Imaginary Things

by Andrea Lochen

  I took a gulp of lemonade, nearly choking. The algebra equation I’d been wrestling with was becoming only more complicated. What events had led to my mom sending me away so hastily? Had Leah Nola and I done something to frighten or injure her, and if so, what had prompted our acting out? It seemed crucial to David’s safety and my own to fill in these missing variables, and there was only one person on this planet with the answers to my questions. Unfortunately, she was also the last person on the planet to whom I wanted to talk.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  My mom’s new place was in one of the well-off, northern lakeside communities of Milwaukee, and I wondered what sugar daddy she’d roped into buying or renting it for her. I’d sneakily copied the address out of Duffy’s address book and entered it into Winston’s GPS. The house itself was nothing impressive: a rundown Colonial with half beige brick and half white siding, rose bushes past their bloom, and two strips of concrete for a driveway with grass and weeds growing in between. There was a one-car garage set back at the end of the driveway, and I wondered if my mom’s car was parked inside and she was home. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and her waitressing jobs usually dictated a night schedule.

  I parked Winston’s car in front of her house and got out before I lost my nerve. I needed answers. Answers that my grandmother had pointed out, at the beginning of the summer, could only be given to me by one person. If you have questions about that time in your life, you know who you should ask? Your mother. But even if my mom did hold the answers I was looking for, would she be willing to share them with me?

  I rang her doorbell, but when I didn’t hear its chiming echo inside, I knocked as well. I started to count to twenty. If she didn’t answer the door by the time I got to twenty—

  She opened the door.

  With her hair piled messily atop her head and her black spandex capris and aqua-colored tank top, she looked like I’d interrupted her doing yoga. I listened for a DVD walking viewers through a sunrise salutation, but I didn’t hear anything. No macho middle-aged guy yelling from the kitchen, “Who’s at the door, babe?” either. (Thank God.) No, there was just a long period of silence as my mom and I stared at each incredulously.

  Finally she said, “Anna. What can I do for you?”

  My heart gave a twinge of disappointment. Was it really so much to expect a smile? An acknowledgement that it was nice to see me after all these years? A greeting just a tad bit warmer than one she would’ve given a door-to-door salesperson? “Can I come in?” I asked in the most civil tone I could muster. I tried to remind myself that I hadn’t come for hugs and a touchy-feely reconciliation. I’d come to learn more about Leah Nola. I’d come to see if I could glean anything to help David.

  “I don’t see why not.” She took a step backward and opened the door wider to admit me.

  The living room had hardwood floors and the walls were painted a soothing sage green. It was the antithesis of the dark, carpeted caves I’d grown up in. Only one framed photo sat on the mantelpiece—a picture of my mom with a balding guy in a gray suit who looked much older than she was. There were no pictures of me or David. Big surprise. The rest of the mantelpiece and all other flat surfaces in the living room were covered with porcelain dolls in stands: a bride, a Russian peasant, a Japanese geisha, a doll that looked like Scarlet O’Hara, a doll in a red velvet hooded cloak, a doll in a satin ball gown. And all their eyes seemed to be watching me as I sat down on one end of the couch. Creepy.

  My mom reluctantly sat down in the chair across from me. She gestured to my pink cardigan, which I hadn’t realized I was still wearing. “Are you on your lunch break?”

  Did she even know I wasn’t living in Milwaukee anymore? That David and I had been staying with her parents for the past two months? Probably Duffy had told her. But maybe my mom had forgotten already—we were that inconsequential to her. “No,” I said. “I had an interview this morning.”

  After a long dry spell of sending out my resume with no responses, I’d finally gotten a phone call inviting me to interview for an administrative assistant position at a residential real estate office in Lawrenceville. The hourly wage was nothing to write home about, but they offered health insurance and paid sick days, and it was getting to the point where any stream of revenue, no matter how small, was simply better than nothing.

