I listened with half of my brain, the other half mulling over the objections she had raised on Jamie’s behalf. Most of them were easy to dismiss as the talk of a friend who didn’t want to believe the worst of Jamie. I understood that all too well. But the bedroom switch with Wendy was interesting. It would certainly explain why both his bedroom and bathroom had looked so clean and unlived in, with no real personal touches.
But if Wendy could no longer climb the stairs anymore, why would all her medications be upstairs where only Jamie had access to them? And why was it specifically oxycodone, his drug of choice, out on the sink? All the holes in the story still weren’t satisfactorily explained, and I felt naïve for even hoping that maybe Carly was right and I might have jumped to conclusions. What was that old saying? The simplest explanation was usually the right one. It was painful to grasp onto a fraying thread of hope, but it was even more painful to just let it go.
Duffy had sent me to bring the clothes in off the line because a squall was approaching and she was trying to get dinner on the table. David darted outside with me, zigzagging across the yard for a five-minute game of tag with King Rex and Weeple. Thunder rumbled in the distance as I squatted to drape one of Duffy’s blouses across the laundry basket, so I didn’t see or hear Jamie approaching until he was only a few feet away.
“Holy cats!” I said, taking a step back. “You scared me!”
He was wearing his work uniform of khaki shorts, tan boots, and a black T-shirt with Demeter Landscaping Services, LLC screen-printed on the breast pocket and carrying a handful of tiny tomatoes. His bronzed face and arms had that flushed glow of someone who’s just been doing hard manual labor in the sun. It physically hurt to look at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “I saw you from our garden. I called your name, but you must not have heard me.”
I unpinned David’s pirate ship T-shirt and tossed it into the basket. I didn’t trust myself to speak. In my tornado of thoughts, who knew which words would tumble out? “I love you, regardless of what problems you have” seemed just as likely to pop out as “How could you have lied to my face? I can never trust you again.”
“I don’t think I can talk to you right now,” I said. Another clap of thunder reverberated, closer this time. I sought out David, half-hidden by the clothes still on the line. His dinosaurs weren’t on the offensive, as I’d expected, and Jamie’s presence hadn’t inspired the panther, in its shadowy or more solid form, either. Instead, David waved excitedly at Jamie before flitting away to tag Weeple.
Jamie gave him a hesitant wave back, as if he wasn’t sure if he was still allowed to wave at my son. “Fine. Don’t talk then.” A vein at his temple bulged as he gritted his teeth. “Just listen.”
“Time to go inside, buckaroo, before you get soaked!” I shouted. “Can you please help Grandma Duffy set the table and tell her I’ll be right inside?” When the screen door slapped shut behind him, I turned to Jamie. “Okay. You probably have about five minutes until the sky breaks open. I’m listening.” As if to prove my point, lightning crackled in a faraway part of the sky, covering up the staccato hammering of my heart.
He started talking rapidly as though he thought I might interrupt him or walk away any second. “I know you’ll believe what you want to, but the pills are my mom’s. For her muscle spasms, which are really painful. Most of them are anticonvulsants that seem to help when things get really bad, but she occasionally takes oxycodone for the pain too. Sunday was one of those days. Her meds are in my bathroom because it’s not really my bathroom. I moved her downstairs to my old room and my stuff upstairs in May, because the stairs were just getting to be too hard for her. But we kept the bathrooms as is because the upstairs one has the bigger tub. With a lower lip too, so it’s easier to get into and out of. Her nurse comes twice a week and carries her up the stairs to bathe her. If you don’t believe me, you can look in the tub sometime. Her bath seat is in there, along with all her favorite shampoos and body washes. I get ready downstairs in the guest bathroom, and my shaving stuff and all the mildew can prove it.”
