Imaginary Things

by Andrea Lochen

  Another wave of contentment crashed over me. Room-darkening blinds blocked the windows, and I now considered my rushed glimpse of the house as Jamie had hurried me toward his bedroom. My blurry memory of the layout suggested that this was the bedroom on the side of the house facing Duffy and Winston’s house. I was trying not to think of my grandparents or my son, sleeping only thirty yards away. Or maybe not sleeping. Maybe Duffy or Winston was waiting up for me. If they’d seen Jamie’s truck drive up, it wouldn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out where I was. Or what we were doing. The neon blue numbers of the clock next to Jamie’s bed read 11:25, and I knew I would have to head home soon. But I didn’t want to leave just yet.

  “Are you ever going to go back out west?” I asked. “See the national parks you never got to see?”

  “Yeah, one day. Probably not anytime soon, though, because my mom needs me too much.” His hand crawled up my spine and massaged my shoulder. He tugged me gently back down onto the bed, so that I was lying with my head against his heart and my body curled around his. “After my dad left, I always had this ideal of the perfect family, what we could’ve been if he’d stayed, and one of the things I imagined was a family road trip out west with an obnoxiously big RV. So maybe I’ll get to see Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon with my own family one day.”

  “That would be nice,” I whispered, and it did sound nice. Teenager Anna would have turned up her nose at this stereotypical, middle-class American fantasy, but grown-up Anna couldn’t help wondering if he meant me and David, or if he was imagining a different wife—maybe a brunette with sparkling green eyes and a trendy nose ring—and two or three of his own biological kids.

  “What about you?” Jamie asked. He entwined his large fingers through my smaller ones and squeezed.

  “What about me, what?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want out of life?” He tilted my chin upward to look at him.

  I lowered my eyes self-consciously. “I have an idea. Kind of. I’ve always wanted to go to college. Take some art classes. Improve my technique and learn about working with different media.” As soon as I said it, I realized it was true. That it was a desire that had been lying dormant inside me. It wasn’t realistic. How would I ever get the money for tuition? And how would I both work and raise David while I was also trying to attend school? And what would a degree in art really be worth anyway? It wasn’t like I would be able to find a job as an “artist” right out of school and immediately better my life and David’s. No, single moms who decided to pursue college went to tech schools to get practical degrees that helped them find higher-paying jobs because that was the smart thing to do.

  “I could see that,” Jamie said thoughtfully. He squinted as though he were imagining it in his mind’s eye. “Your drawings always were so beautiful.”

  I laughed. “You haven’t seen me draw since I was a kid!”

  “So what?” With my ear so close to his chest, his voice rumbled and vibrated. “Even at eight, you probably had more talent in your baby toe than some of these so-called artists today have in their entire bodies. I’d love to see your current work sometime.”

  What current work? Unless the dinosaur series I’d been secretly drawing with my oil pastels counted. I could name them similarly to Monet’s haystack series. T-rex in Sunshine. T-rex (Sunset). Brontosaurus at the End of Summer. By capturing David’s imaginary friends’ likeness in painstaking detail, I’d been trying to demystify them. A kind of art autopsy. And although drawing again had made me feel more like my old creative self, it still hadn’t gotten me any closer to understanding why I could see my son’s imagination and what I was supposed to do with the ability. I still felt like David had handed me a secret message but neglected to include the code with which to crack it.

  I wondered what Jamie would think if I showed the portraits of King Rex and Weeple to him. Maybe he’d think I just really liked dinosaurs. But maybe I should start taking my art more seriously again and branch out to drawing other things besides David’s imagination—if I could ever find the time. The thought of showing Jamie one of my drawings was kind of nerve-wracking but in a good way. It would require me to be totally vulnerable, even more vulnerable than I was lying nude beside him. It would require me to completely trust him in a way I hadn’t trusted any man in a long time, maybe ever. But with Jamie’s ardent heart thumping near my ear, it didn’t seem like such an unimaginable feat anymore.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That means a lot to me.” I rolled onto my back, creating a small space between us. “Jamie? I don’t know exactly how this is going to work.”

