Imaginary Things

by Andrea Lochen

  He climbed out of bed, slipping into a pair of cargo shorts, not even bothering with boxers. “Prescribed to my mom, I hope you noticed. They’re not mine.”

  “How convenient,” I said. I spotted my shorts on the other side of the room, bunched up against one of the legs of Jamie’s desk. One of my sandals was near it, too. I hurried to retrieve the shorts and sandal, all the while keeping my eyes peeled for its mate.

  “I know it looks bad, but it’s not what you think.” Jamie dropped his heavy, calloused hand onto my shoulder. “Stop. Just stop. Let me explain.”

  I ducked out from under his grasp. “Why? So you can tell me more lies about how you’re rehabilitated and all you’re doing now is dutifully taking care of your poor mom? And so what if you refill her scripts for your own personal, illegal use occasionally? No biggie.”

  “No. That’s not what I’m doing. Anna, would you please just stop moving and sit down for just one minute so we can talk?”

  I spied my other sandal under the draped comforter on the floor and jammed it on my foot. “No, I can’t, because you forget that I’ve been through this same kind of shit before. This is the part where you try to explain everything away and make me a whole bunch of promises you never intend to keep. Or aren’t capable of keeping—whichever—but the point is, it never ends happily. And I really can’t do this because I have a son who’s counting on me, and I refuse to put him through this again. He deserves better. We both do.”

  Jamie sat down on the foot of the bed, hunched forward. “I’m not your ex, Anna,” he said softly. “And if you knew me even a little, you would know that I wouldn’t do something like this, and you’d give me the benefit of the doubt and let me explain, instead of jumping to conclusions.”

  I forced myself to walk away from him and put my hand on the doorknob. I would not cry. I would not give in. I needed to be the type of mother who made sacrifices for her child, who put her child before herself and her own stupid desires, no matter what.

  “Well, maybe that’s part of the problem, then,” I said, avoiding his eyes. My heart ached like a bruised apple. “We don’t really know each other so well after all.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I crept up the stairs, feeling like a caricature of myself as a teenager sneaking in after a wild night. Except this time, I almost hoped Duffy would catch me. I wanted her bossiness and overbearing love, so I could hurl my anger and sense of betrayal at her. How could you let me fall for him? I wanted to shout at her. You knew, you knew, you knew, and you didn’t stop me! I wanted her to hold me and rock me until all my miserable tears were spent and I was exhausted enough to finally close my eyes and sleep. But it was after two o’clock when I got home, and she and Winston were sleeping soundly and didn’t stir. I was utterly alone with my wretchedness.

  I stripped down to my underwear, threw on an old oversized T-shirt, and climbed into bed without even turning the lights on. As I flopped down, my shoulder and hand brushed against something. Something solid and warm and taking up half my bed. I bit back a scream. My eyes adjusted to the light, and I quickly realized that it was David, curled up and sleeping in the middle of my bed.

  How long had he been asleep in here, and why had he wandered to my bedroom? David had never been a sleepwalker. Had he come to my room seeking comfort from a bad dream, only to find my bed empty? I stared down at his now peacefully sleeping face and noticed pillow creases on his flushed cheeks and what looked like dried tears crusted on his eyelashes. Had he cried himself to sleep? I brushed a damp lock of hair off his forehead. He didn’t stir.

  In my guilt, I thought about letting him sleep in my bed all night, but it was a twin size bed and much too small for a grown woman and a growing boy. His warm, long-limbed body seemed to be everywhere at once; I couldn’t get comfortable, and I was downright exhausted. I scooped him up as gingerly as I could, trying not to wake him, and carried him back to his room.

  When I laid him back in his bed, his eyes shot open. “Mommy?” he cried, reaching out for me.

  “Yes, David. It’s me,” I whispered. “I’m here. Go back to sleep.”

  He sat upright, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Where were you?”

