Imaginary Things

by Andrea Lochen

  “What’s that noise?” Jamie asked, a little after three in the morning.

  It took me a minute to realize it was my stomach growling, and when I admitted that I hadn’t eaten much of anything since breakfast, he recommended that we stop at an all-night diner to keep up our energy for our search. He was just like my grandma, always believing that a good meal was the solution to everything. Drinking a cup of coffee and eating a huge strawberry and whipped cream-covered waffle did make me feel momentarily better.

  The diner was close to campus, where Patrick’s old apartment had been, and I tried to remember if we had ever gone there together. We hadn’t left the house much in those early days of staying in bed, making love. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, there were several bleary-eyed college students packed into the booths. I couldn’t tell if they’d been up all night partying or cramming for a test.

  “So we’ve already checked out Patrick’s favorite spots,” Jamie started, “but did he ever mention places he wanted to take David when he grew up?”

  I leaned on my elbow, trying to make my sluggish brain dredge up something new. “Nothing in particular that I can remember.” I let my eyelids drift shut and thought back to when I was pregnant and Patrick was so excited he would keep me up late, whispering to my stomach. Baby Panna, he would say, We’re going to have so much fun once you’re born. I squeezed my eyelids tighter. What had he promised he’d do with David? Where had he promised he’d take him? We’ll go to the pumpkin farm and go on a hayride… It was much too early in the season for him to do that. And I’ll draw your portrait every month, and I won’t make you cut your hair ever if you don’t want to. None of that was particularly helpful.

  But maybe David and his panther had dropped hints I hadn’t realized were clues. In frustration, I mentally reviewed all the recent conversations I’d had with David, but everything he’d said about his panther had always been so cryptic. Then, out of nowhere, I remembered his spontaneous questions about the zoo last night, right in the midst of our conversation about recess and the panther.

  Was it possible that Patrick had talked to him during recess while he’d spied on him? Had he tried to find out David’s interests and then lured him away with promises of a trip to the zoo to see the animatronic dinosaurs? Perhaps David had found Patrick’s offer both attractive and frightening, and that was why he had talked about it in such a roundabout way and then insisted he didn’t want to go. Had he been afraid of running straight into the panther’s den?

  “I think we should check out the Milwaukee County Zoo,” I told Jamie, “because of something David said last night. It’s a long shot, but it’s something.”

  “What time do they open?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Nine o’clock?”

  And that’s how we found ourselves parked on Blue Mound Road, along the tree-lined fence of the dark, closed zoo, at four-thirty in the morning. I called Duffy to alert her to this newest turn of events, and she sounded just as wide awake as I was, despite the time. She wanted to forward this suggestion on to the police, but I begged her to hold off on doing that. How Patrick might react to armed officers closing in on him in a public place unsettled me. There had to be a way for me to first pacify him and remove my son from harm’s way. At that point, I realized how much faith I was investing in the belief that Patrick would be bringing David to the zoo tomorrow. Of all the places he could be, of all the places he could convey him, what were the odds that he would show up here, I wondered. Probably not very good. But it was the only lead we had at the present, so I clung desperately to it.

  I leaned my head against the headrest of the passenger seat and let out a deep breath.

  “Maybe you should try to get some sleep,” Jamie said. In the shadows, I could barely make out his stubble-covered face and weary yet alert eyes. “I can watch over you.”

  “I can’t sleep,” I argued. “I can’t sleep while David is somewhere out there—” My voice cracked and I fought back the coming tears with what little energy I had left. I remembered how much the panther had scared him. How he had been unable to sleep. The dark-blue crescent moons under his eyes. How he had adamantly called him “the bad cat” and wished it would just go away. How it had been his dinosaurs’ jobs to chase him away, but in the end, they hadn’t been up to the task. All signs pointed to David being terrified in Patrick’s presence right now, wherever they were. To sleep, to forget his plight for even one second, would be to betray him.

  “Come here,” Jamie said, stretching his arms across the front seat to embrace me. He held me tightly to his chest, not making any promises he couldn’t keep, not whispering meaningless platitudes of consolation. He just held me, and for whatever reason, just being in his arms comforted me. If someone that strong and steady was helping me, finding David seemed not so far out of reach.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you right now,” I whispered into his T-shirt.

  Jamie didn’t say anything; he just continued to hold me against his chest, and, there, I somehow fell asleep, because when I opened my eyes, the clock on the dashboard read 7:58, and bright sunlight was pouring through the windows. I squirmed free of Jamie’s grasp, and he started to stir too. Thankfully, no cops had driven by and busted us for sleeping in the minivan. I grabbed for my cell phone and immediately called Duffy. Patrick and David still hadn’t been found, she reported unhappily, but another tip had come in last night that Patrick’s car had been seen on the east side, which meant that he was still probably in the area. Thank God.

