Imaginary Things

by Andrea Lochen

  “Why was he outside my door?” I didn’t blink. I squeezed my hands into tight fists.

  And suddenly it was there. All of it. The drawing in my sketchbook abruptly made sense. The murky backdrop came to the forefront, as a vision of my mom’s old boyfriend, Dennis, jolted me. His sandy blond hair and mustache, his full, almost womanly lips. The presents he gave me for no reason: the ballerina Barbie doll, the silver bracelet with pink, heart-shaped beads. The way he hugged me, petted my hair, offered to help me with my homework and then sat too close on the couch. Leah Nola hated him. “He’s so nice it’s scary. It makes me uncomfortable. You should tell your mom,” she insisted. But I had never liked any of my mom’s boyfriends, so my complaints fell on deaf ears. Dennis was the first of her boyfriends to show an interest in me—all the others had acted like I didn’t even exist—so my mom couldn’t understand what my problem was. And I couldn’t fully explain it to her either. As an eight-year-old, it was hard to articulate a fear I had no words for or true conception of. But Leah Nola, my more intuitive self, had sensed it.

  When Dennis offered to babysit me, Leah Nola and I both recoiled at the thought and persuaded my mom that I was old enough to look after myself for a few hours and that I could call our elderly neighbor, Vern, if I needed anything. But some nights, Dennis slept over, in my mom’s bed, like all the other boyfriends before him; those nights, Leah Nola stood like a sentry at my door.

  The night my bedroom door groaned open, I could see his sandy head silhouetted by the glow of the hallway nightlight and hear his heavy breathing. Huddled beneath my comforter, I pretended to be sleeping. Leah Nola whispered, “Hold on, Anna. I’ll be right back!” and slipped out of the room like a shadow, leaving me behind, all alone and afraid. His shuffling footsteps and heavy breathing got closer but then suddenly retreated. The door had closed, and I’d heard Dennis and my mom’s low voices in the hallway. Leah Nola had woken my mom up and saved me from whatever unthinkable thing would have happened next.

  “He said he thought he’d heard you having a bad dream,” my mom said dully, still avoiding my eyes. “He was coming to wake me up.”

  “And you believed him?” I kneaded the couch cushion with my fists. I felt like I might vomit. Because my mom had gone back to bed with Dennis that night, like nothing had happened, and the next day she had announced he’d be staying with us while his condo was renovated. That was when my mom had been shoved from the ladder. Not by Leah Nola, as we had led her to believe, but by me. Leah Nola hadn’t been the one capable of physical violence. I had.

  “I don’t know how else to protect you,” she had whispered, as we’d watched my mom set up the ladder, hidden from her view by the L-bend in the hallway. “She won’t listen, and he’s not going to stop until he gets what he wants. I’m not strong enough, Anna. You need to be strong enough for both of us now.”

  “But why do we have to hurt her?” I’d asked. “What if she dies?”

  “She won’t die,” Leah Nola had reassured me. “It’s not high enough. We just need to scare her so she knows we mean business, and he needs to leave. She needs to put you first for once and not be so selfish. I know you can do this, Anna, and I’ll take the blame. We’ve tried everything else. It’s our last chance.”

  Now my mom touched her neck, the tendons flaring. “Who was I supposed to believe? My eight-year-old daughter’s imaginary friend?”

  “Maybe your eight-year-old daughter.” I gasped for breath and struggled to keep my nausea and fury down in the pit of my stomach and out of my scorched, tightening throat. My eyes stung in a way that I knew tears would soon follow if I didn’t toughen myself up quickly.

  My mom grimaced like she was in physical pain. “I sent you to stay with my parents. And we broke up not long after that anyway. What more could I have done? He was a nice guy. You and your friend…you just never wanted me to be happy with anyone. You were always trying to get attention. How was I to know that this was different? I mean, we still don’t know for sure.” She chewed on her fingernails, oblivious to the damage she was inflicting on her expensive manicure.

  “You’re right,” I said in a scathing tone. “We still don’t know for sure. Maybe if Leah Nola hadn’t woken you up. Then we could’ve known for sure. Or maybe if she hadn’t harassed you to the point of sending me away. Then we could rest easy knowing for sure that Dennis was a pedophile.”

