Pretend She's Here(25)

But later, after we finished rehearsing and I stood on the school steps with cold rain pelting down, I had a sinking feeling. I hitched a ride with Tilly McCabe’s mom, and when I got home, I found my mother passed out in bed. The fumes left no doubt that there’d been vodka involved.

I looked for the bottle. My mom had hidden it behind cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink, so I carried it to the recycling bin in the garage. I shoved it down beneath the milk cartons and cardboard boxes and yogurt containers. We had all taken turns doing that over the years. No one had been better at it than my dad. Patrick called it “bottle music”—the sound of my father cleaning up after my mother, when Dad would wait till we’d all gone to bed to get rid of her empties.

It was our way of protecting her, protecting each other. When you love someone as much as we love Mom, you don’t want anyone, even in the family, judging her. You tell yourself she doesn’t mean it, she’ll never do it again. Or you tell yourself she’s sick, she can’t help it. My dad and my brothers and sisters and I all took turns feeling furious at her, despair for her, hope that she’d stop. We never felt the same way at the same time.

That day my dad reached his breaking point. He had planned to surprise my mother and me—meeting us at Beach Road Pizza, where she’d normally have taken me after a play, but we weren’t there. Because she’d blacked out.

“Mary, you’re throwing everything away,” Dad had said. “I’ve given you a hundred chances—we all have. The only thing I’m grateful for is that you didn’t drive—that you missed the play, left your daughter in the rain. That’s good. Better than the alternative. You could have driven her into a telephone pole. So congratulations. You’re a drunk, but at least you didn’t kill Emily.”

“Don’t even say those words,” my mother had said, starting to cry.

“You want her to run away again?” my father asked. “Just stay on this path and she will. And I swear, Mary, when she does, I’ll never forgive you.”

The next day my mother was on her way to rehab. The good news: She got sober. I know my dad was glad—we all were. But I’m not sure he ever really trusted her after that day. Not the way he had before she’d gotten so bad.

Staring at the TV screen now, watching my parents recede down the empty beach, my mother’s back hunched and my father’s posture poker-straight, I remembered that day, my dad’s voice ringing in my head. This wasn’t my mother’s fault at all. This was because of me.

“When you’re ready,” Mrs. Porter said now, “you will come upstairs. I want you to. I can’t wait.”

Her eyes held my gaze. For just that minute I remembered how I’d practically lived at the Porters’ house after school, and during the years of my mother’s drinking, I’d relied on Mrs. Porter in ways she’d probably never know.

“I’m sorry about the threat,” she said. “I don’t want it to be this way.”

Her tone of voice made me realize she meant what she said. “Then don’t let it,” I said.

She was silent for a long moment. Her chin started to wobble, and tears pooled in her eyes.

“I don’t have a choice,” she said. “It’s like being possessed, like having a demon inside. Not a real one, I don’t mean that, but a compulsion to keep you here no matter what. That’s how much I need you. You’re sleeping in her bed; you’ll come upstairs and sit in her chair. I can never let you go, never.”

I’d seen parents cry before—well, my mother—and it was always shocking, and I always tried to make it stop. In spite of everything, I felt Mrs. Porter’s desperation. Part of me cared. One thing a daughter of an alcoholic knows is how to take care of people: to keep the peace, to try to figure out how to make things better, to have compassion, to twist yourself into a pretzel in the hope you can keep them from drinking again. Because something is going on that you can’t possibly fathom, a hurt so deep it makes the sick person do terrible things—get drunk, kidnap your dead daughter’s best friend.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Porter said again, wiping her eyes. “Your parents will be fine, you know. You’re just another runaway.”

My throat ached, holding back a scream.

“Good night,” she whispered, kissing my forehead.

I didn’t answer. She left the room, and I heard her footsteps on the wood stairs. I lay awake, my heart pounding. In some way her apology convinced me even more than the knife that this was real. She had said she would never let me go, and suddenly I knew with absolute certainty that she meant it with everything she had.

I pressed my face into my pillow and finally let out the scream. My chest heaved, aching as if I were having a heart attack. I sobbed until the pillowcase was soaked, and I hugged the pillow as hard as I could, wishing it were my mother, needing her comfort and needing so badly to protect her.

I thought of how weird it was, that I’d written Ghost Girl before Lizzie had died. It had been about Ada, of course. But lying there in bed with my pillow soaked, it felt as if the play had been predictive, and about me—or a girl like me, anyway. To have a best friend die, to have her parents kidnap you, to have her mother threaten to murder your mom: It leaves you so alone, so off balance and unreal-feeling, that you become the ghost, the changeling, and you’re the one haunting school and the town you grew up in together. You used to be solid and strong. Now you’re mist.