Pretend She's Here

by Luanne Rice

  Casey practically dove at me. He cradled my head in one arm. Then he eased me down, flat on the floor, pressed his hands straight into the stab wound, trying to keep the blood inside my body. I heard blood gurgling through his fingers; I swear I felt him holding my heart. All of a sudden my spirit was back in my body. I looked into his eyes, the color of the sea. They were so bright.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said. “Emily, you’re here with me.”

  EMTs rushed in. They pushed him aside. An oxygen mask was slapped onto my face. They cut off my jacket and sweater, applied intense pressure to my chest. Someone was saying my name really loud, “Emily, how you doing there? Emily, you’re going to be fine. Stay with us, Emily.”

  And then another voice: “Virginia Porter, you are under arrest for the kidnapping of Emily Lonergan. You have the right to remain silent, you have the right …”

  Chloe was weeping as the handcuffs were clicked around Mrs. Porter’s wrists. Then they handcuffed Chloe.

  “No, not Chloe!” I tried to say, but I was choking on blood as they led her away behind her mother.

  My whole body had been numb, but now I could feel, and every nerve ending was a sharpened dagger stabbing me again and again. The pain was a wildfire raging through my entire body, taking over my mind, until nothing else existed. I was no longer a person; I was just pain.

  “Emily,” came Casey’s voice. He held my hand, his fingers sticky with my blood, and in the quietest voice you can imagine, with his mouth against my ear, he whispered my name over and over.

  They say your life passes before your eyes when you’re dying.

  Mine did. I saw my parents, my brothers and sisters. Casey, Carole, their faces full of fear and sorrow and love. I hovered above them as they took turns sitting by my bedside in intensive care. Detectives in blue suits stood just outside the room, questioning Casey and Carole about the Porters, taking notes. They tried to talk to me, but Dr. Dean told them it wouldn’t be possible for a long time.

  If I survived.

  My parents huddled close to me, on either side of the bed, holding my hands. My mother, my beautiful mother with her blue eyes, so full of love and worry, as if she’d lost me and found me and was afraid of losing me again.

  Mrs. Porter hadn’t killed her. She was here. I kept thinking that. Hot tears scalded my cheeks.

  “Oh, Emily,” Mom said, her voice breaking. She bent down to hold me, even though I was bandaged and stuck with a thousand tubes.

  I tried to stay awake. I heard my mom and dad say how much they loved me, how they knew I was strong, how I had to fight to want to live and return home. I felt flooded with love for them. I focused on my mother’s blue eyes, my father’s wide mouth, his hand so rough, her voice so tender.

  “Live, Emily,” my mother said. “Please, I love you so much.”

  I love you, too, I tried to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come out. Do you know what I did to save your life? All I ever wanted was to go home. I prayed you wouldn’t drink. I just want everything to be okay.

  But a breathing tube ran down my throat, and the best I could do was croak.

  “Emily,” my mother said over and over. “Emily, my Emily …”

  I stared at her as long as I could, before my eyelids got too heavy to stay open, before they fluttered closed again.

  Morphine kept me in a sick, sleepy twilight state. That meant I was mostly aware but not totally, and not quite sure whether I was dead or alive. My life hung in the balance—literally. That’s a dramatic phrase you hear on soap operas, like the ones Lizzie and I used to watch on snow days, and it meant the person was in a coma, balancing on the tightrope between living and dying. Fall, and you never get up again. The state of my aliveness was minute to minute.

  * * *

  When the EMTs put me in the ambulance, I was legally dead. Casey kept my blood pumping as long as he could, but my heart stopped, and so did my breathing.

  I heard Dr. Dean tell this to my parents. She told them that my brain was deprived of oxygen for over a minute, so even if I lived, I could have brain damage. I didn’t think I did because my thoughts were pretty clear and my imagination was more vivid than ever.

  Or maybe this was just how it felt to be dead.