  She was quiet for a long time, and I thought maybe she’d finally run out of excuses. Maybe I’d finally broken her down to a place where she might express horror and regret. Then she spit out a sliver of fingernail. “I don’t expect you to understand, but I thought she was some kind of devil. That she was trying to possess you and was just whispering whatever lies she could think of to drive me crazy.”

  It would’ve been almost funny had I not been so completely hollowed out by my anger and sense of betrayal. “I do understand, at least sort of. David imagines playing with a T-rex and a Brontosaurus, and they absolutely terrify me. But they’re as much a part of him as Leah Nola was a part of me. And she wasn’t the devil. She was the closest thing to a guardian angel I had.”

  “Well, I hope they never turn on you.” Slack-faced and tired, she stared at me as if she were seeing me for the first time. Her honey-colored hair was wild and disheveled. “I hope you…I hope you…” But she didn’t complete her thought out loud for me, which was almost better in a way because then I could fill in the blank for her and imagine what she hoped for me, even if she would never admit it.

  I hope you learn from my mistakes.

  I hope you are a better mother and a stronger woman than me.

  I hope you always listen to David and put him first.

  I hope you can forgive me one day.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “So it’s official. I’m gainfully employed now,” I told Jamie. It was one of those perfect summer nights when it seemed almost criminal to stay inside, so we’d decided to take a leisurely walk through our tiny town of no sidewalks, no stoplight, and very few streetlights. Hundreds of fireflies’ bulbs blinked on and off, our own private light show, as we walked along Steepleview. “Hopefully, the Salsburg rumor mill will downgrade me from a full-time mooch to a part-time mooch now.”

  “I’ll start spreading the word.” He laughed. “Congrats! Where will you be working?”

  “Galloway Realtors in Lawrenceville.” Melody Yarbrough’s yappy little dog started barking its head off as we strolled past her house; I hoped the noise wouldn’t wake the entire neighborhood.

  “Like, selling houses?”

  “More like answering the phones for the people who sell houses. But they’re nice people, and it’s a paycheck. And the hours are flexible, so it should work well with David at school half the day.”

  “Well, that’s great. I’m really happy for you.”

  We came up to Main Street, and without a word, he reached for my hand as we crossed. His fingers felt good laced snugly through mine, and I was glad when he didn’t let go even when we were safely on the other side. The river burbled hidden in the darkness, the moon shone on the white steeple of St. Monica’s, and despite the sadness and worry that had been consuming me for the past twenty-four hours, I felt a temporary kind of peace.

  Since my visit to my mom’s house, I had been vacillating between feeling emotionally bankrupt and empowered. The times I felt hollow, like a canyon that was defined by its gigantic emptiness, I obsessed over the things I’d lacked growing up: a father, a mother who wanted me, a stable home, the sacred bonds of love and trust between a parent and child. Just when I thought I’d scraped the bottom and there was nothing more that could crumble away, my mom had revealed another empty cavern that I didn’t know how to fill. The realization that I’d broken her arm made me feel somehow dirty, like she’d been right all along about me and my behavior problems. But the memory of Dennis, the reason for my acting out, made me feel even dirtier and confused. Why hadn’t she tried harder to protect me? Why ha
d she chosen him over me?

  But a pity party wouldn’t help David; I knew I needed to be strong for him and succeed in understanding his imagination in the way that my mother had been unwilling to do. It was liberating to realize that it had been me all along—that I had saved myself, through Leah Nola, and that somewhere deep inside me was a fierceness that couldn’t be squashed out by the likes of Dennis or my mom. I could tell by his dinosaurs that my son had inherited that same fierceness, and I needed to find a way to admire it, instead of fearing it. I needed to study and scrutinize his imagination for every nuance and implication as if it were a precious love letter. And if it gave me a flashing warning sign, you could damn well bet I would pay attention.

  “What are you thinking about?” Jamie asked. He switched places with me, gently edging me closer to the shoulder of the road, as the only car we’d seen that night sped past, shattering the stillness.

