Pretend She's Here(39)

While Ms. LeBlanc talked about allegory in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, my mind took me back in time. I pictured Mrs. Porter sitting on the driftwood log. I saw the light glinting on her hair, the easy motion when she’d lifted her hand to wave to me. I smelled the marsh—that unmistakable low tide odor of mud and dead crabs and sea creatures exposed to the air. I felt the summer sun on my shoulders. Why had I pretended I hadn’t seen her? That was so unlike me. I’d thought it was because of her sorrow—of mine, too—over Lizzie. But maybe some ancient part of my brain had sensed danger. She’d been watching for me—now I was sure of it.

Why else would she have told Mrs. Morton, all the way back in September, that her older daughter was traveling, would start school later in the year? And why did it make me feel even worse, even more scared, to know that taking me had been premeditated that far in advance?

The world have seemed safe back then, but I’d been wrong. I’d thought I had control, choosing that path through the woods, but that had been an illusion. Even though I had dodged being kidnapped that summer day, Mrs. Porter’s plans were in motion.

I started shaking. I forced myself to stop thinking of August. Instead my mind wandered to Casey, and I wondered what he and the girl had been talking about. His hand had been against the wall, his arm braced. She had been standing close to him, in the crook of his shoulder. It seemed obvious they were boyfriend and girlfriend.

But something in their intensity had made me think they were arguing. Casey’s tall body looked tense, as if with anger or frustration. The girl had lightly tossed her long, magical red-gold hair. She wore a mid-calf white muslin dress. Although the scowl on her face hadn’t quite matched its radiant glow, it occurred to me Spenser’s title The Faerie Queene could very well apply to her.

I tried to remember the lyrics Casey had sung to me. But my mind couldn’t find them, and eventually I began to concentrate on class. I heard Mrs. LeBlanc and the kids I didn’t know discussing the character Lady Una, the wizards Archimago and Busirane, the kidnapping of Amoretta, how Duessa had betrayed the Redcrosse Knight to the giant Orgoglio.

Faerie Land was a strange world full of danger. But not as strange, I thought, not as dangerous, as the one I was living in. I sat in my chair shimmering. I felt like air, as if Emily had evaporated. I kept glancing out the tall leaded-glass windows, and twice I saw the minivan drive by slowly; Mrs. Porter’s head was swiveled toward the school, on alert for trouble.

*

When Chloe and I walked through the door after school, Mrs. Porter was waiting for us with hot cider and freshly baked gingerbread cookies. Chloe grabbed the snacks and went straight to her room. Mrs. Porter set a place at the kitchen table and gestured for me to sit.

“Tell me about your first day,” she said. She looked eager, expectant, a little afraid of what I might say.

“It was fine.” After English class, the day had gone by in a blur. I’d had history and French with Carole, the nice girl from the bus, but that was all I’d really managed to pay attention to.

“Really?” Mrs. Porter asked. “Did you like it?” I could tell the question was genuine. She seemed to honestly care.

“It’s … not that easy.”

She nodded. “New schools never are.” She reached across the table and took my hand. We sat there for a minute before I pulled away.

“What about questions? Was anyone too nosy?”

“Mrs. Morton asked about Europe. She wants me to do a presentation about my time there, and I don’t even know where I’m supposed to have gone.”

“I’ll give you the list,” Mrs. Porter said. “And you can memorize it.”

“But I’ve never been there! I’ve never even left the country,” I said.

“I have travel books in my room; I should have given them to you before. What else happened? Were there any other problems?”

“Carole Dean wanted to give me her number. But I didn’t have a phone of my own. People will think that’s weird.”

“Thought of that,” Mrs. Porter said, smiling. She went to the kitchen counter, opened a drawer, and pulled out Lizzie’s old iPhone. “This is for you.” She handed it to me. My mouth dropped open.

“Thank you!” I said, shocked.

“I’ve removed the battery and the SIM card,” she said. “You’ll have the phone itself, but you’ll have to pretend to enter numbers. When people call, you can say you’ve forgotten to charge it.”

“Please,” I said. It was as if she’d given me the biggest hope, then smashed it to bits. My heart broke open, the words poured out. “Let me go home.”

“You are home.”

“Did this start in August?” I asked. “You saw me walking and called my name—is that when you first decided to take me?”

“You thwarted me that day,” she said. “You should have come with me then. You could have started school in September, with the rest of your class, and avoided all this awkwardness. It would have been so much better.”

“It would have been just as bad!” I said. “This is wrong. I can’t stay here, pretending to be Lizzie, Mrs. Porter. It’s a lie. And I miss my family so much.”

With a deep sigh, full of what sounded like genuine regret, Mrs. Porter pushed her own phone across the table toward me and pressed PLAY. It was a video of the scene I’d viewed before: Mrs. Porter and my mother in the marsh—the same path I’d been walking in August—Seamus bounding along the path. I heard my mother’s voice. I saw the quick, surreptitious glint of the knife.