Imaginary Things

by Andrea Lochen

  “Do you remember me?” I found myself asking.

  He brushed dismissively at some drops of sweat on his forehead. “For the love of God, Anna, of course I remember you. But I’m surprised you remember me.”

  “I hardly recognized you at first,” I admitted, curling my toes into the soft grass. “What’s with this whole scraggly bearded look? Are you trying to replace the lead singer of the Foo Fighters?”

  Jamie scowled, but then a shadow of his former boyish grin flickered across his face. “Why? You think I could pull it off?”

  I laughed. “I think you should shave your face.”

  “Well, if that’s all you wanted to say…” He replaced his headphones and reached for the bar of the mower.

  “No, that’s not all I wanted to say.” I wanted to express my sympathy for his mother’s illness. I wanted to remind him about the time we took Duffy’s penny jar to the bank, converted it into $22 in paper money, and spent it all on gas station candy that we’d consumed that very same day. I wanted to ask him if he was a drug addict. “What are you doing back here?” I asked instead.

  Jamie gestured to the mower, deliberately misunderstanding me. “Just cutting the grass.”

  “I know that. What are you doing back here? In Salsburg. My grandma told me you went out west.”

  “Did she? Then why don’t you ask your grandma?” He narrowed his brown eyes, and the tough guy facade slipped back into place. “It doesn’t really matter though, does it? I’m here now, and I’ve got a lot to do today, so I’d better get back to work.”

  “Fine.” I put my hand on my hip, leaned forward, and quipped, “I was just trying to be neighborly.”

  Jamie mumbled something under his breath that didn’t sound very neighborly. He jerked the cord on the lawnmower, and the prohibitive noise bubbled up between us. “I could ask you the same question, you know,” he yelled over the noise. “Why you’re back here.”

  “You could!” I yelled back. “So why don’t you?”

  His words were almost swallowed up. “Because I’d honestly rather not go down that road again, Anna.” Then he stared straight ahead at the swath of grass he was cutting.

  A rush of hot blood flooded my face and neck. I turned on my heel and stalked inside, suddenly wondering if Duffy had been watching our interaction. But I could hear her voice from the basement downstairs, where she was working on a client’s hair, and Winston was nowhere to be found. Despite the noise, David was still fast asleep. I sat down at the kitchen table, propped my head in my hands, and watched Jamie’s steady progress through the back windows until he disappeared to do the front yard.

  The kinship I’d imagined between us was clearly that—imagined. It seemed that Jamie was one of those immature people who kept old high school grudges, and it simply couldn’t be helped. But pleasant or not, talking with him had been a welcome distraction. At least while I focused on my indignation, the fear I was losing my mind couldn’t rise up and overwhelm me.

  Duffy let the refrigerator door swing closed. “I just don’t feel like cooking tonight. Let’s go to Ruby’s instead. Winston, sweet potato, would you be up for it? What about you, Anna?”

  “I could cook,” I offered, even though my cooking expertise didn’t extend much further than boiling noodles or punching buttons on a microwave. Staying with my grandparents and eating their food had made me feel like a total freeloader, and letting them take David and me out to a restaurant somehow seemed even worse. Public freeloading.

  “That’s sweet of you, but not necessary. I think we could all do with a night out,” Duffy said without a hint of irony.

  “Ruby’s has some great specials on Saturday nights,” Winston added.

  “If you guys really don’t mind, okay,” I said. “Let me just go get changed first.”

  “You do realize this is Ruby’s we’re talking about, right?” Duffy hollered after me, as I dashed up the stairs. “Ruby’s Diner? The only restaurant in town? No fancy attire required!”

  It was only my second foray out of the house, but a busy diner was certainly a different story than a dairy farm. The chances were incredibly good that I would bump into someone I knew, or someone who knew someone I knew, and I wanted them to give a glowing, somewhat envious report of me, not a pitying or disapproving one.

  I brushed out my hair until it fell down my back in a smooth, gleaming sheet. I slipped out of my jean shorts, T-shirt, and rubber flip-flops in favor of a white-and-pink belted sundress and high-heeled sandals. I looked like my old self, my best self, the one who only got to make an appearance once or twice a year these days. I only wished I’d had time to give David a bath or at least a quick face-scrubbing, but it couldn’t be helped.

