Back in the car, she hardly paused for breath as she berated me. “How could you have been so stupid? Do you know what could have happened to you? Have I taught you nothing about public places and strangers? You don’t look at them, you don’t talk to them, and you certainly don’t just walk away from me, when I trusted you to wait. This is a scary world, and little girls like you need to wise up fast.”
My ears were plugged from crying so hard, and I caught only about half of her tirade.
“You couldn’t wait five minutes until I was finished to go see Santa. You had to run off by yourself even though I promised I’d take you.”
“Santa’s Village closed at four,” I muttered. “Leah Nola said there wouldn’t be enough time.”
An icy silence followed. I could see my mom’s profile, and her jaw was clenched like it was spring-loaded.
“Oh, I see,” she said, her volume steadily increasing. “So this whole thing was all Leah Nola’s fault, huh? You were just an innocent bystander? Well, I am sick and tired of all this Leah Nola said this, Leah Nola said that crap. You did it, Anna. You did. Leah Nola does not exist.” She paused to gulp in a ragged breath. “It’s all in your head, and the sooner you learn that, the better. Now I don’t want to hear her name ever again. Do you understand me?”
I leaned forward in my seat, eager to set the record straight. “But—”
My mom turned around quickly to fix me with her serious stare. “Do you understand me?”
I looked down at my lap. “Yes.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. You’re such a stubborn little thing.”
I met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “I am not stubborn. You’re selfish.” It had been an idea I’d been mulling over for a long time now, but something Leah Nola had only recently verbalized for me. “You don’t care about me. You only care about yourself.”
My words hit their target, as my mom recoiled. She adjusted her grip on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. But then her eyes flicked back up to the rearview mirror. “If I don’t care about you, why do I work two shitty jobs just to put food on the table and keep a roof over your head? Why do I put up with your constant nonsense? Talking to imaginary people and running away in malls? I’m getting pretty fed up with it, I’ll have you know.”
At that age, I didn’t understand the difference between begrudgingly meeting someone’s basic physical needs and lovingly taking care of them, so I didn’t have a rebuttal. Instead I seethed in the backseat, replaying the horrific scene in the mall when my own mother had told Santa I belonged on the naughty list. Of course, she didn’t end up going through with the whole no-present thing. I did get a few presents for Christmas that year, but all of the labels read “FROM: MOM.” Not a single one of them was addressed from Santa, and she made a big deal out of this, acting like she’d been my hero even though I didn’t deserve gifts. It was the last year I believed in Santa.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We arrived back in Salsburg, all three of us more or less intact, but traumatized. David had succumbed reluctantly to sleep, but his cheeks were still an angry red, and his brow was wrinkled even as he slept. Duffy was a fidgety mess, huffing-and-puffing beside me, and I was so deep in my thoughts I doubt I would’ve noticed if a high-speed police chase had flown past us on the highway. I had never been more relieved to pull onto Steepleview, lined with its Douglas firs.
As Duffy went about putting her beauty supplies away in the basement (the trip to the office supply store had been abandoned), I improvised a timeout chair in the dining room. I situated David in the chair and explained that he would have to sit there for fifteen minutes and think about what he had done wrong on our shopping trip. He broke out into his full-face frown again, but I stood my ground and turned him so he was facing the sun-faded mauve wall. That way I wouldn’t see his pouty lips and puppy dog eyes and be tempted to cave in.
Head pounding and knees still a little weak, I collapsed onto the floral couch. The fear of losing David had burned through me like a wildfire. Never before had the possibility seemed so white-hot and real. Not when my mom found out I was pregnant and suggested I consider giving him up for adoption. Not when I found him as an infant, crying, cold, and alone in his baby bathtub. Not when Abigail Gill proposed shared custody. Standing in the strip mall parking lot, scared out of my wits, I had realized that there had been a point in time when I could have imagined my life without David and had even perhaps fantasized about its being somehow better. But now, picturing a life without him was impossible. I loved him and needed him with my whole being. But that didn’t mean I still wasn’t as mad as hell at him for wandering off on his own. Not to mention scared to death that a dangerous line with his dinosaurs had been crossed.
