I stand staring at Butler Library across the immaculate quadrangle. It’s beautiful and represents everything exciting about getting out of your small town high school and starting life for real.
Then I realize. I’ve never visited Columbia before. Of course, I know that, but I’ve never stopped to wonder why. After all, I’ve been in Manhattan before. I’ve been on a college tour with my dad before. Wouldn’t it make sense that this would be the first place I’d come? And yet I didn’t. What suddenly makes sense, terrifying sense, is the vision of this as a blank space in Maggie’s fantasy. That’s right. I’ve seen it before, in my dream. Maggie went there with Benjamin. He taught English here, creative writing. He worked in the building two blocks from where I’m standing. Maggie never wanted to go to college. She gave that to me, at her father’s college, and never bothered (as if she controlled the dream enough to bother) to fill in the blank of having me visit.
I’ve heard the phrase “my blood ran cold” in books and movies. This is what it feels like. It’s your body that’s cold, and really frightened in a way that you don’t know how to fix. I literally can’t move. I don’t notice any sound, though life is going on around me. I’m staring at the air in front of me but can’t focus my eyes on anything. I’m not real. I’m not.
There must be a thousand explanations and a thousand examples of how Maggie could be having the same experience that I’m having. I try to slow my breathing, which makes me feel light-headed. A strangely familiar voice says, “Hi.”
I turn directly into a charming and friendly smile that I’ve seen many times. In my dreams.
“Are you okay?” Andrew asks.
I swallow hard. I’m aware of a conscious effort to keep from blacking out. I take my best shot. “Do I know you?”
“Nope. I’m just a random citizen who thought you looked a little ill or something. I didn’t mean to intrude or bother you.”
He doesn’t know me. Obviously, since I’m not real, he can’t know me. Then a ray of hope. Andrew is showing up in Maggie’s dream, just like Bill showed up in mine. But of course, this hope is dashed. Andrew is alive and real. Bill is only a memory.
“I’m sorry to push this, but you’re not looking any better. Do you want to sit down on that bench over there?”
I should send him away. But I can’t.
“Sure.”
He takes my elbow, gently, so different from Thomas’s terrifying attack. He leads me to the bench and sits beside me.
“Can I get you some water? Or maybe you need some food in your stomach?”
“I’ll be fine in a second.” I look at him and smile. I want to talk to him, even if I don’t know why. “I like your bracelet.” He’s wearing an awkwardly tied multicolor friendship bracelet.
“Thanks. My girlfriend’s sister made it for me.”
“Her younger sister, I hope.”
He laughs in a really easy and appealing way. It reminds me of someone else’s laugh.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “My girlfriend’s older than seven.”
“Good to know. Do you guys go to Columbia?”
“I go to NYU and she’s an actress.”
“She must be a handful.”
“You’d think so. She’d probably say that. But I think when you really want to be with someone, all that stuff goes away.”
“She’s lucky to have a guy who feels that way.”
“We’re both lucky we found each other. I mean, I don’t know what I’d do with the rest of my life if I ever lost her. Crazy, huh?”
I stare in his eyes. And remember the smile his smile now reminds me of.
“There’s worse things than crazy,” I say. And wonder if that could be true.
I tell him I’m feeling better. He points me toward the visitors’ center and heads off with a little wave. I watch him go and suddenly wonder what he’s doing here. His life is downtown. Why would Maggie put him uptown to meet me? For the same reason I put my mom in her bedroom. We wouldn’t. We just can’t control this thing anymore. If we ever did.
I don’t go to the visitor’s center. Instead, I walk into the library. Gaze at the elegant high ceilings, imagine hiding out in the stacks fifteen hours at a time, cramming for finals, the life I’ve longed to have. Know that I never will. In fact, there probably isn’t even a me in the first place. Being here is unbearable. I catch a cab and head downtown.