  He looked down at me with a slight frown. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this.” I gestured to our naked bodies and took a deep breath. “Us. How’s it going to work? Living next door to each other, you with your mom, me with my grandparents. Like I said, David starts kindergarten next week, and he’s been going through a lot this summer, and I need to be there for him. I need to focus, really focus, on being the best mom I can be right now. I also really need to find a job. And, of course, you have your mom to take care of, and your landscaping business—”

  He bent down to kiss my lips mid-sentence. “Shhh. All I needed to hear you say was us.” He pulled the sheet up and pressed himself against me, and I gave into him with my whole being. “Anna, I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. I think I can be patient a bit longer.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “And then he said, ‘Did you know I’ve loved you since I was six years old?’” I told my grandmother, tucking a flyaway strand of hair behind my ear, before signaling to change lanes. Though I had already given her a cursory summary of my date with Jamie, I was now fishing for additional PG-13 details to share with her to distract her from the fact that we were leaving her circumscribed safe area and she seemed on the verge of a full-blown, all-out, completely-losing-her-shit meltdown.

  In the passenger seat of the minivan, Duffy looked like a nervous flyer. One fist clutched the seatbelt across her breast; the other palmed the door handle as though she might leap out of the moving vehicle at any moment. She’d been like this since we’d left the village limits. “That doesn’t surprise me,” she said in a small voice, unlike her own. “You were inseparable as kids, and even though you bossed him around and brought your imaginary friend with you everywhere, Jamie adored you. Winston and Wendy even used to joke about you two getting married when you grew up.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “Let’s try to avoid the M word until we’ve at least reached our one-week anniversary, shall we?” But this comment didn’t even earn me a chuckle or a retort because Duffy’s eyes were closed and she was doing Lamaze-style breathing. I had never seen her so anxious before. It reminded me of the night I’d called her in tears and she’d been my salvation, reining in her fear enough to drive all the way to Milwaukee to collect me.

  We were headed to a strip mall in Glacial Hills because David needed school supplies and Duffy was out of several products for her salon. Normally, Penny Michaels, one of the women who’d rented a chair from her at Savon Vivement, picked them up for her, but she was on a month-long vacation celebrating her silver wedding anniversary. Duffy had started writing me a very detailed yet puzzling list (e.g., Sheen Professional Premium Creme 30 Volume Dedicated Developer, neck strip refills, and something called “cleansing pudding”) until I convinced her that her order would be much more accurate if she simply came along with me. The trip would be short, we could kill two birds with one stone since the strip mall housed both a beauty supply emporium and office supplies store, and I would drive her. Finally, she gave in.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, patting her tense wrist and slowing down for the world’s most inconvenient stop light. The entrance to the strip mall was only a few yards beyond it. “We’re almost there.”

  “Everything’s alright,” Duffy said in a flat monotone. Beads of sweat were rolling down the sides of her face from her hairline, but I co
uldn’t tell if this was from my unbearably hot minivan or her panic attack. I could now understand why Winston’s bushy eyebrows had twitched like two startled caterpillars when I’d told him my intention to take Duffy shopping in Glacial Hills. The flaw in my original plan of dropping Duffy off at one end of the strip mall to do her shopping, while David and I found the items on the list Port Ambrose Elementary had mailed at the other end and then meeting up in the middle was becoming more and more apparent. There was no way I could leave my grandma alone in this state. Clearly, I would need to help her with her shopping, and if she calmed down enough, we’d all go the office supplies store together afterwards. And if not, I’d have to make a separate trip back, which would be my own stupid fault, I knew.

  “Have you seen a doctor about this?” I asked her gently. “Maybe it would be helpful to talk to someone. Maybe they could prescribe you something for the anxiety.” Like a metric ton of Xanax.

  Duffy snatched her purse from the floor as I parked the minivan. “Everything’s alright,” she repeated, but this time her voice seemed to have reclaimed its bossy-take-charge edge. “Liking to stay in one place isn’t a crime, I’ll have you know, Anna, and it certainly doesn’t make me crazy.” She was out the door and already heading toward the emporium before I had even gotten out and rolled back the door for David.

  After his short, insufficient nap, David was as crabby as—well, as a four-year-old boy who’s hot and tired and dreading spending an hour shopping with his mom and grandma. Who could really blame him?