  Since we had time to kill before the zoo opened, we walked to the gas station across the street to use their restrooms and buy cups of coffee. By the time we came back, more cars were parked on the street behind the minivan, and families were pushing strollers toward the zoo. My heart thumped hopefully in my chest. This was it. And if they weren’t here…I had no Plan B. I had no idea what to do next. But I wouldn’t think about that right now. We joined the crowd of zoo patrons who were purchasing their tickets. I hadn’t been to the zoo since high school when a boy had taken me there on a date and we’d made out in the dark of the snake and reptile house.

  “What do we do if we see them?” Jamie asked as we passed the penguin tank, around which a few children, but no David, were huddled.

  “We call the police and let them handle it,” I lied.

  We made a thorough loop of the zoo, walking through each building and area, keeping our eyes peeled for Patrick’s bleached blond head and David’s natural blond one. In particular, we checked out the dinosaur exhibit and train station, with no luck. The zoo grounds were so vast, I was starting to think that even if they were there, there was no way we would ever bump into them at the same place at the same time. Exhausted after walking constantly for two hours, we decided to sit down on a bench by the lake where swans and ducks were swimming peacefully.

  “This was a stupid idea,” I said, with my head in my hands.

  “I think it’s a great idea,” Jamie said. “It’s just hard because there are only two of us. Why don’t we call the police, see if they can send some plainclothesmen in here to look around too?”

  The crick in my neck had returned with a vengeance, and I rubbed it forcefully and then swiveled my head from side to side. The third time, something caught my eye—the shine of tattoo ink.

  And that’s when I saw Patrick standing in front of the polar bear’s enclosure. My eyes rapidly scanned the area around him, and yes, there too was David at his side. I quickly pointed them out to Jamie, who looked both as relieved and alarmed as I felt.

  “I’m going to go talk to Patrick,” I said, standing up from the bench.

  “What about letting the police handle it?” Jamie asked.

  “Call the police,” I said. “Please. But I can’t wait for them to get here and run the risk of losing him again. I’ll be okay.”

  “But what if he’s angry? What if he’s dangerous?”

  “Then it’s all the m
ore reason to get my son away from him,” I replied and dashed off before he could stop me.

  David was still wearing the same red T-shirt, jeans, and red and white sneakers I’d dressed him in the previous day. His hair was sticking up in about ten different directions. His shoulders were slumped in a tired, defeated way. I could tell all this just by seeing him from the back. I wondered if he’d slept at all last night. I wondered where he’d slept and if Patrick had fed him anything. I wondered if he’d cried or shown Patrick his brave, big-boy face.

  When I was only about ten feet away from them, Patrick turned around and caught sight of me. He smiled and waved.

  “Anna!” he called, as if we’d been planning this all along and he’d been expecting to see me. As if we were a normal family who was having a day at the zoo, not a broken family embroiled in a kidnapping situation.

  David turned around at Patrick’s greeting, and when he saw me, he looked like he might burst into tears of gratitude. I lurched toward him, my body drawn to my son like metal to a magnet. My fingers were only inches away from grasping his thin shoulder when Patrick stepped between us. His elbow caught me sharply in the ribcage and jostled me backwards, and David disappeared from view behind the wall of Patrick’s body.

  “I don’t think so.” Patrick’s archangel eyes were shining bright. “You’ve had your time with him, Anna. It’s my turn now. So if you can’t play nice, you should just go home.”

  “I’m not playing,” I said, trying to sound more assertive than I felt. “You’re breaking the law. You could go to jail for being near either one of us right now. So why don’t you give David back to me, and we’ll pretend this whole thing never happened?”

  He leaned forward so close that our noses were almost touching, and I could see his dilated pupils. I instinctively took a step back.

  “I don’t care about the legal system,” he ranted. “It’s stripped me of all my rights to be a father. Just because I have a mental illness! They’re the criminals. They’re the ones who should go to prison for discriminating against me and depriving me of the first five years of my boy’s life. Not me, just for taking him to the goddamn zoo.”

  That tirade didn’t sound like Patrick at all. The legal system stripping him of his rights and depriving him of fatherhood? I wondered who had been telling him he’d been wrongfully discriminated against because of his mental illness. I doubted it was his mom. David’s red and white sneakers poked out from behind Patrick’s scuffed oxfords. If I could only distract Patrick for just one second and get him to move away slightly, I could grab David and run into the nearest building, find a security guard, tell them to lock down the zoo, and wait until the police arrived. But what if Patrick’s parents and the police were wrong? What if Patrick was armed? If he’d gone to so much effort to find David’s school and stake it out day after day, certainly the thought could have crossed his mind to have bought a gun. I really didn’t want to find out.