  I had told him about visiting my mom, but I hadn’t given him the details. There was no way for me to convey what had happened with Leah Nola without sounding like a total nutcase, and I didn’t have words for the rest of it. Jamie was fatherless like me, but his relationship with Wendy was incredibly precious to both of them. I feared he wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t want him to look at me with the same mixture of pity, horror, and disgust that I’d been feeling.

  “I’m thinking about you,” I said. “Your hands. Your heart. Your lips. Your tongue.”

  “Oh yeah? Is that right?” He drew me to his chest, lowered his head, and kissed me intensely, right there on the dark, empty side of the road. A thousand white-hot pinpricks of light exploded behind my eyelids and were still there even when I opened my eyes. The fireflies ecstatically twinkled their approval. All those saved-up childhood wishes were finally coming true.

  White letters on a blue sign greeted us: WELCOME BACK TO SCHOOL, WHERE WE PLAY, LEARN, AND GROW TOGETHER! David and I stood outside the one-story, yellow-brick elementary school. His face was purple and teary, and I was so frustrated and exhausted from the morning’s many battles that if some normal-looking person had come up to me right then and offered to take David inside, I would’ve readily said yes. King Rex stomped behind us. Not exactly the shiny, photo-worthy first day of school that I’d envisioned.

  David hiccupped. I reached down to usher him forward, and his long Hawaiian shirt swayed like a dress. When I’d come into his room this morning to call him down to breakfast, I found him all decked out, not in the Brontosaurus T-shirt that Duffy had bought him at a rummage sale and we’d agreed upon the night before, but in Winston’s old shirt that was supposed to be his art smock. It was turquoise with little islands and palm trees and leaping swordfish all over it. It was so big on him, it could’ve fit three Davids, and it came down well past his knees, making it look like he wasn’t wearing any shorts under it. I told him to change immediately. He started bawling. I reasoned with him about the logistics of wearing his art smock: what would he wear when it was time to do crafts? I threatened and then bribed him. He wailed more loudly and flopped face first onto the bed. Duffy came into the room to find out “what all the hubbub was about,” and when she saw David, she had to repress a fit of giggles. “Honestly, Anna,” she lectured me. “It’s just clothing. So what if he looks a little goofy?”

  “But I don’t want him to be the goofy kid in the too-big Hawaiian shirt on the first day of school,” I hissed. “First impressions matter.”

  “Maybe you don’t remember kindergarten, but I’ve been through it with enough kids. They’re all the goofy kid in the Hawaiian shirt. That’s the very definition of kindergarten. Nobody thinks to be cool until at least the second grade.” So with Duffy and David against me, I’d lost that battle.

  Last night, David had been positively giddy about starting kindergarten, and I’d thought maybe all the parental hype about The First Day of School’s jitters was unwarranted. He had adoringly admired his school supplies, which had been purchased with a loan from Duffy and Winston since I hadn’t gotten my first paycheck yet. There were two bottles of glue, two glue sticks, twelve sharpened pencils and two pink erasers in a red zip-up pencil case, a box of crayons, a box of markers, a pair of safety scissors, and a Buzz Lightyear folder for sending home notes. I had written his name on everything with a black permanent marker, and all of it had fit neatly inside David’s crown jewel, the Spiderman backpack we had found on sale for half off.

  Then David had rattled on about “kindy-garden” until he grew sleepy. He was most excited about “driving the car.” We’d gone to a kindergarten preview day last week, and of all the stations in the classroom—the kid-sized kitchen with the play food, the storytime rug, the dress-up corner, the art easels, the giant bin of blocks—David’s favorite station had been “the car” that was actually just an old seat with a steering wheel attached to it.

  I was seriously beginning to think that his fascination with wheeled machines might be usurping his love affair with the prehistoric. Would King Rex and Weeple disappear? Were David’s imaginary friends, as Dr. Rosen’s book suggested, a phase that he was swiftly outgrowing? The possibility filled me with hope and bittersweet relief. Maybe there would be no more dangerous brushes with teeth and talons. Maybe David was becoming adjusted to his new life and surroundings and had no more emotional need for the dinosaurs, as I had had for Leah Nola.