David let out a whimper like an injured dog, but I did my best to steel my resolve and ignore him. Burrowing deeper into the couch cushions, I reexamined my memory of the East Ridge Mall incident that had recently floated to the surface of my brain, clear and crisp, as if it had happened only yesterday. Leah Nola sitting at my feet, making jokes at my mom’s expense, urging me to run off to see Santa, and accompanying me across the mall. It was like finding a long-lost sister. Or discovering an untapped source of strength I had never known I’d had.
But the incident’s similarity to David’s running away with his own imaginary friends was disconcerting to me. I disliked being cast in the role of mean mom, and I disliked even more being forced to empathize with my mother’s perspective: the distress she’d obviously felt at my disappearance and her anger at my willful blindness to the menace she saw lurking everywhere. Although she definitely could have handled our reunion better—could have said just once, “I’m glad you’re okay,” and perhaps not sold me out in front of a mall full of people including Santa—there was love in her reaction; I could see that now. Fierce, bottled-up love, tinged with something else, though. Fear.
I remembered the way my mom had stiffened when she’d come out of the dressing room after Leah Nola had joined me. The way she’d grimaced when Leah Nola insulted her dress. The way her eyes sometimes flitted to where Leah Nola stood beside me, and how she’d insisted viciously, almost to the point of tears, on our drive home that Leah Nola didn’t exist and was all in my head. Maybe I had inherited my ability to see David’s imagination from my mom, after all. Maybe she had been able to see Leah Nola and had been afraid of her. Of us. Was that the reason why she’d sent me away both summers to stay with my grandparents?
A month ago this possibility might have reassured me that I wasn’t totally crazy and alone, but now it just depressed me. Because if she had had the ability to see my imaginary friend, it hadn’t served as a special bond that had brought us closer together; instead, it had driven us apart. If Leah Nola had been the outlet into which I had vented all my frustration with my mom, and my mom had been able to see and hear her, undoubtedly this had caused even greater tension between us. And if my mom had thought something was wrong with her—or me—because she could see my imaginary friend, maybe she had tried to distance herself from me even more. The thought of that happening to my relationship with David was devastating. I tried not to remember the ominous way King Rex had stood, snarling, between my son and me at the dollar store. Were we already on the same path my mother and I had traveled?
I studied David’s slumped shoulders across the room. He had stopped whimpering. A glance at the grandfather clock revealed only thirteen minutes had passed, but David wouldn’t know the difference. To him, his timeout had probably felt like it had already lasted fifteen hours.
I gently gripped his shoulder and turned the chair around. He let out a world-weary sigh as if he were a convict being released on parole. That sigh made me want to forgive him instantly and cover his tear-stained face with kisses, but I knew I couldn’t give in just yet.
“Do you understand why running away was wrong?” I asked him, tilting my head to force him to make eye contact.
“It was b
ad,” he murmured.
“Yes, it was bad because something bad could have happened to you. A not very nice stranger could have hurt you, or you could have gotten lost, and Grandma and I were really worried about you because you’re so special to us. You can’t go off on your own like that.”
“I wasn’t alone. I was with my dino-suss.”
I lowered myself to the floor and sat cross-legged in front of his chair. “I know that, but King Rex and Weeple aren’t like me or Grandma. They’re not real, and you can’t trust them to look after you. They’re pretend.”
David jutted out his lip. “They look after me. They’re my friends.”
“It’s nice to have pretend friends as well as real friends,” I said slowly. “But it’s not your dinosaurs’ job to look after you. It’s my job as your mommy to know what’s best for you and keep you safe.”
“I’m not a baby,” he spat and kicked out his leg, coming dangerously close to my knee.