  Guilt, as sour as curdled milk, flooded my mouth and stomach. I was just like my mom, leaving a child in the middle of the night to deal with whatever trauma might arise on his or her own. No, a part of me argued, Duffy and Winston were here. My mom had left me totally alone. But that logic couldn’t bear much scrutiny. David had wanted his mom, and I hadn’t been there for him. He was only four, and I had known he had been having trouble sleeping. And I had left him to go across the yard to the next door neighbor’s house, a drug addict’s house, to have sex. But it would never happen again, I resolved fiercely.

  “I was outside,” I said. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “No.” David buried his head in my armpit. “I can’t sleep in here.”

  I flipped on the small lamp on his nightstand. A pool of light spread across the bed, dispelling the shadows a little. I hugged David tighter, inhaling his little-boy scent.

  “Why not?” I asked. “What’s wrong?” My question made him start to cry. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I rubbed his back.

  “I don’t know what he wants,” David choked out between sobs.

  The hair follicles on my arms stood up, as a chill passed through me. “Who?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.

  “Under the bed,” David whispered.

  I tried not to think of Sierra B. and her dream of the Shadow Man biting off all her fingers and toes. I tried not to think of every scary movie I’d ever seen where a gray-skinned ghoul dragged the protagonist under the bed to kill him or her. Instead, I tried to imagine the black-and-white photo in chapter nine, that had showed the fearless daddy checking under his photogenic daughter’s bed for monsters.

  “There’s nothing under the bed except for some forgotten toys and dust bunnies,” I teased. “Would it make you feel better if I looked?”

  “No.” David clung to me, his fingers digging into the ribs in my back. “Don’t look, Mommy.”

  I certainly didn’t want to. My heart was battering against my chest, like it was trying to run away, and every inch of my skin was covered in goosebumps. But I was being ridiculous. There was nothing to be afraid of. No boogey monsters, no shadow men. They were all just imaginary. The problem was I could see imaginary things.

  I pried myself free of David’s death-grip and knelt down on the floor. I seized the navy blue dust ruffle with sweaty fingers in preparation to fling it upright.

  “Mommy,” David whined, huddled against the headboard.

  “It’s okay, David,” I said. I took a deep breath and counted to three and—

  A pair of large, green reflective eyes with black pupils stared back at me. I couldn’t help it. I screamed. David screamed with me. I scrabbled backwards on my hands and knees, but the dust ruffle stayed flipped up, and the green eyes continued to watch me hungrily. They seemed to belong to an enormous, muscular cat of some sort with black, shiny fur. The bad cat was…a panther? It was hard to believe it was able to hide under something as small as a twin size bed. It opened its mouth, revealing a rough pink tongue, and the sharpest incisors I’d ever seen, and it let out a bone-chilling growl.

  “Anna? David?” Winston, wild-haired and breathless, ran into the room, wielding what looked like a hammer. “I heard screams. What’s wrong?”

  Neither of us was capable of speaking. The bad cat still had me fixed in its hostile gaze.

  Winston followed my eyes and bent down to look under the bed. I almost cried out for him to stop, to save him from getting his head chewed off, but he popped back up with a confused look. Of course. The panther was invisible to him.

  “For the love of God, can you please put the dust ruffle back down?” I asked him. David hiccupped and nodded wildly in agreement.

  Winston dropped the dust ruffle back into place, and the panther merci
fully disappeared from view. But this time, I knew what was lurking under the bed.

  “What is going on here?” Winston asked. Duffy appeared in the doorway behind him, a pink satin eye mask pushed up onto her forehead.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Bad dream, that’s all. Everything is fine now, but I think David might sleep with me tonight.” There was no way I was making my son sleep in a bed with a panther under it. Especially one that might have physical properties and the power to hurt us. Especially one that David cowered from, suggesting it wasn’t under his control.

  Winston scratched his head. Duffy pursed her lips. David leaped off the bed toward me, and we carefully edged our way past my grandparents and out of the bedroom.

  “Seriously. Everything’s fine. Go back to bed. Sorry for waking you.”

