Imaginary Friends

by John Marco

  “Why did you start drawing him?” Dierdre countered, refusing to be drawn in. Damn eight-year-old insight, anyway.

  Paul shrugged. He could be as stubborn as his father had been. As Dierdre was too, she admitted. That was part of the reason Paul’s father had left. Minor squabbles turned into huge fights, with neither one able or willing to let go.

  “I dunno.” His gaze slipped past her, and he cocked his head as though he were listening to something. “I’ll stop drawing him if you promise me I don’t have to go back to the hospital. I want to go to school on Monday.”

  “Of course you’re going to school on Monday,” Dierdre said. Her shoulders slumped as the tension in her neck and back began to loosen. “Now go play.”

  She pulled out a cigarette as she watched him explore the playground, walking from the swing set to the monkeybars to the slide, touching each one but never actually playing. Before the leukemia, he had run everywhere.

  “How are you feeling?” she shouted.

  “I’m fine, Mom.” He moved like a sleepwalker, feet dragging through the grass. He hesitated when he reached the teeter-totters.

  The teeter-totters had always been Paul’s favorite. One of his proudest moments had been the day he learned to balance on the middle of the board, bending his legs and shifting his weight to tilt it from one side to the other.

  Arms spread, Paul took a tentative step onto the old yellow board. Dierdre was too far away to see his face, but she could imagine his expression. His eyes and forehead wrinkled when he concentrated. No doubt he was biting his tongue, as he did when he practiced his handwriting.

  He reached the midpoint and bent his knees, leaning to one side, but the board didn’t move. The equipment was old and stiff. Paul stepped past the midpoint and stomped his foot.

  The board squealed into motion, and Paul’s foot slipped. His shin scraped the board, and he tumbled backward onto the ground.

  Dierdre was there in an instant, helping him sit up as she rolled up his pants and examined his leg. Pin-pricks of blood bloomed along the skin.

  “I’m okay.” Paul shoved her away. His face was red. He wouldn’t look at her.

  She reached out to help him stand, but he twisted out of her grasp. As he did, Dierdre glimpsed the back of his leg. Red spots dotted the back of Paul’s thigh, above the knee. There was no blood. These hadn’t come from the teeter-totter.

  “What’s wrong?” Paul tugged his pantlegs back into place.

  “Nothing.” The spots might not mean anything. They could be a rash, a reaction to the new pants, or to the cheap detergent she bought at the laundromat. Doctor McCarthy said he was okay.

  Paul clearly wasn’t buying it. “You promised I could go to school.” He looked close to tears. The last time he had come so close to breaking down was at one of his earliest blood draws, and he had fought and kicked like an animal the entire time.

  School was only two days away. She could take him to the emergency room now, or she could schedule an appointment for Monday afternoon, after his first day back. Deep inside, she was screaming.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you back home before it gets too late.”

  The relapse hit Paul on Monday morning, only a few hours after Dierdre dropped him off at school. His teacher took him down to the nurse’s office when he started shivering and couldn’t stop. The nurse took one look at Paul’s records and called Dierdre. By the time she arrived, Paul was wrapped in two wool blankets, his teeth chattering.

  He threw up halfway to the hospital, splashing half-digested Froot Loops all over the back seat. The smell made Dierdre’s stomach rebel, but she couldn’t open the windows without chilling Paul worse.

  An eternity later, she was back in the children’s care unit, pleading with Paul to take another sip of broth, another spoonful of lemon Jello.

  Doctor McCarthy stepped softly into the room. “We’ve got his lab results.”

  The gentleness in his voice made Dierdre want to hit him. Instead, she turned up the television mounted on the wall and stepped away.

  “You don’t have to leave,” Paul yelled. “I know what he’s going to say.”

  Dierdre couldn’t answer. Paul sank back into his pillows and stared blearily at the television screen.

  For an instant, Dierdre imagined she could see Death dancing and grinning next to SpongeBob SquarePants.