I know where I’m going. I come down Hudson, get out at Horatio, and head west. I soak in the neighborhood. I’ve seen it a million times but never really looked at it. Probably because I always thought it wasn’t real, like a fake street in a movie.
All of a sudden I’m there. Staring up at where she lives. Where I live? With my sister, Jade? I summon all my courage and go to the call box. I scroll for Jameson, but just as I get to the Ds…
“Lose your key?”
I turn to see a lean, handsome man in his mid-forties. I feel as if I’ve known him all my life. And that feeling is like a knife in my gut. Maggie’s father, Benjamin, is dead, as dead as Bill. Yet here he is, thinking that I’m his daughter who has lost her key.
“I can’t believe I did that. I’m a bonehead.”
He sits down on the stoop, and I sit alongside him. There are tears in my eyes. How much Maggie, or I, really loved this guy. And this might be the last moment either of us will ever speak to him. I lean my head on his shoulder, and he strokes my hair.
“Tell me a story,” I ask.
“You first.”
I take a deep breath. “There once was a girl who was very, very unhappy. But she didn’t know it. She invented an imaginary world and told herself it was her special, fun place to go visit.”
“But it was her place to hide,” he says.
“Hey, who’s telling this story?”
“We are,” he says. Which suddenly makes me feel warm and comforted. Someone else once said those words to me. And they made me feel less alone.
“She visits her special place every night. It’s a secret from everyone. And she looks forward to it. Even though it isn’t always easy there.”
“And then one day…” he prompts.
I look over at him questioningly.
“Every story has a point. Every story has a reason and a journey. Every story has an end.”
“That’s where this one is different. Because the girl doesn’t want it to end. Won’t let it end.”
He looks at me with a wisdom that reminds me of the way Bill looked at Maggie last night.
“Oh, it will end all right. The storyteller just needs to find a nice soft place for her to land.”
I start to cry. “Can she find it?”
He studies me. Almost as if he can read the answer to that question in my eyes.
“She will,” he says. “Even if it’s not the one she’s planning on.”
I’m not sure how to take that. But his face looks so kind, I know he meant it well. He doesn’t comment on the fact that I’m crying. Maybe being a ghost, he doesn’t notice. But then he reaches over and dries my face with his fingertips.
“I have to go now,” he says. “I wish I didn’t.”
He stands, leaning down to kiss the top of my head. I feel this glow and sadness as if he is my own father, which in this moment I wish he were. He walks off down the street and I watch with this unbearable regret that I will never see him again even though he is someone I never really knew.
I wander around for hours. My dad calls, asking if I’m ready to meet up. We talk about getting an early dinner before our train. I tell him to meet me at Union Square Café.
I stand in the park, across the street from the place Maggie goes to be alone in a crowd. To watch the strangers she makes up stories about. If I sit there tonight, will she be somewhere in the room, maybe in a parallel universe, watching me and creating me? Maybe she’s in there right now.
I cross the street, and just before I can enter…
“There you are.”
I know the voice
even before I turn around. Emma is looking at me in a very different way from the way everyone else from Maggie’s world has looked at me. She knows who I am. She knows I’m Sloane.
“Do you know who I am?” she asks.
I’m struck dumb. This really isn’t possible.
“Sloane, can you hear me?”
I nod slowly, like a three-year-old.
“Go away, Sloane. Let her be. Leave her alone so she can have a life.”
She glares at me, actually angry, blaming me for everything.
“Why doesn’t she let me go so I can have a life?”
“You know why. Maggie can’t go away. Any more than her sister, or her mother, or I can.”
“Oh, but I can, huh?”
“You can if you want to. You can just let go, and fade away, and be happy that she can live without you now.”
“Because of Andrew?”
“Because of the possibility of Andrew. She can’t really be with anyone until you’re gone. I know you love her. Please, please let it happen.”
“So I’m supposed to, what, kill myself?”
“Stop it!” That isn’t Emma. I close my eyes. But I know he won’t go away.
