It took me a few beats too long to process what he’d said. My eyes were still darting toward the tree line, watching for King Rex to return. “Then why are you here?”
He motioned to something tucked under his arm I couldn’t see. “I brought you something. But if this is a bad time…”
I was suddenly very aware that I was wearing only a bikini. I folded my arms over my lower stomach, where white hair-line stretch marks scarred my skin. “What is it?” I asked suspiciously.
He frowned and held it up, and I could see that it was a thin, spiral-bound sketchbook. It looked just like any of the cheap sketchbooks you could buy in a drugstore, except the cover of this one was decorated with Sailor Moon stickers. “When you asked me last week if I’d ever seen your imaginary friend, Leah Nola … well, I guess I lied.”
My heart accelerated. I nervously wrung out my wet hair and glanced over his shoulder to see Weeple lie down, folding his enormous legs as if he were a camel. The T-rex was still nowhere to be seen. “What do you mean?”
“In here,” he said. “You drew pictures of her. Of us. It’s from the second summer you stayed here, and you gave it to me before you left because you said your mom would be mad if she saw it.”
“Really?” I reached for the sketchbook, which felt warm from Jamie’s hands and the sun. I ran my fingertips over the faded stickers. His offering was so kind and unexpected, the perfect olive branch. I didn’t have many artifacts from my childhood. My mom hadn’t been sentimental enough to keep much, and the handful of items she had kept—boxes filled with my baby book, a few dolls and stuffed animals, and some elementary school projects—had supposedly been ruined in a basement flood after I moved out. The only pictures I had of my childhood were in photo albums Duffy had compiled. “Thank you,” I said, hugging the sketchbook to my waist. The words felt inadequate, so I repeated them with more emphasis. “Thank you so much.”
“No problem.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. Without his beard, Jamie looked much younger and more like the boy I had once known. Shaving had revealed his full, well-formed lips, lips I had always thought were such a waste on a guy. They were the lips I’d practiced kissing as a little girl.
“Well, we’d better go inside,” I said, bending down to retrieve my lemonade thermos. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jamie studiously not noticing my breasts as they swelled over the tight triangles of my bikini top. “David and I,” I clarified quickly. “He’s overdue for his nap. But thanks again for this. And for”—I dug deep—“your help last week. I know I made it pretty clear to you that I didn’t want it at the time, but it was really nice of you.”
“No problem,” he repeated, struggling to withdraw his hand from his pocket to gesture dismissively. Was it just me, or did he look both disappointed and relieved? He took a few steps backward, his eyes never straying from my face.
“David,” I called. “Time to come inside and get dried off.”
My son galloped toward me without Weeple, wielding the loofah in front of him like a sword. Its spongy surface glistened with something speckled and shiny. He shot Jamie a curious glance as he approached. I knew I was being rude by not introducing him to Jamie, but the dinosaurs’ reaction to my childhood friend still had me wound-up. Was it possible that David had sensed something about Jamie that I could not? Something threatening that had raised his dinosaurs’ figurative hackles?
We climbed up the stairs to the deck together. I draped a faded beach towel around David’s shoulders and pried the long-handled sponge away from him. Up close, I could see its head was coated in something gelatinous and gleaming, like a thousand tiny frog eggs. Ew. He must have left it lying in something gross in the yard, because imaginary dinosaurs certainly weren’t capable of sloughing off their imaginary skin, were they? Of course not! Dang it, now I couldn’t return the loofah to Duffy without her noticing. I’d have to throw it out and buy her a new one.
I looked up to see Jamie crossing the yard back to his house. I lifted my hand in a wave, but he must not have seen me.
Inside, the only sound was the humming air conditioner on full arctic blast. Duffy was still ensconced in her basement salon, and Winston was volunteering at the pioneer village. David’s bare skin contracted into tiny goosebumps, and I tightened the towel around him.
“Let’s hurry upstairs and get you in some dry clothes,” I said, vigorously rubbing his arms with my palms. “Then it’s time for a nap.”