  Tight-lipped and pale, my grandmother was already tossing bottles into a cart when we entered. I approached her, suggesting we divide up the list to make this go twice as fast, and she ripped off the bottom third of the list for me. I was supposed to find a specific kind of perm solution, Luscious Locks shampoo and conditioner, a bottle of barbicide, and a few other items I had no idea where to find in the maze of the emporium. I grabbed a cart of my own and asked David if he wanted to ride in the front seat, which he usually enjoyed, but today, nothing was pleasing the little grump. He insisted on walking.

  “Then stay close to me,” I cautioned him as we tackled the first item on our list. There seemed to be an entire aisle devoted to perm solutions, and each box looked about the same to me. “Can you be a big boy and help Grandma Duffy with me? We need to find different things that she uses to cut and style hair.”

  David wrinkled up his forehead, eyes, nose, and mouth into a whole-face frown. It was quite a feat. “I don’t want to.” He fingered an artificial clump of hair hanging off one of the shelves. I scolded him when he tried to rip it off, and he let out a high-pitched whine that I was worried would lead to a full-fledged tantrum.

  “You can touch the hair gently,” I said. “Just don’t pull it, okay?”

  At last, I found the box of perm solution, which was totally gray and nondescript, on the very bottom shelf, so I was on to the next item on my list: Luscious Locks. We hurried into the shampoo and conditioner aisle, where a middle-aged lady was meticulously uncapping and sniffing each bottle of shampoo before putting it back.

  “Do you know where Luscious Locks is?” I asked her hopefully.

  She gave me a disdainful look. “I don’t work here.”

  I forced myself to smile. “I didn’t think you did. I just thought maybe you’d spotted it.”

  The lady unscrewed another shampoo cap and inhaled. “Well, I haven’t. So maybe you should ask someone who actually works here.”

  What a class act. Discouraged, I stood back to take in the entire wall of shampoo and conditioner bottles. It would have been kind of awe-inspiring had I not been so stressed out to get Duffy’s items as quickly as possible. Even knowing what color bottle Luscious Locks came in might not have helped much—every color of the rainbow and even some nature hadn’t dreamt up seemed to be represented.

  Duffy wheeled past the aisle, her cart nearly filled to the brim. Her color had improved slightly; maybe being in the presence of so many hair products was somehow fortifying her. “Almost done, Anna? I’m ready to check out.”

  “I just have a few more things to find. Do you know where the Luscious Locks is?” But she had already disappeared. I stared at the shelves, willing the brand name to pop out at me, and finally, it did. I chucked the bottles into my cart and set off in search of the barbicide.

  Thankfully, the store’s selection of disinfectant was limited, so I chose the cheapest refill bottle. “We’re almost done, buckaroo,” I said, spinning around. But David wasn’t standing by the cart, where I thought he’d be. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere in the aisle.

  “David?” I called, expecting him to peek out from behind the display at the end of the aisle, but he didn’t. “David?” I called more loudly. “You need to stay close to Mommy. Come right back, okay?”

  I shoved my rattling cart into the next aisle over. No David. I backtracked to the shampoo aisle and the perm solution aisle, where he’d been so enraptured with the swaths of fake hair. No David. I ditched my cart and started a methodical search of each aisle in the store, glancing desperately up at the mirrored border near the ceiling to see if I could catch a glimpse of David, certain he was hiding. Probably crouching behind the boxes of hair dryers and curling irons or leaning next to the wall of colorful, rippling hair extensions. But the mirrors reflected only a billion different salon products and a frantic, tiny version of me.

  The mean, shampoo-sniffing lady had now moved to the hairspray section, where she was testing out each with a furtive squirt.

  “Have you seen my son?” I asked her. I drew an invisible line extending from my ribs. “A little blond boy?”

  She spared me a narrow-eyed glance that said I knew you were the kind of woman to lose your son in a beauty supply emporium. Then she shook her head dismissively and returned her attention to the hairspray. Her short hair was reddish-brown and thinning, and there was a balding patch radiating from her whorl. For a long moment, it was all I could see. The crown of her head filled my vision as hysteria bubbled up inside me.