  I’d dug out a pale pink cardigan from the depths of Duffy’s closet and added it to my interview ensemble. With my blouse buttoned nearly to my throat, the cashmere-blend cardigan layered over it, and my long hair pulled back in a French twist, I’d looked like the kind of innocuous, wholesome Barbie that employers were dying to hire. Winston had even proposed I drive his car, so I wouldn’t arrive to my interview windblown and damp with sweat. I hoped he wouldn’t mind that I’d fibbed a little and told them I was meeting Carly for lunch after my interview and wouldn’t be home until mid-afternoon but, instead, had driven to Milwaukee to see my estranged mother.

  Janet Galloway, the realtor interviewing me, had smiled and nodded emphatically at each of my answers as though she couldn’t have said it any better herself. After giving me a tour of their small office and introducing me to her two partners, Gisele Quenzel and Brandon Dial, she had squeezed my hand and said tellingly, “You should be hearing from us in a few days. Thanks so much for coming in, Anna.”

  Immediately I had felt twenty pounds lighter. I was close to securing one aspect of my otherwise erratic, up-in-the-air existence. Now if only I could get the imaginary friends situation—David’s and my own—figured out.

  But my mom didn’t ask anything about my interview. She didn’t ask where it had been or how it had gone. Instead, she directed her gaze to a foot or two above mine. “Well, you look nice.”

  Yeah, right. Probably like one of her porcelain dolls, cutesy in a tweed skirt and leather flats. Why was she always so focused on appearances? I fingered one of the pearl buttons on my cardigan, wishing I had thought to bring a change of clothes along. I didn’t want my mom thinking I had dressed up on her behalf.

  “Thanks,” I said. Clearly neither of us was in the mood for girly chitchat, and there was really no way to ease into the topic I had in mind. “I came here to talk about Leah Nola.” My words had the effect I’d expected them to. She clearly remembered my imaginary friend’s name; she stood up from her chair as if she planned on leaving the room.

  “God almighty, Anna! Fifteen years later, and you’re still going on with this stupid nonsense? I would hope you’d have more important things to be worrying about.”

  “It’s important to me,” I persevered. “I don’t remember much about that time period; I was so young. And it seems like Leah Nola contributed to the problems you and I had. That she was one of the reasons why you sent me to stay with Duffy and Winston the summers I was seven and eight.”

  My mom flopped back down in her chair and crossed her long, toned legs. “Why do you want to know? Are you writing a tell-all exclusive about your shitty childhood? Do you need more ammunition against me?” She released the sloppy bun on her head and set about rewrapping it. She sighed. “If we’re being honest here, sending you away to Salsburg those two summers was probably the best thing I ever did for you. You should be thanking me.”

  In retrospect, I agreed with her, but at the time I’d felt so wronged and abandoned I hadn’t seen it that way. I wanted to ask her point blank if she’d been able to see my imagination, but it was such a ludicrous question, and she was already on the defensive. I didn’t want her to shut down on me altogether.

  “You’re right. Living with Winston and Duffy was wonderful. But you didn’t send me there because you wanted me to spend quality time with my grandparents. You sent me there because of ‘behavior problems.’ Because of my overactive imagination. And I need to—”

  “You need to leave the past in the past.” She waved her hand dismissively. “You were a stubborn kid, a loner, who believed in fairies and all that other garbage, but you grew out of it. Well, not
the stubborn part, but the rest of it. Why borrow trouble?”

  “I’m not borrowing trouble,” I said. Trouble was on my doorstep. Trouble was stalking my child and breathing down my neck. I needed to convey this to her, and there was only one way to do it. “David,” I started—“my son”—in case she’d forgotten, “has imaginary friends too. Dinosaurs. And…” It had to come out, but it was harder than ripping off a Band-Aid. At least then, you knew you were going to feel sharp yet short-lived pain. But in this situation, I had no idea what her reaction would be. “I can see them,” I forced myself to finish.

  Her smooth face blanched and hardened as if it were a plaster death mask. Neither of us seemed to breathe for several seconds. Finally, she said, “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” She stopped abruptly. “You should just go.”