He squinted at the slate gray storm clouds, as if considering what other questions I might be wondering, and rubbed the back of his deeply tanned neck. “Her doctor asked me to keep the drugs out of her reach, which is why they’re in the upstairs bathroom because she…so she doesn’t take too many. We tried the top kitchen cabinets, but that didn’t work. If she really put her mind to it, she could still get to them. So I brought them upstairs, where only the nurse or I could access them. I know you probably won’t believe me, but I’ve never taken any of my mom’s pills. Not a single one, and no oxycodone since I’ve been back. I’m clean. I can see how you’d think I’d be tempted, and to be honest with you, sometimes I am still tempted. That’s why I rarely set foot in that bathroom. It’s my mom’s. It’s her stuff, and when she needs something, I get it, but otherwise, the door stays closed.”
He held out his splayed hands in front of him, the small tomatoes cradled in his fingers, as if I could read the truth in the deep lines of his palms. He looked so earnest right then, like the little boy I’d grown up with, big-eyed with his heart safety-pinned to his sleeve. I felt stunned and sheepish, incredulous yet hopeful as hell, and I wanted nothing more than to press my nose against his chest, breathe in his cedar smell, and let him wrap his arms around me and hold me up.
But something black and cancerous was growing in my abdomen, preventing me from making a move toward him. The panther under the bed, David’s pitiful question of why hadn’t I been there for him, my mom’s appalling taste in men, Dennis lurking in my doorway, Patrick pleading with me to never leave him, that he’d kill himself, that he’d kill us all if it was the only way we could be together. It was all getting jumbled together, roiling in a sea of black, and Jamie was there too, with his former drug addiction and everything I didn’t know about him and all the ways he might let David and me down if I gave him the chance.
“Thanks for telling me,” I said softly. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you right away.” I removed the last few pieces of clothing from the line and folded them on top of the mounded pile in the basket. Despite the fact that it was only six o’clock, it was nearly pitch black now. The atmosphere was thick and almost magnetic with the impending storm.
“That’s really all you want to say, Anna?” Jamie asked, narrowing his eyes and rocking backward on his heels.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I believe you’re telling the truth. But I told you this isn’t a good time to talk.” The first drop of rain, warm and dime-sized, plopped on my shoulder.
“You’re probably right,” he said, blinking, as a raindrop pelted his cheek. “So when can we?”
I hugged the laundry basket to my hip, as if this could somehow protect the clothes from the rain. A tempestuous range of desires swirled within me. I wanted to forgive him and invite him inside for dinner. I wanted to drop the laundry basket and passionately kiss him, rain and clean clothes be damned. But I also wanted to flee inside and pretend this whole thing had never happened. I wanted to punish him for failing to somehow convince me sooner and sparing us the humiliation and heartache. I wanted to blame him for David’s fears and the way he distracted me from being the kind of mother my son needed.
“I don’t think we should,” I whispered, as raindrops fell more steadily, wetting my bare arms and the crown of my head. “I don’t think I can be in a relationship right now. David needs me too much. I’ve only got one chance to get this right, and I really think I need to focus more on him.”
Nestled in Jamie’s black hair, raindrops refracted the light like tiny diamonds. “I really don’t understand you, Anna. You’re a great mom, and David is a great kid. I’m not asking you to demote him as your number one priority, so why are you acting like this is about him? Are you just trying to spare my feelings?”
A bolt of lightning lit up the sky, like a bright white scar, and a thunderclap followed not thirty seconds later.
I jumped. “It is about David!”
His jaw muscle twitched. “Come on. You can’t tell me you don’t see the pattern here. You can only afford to like me when it’s convenient for you. Because I’m here and I’m what’s available, and as soon as there’s the slightest problem or someone better comes along, you move on without a glance back. Like you’ve always done.”
“That is really unfair,” I said, even as his words plucked a chord of ugly truth, which resonated in my chest. I wanted to defend myself against his accusations that I’d treated him as the boy next door, my plaything who would always be right there where I’d left him, while I could come and go as I pleased. In childhood, in high school, even this summer. But I knew there was a kernel of truth in what he’d said. I had used him in some ways, and I was still doing it, toying with his heart when I was too busy being a single mother to engage in a romantic relationship. Too busy and too broken after what Patrick had put me through. Would a normal person without trust issues and the constant expectation of being let down have reacted the same way to the prescription medicine as I had? I honestly didn’t know.