  The diner was crowded by Salsburg standards; we had to wait ten minutes for a table, and I endured a lot of curious stares from the other patrons, who were mostly middle-aged and wore their patriotic or Harley-Davidson T-shirts tucked into faded jeans.

  David was very impressed by the swiveling stools lined up at the counter and therefore upset that we would be sitting at a booth instead. He showed his displeasure by folding his skinny arms across his chest and making half-whining, half-growling sounds under his breath.

  “You need to behave,” I warned him. “Grandma Duffy and Grandpa Winston are being very nice by taking us out to eat, so be a good boy.”

  He scrunched up his face and climbed into the booth next to me, stepping on the flared skirt of my dress with his dirty sneakers in the process. Winston set about the very serious business of deciding what to order, and Duffy made a not-too-subtle survey of all the other diners in the room, turning her head to and fro, and smiling and waving at a few she recognized. I tucked my skirt under my legs to prevent further damage and tried to discreetly pull up the bodice of my dress so that my hot pink bra wasn’t peeking out.

  “Why look who it is! You brought the whole family in!” Lorraine Schiff, our waitress, crowed. She tucked her order pad into her apron to free up her hands to better pinch David’s cheeks. “My, my. What an adorable great-grandson! What’s your name, honey?”

  David scowled at her and threw himself into my arms.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “He can be a little shy. His name is David.”

  Lorraine smiled indulgently; she was the type of overly friendly, insincere waitress who you just knew would turn on her heel and badmouth her customers in the kitchen. “Well, he’s a positive cherub. I’m envious. I keep asking my son and daughter-in-law when they’re going to make me a grandma, but they keep telling me not to rush them, that they want to get their careers established, and save up to buy a house first. Imagine that! Why, Anna, I think you went to school with my daughter-in-law, Laura. Laura Armentrout? Do you remember her? She was the secretary of the student government and graduated salutatorian, and now she’s a pharmacy tech and even wants to go back to school to become a pharmacist. Too busy for babies, I guess.” She pursed her red lips in an exaggerated pout.

  I hugged David, who seemed to be trying to put his head down my dress, closer to me. If I had to hear about this Laura Armentrout-Schiff one more time… “Good for them. I wish them the best,” I managed to say.

  Duffy leaned forward. “Yes, certainly. You have a lot to be proud of, Lorraine. Tim’s a real success at the bank, and Laura always was a bright girl. It takes a lot of skill, I always say, counting all those little pills and making sure you put them in the right bottles, and working the cash register to boot. Just make sure she doesn’t wait too long to start a family. You know what they say about a woman’s eggs: they’ve got an expiration date.” She cocked her head toward me and gave me a sly wink. “Well, anyway, we’re all ravenous. Would it be okay with you if we ordered now?”

  Lorraine’s gloating smile faded, and it was clear she was trying to figure out if she and her daughter-in-law had just been insulted. She fumbled for her order pad.

  There wasn’t a children’s menu, so we ended up ordering what turned out to be a m
ountainous plate of spaghetti for David. I shuddered to think what he would look like when we left the restaurant, but there was nothing else he’d eat, and the spaghetti seemed to take the edge off his crabbiness. I tucked one napkin into his collar and spread another across his lap. But after only a few bites, he claimed he was full and wanted to play in the “PlayPlace.” I told him this wasn’t McDonalds, and there was no PlayPlace, but if he ate a few more bites, he could have dessert. He wailed that he didn’t want dessert and became increasingly antsy, until Winston had the brilliant idea of asking Lorraine for some paper and crayons. David pushed his plate away and set about coloring immediately.

  “We’ll get a doggy bag and take it home,” I said apologetically. “He and I can eat the leftovers.”