  Doctor McCarthy waited for her to follow, then gently closed the door behind her. “His white blood cell count is almost seventy thousand.”

  So fast. Her skin felt like ice. “What about his blasts?”

  His eyes were sad, but his voice didn’t falter. “Around eighty percent.”

  Dierdre collapsed against the wall. Paul’s bone marrow was packed with undeveloped, useless cells. “You told us he was getting better.”

  “I know. But sometimes—”

  “Don’t say it! Don’t tell me things happen.” She should have dragged Paul in the instant she found the second drawing. Death had known, even if the doctors hadn’t.

  “We’re waiting on a few more tests,” he said. He reached out to squeeze her arm. “Sometimes there are setbacks. We’re going to beat this thing. Paul’s a strong boy. You should—”

  Dierdre pulled away. By the end of the day, they would be starting Paul on yet another round of chemo. Paul said the medicine was like liquid fire pumping through his body. Or would it be bone marrow transplants this time, and with them the immunosuppressants that would leave him weak and vulnerable to every germ that floated through the air?

  No. Death would not take her son. She turned her back on Doctor McCarthy without another word and hurried into Paul’s room.

  Paul rolled over as she entered. He looked so helpless, tangled in a spider’s web of tubes and wires. An IV tube ran past his neck, disappearing down his hospital gown into the catheter in his chest. A blood pressure cuff engulfed one arm. Other wires monitored his heart rate and blood oxygen.

  His complexion matched the pale walls behind him. Dierdre sat down and ran her fingers over the downy brown fuzz on his scalp.

  Paul squirmed away. His arms were stretched awkwardly to one side, his hands tucked beneath the pillow.

  On a hunch, Dierdre grabbed beneath the pillow. Her fingers touched paper, and she pulled the drawing free before he could stop her.

  “That’s mine!”

  It was another portrait of Death. Her hands began to shake. “When did you draw this?”

  “At school today.” He untangled his IV tube, then sat up to glare at her. “When I started feeling cold.”

  A crude stick-figure wearing a baseball cap sat on one side of a teeter-totter, with Death on the other. There was no ground, only a vast black plain. Wavy motion lines showed Death rising as the stick figure descended toward the darkness.

  “Why do you keep ruining them?” Paul asked.

  Because I don’t know how else to fight him.

  But destroying the pictures wasn’t enough. Death still found him. “You promised you wouldn’t—”

  “I’m dying!” Paul said. His frustration and fatigue hit her like a physical blow. “Who cares about a stupid picture?”

  She stood and backed away from the bed. “Did you see him yesterday?” The paper crumpled in her hand. “Is he here now? Here in the room?”

  “No.” His gaunt face was full of anger, but she saw confusion there as well. Confusion and fear. His forehead wrinkled. “You know what that thing is, don’t you?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.” She moved toward the door, still holding his picture. She didn’t know.

  “Mom, wait! I’m sorry.” He sounded frightened. “Where are you going?”

  She stopped in the doorway, searching for an answer that would make sense. But how could she explain what she didn’t understand? She couldn’t help him. Not here. She bowed her head and said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  The museum was dark, save for a small spotlight illuminating the front sign
next to the porch. The old house was more familiar in the darkness, making Dierdre feel like a child again.

  Climbing the old pine tree in the side yard was harder than she remembered. The branches were thicker and harder to grasp. Her muscles and joints protested the unfamiliar strain. But she made it to the roof without falling. There, she clung to the dormer shingles while she regained her breath. She picked pine needles from her hair with her free hand. Gummy sap covered her sleeves.

  The security system would sense if she opened her old window. She could just make out the wires in the middle where the two panes came together. It was an old system, but effective.

  Her father had used a simpler system with a board, some twine, and an old mason jar. Opening the window tilted the board, sending the jar rolling down the roof to shatter in the driveway. When her father was working, anything quieter than shattering glass would go unnoticed.

  Squirrels had occasionally smashed a jar, but the makeshift alarm had stopped Dierdre from sneaking out her window at night.

  Instead, she had gone through the attic.

