe’s hand, pressed my mouth to it, and screamed.

“Mom, run! Get away from her!”

“She can’t hear. My mother has her phone on mute,” Chloe said. She pressed the OFF button, and the screen went black. I slapped her face as hard as I could, fumbled for the phone. Chloe charged at me, clawed the phone out of my hand. We kept fighting for it, but then she shoved me.

“You’re wasting time! Your mother has five minutes to live!” she said.

“What?” I froze.

“I was supposed to make sure you saw that,” Chloe said. “My mother meant what she told you. I have to call her back within five minutes, or she’ll … well, you know what she’ll do. To your mother. She’ll kill her. That’s what the knife is for. So come on. We’re going upstairs. You’ll send that email to your parents. Then I’ll call my mom to let her know, and everything will be fine. Your mother will get to live.”

I couldn’t even think. Chloe led me up the stairs. They were made of unfinished pine. It’s strange how I noticed that at a time like this, but my dad did carpentry, and the wood was the kind of thing he would have remarked on. There were little amber beads of pine pitch on the banister. I stared at them; they made me feel connected to my dad, to things he had taught me. How to measure carefully, how to hammer a nail the right way, how to sand a surface. I was in some kind of trance—it was the only way I could survive what was happening.

I half expected upstairs to be an exact replica of the Porters’ house in Black Hall, but although I recognized most of the furniture, it wasn’t arranged as precisely as Lizzie’s room. Chloe led me to the big faded chintz sofa, the one we’d all spent hours on, watching TV and playing Scrabble. The coffee table was a large brass-bound leather trunk that had been Mame’s. It had traveled the world with her. It had taken the Queen Elizabeth II across the Atlantic Ocean.

There were windows on two sides of the living room. Everything happened very fast. I blinked in the daylight—my first time seeing natural light in twenty-two days. While Chloe clicked the keys of her laptop, I looked outside and saw a house next door. It was big and white, like one of the sea captain’s houses in Black Hall, but it looked old and deserted. The paint was peeling, and the roof looked as if it might cave in. There was a line of beehives along a garden choked with weeds. But as I stared, I noticed a boy standing in the shadows on the front porch.

He was tall and skinny, his dirty-blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Torn jeans slipped low on his hips, and he wore a faded red T-shirt. His face, a pale oval, was turned toward me. He looked about seventeen, Patrick’s age. My heart began to pound even harder than it already was. Was there a way I could signal to him, get help for me and my mother? I glanced at Chloe; she was intent on the computer screen. Turning back to the boy, I raised my hand, just slightly.

“Come on,” Chloe said, and I dropped my arm fast so she wouldn’t see. She gestured for me to sit beside her on the sofa. She had her laptop open to Gmail, my username typed in, as if this was predestined, as if she’d already known I would be doing this. All I had to do was insert my password. Mrs. Porter had written out what I was supposed to say. There it was in her neat handwriting on a piece of geranium-emblazoned notepaper next to the laptop.

“You have to type it exactly. No code words. Mom’s going to check,” Chloe said. “And don’t get your hopes up.”

“About what?” I asked, as if I had any hopes.

“Your family finding you through the IP address. My mom figured out how to have a fake one, a virtual private network.” Chloe paused. She glanced away, then back at me. “She thinks of everything.”

Tracking me through the IP address hadn’t even occurred to me. But now, Chloe telling me it could have been possible—but wasn’t—filled me with despair.

My heart was in overdrive. My chest hurt so much I wondered if I might drop dead. I read the message on the notepaper, and I couldn’t get my fingers to work.

“Hurry up,” Chloe said. “If I don’t call my mom right away …”

“Okay,” I said. I logged in. My password was LiZZieP0rTEr4ever. I had changed it from my old one on the day of Lizzie’s funeral.

My inbox was overflowing. Emails from my mother, my father, all my brothers and sisters, school friends, even Dan. I caught the subject line of the most recent from Bea: I love you so much! Emily, I need you now, come home!!!!! Did they really think I was able to read my emails? Why wouldn’t I have written back? A yearning for my cell phone overtook me, nearly knocked me down.

“Do it,” Chloe said, tapping the time in the upper right corner of the screen. “You have sixty seconds or the knife comes out for real.”

I heard myself moan, and then I stopped thinking. I addressed the email to both my parents and just typed:

Mom & Dad,

Everything got too hard. I know Mom is back to drinking—I found the bottles. If she really loved us, she would have stopped for good. Don’t look for me. For now, I don’t want to be part of the family. There’s too much wrong. I’m safe, and I’ll come home when I figure things out.