It started to rain in earnest then, as if God had turned his showerhead from a misty rainforest setting to a high pressure deluge. Our clothes were instantly soaked and clinging to our bodies, but it didn’t seem sexy like it did in the movies. It just seemed like a very sad, very final ending.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Anna bean!” Duffy hissed. She was shaking me harder than seemed strictly necessary. “David’s going to be late for school, and you’re going to be late for work if you don’t get a move on.” Her face appeared upside-down and frog-like as she leaned over me on the couch. “What are you doing out here?”
I struggled to kick free of the chenille throw blanket and sit up, but Vivien Leigh was curled on my stomach, and she let out an indignant meow. She’d been skittish and clingy the last two days, avoiding the upstairs at all costs, which made me wonder if somehow she could also see the panther. That my house cat could intuitively sense the much bigger imaginary feline seemed no weirder than anything else in my life these days. But how could I explain to Duffy that the panther hiding under David’s bed had taken up residence under my bed last night, exiling us to the living room?
“What time is it?” I moaned. There were no digital clocks in the living room; only the grandfather clock that had woken me up every hour on the hour as it boisterously rang out the time. There was a crick in my neck that made the muscle feel like a crimped piece of pie crust. An unexplained feeling of emptiness washed over me, and I gradually remembered my break with Jamie.
“Seven-thirty.” She turned to the loveseat where David was still sprawled out as limp as a rag doll and started gently stroking his face and exposed arms. “Time to rise and shine, grasshopper.”
So I had overslept by half an hour. Normally by seven-thirty, we were sitting down to eat breakfast and argue over David’s questionable wardrobe choices. Drop-off time for kindergarten was between eight and eight-twenty, and normally I took David closer to eight, so I could still get to the real estate office by eight-thirty to open it up. Our mornings were carefully orchestrated chaos in a very narrow window of time, and now I’d gone and screwed that up because I hadn’t remembered to drag my alarm clock out into the living room, plug it in, and re-set it when the panther had resolved to terrorize us the second night in a row.
“Time to get dressed,” Duffy sang to David. “You’ve got to hurry, though, or Grandpa Winston will eat all the pancakes, and there won’t be any left for you.”
“Pancakes?” David’s sleepy face lit up. The purplish circles under his eyes were gone, and I was relieved to know that at least one of us had slept soundly last night.
“You bet,” Duffy said. “But you need to be quick and pick out a nice outfit you know your mommy will like, okay?” She spun around and pointed at me like I was vermin she wanted to shoo from her house. “You! Go hop in the shower. Winston can drive David to school this morning if need be. We don’t want you getting fired for lateness in only your first month.”
With Duffy the drill sergeant’s instructions, Winston was able to leave by 7:55 with David who had been washed, dressed, and fed, more or less. He gave me a syrup-sticky kiss on the cheek before he left, and I squeezed his shoulder, wanting to fortify him somehow against the panther who I was worried might follow him to school next.
Since I wasn’t driving David all the way to Port Ambrose, I still had a few minutes before I needed to leave for Lawrenceville. I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs, zipping up the side of my skirt with one hand and reaching for a mug of coffee Duffy had just poured me with the other. The effect of my sleepless nights left me feeling like a leaky inner-tube being tossed about by the ocean. My eyes hurt. My back and neck hurt. My brain hurt. But most of all, my heart hurt.
Duffy handed me a plate stacked with two golden, fluffy pancakes, drenched in maple syrup. She put her hands on her hips. “Sunday night, we hear screams and then you let David sleep in your bed, and now last night, you’re both sleeping out here. What in the name of Pete is going on?”
I chewed slowly, letting the heavenly pancake melt on my tongue. The pancakes looked soft and pillowy, like a great place to rest my head for just a moment. “I told you, he’s having nightmares.”