“Sloane, what are you doing? What are you saying?”
I open my eyes and stare at my dad for the longest moment.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m just confused, I guess. Just. Really confused.”
I’ve never seen tears in my dad’s eyes before. His arms slide around me. He holds me tight.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispers. “We’ll figure it out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
maggie
My eyes spring open. I’m completely disoriented. My head whirls to my left to see the clock, but it’s not there. Who took it? I turn back, and it’s on the right. But I don’t keep my clock there. Suddenly, I focus on the time; my God, I’m late for school.
I throw back the comforter, my feet hit the floor, and then I remember. This is Saturday. There’s no school today. I can calm down. I can slow my breathing. Everything’s fine.
Then I realize. I’m not Sloane. I don’t go to school. Ever.
I sit on the edge of my bed and try to swallow back the panic. This is worse. Things are getting worse. I can’t let them.
I have to get up the courage to go to the bathroom because what if it’s Sloane in the mirror? What if it’s her bathroom? What if I can never find my way back? But I can’t sit here all day. I have to take the chance.
I walk to the bathroom so slowly. I open the door a crack. It’s still my bathroom. I enter and look bravely into the mirror. It’s me.
On the wall are all these framed family photos: my first carousel ride, Jade and I building a sand castle, my mom and dad skiing. My school play. I was a cucumber. I was so cute.
And suddenly, I feel blind, utter panic. What school was that? I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about any schools. Suddenly, I don’t remember anything before I was like twelve or thirteen. I mean, nothing. No Christmas, no best friend, no stomachaches where Mom kept me home and made me pudding. I called her Mom, not Nicole. Like Sloane calls her mom.
I can remember Sloane’s mom making her egg drop soup and rubbing her back when she was getting over the chicken pox. I can remember everything about Sloane’s childhood. Why can’t I remember mine? There’s only one reason.
I’ve been waiting in Emma’s stupid, fussy, little waiting room for forty minutes. My heart pounds so hard, I know I’m going to throw up. I keep trying to remember. Back to age twelve, I know everything. My God, it’s actually true. But how can it be? How can a person not be real? It would mean that nothing and no one in my world is real. Even Emma. So of course, she’ll defend this world with everything she’s got.
She opens the door, gives me that phony, sweet smile. As I enter, she tries to give me a hug, and I just can’t let her today. I flinch at her touch, and I know this offends her. And I don’t care. Not today.
I tell her everything. I am Sloane’s creation, nothing exists before I was twelve, that must be when Sloane’s dream started.
Emma remains calm. I hate her so much in this moment.
“Calm down. It’s only a panic attack. And luckily, it’s one I can solve in a heartbeat. I know everything about your childhood because you’ve told me everything during our three years together. You went to Calhoun on the Upper West Side because you lived near Columbia, where your father worked. Your favorite teacher was Ms. Wallace in fourth grade. You made a clay turtle and fired it in the school’s kiln. The glaze was maroon, I think you said. Can you remember the turtle?”
“Shelly.” Suddenly, I remember everything. I wanted a pet like Eloise’s turtle, Skipperdee. So I made my own. My best friend was Ashley Goldberg; we swam in a fountain somewhere and got into heaps of trouble. Central Park. It was the one with the boats.
For one blessed moment, I am so relieved and overjoyed.
And then I realize Sloane is making me remember. This is her dream. She would be scared that I am figuring things out. The game would be over. So I say all of this into Emma’s complacent smile.
“You have to stop this, Maggie. You act as if you have no control over the situation. And the truth is since neither I nor any of the doctors that I have consulted with have ever seen anything like this before, none of us really know how far you can push it. But we all agree on one thing. You have to take responsibility for yourself. You have to try to hold on to reality.”
