Pretend She's Here(32)

We entered the house to the disgustingly sweet scent of a baking cake. I wished I was back in the woods, surrounded by the smell of fallen leaves and a clear-running brook, by a song that echoed the yearning in my heart.

*

That night the Porters sang “Happy Birthday” to me. The name on the cake was Lizzie. I blew out sixteen candles, even though I wouldn’t actually be that age for two more days.




On the anniversary of Lizzie’s death, the day between the birthdays, Mrs. Porter came to my room while I was still asleep. Instead of creeping silently around, she shook me awake. When I sat up in bed, she drew my eyebrows on.

She frowned, stroking the black pencil along the ridge of my brow, just beneath the scrawny over-plucked line.

“It’s important you look like yourself,” she said. “Every day, but especially today.”

“I miss her, too,” I finally said.

“The point is to not miss her—but to be her. By next year, I hope you’ll understand that much better than you have so far. I need you to succeed. For now, you’re a disappointment. Get dressed.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

*

It was barely dawn, a thin line of orange shimmering through the trees. Back into the minivan, where Chloe and Mr. Porter waited for us, down the Porters’ thickly wooded driveway, onto the main road. Next thing I knew, we were on the highway, and by the time the sun came up, we were crossing the Connecticut state line.

We were on the way to Black Hall to visit my grave. Well, Lizzie’s grave. I felt like two girls, half one, half the other. The Emily part of me had been fading away, but right now I was totally awake, on high alert. What if we’d come here so Mrs. Porter could do something terrible to my mother?

This was my hometown. Whichever girl I was, I had lived here all my life. Each sight was equally familiar to Lizzie and to Emily. The graceful white church painted by so many famous artists—the American Impressionists who had come here over a hundred years ago, pulled by the beauty of the beaches and woodlands. I stared at the sea captains’ houses, the golden salt marsh.

The salt marsh stabbed the Emily part of me in the heart—this was where Mrs. Porter had walked with my mother and Seamus and first shown me the knife. I stared out the car window, wondering if I’d see a woman who’d lost her daughter, walking her dog. But today the path was empty.

We stopped at the Black Hall Garden Center. I waited in the minivan while the Porters shopped. Why didn’t I bolt? I was held in the back seat by invisible chains. I was frozen in place; if I didn’t move, my mother would be okay. We’d get through this. Summer flowers were long gone, replaced with rows of potted chrysanthemums. The shades were autumnal—maroon, burnt orange, vibrant yellow—and when Mr. Porter placed two large plants in the back of the minivan, they smelled dusty.

The cemetery was set along the banks of Blackbird River, one of five rivers in our town. Sunlight glinted on the water. Wind in the branches sounded like the whispers of ghosts. It was late fall, and I remembered past All Hallows’ Eves, when my friends and I would visit the oldest graves, some from the 1600s. We would light candles and ask the dead to come forth.

We hadn’t called these sessions séances, but that’s what they were. Lizzie and I had memorized the names on the most ancient headstones: Ada Lord, Matthias and Penitence Morgan, Charles and Letitia Griswold. We would sit cross-legged on the ground, ask them how they had died, whom they had loved, what they missed most about life.

We had asked them to tell us about the afterlife.

We had never really gotten answers. That’s when I had written my play Ghost Girl. It was inspired by Ada Lord. The dates on her headstone, worn down by time and weather to spidery script, were 1698–1714. She had been sixteen when she’d died. Across the cemetery, in a grove of pine trees, was the grave of Timothy Lathrop, also dead at sixteen, but a hundred years later: 1814.

My English teacher Mrs. Milne had loved the play, and had encouraged me to work with the theater club to produce it. And we did. I played Ada, and Dan Jenkins played Timothy. We met as ghosts. On nights of the full moon, we rose from our graves and were given our lives back until the moment of sunrise. In the last scene, we stood on the banks of the Blackbird River. The sky was lightening in the west. Lizzie worked the stage lights, to create a rose-gold glow. Timothy kissed Ada, and then he walked into the river and Ada returned to her grave.

“When your first kiss is a stage kiss,” Lizzie had said afterward, teasing me.

Now I wondered if it would be my only kiss.

As we drove down the hilly dirt road through the cemetery, I closed my eyes and remembered the beautiful song I’d heard yesterday. I wasn’t sure how, but suddenly I knew Casey had written it. I imagined the feeling of his lips on mine. Was that weird, dreaming of a kiss, surrounded by death and mourning? But I couldn’t help it.

Mr. Porter slammed on the brakes. The minivan screeched to a halt. I craned my neck to see what was happening. There was a crowd gathered around Lizzie’s grave. Kids from our class held candles. My heart stopped: They must have gotten time off from school, to remember Lizzie. Jeff stood by the headstone, his head bowed. I thought I caught a glimpse of Lizzie’s ring on the chain around his neck. I saw Tilly McCabe pushing her sister Roo in her wheelchair alongside Newton, Roo’s boyfriend. Dan was there, too, right next to Lauren Kingston. He had his arm around her waist. Gillian was in the past, and obviously so was I.