Pretend She's Here(50)

Late that morning, the landline rang.

“Oh, hello, Carole,” Mrs. Porter said. “Yes, just a minute.” She handed me the phone.

“Hello?” I said as Mrs. Porter stood right there listening.

“I’ve totally given up texting you since you never get my messages, so I got your family’s landline number from my mom,” Carole said. “Want to meet up?”

“Meet up?” I asked, watching Mrs. Porter’s reaction. She nodded with a head tilt as if waiting to hear more. “And do what?”

“Go to Boston and escape the woods, ha-ha, but forget that. Want to come over?”

“Uh,” I said. Then, to Mrs. Porter, “Can I go to Carole’s?”

“Have her come here,” she said.

An hour later, Carole’s mom dropped her off. Mrs. Porter hurried out to the car to talk. She hadn’t worn a jacket, so she stood in the driveway, arms wrapped around herself against the bitter cold. I heard laughter, and it struck me—it sounded as if she and Dr. Dean were friends.

I hadn’t quite imagined Mrs. Porter having any friends up here. How was actual friendship possible when you were living a lie?

Carole and I made grilled cheese sandwiches—the best kind, fried in a skillet with butter, the bread soft and the crusts crispy brown—and ate them in the living room in front of the TV, watching the first Mockingjay on demand. I couldn’t pay attention. Carole was a bigger fan than I was, plus I felt weirded-out sitting with her on the same couch where Lizzie and I had watched the exact same movie together.

The furnace rumbled on and off; the house got claustrophobic, so we decided to go outside. Mrs. Porter stood at the window pretending to do the dishes but actually watching us. The snow was deep. Out by the road, the plows had left piles that were taller than we were.

“Snow fort!” I said.

“Never built one,” she said.

“You’re kidding.”

“City girl, baby. I grew up on Beacon Hill. We probably would have stayed in Boston forever if my parents hadn’t gotten divorced. Then my mom had to do the independent-woman thing and relocate here.”

“That’s a pretty cool thing to do,” I said. “But it must have been hard, leaving your friends.”

“Massively,” she said.

“Me too, from when I lived in Black Hall before.” I could say that because it was a true part of the Lizzie story.

I ran to the garage, grabbed two shovels, and handed one to Carole. I had excellent snow-fort technique, taught to me over my entire lifetime by older brothers and sisters. Tommy had shown us how to cut hard-packed snow into cubes, pile them up in a square. Mick had instructed us how to tunnel through short-enough sections so we wouldn’t get buried if the fort collapsed. Anne used chunks of ice and stray icicles to build castle-like crenellations and window ornaments, and Iggy was great at using the shovel handle to carve out precisely arched windows at eye level. Patrick, Bea, and I built snow chairs and tables inside and stockpiled snowballs in case of attack.

“This is beautiful,” Carole said, admiring our work when we were done. “Like a sandcastle, but in the snow.”

“If there was a neighboring fort, we could have a snowball fight,” I said.

“Well, the only neighbor is Casey Donoghue,” she said. “I’m sure he’d love it, but he wouldn’t see well enough to hit us.”

“Do you know what happened to his eyes?” I asked, looking toward his house.

“An infection when he was a baby,” she said. “It was rare, came on really fast, and even though his parents took him to the hospital right away, some damage was done.”

“I thought it had something to do with his mother not getting good medical care, not getting vaccinations or taking care of herself, when she was pregnant with him,” I said, remembering all the things Mrs. Porter had said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Carole said. “She was an awesome mom. She did everything possible.”

Once again, Mrs. Porter’s craziness shone through, her skewed vision of what a mother should be, of how she was the only one who truly measured up.

“You and Casey seem close. I can’t help noticing,” Carole said.

I smiled and couldn’t help blushing, lightly tossing a snowball at her. She threw a big, fluffy clump up in the air, and powder sprayed down on us.

“Look at his house,” she said. “It’s so sad, the way it’s gotten.”

I stared at the elegant old place: the tall windows, the porch columns. One black shutter on the second floor hung loose on a broken hinge, creaking and slamming in the wind.

“After his mom died, their honey business did, too,” I said.

“Yeah, she was an incredible person. She was super talented, nice to everyone, ran the whole show. His dad being a musician, and all.” She sighed. “Artists don’t always notice mundane things like falling-apart houses. See, I get that, and I feel sorry for Casey. Did I mention my dad is a sculptor?”

“No,” I said.

“He has pieces in the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Tate Modern, but he didn’t know how to change a lightbulb. Or maybe he just didn’t notice the hall was dark. He’s famous, and mostly sweet, but my mom got tired of doing everything.” Carole paused. “I mean, she’s a doctor, it’s not like she has all this free time. So they broke up. Now that we live a million miles away, they’re friends—he visits every few weeks, they go out to dinner. It’s so contrary.”