  “If he doesn’t like it now, I’m sure he won’t want it reheated,” Duffy said. “Oh, honestly, Anna. No need to look so stricken. Sometimes you act like we’ve never dealt with a cranky four-year-old before. It’ll be fine. Although we do need to do something about this picky eating, I’m afraid, or he won’t get all the nutrients he needs to grow into a big, strong boy.” Here, David looked up, and Duffy grinned at him. “Instead he’ll turn into a pile of spaghetti! Or a meatball! A big, Davey-sized meatball! And then how are we going to keep Grandpa Winston from eating you?”

  David giggled and reached for another crayon.

  “Why—it is you!” a familiar female voice exclaimed. “Lorraine said you were here with your grandparents, but I didn’t believe her!”

  I turned around to see a petite young woman with unruly brown curls grinning at me. Carly Cardwell, a friend from high school and one of the few I’d bothered to send a birth announcement to when David was born. She’d been famous in our class for throwing the wildest parties at her parents’ house on Long Lake whenever they went out of town. Drunk boating, drunk skinny dipping, drunk jumping on a trampoline. The stupid, death-defying stuff of teenagers’ dreams.

  Duffy helped me scoot David aside and then swapped places with me, so that I could slide out of the booth and hug Carly. She came up to only my chin and was a genuine hugger—the kind who gave you a good tight squeeze and held on just a few seconds longer than the norm.

  “It’s wonderful to see you!” I said into her nest of chestnut ringlets.

  “Same to you! What an absolute trip to run into you here at Ruby’s again like the good old days! You look just the same, but you’ve got your little boy with you now.” Carly studied him with a look akin to wonder. “He’s got your hair, of course, and your chin and oval face, I think. He’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks.” A lot of people instantly professed that he looked just like me, because of our blond hair, but in truth, he looked much more like Patrick with his dark, serious eyes and expressions of intense concentration. Carly had managed to pinpoint the few small similarities that I myself had sought out many times in my son’s face. “So what’s new with you? It’s been ages.”

  Carly rocked backwards on her heels, and for the first time, I noticed she was wearing an apron. Was she waitressing at Ruby’s? She made a face. “It’s just my gig for right now to get some experience,” she explained. “I started doing the desserts and pastries here. I’m working toward having my own bakery one day. If I ever do, Sam always jokes that I have to name it the One Day Bakery. That’s another new thing, I guess—I’m engaged, and oh, you should totally come to our party! One week from tonight. At our condo in Lawrenceville. Please tell me you’ll come! We have some serious catching up to do.”

  “I’d love to!” I said, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, but the thought of socializing with someone other than my grandparents was incredibly appealing at the moment.

  Carly wrote her address and phone number down on an order pad and then insisted my grandparents and I order dessert on the house. She recommended the cheesecake, which we all enjoyed except for David who was suspicious of its name and consistency.

  “What you drawing there, kiddo?” Winston asked David, after he’d flipped over his fifth or sixth sheet of paper.

  “My friend,” David said, without looking up. He’d worn the tip of his crayon flat. He reached for another.

  Winston sipped his coffee. “Does your friend have a name?”

  “King Rex.”

  The name caught my attention. I set down my fork and glanced across the table, expecting to see a black-and-white cow, but instead, the drawing was an odd reddish-brown shape.

  “Can I see that?” I asked.

  David obligingly handed me the paper. As with most of his artwork, a thin strip of green grass lined the bottom and an egg yolk sun smiled down benevolently from one corner. Centered in the page, floating a centimeter off the grass, stood the reddish-brown blob. Its little head with black eyes balanced atop a cylindrical body. Two claws sprouted from its chest, two webbed feet grounded its body, and a long triangular tail sailed behind it. Most startling, however, was the mouth. Nearly taking up the whole head, the mouth was a wide circle filled on all sides with a jumble of pointy, yellow teeth, like a sea lamprey.

  My sweaty fingers dampened the paper’s edges as I clutched it and stared disbelievingly. It looked like a fairy tale creature, a monster, a dragon—something that existed solely to steal children away from their mothers in the dead of night.

  It looked like the creature I had seen chasing David earlier in the day.

  “What is King Rex?” I asked, raising my eyes to my son’s face. I could no longer bear to look at the waxy image before me. The talons. The mouth of razor-sharp teeth. The way it conjured up the terrifying likeness I had seen with my own eyes.