  My parents were generous, I heard Dr. Dean tell me. Some families don’t let friends visit the patients in intensive care because visiting time is so limited—only a few minutes each hour because the patient needs her rest. But my brothers and sisters were here in Maine, and each one took a turn with me.

  And every three or four times, Casey came.

  I longed for those times.

  His touch was so gentle, the way he smoothed my hair, stroked my arms. His long hair brushed across me, tickled my face when he lowered his head to kiss my forehead, press his cheek to mine.

  “Patrick and Bea told me a lot about you,” he said. “Things I didn’t know. Because we haven’t had enough time.”

  He was holding a library book. I could see the protective clear plastic wrapping, the sticker on the spine, but his hand covered the title. “Patrick says you like plays. You write and perform in them, and I can’t wait to see one. Maybe you’ll write one about what happened here.”

  I will, I thought. It will be a killer, not just because the girl was kidnapped and stabbed and lives through it, but because she fell in love with the boy next door.

  “I know you can hear me, Emily,” Casey said. “Some people are saying you can’t, the coma is too deep, but I feel you. You have so much energy, it’s filling this room. The whole hospital is humming with it. So I thought, since you love plays, I would read one to you. That means I have to play all the parts, so try to forgive me because I’m no actor, and I’m sure you’ve read this a few times already, but it, well, it’s a love story.”

  He started to read:

  “Act One, Prologue, Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene …”

  Romeo and Juliet.

  The breathing machine, the thick tube down my throat and taped to my mouth, kept my respiration steady, a constant rhythm that didn’t vary. But if only Casey knew how fast my heart wanted to beat. The fact he chose this play to read me, the way he’d said, Well, it’s a love story.

  I wiggled my fingers. He didn’t see, because they didn’t actually move. But inside me, where I was most awake and alive, my spirit most restless, they did. They were signaling to him that I loved his choice of plays, I loved the way he read each character with such feeling, and I loved him.

  * * *

  “She lives!” Iggy said.

  He and Mick happened to be the ones at my bedside when my eyelids fluttered open and didn’t close again right away, when I started gagging and pulling at the tube in my throat and the little plastic oxygen prongs in my nose, trying to rip the needles from my arms.

  “Whoa, sweetheart,” Mick said, restraining me with his entire 6’4” heft. “No going crazy here. Calm down, there you go. Look at those eyes, look at those gorgeous blue peepers. You know how worried you’ve had us? Well, I’ve said all along, ‘She’s a fighter, she’s a trouper, no one has more Irish in her than Emily Magdalene Bartholomea Lonergan.’”

  I couldn’t wait to tell him I saw him crying when he said all that, big tough Michael Lonergan, older brother. Ha-ha, saw your tears, big guy.

  Iggy walked into the hall to tell the family that I was awake. They all rushed in, completely ignoring rules about two visitors at the most at a time in the ICU. They surrounded me, every single one of them either touching my legs or arms or literally, like my dad, picking me up. He held me in his arms, cradling me against his chest, probably just like when I was a baby. Bea got right into the bed with me. She lay beside me, just like we did on cold winter nights when we’d giggle and tell stories, when we’d entwine feet to stay warm and wind up in a pillow fight. I felt her breath on my cheek, and it calmed me down a little.

  But I quickly started struggling again. I
wanted to untube myself and get out of there. A nurse came in. I liked her—Nina, with dark hair and long eyelashes and a way of telling me about her rotten boyfriend while I slept on. She herded my family out the door and talked to me while she took my vital signs, told me the jerk had had the nerve to show up at her apartment with a cactus—a cactus!—three days after she’d found out he was cheating with his upstairs neighbor.

  The story slowed my heart rate, and if I could have laughed at the cactus, I would have. By the time Dr. Dean arrived, I was ready to breathe on my own. She and a resident and two nurses removed the thick tube, hurting my throat as if it had been sliced with razors, but giving me so much relief I felt freed from yet another prison.

  Only an hour later, the agents showed up. I had thought they were detectives, a man and a woman, in the suits and solemn expressions, but they were FBI. I couldn’t believe it.