  She doubted the museum would have bothered to wire the gable vent on the north end of the house. Nor were they likely to have noticed the missing screws where a young Dierdre had prepared an alternate way in and out of the house. She made her way to the end of the roof, then stepped out to balance on another tree branch as she worked the vent loose. Her body was thicker than it had been in those days, but she managed to squeeze inside, her feet automatically finding the beams beneath the fiberglass insulation.

  The hinges squealed like a wounded animal as she lowered the attic ladder into the house. She froze, half expecting her father to come thundering out of his office. Back then, Dierdre had oiled the hinges regularly.

  She used the tiny LED flashlight in her cellphone to make her way toward her father’s office. Framed comics decorated the wall where Dierdre’s memory still expected to find family photos. Dierdre stopped as a familiar figure caught her attention.

  Bill Hammerberg liked to experiment with new characters, often introducing a new one into the strip for a few weeks, then discarding it before anyone even knew its name. Kind of like his relationships with women, after Dierdre’s mother left him.

  Perhaps that was why nobody ever noticed the significance of Death. He was one more experiment, like the feathered bowling ball with long chicken legs in the single-panel strip titled “The Nursing Home.”

  Bowling Ball wore a dirty butcher’s apron. Clawlike fingers clutched an oversized vacuum cleaner that sucked elderly, twig-limbed men and women from a brick building. Death, dressed like a garbage man, was pulling people from the vacuum and tossing them into a riveted steel dumpster.

  Standing in the empty house where she and her father had lived for so many years, it was all she could do to keep from screaming. “What is he, Dad?” What was this thing her father had brought into her son’s life?

  Sweat dripped down her face as she moved from one strip to the next, searching for answers. Her throat was dry and dusty from her trip through the attic.

  Dierdre opened the door to her father’s office and stepped inside. Green velvet ropes surrounded the ink-stained desk. Drawing paper sat stacked to one side, far neater than it ever had been in her father’s life.

  Paul had drawn Death, but Dierdre’s father had created him. Death lived here on the walls, and in this office. She could almost see that horrible Cheshire smile floating in the darkness. She could smell him, an oily scent barely noticeable over the too-strong floral tang of the plug-in air freshener.

  Setting her cellphone on the desk, she picked up one of the old fountain pens. The ink had long since dried, and the inkwell on the desk was empty, but Dierdre had come prepared. Tossing the fountain pen aside, she pulled a ballpoint from her purse and grabbed the top sheet of paper. And then Dierdre sat in her father’s chair and drew Death.

  Destroying Paul’s pictures hadn’t helped, any more than it had when she tore up her father’s final sketch. She had ruined paper, nothing more.

  At first, she drew Death trapped. Tied to railroad tracks like an old cartoon villain, crushed beneath a heavy safe, sinking to the bottom of the ocean in chains. Even as she drew, she knew her pictures were somehow wrong. Paul’s sketches, crude as they were, captured the essence of Death. But when Dierdre drew him, it was merely a drawing. Death was ignoring her.

  After trying and failing yet again, Dierdre stood up so fast the chair toppled backward. She stormed out of the office and retrieved “The Nursing Home” from the hallway. Back at the desk, she flipped over the print and ripped it from the frame.

  This Death was real. Unlike her poor drawings, even more than Paul’s, her father’s Death watched her and laughed. For an instant as she studied the brittle paper, one of the discarded bodies appeared to be wearing a T-shirt and baseball cap.

  This time, Dierdre didn’t bother with neatness. Her scribbles were like a child’s, looping a thread of ink around Death again and again. If she had to, she would tie up every last image of Death in the museum.

  Her pen dried after only a few seconds. “Dammit!” She flung the pen away and dug in her purse for another. Finding none, she hurried out of the office and down the stairs. A small guestbook sat on a pedestal by the front door. She grabbed the pen and ripped it free, breaking the chain that secured it to the book.