I stilled his leg with a firm squeeze. “I know that, buckaroo. You’re going to be starting school next week, and you’re turning five next month. But I’ll always be your mommy, and you’ll always be my David, and it’s so important to me that you’re safe and healthy. I’m worried that you’re not safe with the dinosaurs anymore. That they might hurt you—maybe on purpose or maybe by accident.”
“They won’t hurt me.” David’s eyes were as shiny as two new pennies. “They’re mine.”
His proud claim of having dominion over his imaginary friends was strangely unnerving. Though I wanted to believe in his guarantee that they would never go berserk and turn on him, I wondered about everyone else’s safety. What about Jamie and Gunner? What about me? Had those aggressive actions been under David’s control too? “But even if you say your imaginary friends won’t hurt you, what about other people? You told me King Rex hurt Gunner, and that’s not acceptable. We can’t have that happening.”
“King Rex said he’s sorry.”
Well, that was comforting—the Tyrannosaurus rex was apologetic for slashing a boy half his size with his claws. What if he was still gaining gravity, strength, and speed? And what if he used his teeth the next time David was in a situation with someone the dinosaur considered threatening? I could hear Duffy’s footsteps climbing the creaky basement stairs, and I knew we needed to wrap this conversation up. But not before I’d extracted some very important promises.
“Listen to me, David. You need to control your imaginary friends so that they can’t hurt anyone—not you, not me, not Grandma and Grandpa, not other children, okay? Because if you can’t control them, if they do bad things, they need to go away and never come back, okay? Do you understand?”
He had never looked more like his father—the intense gaze, the conflicting emotions warring across his face. He nodded gravely.
“And you need to promise me that you’re never going to run away like that again. My heart can’t take it. I was so scared I had lost you.”
David’s brown eyes widened. “You were scared?”
“Terrified. I love you, buckaroo, and I don’t know what I’d do without you. So do you promise not to run away like that again?”
He gestured with his cupped hand that he wanted to whisper something in my ear. I leaned forward. “Yes, Mommy,” he hissed in approximation of a solemn, secretive whisper. His warm, sweet breath tickled my ear.
Over the next few days, I became obsessed with the idea that my mom had been able to see Leah Nola, and that this had somehow led to our undoing. Something major must have happened between the three of us for my mom to send me away and cite Leah Nola’s arrival in our lives as the moment that I started to hate her. The parallel sets of mother, child, and imaginary friend felt like one of those algebra equations I had been so terrible at solving in high school. If x is a dinosaur, solve for y. I felt like understanding what Leah Nola had represented to me and what purpose she had served in my childhood might somehow provide the key to David’s dinosaurs. And maybe understanding how my mom had mishandled my friendship with Leah Nola could teach me what not to do. With David’s first day of kindergarten less than a week away, I was desperate to learn anything that might help him and reduce his attachment to the potentially dangerous dinosaurs.
I peppered Duffy with questions about those two summers, but she evaded them, blaming a poor memory. I knew her reluctance to talk about Leah Nola and my mom had more to do with her unwillingness to disparage Kimberly, especially around me. I had yet to come to terms with how the same leniency and forgiveness my generous, loving grandparents had shown me extended also to my mother.
I hunted through my childhood sketchbook for clues I might have missed the first time. There was one drawing that stood out to me as significant, but I couldn’t figure out the context. In it, I was sitting in bed, wearing a yellow nightgown, and Leah Nola stood beside me with her arms spread out, as if she were vanquishing a bad dream. I asked Jamie about it one night, as we sat on orange vinyl barstools in his wood-paneled basement, swiveling, throwing darts, and drinking Cokes like we had as kids, but he didn’t know what it meant either. He told me I had been pretty tight-lipped about my relationship with my mom, saying only a few times that I wished I never had to go back home.
Finally, I cornered my least likely source, my reticent grandfather, as he dug out the roots of a dead woody shrub in the front yard. I’d found with Winston, he was more likely to talk if you got him away from Duffy and occupied with some other activity, instead of trying to sit down for a face-to-face conversation.