  Had I been totally off base with my speculations that she had seen my imagination? But no. Because even now while she was trying to brush me off, she looked shell-shocked, like I had struck a major nerve.

  I pushed harder. “You know I’m telling the truth.” I took a deep breath, looking straight into her hazel eyes. “You know it because you saw my imaginary friend too.”

  She jumped up from her chair again. “This is a fucking joke.” She raised her wrist to glance at her rubbery, aqua-colored digital watch. It was color-coordinated with her tank top perfectly. “Well, it’s been fun, but I need to get going to my Pilates class. Then I’m headed straight to work.”

  The kitchen was connected to the living room, and I followed her as she headed to the fridge to get a bottle of water. “I need to know what happened,” I said. “I’m worried about David. I’m worried his dinosaurs might be dangerous.”

  I thought I saw her hesitate as she closed the fridge. She kept her face turned away from me.

  “Mom?” I hadn’t called her that in several years. As a teenager, I’d taken to defiantly calling her by her first name, and nowadays I avoided referring to her by any name. I hardly recognized my own voice; I sounded so plaintive. “Please?”

  She didn’t turn around. “You really don’t remember?” Apparently forgetting her hair was in a bun, she forced her manicured fingernails through the crown of it, loosening strands and mussing it up. She blew out a heavy sigh. “Oh, God, what a mess.”

  “Was it the mall incident? When I ran away to see Santa? Was that the first time you saw her?”

  “No, I saw her from the very beginning.” My mom studied the Scarlet O’Hara doll on the end table beside her. It was one of the only things she and I had in common: our love for Gone with the Wind. The rare times we’d been at peace with each other in my middle school and high school years had occurred when the movie came on TV and we settled down to watch all six commercial-interrupted hours of it together. She glanced up at me, and I could tell she hadn’t been reminiscing about the same thing, but a memory that deeply upset her. “For a few weeks, I thought she was just a neighbor girl you were playing with. But then one day, I saw her disappear right before my eyes.”

  “And you thought you were going crazy,” I supplied, smoothing my skirt over my lap.

  “I thought I was going crazy,” she agreed.

  I wanted to hear absolutely everything. How she had come to understand it was my imagination she was seeing, if she’d taken me to a doctor, if she’d gone to a doctor herself, what kinds of things Leah Nola and I had done together, if she had ever tried to talk to me about it. But she was as restless and edgy as a criminal about to stand trial. Our tentative truce might not last for very long, and I needed to hear the most pertinent, valuable details while she was still willing to open up to me.

  “Could she touch things?” I asked. “Affect her environment?”

  “She could.” She raised her eyebrows as if about to challenge me, but her perfectly pink-lipsticked lips were trembling. “The little bitch.”

  The word bitch landed like a stinging slap on my cheek. It was the word we’d cruelly yet casually launched at each other all throughout my adolescence. The insult hurt even more now, though, because she was trying to tear down the friend I’d purposely created to build me up. It set my already electrified nerves on edge. Did I really want to hear the whole story, or rather, my mom’s side of the story? I was suddenly scared to uncover the events that had caused me to repress Leah Nola’s memory.

  “What did she do?” I asked softly, grabbing the throw pillow next to me and squeezing it against my stomach.

  “She made all kinds of trouble.” My mom’s face was so similar to my own; it was like looking into a mirror that showed me what I would look like too, one day, if I lived a life of bitterness like hers. There were more frown lines than laugh lines. She swiped absentmindedly at her eyelashes as if she’d noticed me staring at her and thought her immaculate makeup was amiss. “But the worst of it was at the end of second grade.” Right before she had sent me to Salsburg the second time. “She told you to smash my wedding cake topper collection.”

  “Your wedding cake toppers?” That sounded vaguely familiar, and I realized Winston had just mentioned them in the context of my mom’s various collections as a child.

  “You don’t remember them? I had been collecting them since I was a little girl. I begged the bride of every wedding I attended to give me hers off her cake after the reception, and I got them from rummage sales and discount stores too.” She shot me a look that implied I very well knew what had happened and I was just playing at forgetting to make her relive it. “I came home one day from running errands—we’d been fighting before I left, about God knows what—and I went into my bedroom, and there you were with Leah Nola, dropping the figurines off the shelf, one by one, sniveling and telling her you wanted to stop.”