  On her way back, she stopped as a black and white photograph caught her eye, illuminated by the light through the front window. The photo showed her father receiving an award from the city council. His face was wrinkled as a prune. He looked uncomfortable in his suit and tie. According to the caption, this would have been less than a year before his death.

  “You knew what he was,” Dierdre whispered. “You must have known. But you kept drawing him. You drew more.” She stared at the pen in her hand. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  Those last years had been his most productive. Knowing Death was near, Bill Hammerberg hadn’t tried to fight. He had simply drawn faster.

  The broken pen chain tickled her wrist as she returned to the office. She sat down and stared at the comic. She had crossed out the lower part of Death’s body, along with his vacuum cleaner, before her pen went dry.

  Dierdre set the tip of the guestbook pen against the page. Her hand trembled, leaving a small black streak next to Death’s arm. The space around Death was mostly empty. With the vacuum scribbled away, the whole thing appeared incomplete.

  “Why didn’t you fight?” she whispered.

  Slowly, the pen began to move.

  Back at the hospital, Dierdre was stopped twice by well-meaning staff who told her visiting hours were over, and that if she wanted to bring a gift to a patient, she should come back in the morning.

  “It’s for my son. He has leukemia.” She barely managed to get the words out without breaking down. Both times, the staff stepped aside with that look, that sad, sympathetic, pitying expression that made her want to scream, He’s not dead yet, damn you!

  Paul was sleeping when she arrived at his room. The lights were out, but the door was open. The hall lights provided more than enough illumination for her to make her way to the bed.

  He had his thumb in his mouth, and his knees were pressed against the bedrail. Dierdre tried to be quiet, but Paul stirred before she reached the chair beside the bed. He never slept deeply, even with drugs to soothe his pain.

  “Mom?”

  She reached over to turn on the fluorescent lamp above the head of the bed. Then she lowered the bedrail and sat down beside him. “I’m sorry I left you.”

  “You look horrible,” he said.

  Dierdre ran one hand through her hair, grimacing at the tangles and pine debris.

  “Where did you go?” Paul rubbed his eyes, then tugged his IV tube to give himself a bit more slack. “What’s that?”

  Dierdre unrolled the print she had taken from the museum and spread it on the bed.

  Paul’s index finger nearly tor
e a hole through Death. “Who drew this?”

  “Your grandfather.” Dierdre’s throat tightened. She wiped her hands on her pants, fighting the urge to yank the picture away and destroy it. “I did the part in the middle.”

  “That’s terrible, Mom.”

  She snorted. “I know.”

  “Grandpa Hammerberg liked to draw?” he asked, still studying the picture.

  “He had a comic strip in the newspapers for a while,” Dierdre said. She pointed to Death. “He started to draw this character a few years before—.” She swallowed, then forced herself to continue. “Before he died.”

  “Oh.” The flatness in his voice made her want to pull him out of bed and rock him in her arms.

  He ran a finger over the freshly inked swirls. Dierdre’spen had looped around and around, but she hadn’t scribbled through Death himself this time. Instead, she had expanded his arms until they were like tiny tornadoes spinning from his body. Each arm cocooned a struggling figure. On one side, a line through a protruding oval formed a baseball cap. On the other side, a single arm reached through Death’s grip. The fingers appeared to be clutching a pen.

  “That’s me, right?” Paul asked, pointing to the capped figure. “Then who—”

  “Me,” said Dierdre.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you remember when your father and I were still married?” Dierdre asked. “How he and I were always fighting, and we never had any time for you?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Ever since you got sick, I’ve been so focused on trying to fight this. On fighting him.”

  “Does that mean you’re giving up?”

  She swallowed, then said, “It means I won’t let him take me away from you.”

  “Oh.” Paul studied the picture more closely. “Grandpa was really good.”

  “Yes, he was.” Dierdre forced herself to look at the picture. “I think Grandpa knew he was going to die. Just like you knew you were going to get sick again.”

  Paul stared at his hands. “So what did he do?”

  “He concentrated on what was important to him.” Dierdre had to try three times to get the words out. “Is he going to take you away from me?”