“Do you need any help?” I asked, wondering why root and stump removal didn’t fall under Jamie’s landscaping jurisdiction. The sleeves of Winston’s shirt were rolled up, and the material clung to his back and chest in two dark stains. It looked like Winston and his spade were fighting a losing battle against the gnarled roots.
“I wouldn’t say no to a glass of lemonade,” he said, mopping his forehead with a yellowed handkerchief. When I returned with two frosted mugs, he was leaning on his spade, contemplating the stubborn roots. “Thank you.” He chugged the lemonade down in one continuous swallow, set his empty mug in the grass, and got back to work.
I sipped mine. “Do you happen to remember anything about my imaginary friend, Leah Nola?”
“Just what you told me.” He punched the sharp edge of the spade repeatedly into the earth. “Orphaned as a baby. Independent, pretty, smart. A little mischievous at times.” He grunted with exertion.
“Mischievous, how?” The mug was dripping condensation down my wrist. I shook it off.
He shrugged. “I can’t say. We never experienced any problems with you here in Salsburg. You were pretty well-behaved for us.”
“But with my mom in Milwaukee…?” I prompted him.
“Well, it’s no secret you two have your history of butting heads,” he said a little tiredly. “Kim never said anything specific, but it was clear your having an imaginary friend bothered her.”
“Why do you think that?”
He considered this, pausing to pull his handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the back of his neck. “I don’t know. Maybe she was worried you were spending so much time with her. Or maybe she just didn’t understand. As a girl, Kim never had an imaginary friend. Luke was always the more creative one; Kim was the realist. She liked to play her flute, and she liked to collect things: wedding cake toppers, salt and pepper shakers, porcelain dolls. Not to play with, mind you, but to look at.”
My mom, the realist? Ha. It sounded like something she’d paid Winston to say. The collecting part I vaguely remembered. In our kitchen, there had been a decorative shelf with several small boxes, and each box housed a ceramic salt and pepper shaker set—mushrooms, owls, gnomes, acorns, ducks—each piece an essential part of an ordained pair. As an adolescent, I’d thought her knick-knack collection was incredibly tacky.
“Could you hand me that utility bar over there?” Winston asked.
I turned around and saw the long, stee
l pole to which he was referring. The pole was rounded on one end and had a flat, sharp blade on the other. It was heavy; I had to kneel and lift it with both hands. “Do you think Leah Nola had anything to do with my mom sending me to stay with you guys?”
“I can’t say.” He angled the utility bar under the soil-packed mass of roots. “That first summer we planned your visit ahead of time. But that second summer, it was short notice. Very short notice.”
His face reddened and then purpled with the effort of freeing the clump of roots from the earth, and he stopped talking. At last, the shriveled shrub fell away, revealing a cavity big enough to cradle an infant.
He huffed to catch his breath. “That second summer, Kimberly just showed up one afternoon with you and your suitcase. Of course, we were happy to have you. But it came as somewhat of a surprise.”
“And she didn’t say why?”
“Not exactly.” Winston’s tufted eyebrows knit together. “But her arm was in a sling, and she said she’d broken it falling off a ladder. I remember she was worried about waitressing and paying the bills because she was right-handed and it was her right arm.”
Despite the August heat, I shivered, deeply disturbed. I had absolutely no memory of my mom’s breaking her arm.
He stooped to position the wheelbarrow near the pit. “You’re an adult now, so I can tell you that your grandma was concerned the ‘fall’ had really been a fight. We didn’t like her boyfriend at the time, but Kimberly insisted he wasn’t the problem.”
My skin crawled. He, the boyfriend, wasn’t the problem. What she’d left unspoken, or maybe Winston had left unspoken out of the desire to protect my feelings, was that I was the problem. Leah Nola was. Part and parcel of each other, we were the problem. Had the boyfriend injured my mother? Or had Leah Nola somehow done it? The thought, with the memory of what could have only been King Rex’s cool, scaly skin brushing against my hand at the dollar store, filled me with a sick dread. If it was true, then imaginary things were capable of physical force. Of violence.
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