  I ran to the front of the store to ask the cashier to make an announcement over the loudspeakers.

  Duffy wheeled her cart up to the front at that exact moment. “Anna, is everything okay? I thought I heard you shouting. Where’s Davey?”

  My panicked response was swallowed up by the loudspeaker crackling to life and the teenage clerk’s whiny voice amplified throughout the store. “David Jennings, please come to the front registers. Your mom is worried about you. And if anyone sees a four-year-old boy alone in the store—blond hair, brown eyes, in a white T-shirt and green shorts—please bring him up to the front registers immediately. Thank you.”

  I looked helplessly at Duffy, expecting the cool-under-fire, fierce mama bear to emerge and allow me to break down into the quivering pile of irrational goo I so urgently wanted to abandon myself to. But her face had turned eggshell white, and the Lamaze-style breathing had returned but more rapidly this time. “Oh no,” she murmured breathlessly. “Just like I knew. Just like I always knew. He’s gone. We shouldn’t have come here.”

  I gripped her shoulders and spoke directly into her face. I think I maybe shouted in her face. I couldn’t be sure. “CALM…DOWN.”

  The teenage cashier was watching us like we were an entertaining soap opera, the most interesting part of her otherwise boring day. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed—ten seconds or ten minutes—but no shoppers had come up to the front to report David, and his white-blond head was still nowhere in sight.

  “We’re going to find him,” I told Duffy firmly. “You stay here. Ask the cashier if there’s a storage room or bathroom that David maybe wanted to investigate. See if any of the other shoppers noticed anything unusual.” My throat caught around the word “unusual.” I didn’t even want to think about what unusual things they might have seen. “Just wait for him here in case he shows up. I’m going to go outside and see what stores are next door, see if he wandered over there, or ma
ybe even all the way to the office supplies store.”

  Duffy was visibly trembling and I didn’t know how much help she’d be, but another cashier was hurrying over to the registers—a heavy, capable-looking woman in a black vest, a manager, maybe, and I hoped she’d somehow magically undo the situation while I was gone.

  Out on the sidewalk, facing the expansive parking lot, my stomach convulsed in fear, and I thought I might lose my breakfast. How big the world was! Inside the contained emporium, David could have been concealed somewhere in Aisle 2B. Out here, out here…Oh my god, there were so many cars, trucks, vans, so much pavement, so many streets. So many dangers to a little boy. Traffic, strangers. What if a stranger had approached him? Promised David candy and led him off to…No, I wouldn’t think the worst. He was nearby. I could feel it.

  A clothing boutique for plus-size women and a dollar store flanked the emporium. Hot pink and lime green pool noodles and rainbow wind socks cluttered the plate glass window of the dollar store, definitely an attractive display for a child. I stormed toward its door. A little chime tinkled as I opened it, but the check-out area was unattended.

  “Hello?” I called as I skirted a table stacked with dashboard hula girls. “David?”

  A guy about my age with greasy hair and a wisp of a mustache appeared from behind a bunch of helium balloons. “Hi. Can I help you?”

  “Have you seen a little boy? Unaccompanied?” The young man continued to stare at me dully, so I rushed on. “I’m looking for my son, David. He’s four. We were in the beauty store next door, and he wandered off. I thought he might have come in here. He’s about three and a half feet tall, blond hair—”

  The clerk shook his head. “Sorry. I haven’t seen him, and I think I would have noticed a little kid all by himself come through here.”

  My heart fell through a trapdoor into my abdomen. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to take a look around anyway.” I think the clerk said something else, but I couldn’t hear him. My blood whooshed in my ears. David wasn’t here. He was gone. Maybe Patrick had taken him. Maybe he’d come to Salsburg and then followed us to Glacial Hills and seen his chance to grab his son. He’d walked off with David, and maybe he’d take him back to his parents’ house, and they’d call me, but maybe he’d take him somewhere else, somewhere far away. And maybe after his initial interest wore off, he’d forget about David and leave him there, all alone and scared. Because that was how Patrick was off his meds, how he operated. He loved you, he loved you, he loved you, until he simply disappeared and forgot all about you. I fought back a wave of emotion that was struggling to escape—tears, screams, I wasn’t sure which. Maybe both.