  It took David a long time to fall asleep, and it took me even longer. Our bodies were still trembling with shock as we curled together. What did Imaginary Friends, Your Child, and You have to say about a freaking panther under the bed? What fear did that represent? Fear of being mauled to death by a large carnivorous cat? Because if that was the case, I was afraid of that too. I lay awake until the sky turned a milky white, wondering how the hell we were going to survive David’s imagination.

  The next day Carly and I had planned to meet at La Frontera in Lawrenceville—according to her, the only halfway authentic Mexican food you could find within a thirty-mile radius—for a quick lunch. I considered canceling because of my grainy eyes and lack-of-sleep-induced headache, and most of all, because I knew she was going to give me the third degree about Jamie, and I’d have to admit what had happened between us. But it had been weeks since I’d seen Carly, and I figured her brand of humor and some margaritas (okay, well, maybe only one margarita, since it was the middle of the work day) would help take my mind off David’s panther and my otherwise crumbling life.

  When I arrived at the restaurant, Carly was already seated at a table near a reproduction of a Diego Rivera painting. She stood up to get my attention and waved me over. After squeezing me in a tight hug, she handed me the laminated drink menu. “Here. You look like you could use this.”

  I nodded and studied the menu with unseeing eyes. “Let’s just get a pitcher of margaritas.” So much for responsibility.

  She grinned. “My thoughts exactly.” Our waiter appeared then with two types of salsa and a basket of warm tortilla chips glistening with oil. She gave him our drink order, and he hurried off. “So what’s up? No offense, but you look kind of exhausted.”

  “None taken. I am exhausted. I was up really late last night with David. He had a nightmare.”

  “Oh, poor thing,” she cooed, scooping up some salsa with a chip. “I sometimes have this recurring nightmare that I’m late for a precalculus test in Mr. Crunkle’s class—do you remember that old dillweed?—and when I finally get there, I realize I’m totally naked.” She laughed and pretended to shiver. “Probably not the same kind of nightmare David’s having though, huh?”

  “A little different.” I attempted a smile and ran my fingers over the blue tiled tabletop. The panther’s twin incisors, at least two inches long, flashed in my mind. His green eyes like two glassy marbles floating in the darkness. The kind of nightmare that didn’t vanish even when you were awake with your eyes wide open. “I don’t think I was in Mr. Crunkle’s class with you,” I added quickly, to change the subject. “You were one semester ahead of me in math, remember? I would’ve been in geometry with Mrs. Yetz.”

  “That’s right. I had her too. She was so sweet. One of the only teachers who ever believed in me.” Carly tapped her short, somewhat square fingers against her water glass. “But we’re not here to reminisce about high school math teachers, are we? I want to hear all about Jamie, and don’t even think about leaving out a single detail. Start from the beginning, please. So how did you guys finally get together?”

  I could see our waiter over her shoulder heading our way with the tray of margaritas. “Look what’s here!” I exclaimed, buying myself some time. The next few minutes were taken up by the waiter sliding our salt-rimmed and lime-wedged glasses toward us as expertly as a poker dealer, positioning the pitcher in the middle of the table, and jotting down our food orders.

  Carly carefully sipped her margarita. “I have to say that in high school, I never would have imagined you two together. But when you started talking about him the day we took the boat out, I could totally picture it. When Sam told me about seeing you guys at the fair, it all clicked; you two being a couple just made sense. I’m really so happy for you.”

  She wasn’t going to make this easy for me. I took a swig of my margarita and remembered the medicine cabinet chock full of pill bottles, all prescribed to Wendy. I tried to focus on that—his addiction, the blatant lies he had told me—instead of the earlier part of the evening when he had sweetly shown me his box of childhood memories and we had made love. The way I saw stars when he kissed me. How in his arms I felt safer than I’d ever felt in my life—before I had known the truth.

  “Well, it didn’t last very long,” I said, raising my shoulder to my ear. I exhaled and let it drop. “We broke up last night.”

  “Really?” She cocked her head and leaned in. “What happened?”