  A chill crept down my spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, as I realized my mom was telling the truth and I remembered flashes of that day. The wedding cake topper collection had been divided among two old, scratched-up curio cabinets flanking my mom’s queen-size bed. There had to have been at least forty of them—miniature smiling brides and grooms, ceramic, porcelain, and blown glass, all frozen in that eternal moment of the anticipation of a life of happiness. Some of them broke simply by sweeping them to the floor, but others needed to be stepped on with a satisfying crunch.

  Leah Nola had pointed to the first one, a brown-haired man lifting a blond woman into the sanctuary of his arms, folds of her extravagant dress cascading downward. “This is her favorite one, isn’t it? Let’s show her, Anna. This is the only way she’ll listen to you. This is the only way we can make it stop.”

  I lifted the figurine from the shelf and let it slip through my trembling fingers. It shattered into a hundred little pieces on the floor. “No more,” I sobbed. “I don’t want to do this. You’re wrong.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” she argued. “She doesn’t trust you. She trusts him. And this is the only way to get through to her.” So more couples gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes were split apart and decimated. Marital bliss annihilated. My mom’s hopes and dreams, whatever those sentimental cake toppers represented to her, all smashed to smithereens. Only the figurines on the two highest shelves remained when she walked into the room, a look of fury emblazoned on her face.

  “You know what you need to do,” Leah Nola said, before vanishing to leave me with the aftermath: my mom’s rage and all those sharp little pieces like tiny seashells littering a beach. At the time, I thought she’d been talking to me. But now that I knew my mom could see and hear her, I wondered if Leah Nola’s comment had been directed at her. What had our argument been about? What had prompted such a mean-spirited act of revenge? I still couldn’t remember everything—only bright, crystalline flickers in an otherwise murky backdrop—and it was unbelievably frustrating.

  “That wasn’t even the worst part,” my mom said, brushing an invisible piece of lint off her stretchy black capris. “She woke me up that night, standing at the foot of my bed like a goddamn ghost. I about had a stroke. And the next d
ay, after I boxed up the few remaining cake toppers so you couldn’t break those too, I climbed the ladder to put them in the attic space, and she pushed me, the little shit. I didn’t fall far, but far enough to break my arm in two places.” She held up her flawlessly lean and tan arm as if it still bore the proof of her injury.

  My mind was racing. Leah Nola was supposed to be my friend, my protector, the brave self I wished I could be. It made no sense for her to attack my mom unprovoked. Though I had been furious with my mom on countless occasions, I had never seriously wanted to do her bodily harm. Had Leah Nola slipped out of my control and taken on a malicious life of her own? If so, I could be in serious trouble with David’s dinosaurs. But the memory of what Leah Nola had said, her shrouded reasoning for destroying the collection, made me skeptical of this. Also, there was my mom’s tendency to never admit any wrongdoing or accept blame. Something about her short account of the events seemed fishy.

  “But why?” I crossed my legs at the knee and pulled them toward me.

  “I don’t know,” she shot back. “She was your imaginary friend, Anna. It stands to reason that you’d understand her crazy motives better than I do.” The pallor that had fallen over her face when I’d first brought up our strange shared ability was being replaced by a pink flush.

  “All I remember is her saying that you wouldn’t listen to me,” I said. “That you didn’t believe me. But wouldn’t believe me about what? What did she say to you? Why would she wake you up in the middle of the night?”

  Red sunburn-like blotches were coloring my mom’s chest and neck and creeping higher. Her lips hardly moved. “She wanted me to go to your room.”

  My eyes were transfixed by her blossoming red rash. I held my breath. “Why?”

  “She wanted me to check on you,” she said, refusing to look at me. “She wouldn’t leave until I did. So I got out of bed. And I bumped into Dennis in the hall. Outside your door.”