  “I’m FBI Special Agent Chase,” the man said. “And this is Special Agent Madison.” He gestured to the woman.

  “The FBI?” I rasped.

  “Emily, we are investigating because you were allegedly taken across state lines,” Special Agent Madison said. “Can you tell us in your own words what happened?”

  I wanted to laugh. I knew Bea was out in the waiting room, and she would have gotten it: Special Agent Madison was a woman in a pretty blue coat, with fair skin and blond hair. The kidnapper of my mother’s nightmares. But instead of laughing, I shrieked. I guess the medication had made me a little sensitive, and the reality, the nightmare of what I’d been through came roaring back. Having the FBI at my bedside made it realer than real. There was no way I could even start to tell what happened, what it was like in the basement.

  “You’re not ready; it’s okay,” the agent said, when my shrieking got louder, when I felt myself going insane. Then I exhausted myself—my mind went totally blank as if all the bad memories were erased. I stopped screaming and became totally silent. I stared into space, not seeing anyone or anything, just blankness.

  “We’ll come back,” Special Agent Chase said.

  * * *

  “Chloe is toast,” Carole said. Other than Casey, she was the first non-family visitor once I’d moved from the ICU to a room on a medical floor.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “They’re in prison,” Carole said. “All three of them. Mr. Porter’s in the Maine Correctional Center, Mrs. Porter’s in the Women’s Center, and Chloe is in the Casco Bay Development Center, which is another way of saying jail for kids.”

  “But she didn’t do anything,” I said. “Other than what they forced her to.”

  “It’s sad, I agree, but she had a choice,” Carole said.

  “Not really,” I said, remembering how focused and controlling Mrs. Porter had been. “She went along because her mother needed her to.”

  “If her mother had needed her to kill you, would she have done that?” Carole asked.

  “No,” I said. “She helped me to get away.”

  “Well, yes,” Carole said. “But only after you were there for over two months. By the way—two months? You couldn’t have told me?”

  I stared at her. She was wearing a huge blue L.L.Bean fleece that I knew belonged to Mark, her gold CD necklace, and a cream-colored cable-knit cashmere watch cap. She looked both hurt and reproachful.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not just because we’re friends,” she said, “but I could have helped you. I keep thinking back, wondering if you tried to give me secret messages. Did I miss them? Did I let you down?”

  “No, not at all!” I said, wishing I could leap out of bed and hug her.

  “Okay,” she said. “But I’m so worried I did.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Carole nodded, then patted my hand. “Anyway, half the school wants to start a defense fund for Chloe, and the other half wants her to rot in jail.”

  I thought about it, remembering moments with Chloe: when she’d lured me into the van, when she’d forced me to watch her mother’s FaceTime and send the email, when she’d brought me soup and led me to Casey’s house.

  “I don’t want her to rot in jail,” I said. But I was confused about exactly what I did want.

  “Yeah, well,” Carole said. “The FBI will sort it out. They’re in the hall, salivating to interrogate you some more.”

  “I know,” I said, because they’d already been in to see me again and again. I was tired of talking. There was only so much I could say about what I didn’t understand.

  * * *

  A resident I’d never seen before entered my room. She was tall, thin, with curly red hair, hazel eyes, and surprisingly perfect makeup. She wore blue scrubs and I noticed the hot pink collar of a wool blazer peeking out. It was pretty and matched her blush.

  “How are you today?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “I’m Dr. Daniela,” she said. “I’m a psychiatry resident. Do you mind if I ask you about how you feel? Maybe you can tell me what happened?”

  I watched her pull a stethoscope out of her pocket. With one hand, she warmed the round metal piece they put on your chest. But she didn’t press it against my heart. She just stood there holding it.

  “Start from when the Porters took you,” she said. “What was it like?”

  “Well,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “I didn’t expect it.”

  “I can imagine! Tell me more.” She moved closer. I looked into her eyes and had the weirdest feeling: She looked hungry but very excited, as if she had just come upon some delicious food, as if I were her meal.