  “My friend,” David repeated. He rifled through the stack of drawings before him and held up another one, similar to the one I clutched in my hands. It depicted the same brown creature, but standing next to it was a boy with yellow hair, long orangutan arms, and a big smile. David, himself.

  Fear and slow comprehension squeezed my heart. “You said that,” I said. “But what is he?”

  David smiled, his own blunt baby teeth as perfect as pearls. “A tie-ran-a-suss rex, Mommy.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was an overcast morning, threatening rain. The sky was grayish-white, bleaching the landscape. David stood on the top step of the deck facing the yard, hesitant as though he were on a diving board, about to leap into a swimming pool. He turned to me with wide, questioning eyes.

  “It’s okay, buckaroo. Show me how you play.”

  He descended the stairs. I stood at the railing, my cup of hot coffee the only thing anchoring me to reality. When I’d tucked David in last night and asked him if he was afraid of King Rex and if King Rex had ever hurt him, he’d replied adamantly, “No! He’s my friend,” as though it had never occurred to him that friends, especially of the dinosaur variety, could harm him. I had eked out only two hours of sleep the whole night, and even those hours were filled with terrifying, Jurassic Park-like nightmares. And yet I’d woken up this morning with the cold certainty that I needed to face this thing head on. I needed to see the creature again to help me understand, so I could figure out how best to protect my child.

  David seemed self-conscious at first, jogging around the yard in circles, looking at me over his shoulder occasionally. But in five minutes he had forgotten me and lost himself in the world of play. He raised his arms, curled his fingers, and stomped across the grass in a stiff Frankenstein walk that I now recognized as his impression of a dinosaur. He was being a T-rex. His loop-de-loops around the yard seemed random at first, but I soon noticed a pattern. It seemed like he was following someone, or someone was following him. But still the creature didn’t appear.

  I sipped my coffee and set the mug down on the railing. It had been such a relief—in a very perverse way—to think that my delusion was not just mine. It was shared with my son, and so therefore, maybe I wasn’t losing my mind. But as I tracked David’s progress across the yard, I wondered if I was only grasping at straws, trying to explain my halluc
ination in any way possible. Maybe his artwork was only a coincidence.

  The clouds were turning a smoky gray, and I knew we’d have to go inside soon before the sky broke open. David careened past Snow White and her ceramic dwarfs, and suddenly, something caught my attention. Level with David’s head was an odd patch in the air—an oval of dull muddy-brown. The patch expanded and swelled, taking shape like it was being painted by some invisible hand. The head appeared, the body filled in, the tail elongated. And then the details slowly came into focus, like I was examining it through binoculars now. Reptilian scales. Sinewy muscles. Golden eyes.

  Hugging my ribs, I fought the urge to cry out or run to David. But he didn’t seem the least bit startled that his dinosaur pal had decided to show up. In fact, he continued to play in the same manner as if the creature had been there with him all along. Maybe he had. Maybe I was just starting to perceive him.

  Seeing the creature materialize was like watching your child trapped in a hungry lion’s enclosure at the zoo. Or waking up from a nightmare to find your dream stalker standing over your bed. It was terrifying, it was illogical, it was certifiably batshit-funny-farm-one-sandwich-short-of-a-picnic-basket crazy. But there it was, in the flesh, following my son around the yard. A miniature freaking T-rex.

  The dinosaur lurched past the shed, its tail whacking against the door, but the contact made no hollow drumming noise as I’d expected. Its nostrils flared, and its short arms flailed ineffectually, as if reaching for something it knew it could never quite grasp. Both David and the dinosaur disappeared from view for a moment, as the shed hid them from me. I lunged forward, prepared to throw myself off the deck and between them.

  “Anna?” The exasperation in Duffy’s voice suggested she’d been calling my name for a long time. “You’re both going to get soaked. It’s time to come in now. Davey, darling! Come now, hurry inside!”

  Steady rain clipped my face, a prelude to a fierce downpour. I wiped the moisture from my blurry eyes to discover David scurrying toward us, unaccompanied, his blond hair slicked to his skull and his gray T-shirt speckled by raindrops. How long had it been raining?