“But I am, don’t you see? How ridiculous for me to ever think that the girl who doesn’t go to school, who lives in Manhattan, who’s an actress moving to Los Angeles with a plum role waiting for her, that this person could be real and the small town high school girl squabbling with her girlfriends and flirting with the cutest guy in class would be the fantasy. There’s no way you can defend that.”
“If I try,” she says, “will you listen? Will you give me a chance to save your life?” And in that moment, I feel she cares, even loves me, and I say yes. I will listen.
“You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Maggie. The starting point is which of you has the creativity, the imagination, the individuality to create something like this. An entire world, populated with well-defined and realistic people. It’s an achievement of will, of need. You are the one who makes up stories. You see strangers everywhere, and you invent entire lives for them. You are so devoted to maintaining a second life for yourself that you refuse to see the obvious. This invention is what you do, even in your waking life.”
“Sloane doesn’t have to do this in her waking life; she does it every night in her dream. And the only way she can keep from knowing that I’m the fantasy is to give me exactly the kind of behavior you’re talking about. See, we can play traits in either direction; none of that proves anything.”
I watch her gather her thoughts. My panic is rising again. She has no answers. What am I going to do?
“Here’s why you’ve created Sloane. You have lost your father, the most important person in the world to you, the one person you could trust with your problems. Your relationship with your mother is so disconnected that she’s basically a girlfriend and not even a terribly close one. You adore your sister, but she needs you and you feel the weight of that responsibility. You have no truly close friends except for Andrew, who wasn’t around when you started this.”
Andrew. He’s not real either. Sloane just made him up.
“You haven’t made up Sloane to exchange your life for hers. What you’re doing is adding her life to yours. You get to have your career, your sister, your freedom, everything you love, and you get to have a close-knit family, girlfriends, all the comforts of a so-called normal life. It’s like having a weekend house. Who wants to live in the city every minute? You’d go crazy.”
“It’s your fault!” I’m suddenly screaming. “I mean everything’s Sloane’s fault, of course, you’re not even real. But she put you here to keep me in line, to keep tell
ing me, convincing me that I’m a flesh and blood person who’s just crazy. If you weren’t here, I’d have been out of this long ago.”
“Good. This is progress. You’re down to blaming me…”
“Fuck you! Shut up! Just shut your mouth!” I jump up, but she opens her mouth to say something. “No!” I scream at the very top of my lungs, and grab the nearest thing, a table lamp, and just throw it as hard as I can against the wall. She shouts my name, like a schoolteacher who feels this is the time to be firm, but she’s way too late.
I’m out the door, pounding down the stairs, and out onto the street, straight into two-way traffic. The cars aren’t real. I’m not real. It won’t hurt. They honk and swerve and pretend to be real. Even the people shout all the predictable pretend-to-be-real things. They can’t fool me anymore. I get across the street, and see, I’m fine. Nothing’s touched me. Nothing here can. Sadly, nothing anywhere can.
I start running. I don’t know where I’m going. But of course it can’t possibly matter. It’s my last chance to feel my lungs bursting for air and my legs burning with the effort. I turn toward the river and there’s a line of traffic at a dead stop.
The bridge must be up. I slow down. I’m hungry. Maybe I’ll grab a muffin at the Green Marble. I’m not that far from home; maybe Mom will make me some waffles. I don’t want to see her right now. That’s right, it’s Saturday, she’s picking up Max from soccer anyway. I turn down the alley at the Army Navy Store, but somehow there’s the Hudson. I’m in New York. I stand still and blink. I look down at my body. It’s Maggie’s body. So of course I’m in New York.
I walk slowly, just trying to keep it together. I can’t really be Sloane, even though I am. This is my last chance to be anything at all. It’s so sunny out. Maybe Jade is walking Boris. I hate Boris. I had a bunny growing up, but Tyler was allergic, and I had to give him to Uncle Fred to keep on his farm. No, the bunny’s mine and the uncle is Sloane’s. Bunny, mine. Uncle, Sloane’s. That’s easy. I won’t forget again.
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