I wanted to talk to him about his dinosaurs’ aggressive behavior but didn’t know how to broach the subject without revealing that I could see them. Surely it wasn’t a good idea to divulge to my son that I had a less-than-normal relationship with his imagination unless I wanted to condemn him to a life of therapy. My greatest fear was that by acknowledging my ability aloud, it would make David believe in them even more, and they would somehow become even more real. With more weight, more substance, more of their own agency, more potential for violence. I had no idea how this phenomenon worked, but I really didn’t want to be responsible for unleashing that.
Drowsy from the sprinkler and the sun, David climbed into bed without his usual pre-nap protest.
“That man we saw lives next door,” I told him. “I think you’ve seen him mowing our lawn? His name is Jamie, and I was friends with him when I was a little girl. Just a little older than you.”
He stared up at me, clearly shocked by the notion of my being a child once. I pulled the sheet up to his chin.
“You seemed upset when you first saw him,” I said. “Any reason why?” I suspected there had been something primal and protective in his response. Maybe it wasn’t that he’d sensed anything threatening about Jamie in particular, but that he was simply a stranger, and a male one at that, when David hardly had any interaction with men. His first instinct had been to defend us. But it scared me that he’d sicced his dinosaurs on someone in order to do that.
David leaned his cheek against my hand and closed his eyes. He mumbled something that sounded like, I thought it was him. When I asked him to repeat himself, he said, “I don’t like the bad cat. King Rex and Weeple chase him away.”
“What bad cat?” I asked, but he didn’t respond. “If you want to keep playing with your dinosaurs, they need to be nice. No chasing cats or people, okay? I don’t want them to hurt you or someone else. They can eat all the pickles and bologna they want, but they need to be good.” I stroked his cheek and quietly left the room.
I changed out of my bikini and sat cross-legged on my bed with the sketchbook Jamie had brought me. Vivien Leigh jumped up beside me and butted her head against my thigh. Scratching her white chin with one hand, I inspected the front and back covers for any writing, my name or otherwise, but found nothing. After engaging with David’s monstrous imaginary friends, I was a little hesitant to uncover more about my own. But mostly, I wanted to extend the pleasure of anticipating what would be inside—a message from my eight-year-old self. Maybe learning about my own childhood would shed some light on my son’s creations.
I slid my pointer finger under the lip of the front cover. The first drawing, disappointingly, was not of my imaginary friend. Instead, it was a colored-pencil sketch of the river and the grassy banks around it. It was actually pretty good for an eight-year-old, I had to admit. I flipped to the next one, which showed a barn, and the next one, a Ferris wheel. My landscape phase, apparently.
A third of the way through the sketchbook, I came across a portrait of a little girl. Black pageboy haircut, large lavender-gray eyes, a hint of a smile playing on her lips. Charcoal gray jumper with a white blouse underneath. LEAH NOLA was written in my girlish, bubbly handwriting. She looked pretty and self-contained somehow, like an orphaned yet tenacious heroine in a children’s book. I studied each line of the drawing, trying to remember her, willing myself to hear her voice. Had she sounded sweet and ghostly? Or loud and bossy? But the drawing stared silently back at me.
I paged through the rest of the sketchbook.
There were drawings of Leah Nola and a blonde girl of the same height—me—and there were drawings of us with a slightly smaller, wide-eyed, brown-haired boy. Jamie. I closed the book, and Vivien Leigh immediately settled herself on top of it. She yawned, revealing the tiny pink cave of her mouth, and I stroked the delicate arch of her back.
Jamie had said I’d given my drawings to him for safekeeping because my mom would’ve been mad if she had seen them. But why? They were lovely, precise sketches, full of promise, and even though my mom had never really encouraged my interest in art, she certainly hadn’t prohibited it either. So clearly, it had something to do with their content—my imaginary friend. The imaginary friend who, until a few weeks ago, I’d had no memory of. And if I’d been hiding the drawings from my mom, that meant that she had known about Leah Nola and disapproved.
A disquieting idea crossed my mind: had she been able to see my imagination as I was able to see David’s? But it seemed unlikely because in order to see my imagination, she would’ve needed to have paid attention to me. And if there was one consistent theme of my childhood, it was that her time was too precious to spare much of it on me. Kimberly Jennings was a vanishing act. Now you see her, now you don’t.
