Pretend She's Here(23)

Love, Emily



I hesitated before sending—I couldn’t bear to think what this would do to them. But I looked at the time—one minute had already passed. Was I too late? My heart was pumping so hard, in sheer terror for my mom, and I hit SEND. The instant the email went, Chloe turned her phone back on and dialed her mother.

“It’s done. I’ll take a screenshot and send it to you so you can see,” she said into the phone. Then she hung up and nodded at me.

“Why didn’t you just forward it to your mother?” I asked Chloe. “That would be her proof.”

“My mom says the police have probably already hacked your account. They’d get suspicious if they saw you forwarded it to my mom.”

I pictured my mother, over by the marsh in Black Hall. Mrs. Porter getting a call from Chloe would be the most natural thing in the world. My mother would be wishing she’d get a call from me. Her smartphone would buzz, an email notification, and she’d pull it from her pocket. She’d see my screen name. She might cry out. Then she’d open the email. She’d read it. My father, wherever he was, would be reading it at the same time. Their hearts would be broken.

Tears were pouring down my cheeks. I stood up and started stumbling toward the cellar stairs. Chloe caught my arm.

“You don’t have to go down there now,” she said. “You proved yourself.”

“What?”

“By sending the email. You’ve officially joined our family, Lizzie. You’re allowed to be anywhere you want in the rest of the house during the day. You can sleep down there. It’s a nice room. But you’re free to be up here with us.”

I stared at her with all the hatred I felt.

“But one more thing,” she said. “You’d better put those contacts in. My mother said if your eyes aren’t green next time she sees you, the email won’t matter—she’ll hurt your mom.”

And I walked downstairs, my hand sliding down the rough wood banister, bumping over the tiny, hard orange beads of pine sap, and barely feeling the pain of the long splinter that slid into my palm.

In the back of my mind was that boy next door. Maybe he had seen me. Maybe he would know something was wrong and call the police. But the thoughts dissolved. I felt too hopeless to really, seriously consider the possibility that someone could help.

I went into the bathroom and stuck the contacts into my eyes, first try.





I kept thinking of the email I had sent, wondering if my parents would think it sounded like me, if they could tell I hadn’t written it myself. If they didn’t figure out the truth, my mother would feel so hurt I believed she was drinking, and the rest of the family would be filled with suspicion that she was. I didn’t have long to wonder, though.

“You’ve earned this,” Mrs. Porter said, beaming as Mr. Porter filed silently in, carrying the TV, setting it on the left side of Lizzie’s desk, hooking it up to the cable that was already there.

Mr. Porter handed me the remote and left without a word, but Mrs. Porter took the remote from my hand and switched on a news network. She sat next to me on the bed to check the stitches in my head and the puffy red splinter gouge on my palm.

Then she took out her cell phone.

“You’re everywhere,” Mrs. Porter said. “Online, on TV.”

That felt weird to think about, but I didn’t react.

“You know the next step, don’t you?” she asked.

I stared at the TV screen. There were my parents. They walked silently from our car up our sidewalk toward the house. At the same time, Mrs. Porter scrolled through her phone. She pulled up the same video on CNN online, held it in front of my face. She closed that window, opened another news page, and there was my smiling photo from last year’s yearbook.

“You see?” Mrs. Porter asked, shoving her phone into her pocket before I could grab it from her. “I don’t want you dwelling on it, but I think it’s important for you to see what is being said. And you need to think about this: You know what is possible. You saw with your own two eyes how close I came to your mother. When you’re ready, you will join us upstairs. The invitation was extended the minute you did the right thing—wrote that email.”

“I didn’t write it,” I said. “I only sent it.”

“The point is, you will come upstairs and we will all be together. As a family. Now watch.”

On TV, I saw that my father’s arm was around my mother’s shoulders. He was tall and thin and towered over her. I leaned close to the screen. Mom’s posture looked hunched, as if she was curving into her own heart. She wore the same blue jacket she’d had on yesterday, when Mrs. Porter had broadcast their walk to me.

Or maybe this news report had been taped yesterday. I heard reporters calling, asking for a reaction to my email, but my parents didn’t answer. They walked up our steps, across the front porch. It was late October, so the house was decorated for Halloween. Bea and I had always done it. There were the jack-o’-lanterns our family carved, the haystacks we tied to the posts, the dry ears of yellow-and-purple corn we would get at Sloane’s Orchard and hang on our bright blue front door. Someone inside the house opened the door, and my parents disappeared inside.

Marcela Perez, our family’s favorite newscaster, who wore tortoiseshell glasses just like my sister Anne’s, and who reported on all the big stories in Connecticut—fatal accidents, a home invasion in Guilford, drugs on the streets, and missing kids—stood in front of my house holding a microphone.