Pretend She's Here(41)

One of the shows ended with a video clip of me I hadn’t seen before, but I remembered the day exactly: Iggy had taken Patrick, me, and Bea to Gillette Castle, high on a cliff over the Connecticut River. William Gillette, an actor known for playing Sherlock Holmes, had built it in 1919, and named it Seventh Sister.

“You’re the seventh kid in our family, and you’re our sister,” Iggy’s voice said as the camera captured me standing on the parapet, the ice-choked river winding behind me.

“So it must be my castle!” I said. Bea entered the frame and jostled me. We walked through the heavy wood door into the hall, decorated with evergreens and red bows for Christmas.

“What do you want for Christmas?” Iggy’s voice asked.

“A white pony and for us all to be together,” I said. “As usual. Duh!”

“Duh,” he said, and the clip shut off and went back to the sad-eyed, perfectly made-up newscaster.

“With the holidays approaching,” the newscaster said into the microphone, “will there be another message from Emily? Or is the mystery of her disappearance something much more sinister?”

“It’s time for you to send another email,” Mrs. Porter said as I started gathering my books for the school day.

“An email is not enough!” Mr. Porter said. “Ginnie, this is falling apart. We can’t keep pretending …”

“‘Pretending’? Don’t let me hear that word!” Mrs. Porter said, sounding truly anguished.

“Okay, okay. But don’t you see?” he asked, walking over and trying to hug her. She shook him off. “I told you, if they start looking for her again, they could easily come here and question us. We have to think about that possibility, what we’ll have to do. Having her out in the world is disaster waiting to happen.”

My shoulders were tense, brittle as glass. I was “her.” He spoke about me as if I wasn’t there, as if I was just a figment of their imaginations. What was the alternative to “out in the world”? Back in the dungeon? Or would they kill me, as Mrs. Porter said she’d do to my mother?

“You’ve never been with me on this,” Mrs. Porter said to him. “I’m all alone; I feel no support at all. I need her, John.”

“I know that, Gin,” he said, trying to hug her again, and this time she let him. “But come on. I’ve done nothing but support you. I’m doing this for you.”

“Then do it all the way,” she whispered. “Believe.”

That I was Lizzie. Mr. Porter looked over the top of her head, and our eyes met. I saw terrible sadness there, almost as bad as the day of Lizzie’s funeral.

“I do. I believe,” he said. His voice sounded genuine, but the lie showed in his face.

“Okay, then,” Mrs. Porter said. “We need a plan.”

“Let’s keep her home from school today. Just till the missing girl stories die down,” he said.

“She’s brand-new at school—that would make her stand out. No, we have to continue as if nothing is wrong, nothing at all. Lizzie, you can do it, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We’ll schedule an email to Mary and Tom,” she told me. My parents, but she couldn’t call them that. “We don’t want it to seem like you’ve written them in response to these news reports, so we’ll do it later this week. I’ll come up with something.”

I was sure she would.

“Take extra care at school,” she said. “Just as your father says, Emily’s face will be fresh in people’s minds, if they’ve been watching the news. Be on guard, sweetie.” She primped my black hair, twisted the curl around her index finger, stared into my contact-lens-green eyes. My eyebrows were finally growing back, but she fetched the kohl and filled them in some more. She darkened the beauty mark, too. Then she drew her finger along the part in my hair, examining my roots. Seeming satisfied, she nodded.

Chloe had been standing there, in the corner, the whole time. Her face was pure white, and when I looked straight at her, she turned away. We grabbed our coats and left the kitchen. She walked a few steps ahead of me out to the bus. I tried to catch up, but she picked up speed.

“I wish you weren’t here,” she said under her breath. “They fight over you, all the time.”

“I wish I wasn’t here, too,” I said.

“Before, they were just sad. Now they’re angry. Lots of people get divorced after the death of a child,” she said. “I never thought my parents would, but since you came, it seems they’re heading that way.”

“What did your father mean?” I asked. “When he said if people start looking for me again he and your mother have to ‘think about it.’ What would they do to me?”

“Shut up,” she said. “Shut up, shut up.”

It was snowing lightly, but as we stood at the bus stop, the wind picked up, and the flakes started to come down hard. I shivered, but not from the weather; I’d seen fear in Chloe’s eyes, and I thought it might be because she knew what they’d do.

I tried to calm myself. The falling snow was beautiful and made me think of Lizzie. Her favorite poets all wrote about New England—Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, and Robert Frost. She especially loved Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”