  But I’d been dead wrong, of course. Because King Rex had been waiting patiently for us, crammed into the back compartment of the minivan when we’d climbed in this morning.

  “What the fudge?” I cried out, immediately grateful for the way I’d been training myself to avoid swearing around David. I twisted around in my seat to face my son, wide-eyed and innocent in his booster seat, and his T-rex, glowering at me with his mustard-yellow eyes. “You know that King Rex can’t come to school with you today, right? He’s not allowed.”

  “But he wants to come,” David said, tugging on the strap of his new backpack.

  “I’m sorry, but he can’t. Kindergarten is only for little girls and boys like you. Ages four and five.” I was already envisioning a repeat of the Gunner incident, except this time on a larger scale. Multiple scratches and bites, sobbing children, angry parents. There was no way I could set loose an invisible T-rex on Port Ambrose Elementary.

  “King Rex is five.”

  “But he’s a dinosaur, and the school rules specifically state no dinosaurs are allowed.” Which was hardly a lie because if the school board had realized there was a possibility someone might bring an extinct man-eater to school, I was sure they would have ruled against it in a heartbeat.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” he pleaded. His voice sounded shaky, like tears were not far behind.

  I counted to twenty and then turned the key in the ignition. We were already running late, and I figured I had the whole drive ahead of us to talk him out of King Rex tagging along. But the more I persuaded David he couldn’t bring his friend to school, the more panicked he looked. The closer we got to school, the faster his legs swung back and forth. By the time we pulled in to the lakeside school’s parking lot, tears were dripping from his eyes and nose, and King Rex had started a low-pitched growl that sounded like a distant roll of thunder.

  I was trying to channel the mothers in my life I trusted—primarily Duffy and Stacy, certainly not my own mom—to determine what they would do if they were in this bizarre, between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place situation, but it wasn’t proving helpful because they had never been in this situation. This situation was uniquely my own. Talking calmly and reasonably to David was getting me nowhere. Maintaining an authoritative, no-nonsense position was absolutely useless. I decided to stop thinking like a mom for one minute and put myself in David’s shoes. It was fairly easy because of my recent memories of Leah Nola. Obviously King Rex was a kind of security blanket for David, who wanted the dinosaur with him on his first day of school, and I couldn’t bear to deprive him of that comfort. Besides, I knew that David’s imagination
was the one really running the show here, and as frightening as that was, it was his decision to make, for better or for worse.

  “Okay, buckaroo,” I said, exhaling heavily. “Let’s go inside. But remember what we talked about with King Rex? You promised me that he wouldn’t touch or hurt anyone. Even if someone says something mean. What should you do if someone says or does something mean to you?”

  “Walk away and tell an adult,” David parroted. He must have sensed my relenting, because his eyes looked clearer and brighter. King Rex’s snarling stopped.

  “That’s right,” I said. I pulled back the minivan door and leaned in to unstrap him from his seat. “It’s really important for you to try to make new friends today. No hanging out with King Rex all morning, okay?”

  He nodded eagerly, jumping down into my arms, and immediately wriggled away. I looked up. Apparently his dinosaur had teleported from the minivan to the asphalt behind me.

  Now inside and sticking close to the mint-green tiled wall, David, King Rex, and I walked toward the kindergarten hallway together. Older kids raced past us, confident and laughing: third graders, fourth graders, maybe even fifth graders. They looked huge, even to me, and I couldn’t imagine how big and intimidating they must have looked to David. Another mom and son were only a few feet ahead of us. The mom’s brown, perfectly-trimmed, split-end-free hair was pulled back into a sensible ponytail and she looked like she’d just walked off the cover of Parenting Magazine. The little boy matched her perfectly—brown hair parted down the middle and combed neatly and wearing an argyle sweater vest. Blech. The Mother of the Year must have caught a glimpse of us in her peripheral vision, because she stopped and stared with a slightly traumatized look on her vanilla yogurt face. I could see in her eyes that she was already deciding who to call first. Have I got a story for you! You’ll never believe what I saw when I was dropping Langdon off at school today…Her equally perfect best friend? Her matching Ken doll husband? Or maybe even Child Protective Services?