She sat down across from me. “I understand that, and I’m sorry to hear it. But I don’t understand why he needs to sleep in your bed or you both need to camp out in the living room. It seems like that might send the wrong message to him. You want to take his nightmares seriously, of course, but not so seriously that you’re encouraging him to continue being afraid. You need to teach him to face his fears and see they’re not so scary after all. Giving him this kind of special treatment and attention seems like it might enable him.” She was starting to sound like Dr. Rosen’s book. “Do you remember what we used to do when you had a nightmare?”
I shook my head, which felt like it weighed twice its usual amount. I remembered having a bad dream once at my mom’s house. I had probably been only five or six. I couldn’t remember the dream, but I remembered my mom in a pink negligee slipping into my room like an apparition to push my head back against my pillow and whisper, Hush. It was just a bad dream. You’re going to have a good dream now. Close your eyes, and you’ll be a beautiful princess living in a castle in the clouds far, far away from here.
Duffy toyed with the white bandana covering her hair. “It was Winston’s duty mostly, soothing kids after bad dreams. I figured it was the least he could do after the baby years of nightly feedings. But then he got so gosh darn good at it that even if I wanted to try to console Kimberly or Luke after a nightmare, they didn’t want me. They wanted their dad.” She shrugged. “I tried not to take it personally.”
“What did he do?” I took a sip of my coffee and leaned forward. Did my grandfather have some handy-dandy nighttime blessing or bedroom enchantment up his sleeve that he could teach me?
“He would sit on the bed, pull you onto his lap, have you tell him about the dream, and then kiss you good night.”
Disappointed, I sat back. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said defensively. “Anyway, it seemed to work.”
It was worth a try, but I suspected that Winston’s trick wouldn’t work with a two hundred-pound panther. Duffy was right in her own way; we couldn’t keep letting the panther bully us and drive us from our beds, but there was no way I was leaving my son alone in the dark with a lethal animal that belonged in a cage at the zoo. Imaginary or not. I had experienced the terror first-hand last night as we lay together in my bed, and suddenly a deep growling had started up from beneath the mattress. We had only stayed long enough for me to strip the pillows and blanket from the bed.
“I’ve tried something similar,” I said. “David keeps dreaming that there’s a black panther under his bed, and it wants something from him, but he doesn’t know what. That’s as far as we can get, and he’s terrif
ied of it.”
Duffy puckered her lips, deep in thought. “A panther? Where could he have come up with that? Has he been to the zoo recently?”
“No. His preschool took him to the petting zoo last year, but the meanest thing they had there was a llama. He’s got a very active imagination.” I pushed off from the kitchen table, wishing I could eat more of my pancakes, wishing I could go upstairs and back to sleep in my hopefully no longer panther-occupied bedroom. “I think I’m going to call his pediatrician and see if she can refer me to a good—” I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘child psychiatrist,’ so I stopped. “This book she loaned me was talking about how I need to figure out what his imaginary friends and his bad dreams symbolize. What he’s really afraid of.”
Last night, as I’d listened to the grandfather clock chime and tossed and turned restlessly on the couch, I’d brainstormed a list of possibilities. An aversion to Jamie or any man in my life was probably out, since David continued to see the panther even when Jamie wasn’t around, and he’d professed to like our neighbor. (I wasn’t looking forward to explaining that we probably wouldn’t be spending any more time with Jamie in the future.) Anxiety about school seemed off the table too, since David enjoyed his mornings in kindergarten and talked enthusiastically about them.
So was it a more generalized fear? Perhaps watching Gunner’s Titanic video had made him more aware of death, and now he was subconsciously worried about losing his grandparents or me. Or maybe since the panther seemed to be haunting me equally, it represented my fears for David, my insecurities as a mother, my constant worries about his happiness and safety, his lack of a stable father in his life, the possibility of mental illness lurking in his future. Maybe David had created the shadow animal, but I had inadvertently fed his fears and made it more solid and ever present. I didn’t know if that was even possible, but since the situation was already so outrageously surreal, I wasn’t going to discount it until I had answers. That’s why I needed to get David in to see a child psychiatrist to discuss his imagination, so we could uncover the truth about the panther before it got even more out of hand.
Imaginary Things Page 27