  “Where’s Dr. Dean?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’s busy with other patients,” she said. “Now, what part did Chloe play? Is it true she lured you into the van? Did they drug you?”

  I’d had therapists after Lizzie died. I’d seen a psychiatrist. They always asked you about how you felt—not about what actually happened. Also, why was she holding a stethoscope? Why was I getting such a creepy feeling?

  “Um, is my mother outside?” I asked.

  “She’s getting coffee,” she said. “Now, about Chloe. I’m hearing that she was every bit as guilty as her parents, and …”

  The door opened. My brother Tommy walked in. He stood between me and the woman, glowering at her. “I’m studying journalism and I appreciate that you need to get the story,” he said. “But you can’t bother my sister.”

  “The story?” I asked.

  “This is Daniela Starkey,” Tommy told me. “She’s a reporter for a local station. She’s been trying to interview the family, just wanting to do her job, but she can’t do it here. Do you understand, Ms. Starkey? Don’t bother my sister again.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I truly am. But if you want to talk, Emily, when you’re ready, I’m here.”

  “Got it,” Tommy said, his voice hard, leading her to the door. “But I swear you’ll be sorry if you come back.”

  “You’re threatening me?” she asked, holding her tape recorder toward him.

  “I’m telling you we’ll call your editor. We’ll get you fired for harassing a very badly injured girl.”

  She clicked off the recorder and scuttled away.

  Tommy returned to me, sat on the edge of my bed. “What a sleaze, trying to trick you. She must have missed the part about respect in journalism school.”

  “What does she want with me?” I asked.

  “Em, you’re the biggest story in the country right now. Every single TV station and newspaper wants your story. Have you looked outside?”

  He put his arm around me, helped me out of bed. My chest was bandaged. My breath was shallow, because it hurt every time air went in or out. Just a few steps to the window felt like a mile on the track, but Tommy held me up.

  Lining the street and filling the hospital parking lot were more trucks than I could count. They all had logos painted
on the side—TV stations from NBC to the BBC—and satellite dishes on the roofs. People were standing outside the vehicles, bundled up against the Maine winter cold, staring up at my window. As soon as I leaned my forehead against the glass, a bunch of flashbulbs went off. Tommy eased me away, closed the curtain.

  “I bet Daniela’s stethoscope was a microphone,” Tommy said. “She was trying to get the dirt on Chloe and the Porters. You can talk whenever you want, but we’ll help you. The whole family’s behind you, Em. These reporters are sharks, and …”

  “I’m shark food,” I said. “I get it.”

  I certainly felt like it.

  * * *

  I had seven surgeries within the first three weeks. The knife had nicked my left lung, barely missed my heart. My ribs were cracked. The wounds and incisions contributed to a lot of pain, way too much anesthesia, and, yes, opioids. I wasn’t quite allergic to the drugs, but they made me really sick. I was always throwing up. Casey could visit me lots more now that I wasn’t in intensive care, and it was great, but what wasn’t great was having the dry heaves with him sitting there.

  “It’s okay,” he said, grabbing for the little curved plastic pail on my tray table.

  “Not in front of you,” I said.

  “Em,” he said just as I let go and spewed into the pail.

  “That didn’t happen,” I said.

  “Already forgotten,” he said.

  Tears began leaking from my eyes. He wiped them with his thumb. The worst part about trying not to be emotional was that I always wound up emotional. He was kind of the best. No, he was the total best.

  * * *

  It turned out the reason I wasn’t getting better faster was that I had “confusion”—that was an actual medical term. It meant I had tachycardia—a too-fast heartbeat, over one hundred beats a minute—and dropping blood pressure. Dr. Dean did another sternotomy—she cut straight through my sternum—to find that Mrs. Porter’s knife had actually touched the left ventricle of my heart. Only the very point of the blade had penetrated, an almost microscopic incision, but that was enough to cause internal bleeding. My blood oxygen level had dropped, so they had me on oxygen again.