  I gripped the base of my margarita glass and then pinched the stem. I didn’t want to be a cog in the Salsburg gossip machine, but I also knew Carly would be skeptical of any other excuses I could give her. She would know I was lying if I told her there was no chemistry between us (we were practically a combustible explosion in bed) or that Jamie was put off by my being a single mother with baggage, when he actually accepted me like no one before him ever had and was really great with David to boot: a bottomless source of patience and kindness, a little boy at heart himself. So vague lies definitely wouldn’t cut it, and in a way, I felt like Carly deserved to know the truth about Jamie. Her fiancé was his close friend, after all, and maybe there was something they could do to help him. Maybe they could talk him into going back to rehab.

  “The rumors about him are true,” I said. “He’s addicted to oxycodone, and I told him I can’t be with someone with problems like that. For David’s sake.” I fingered my paper napkin bundle of silverware and glanced up at Carly.

  “Really?” she repeated, but she didn’t sound as surprised as she had the first time. “Sam told me about the car accident and how Jamie got hooked on narcs the first time, but I thought that was in the past. That he went through the program and hardly even drinks beer now.”

  I shook my head. “That’s what he told me too. But he lied.” The Rivera painting on the wall next to us made me sad. The massive bunch of calla lilies, the young woman’s black braids, her strong back and arms open wide; all of it would have filled me with hope yesterday. It would have made me think of Jamie and the way he took an interest in my art, making it seem like not such an unattainable goal, but something alive and shimmering. But today the dream of pursuing an art degree seemed impossibly out of reach again.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you find out?” Carly removed the lime wedge from her glass and tossed it aside.

  “I found the pills,” I said simply and rested my throbbing forehead in my palm.

  “But how did you know they weren’t his mom’s?” she asked, draining the rest of her margarita. “I mean, with her MS, she’s got to be on a whole regimen of different drugs, right?”

  “They were his mom’s. Prescribed to her at least. But he’s clearly the one taking them. They were in his bathroom, out on his sink, plain as day.”

  She lifted the pitcher to refill her glass. She topped off mine too, but there wasn’t much space for her to refill it since I’d taken only a few sips. Her tone was light and thoughtful as she asked, “So what did he have to say for himself?”

  “I didn’t care to hear it. I left.” I sat up, scanning the restaurant for our waiter, hoping our food would be arriving soon to save me from this line of questioning, but no
luck. “Can we—”

  She interrupted me. “But maybe there’s a reasonable explanation. I know the evidence seems pretty damning, but something’s not quite adding up. Why would Jamie lie to his friends when he told them the truth about everything else? When Marshall has acted almost as a kind of sponsor for him? And why now when Sam says Jamie is the happiest that he’s ever seen him? There’s something else bugging me too. A few months ago, before you moved back, Jamie asked Sam for help moving some furniture around. He and his mom were switching bedrooms because she could no longer climb the stairs. So maybe—”

  “Carly, please. I know you’re just trying to help, but I really don’t want to talk about it anymore. Jamie and I are through, which is probably a good thing anyway, because I have my hands full enough without someone else’s drama. So please. Tell me about your wedding dress hunt. Or what’s new at Ruby’s. Or absolutely anything you want, unrelated to Jamie.”

  “Fine. Just one more thing, and then not another word.” She pushed a curl out of her eyes and leaned forward. “I just think you should hear him out. At least listen to his side of the story. You owe him that much.” Then she made an elaborate show of zipping her lips and wiping her hands clean of the topic.

  Our waiter mercifully showed up at our table then with our enchiladas, rice, and beans, and I dug into the food, somewhat because I was hungry and would need to return to Galloway Realty soon, but mostly because I was glad to have a reason to underscore the end of our conversation about Jamie. Carly chatted away about the prohibitively expensive mermaid sheath wedding gown she’d fallen in love with online but couldn’t find in any of the local boutiques for cheaper. I recommended a discount designer bridal store in Milwaukee that she should check out, and she eagerly jotted the name down on her napkin. She told me about Sam’s intramural baseball league and a tournament his team had recently placed second in. She offered up his services to play catch and do some batting practice with David.