Even if she hadn’t been able to see Leah Nola, she certainly could’ve been aware I had an imaginary friend. Probably I had talked about her in front of my mom, asked her to set out an extra place setting like Winston had done, that sort of thing. Had my mom been disturbed by my overactive imagination? Had she worried I was a troubled or abnormal child? It seemed too big a coincidence that the first two summers I’d been sent to stay with my grandparents—tumultuous years with my mom, years she claimed I exhibited “behavior problems”—paralleled my friendship with Leah Nola.
And why could I remember so little about her? Why, until both Duffy and Jamie had mentioned her, had I totally forgotten about the gray-eyed girl in the jumper? I didn’t have a steel trap memory like Jamie, yet I could remember a lot of other details from my summers here. But not Leah Nola. It was almost like I’d repressed the memory of her. The only interaction with my mom I was able to pluck from my memory that related to Leah Nola was my thirteenth birthday party. She had muttered my imaginary friend’s name hatefully under her breath.
When I turned thirteen, all I wanted for my birthday was a sleepover party. I’d been to plenty of them before but had never hosted one at my own house mostly because my mom was too flaky and unpredictable. But I’d finally worn down her resistance by playing up how all of my friends thought she was the youngest and prettiest mom, and therefore The Coolest Mom in Our Grade, and how they just knew we’d throw the best sleepover ever. My mom took unprecedented pride in her new title and, in an effort to live up to it, granted me one of the best weeks of my life leading up to my birthday. We planned the party together, harmoniously side by side, acting like a mother and daughter who actually liked each other. We sent out glittery invitations, ordered a real bakery cake with pink icing roses, rented R-rated chick-flicks, and made up little party favor bags with lip gloss, ring pops, and glow stick bracelets.
By the time my first guest arrived, my skin was nearly shooting off little sparks of happiness. As planned, I showed my room to the eight specially-chosen girls, and then we set about playing a dating board game until the pizzas were delivered. But my mom didn’t call us down and some of the girls were starting to complain they were hungry, so I went downstairs to investigate. My mom was sitting at the kitchen table, frowning at the mound of beautifully wrapped gifts. When I asked her about dinner, she snapped, “Mark went to go get them, so we didn’t have to pay some idiot driver a tip.”
Mark was her current boyfriend, a bald-headed cook at the restaurant where she worked, who almost exclusively referred to her as “mama.” She’d had a lot of boyfriends over the years, but Mark definitely ranked in my Top Ten List of Losers.
When Mark finally showed up with the pizza, my mom berated him for forgetting to pick up the cake as well. They argued right in front of us, and Mark shouted at one point, “It’s not like she’s my fucking kid, Kim!” My mom said nothing in reply, but her hazel eyes told a different story. They flashed indignantly: I wish she wasn’t my fucking kid either.
My friends politely pretended to be busy choosing their pizza slices. I was disappointed to see that my mom hadn’t thought to order my favorite pizza toppings—ham and pineapple—or if she had, Mark hadn’t remembered. The birthday cake never did get picked up because by the time my mom had won the fight, the bakery had already closed for the evening, and Mark returned empty-handed and fuming.
The party limped along. Half of the girls were resigned to treating me with patronizing kindness; the other half had given in to malicious whispering about my screwed-up home life. When the credits on the last movie rolled and the majority of my “friends” were drifting off to sleep, I felt only immense relief. That is, until Katie Birch nudged me awake. Her pretty face was pale and drawn in the moonlit living room. “I don’t feel good,” she whispered and immediately burst into hot, gulping tears. I hurried her into the bathroom before she could wake the other girls and held her shiny black hair back as she hurled the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl.
“I want my mom,” Katie whimpered, before retching again.
“Wait here.” I gave her a wet washcloth to wipe her face.
I tiptoed past the living room to my mom’s bedroom. In the pitch dark, I knelt by her bed to gently prod her awake. But she wasn’t in the bed. Neither was Mark. I did a quick search of the rest of the house and found they were both gone. Both their cars were missing too. No note, no nothing.
Since I was eight, my mom had been leaving me home alone with only our downstairs neighbor, an elderly man named Vern, as a vague kind of “in case of emergencies” babysitter. She’d leave for hours at a time, but she had never left me alone overnight. At least not that I knew of. I wondered if maybe Mark had murdered her. In my righteous adolescent anger, I almost hoped that was the case, instead of her intentionally leaving me all by myself to fend with a situation I didn’t know how to handle.
“What did your mom say? Did she call my mom?” Katie asked. Her face looked even whiter than when I’d left her, and her slight shoulders were shaking.
“Do you really think we need to call your mom? I mean, you threw up, so hopefully you’ll feel better now, right? Why scare her and make her come out here in the middle of the night?” I chattered nervously. I was scared to death that Mrs. Birch would find out how negligent my mom was and that we’d somehow get in trouble.
Fat tears rolled down Katie’s cheeks, and she rubbed at a smear of vomit on the corner of her lips. “Anna, please. My mom won’t mind, I promise. I just want to go home.”
“Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll call.”
True to Katie’s word, her mom wasn’t angry or annoyed to have to come get her at 3:30 in the morning. She was still wearing her pajamas—a matronly pink-plaid short set that revealed the varicose veins in her legs, unlike the lace and silk nighties my own mom wore—and her eyes were bleary, but when she saw Katie, she heroically scooped her into her arms and let out a string of comforting phrases, “Sweetie, it’s okay. I’m here. There now. Everything is fine, Katie girl.”
When I told Mrs. Birch my mom was a heavy sleeper, she didn’t seem the least bit suspicious. Instead, she stroked my hair and said, “Poor Anna. I’m sorry this had to happen at your birthday party. Thank you for helping Katie and calling me. You did the right thing.” I watched them walk to their station wagon, Katie’s skinny form leaning against her mother’s sturdy one, and I wanted to go with them. I wanted Mrs. Birch to be my mother and to never again have to wonder where my mom was or if she would be there for me when I needed her.
My mom had miraculously reappeared by the time everyone woke up the next morning, with a box of frosted long john doughnuts with sprinkles, as though that could somehow make up for everything else. I gave her the cold shoulder the more she tri
ed to cajole me and win over my friends with her knowledge of current trends and celebrities. Finally, all the girls had been collected. I stood up to go to my room.
“What’s your problem?” my mom asked, struggling to squeeze the empty bakery box into the garbage, which was already jammed with foul-smelling pizza boxes. “I throw this extravagant party for you—which was not cheap, let me tell you—and I don’t even get the slightest thanks?”
My face burned. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but my anger was flooding my throat like a tidal wave of verbal vomit, and I couldn’t hold it back any longer. “What do you want me to thank you for?” I shouted. “Embarrassing me in front of everyone? Not standing up for me to stupid Mark? Forgetting my cake? Leaving me all alone in the middle of the night to fend for myself with Katie puking…and her mom…” I was sobbing at that point, and my words were thick and wet and probably hard to understand. I cried until my sinuses ached from the pressure.
“Are you done?” my mom asked. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her hands folded primly and her face bland and expressionless. I had never hated her more than I did at that moment.
“I know this is hard for you to understand, but please try,” she started. Without her makeup on, she looked older than her thirty years. “Sometimes life can be disappointing. It can turn out in ways that you didn’t expect. You’re thirteen now, a teenager. You need to know that not everything is always going to be perfect, least of all me, and you need to learn to deal with that.”
“Really, Mom? Life can be disappointing, and you’re not perfect?” My voice dripped with sarcasm. “You think I’m just figuring that out now?”
“With that bad attitude, you’ve got a lot more disappointment coming to you, Little Miss Anna. Life is not gentle with girls like us.”
“Don’t say that. I’m nothing like you!” I spat. “I hate you!”
I’d finally pierced her composure. She leapt from the table with her palm raised as though she were going to strike me. She pounded the tabletop instead. “It’s a terrible thing to hate your mother. But I’ve known it for a while now. I’ve seen it in your eyes. Ever since Leah Nola.”
Imaginary Things Page 10