  “You didn’t lose your custody of David because you’re bipolar,” I said. “You lost your custody because you refuse to do anything about it. You don’t seem to want to get better, and David can’t be around you when you’re like this. Just look at him. Can’t you see how afraid of you he is?”

  Patrick sneered at me but then turned around and crouched down to examine David. He didn’t seem to notice the way David flinched when he raised his hand to flatten one of his son’s cowlicks, and he didn’t seem bothered by the purple shadows under David’s eyes. In his mind, today was a beautiful, harmonious day and David was grinning with delight. He had his son and he was taking him on an outing, and he couldn’t recognize that David wasn’t having the time of his life.

  “He’s not afraid,” Patrick snapped, satisfied with his assessment, and straightened up. “Just bored. We came to the zoo to see the animals, not stand around arguing with you all day.” He reached down and seized one of David’s hands. “Should we go see the big cats now? The lions and tigers and cheetahs…” The black panther tattoo gleamed on his arm in the sunlight, the ink as shiny as a puddle of oil.

  David’s face had turned a grayish white, but he didn’t speak up. My heart was beating rapidly, and my mouth was so dry I felt like I could hardly crack open my lips to form words. “David’s afraid of big cats,” I said. Where the heck were the police officers when you needed them? Shouldn’t they have been here by now? Why hadn’t I agreed to let Duffy call them right away?

  “I’m going to teach my son to be fearless,” Patrick said loudly, and it wasn’t clear if he was addressing me or David or maybe the crowd in general.

  “There are other more important things to teach him.” I was stalling for time. I was so close to them now that I could’ve grabbed David’s hand, but Patrick still had a tight grip on his other one, and I really didn’t want to get in a tug-of-war contest with my son in the middle. “Like integrity. And steadfastness.”

  Patrick scowled and started to pull David away from me. David was resisting, dragging his sneakers, so Patrick slung his wiry arm around David’s back to shove him forward. “He’s my child, Anna, like me in every way, so you better get used to it. Now, say goodbye.”

  “He may look like you,” I shouted after him, and the people around us all turned to look. I wanted to make a spectacle, to draw attention to what was going on, so Patrick couldn’t just disappear into the crowd again. “But David is my child through and through.” I fought for air to fill my tired lungs and shout even louder. “He has my creativity and imagination. He has my spirit. He has my fight.” I ran after them, but Patrick was picking up speed and charging up the hill toward the big cat house. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Jamie was resolutely blocking his path.

  And finally! A flash of black—two police officers in black uniforms. They flew up the hill and restrained Patrick, breaking his grip on David. In an instant, Jamie had picked up my son and was carrying him over to me. I was so overcome with relief that I fell to my knees, right there on the concrete, and David ran into my arms. Holding my son had never been sweeter. I plastered his face and the top of his head with kisses. I was murmuring to him, but I hardly knew what I was saying, and I doubt what I said mattered to David at that point either. He was safe in his mother’s arms. In his mother’s love. We were back together, and I was never going to lose him again. And that was what mattered most.

  The Milwaukee police took Patrick into custody and led David, Jamie, and me into the zoo’s education center to question us about the last twenty-four hours. I held David on my lap, not wanting to miss out on a single second of physical contact with him. He leaned limply against me and every so often reached up to touch a strand of my hair, so I could tell he felt the same way. In this position, he recounted the whole frightening ordeal. Patrick had been watching him at recess but not every day; by David’s estimate, he had visited the school a total of four times. Most days, he leaned against a car in the shadowy parking lot and watched the children play, and David gave him a wide berth, but sometimes when the teachers congregated on the other side of the playground, he asked David questions about himself, like what he liked and where he lived, and sometimes David answered, and sometimes he didn’t. On the day Patrick had taken him, he had called David over to the fence by name, and this had both startled and impressed David. “David Patrick Jennings Gill,” Patrick had called him with a friendly, non-threatening smile. “Do you know how I know your name? Because I’m your dad.”

  David hadn’t believed him, but the man persisted and told him he would explain after school and they could go out for ice cream together. David turned him down, knowing that Grandpa Winston would be there to pick him up like always and that I wouldn’t like it if he talked to strangers. But when the final bell rang and David went outside with his other classmates to look for Winston’s car, he spotted Patrick first. And Patrick spotted him too. Patrick picked him up, shoved him in the car, and drove off—in the front seat of the car with no booster seat, David specified, clearly shocked by this—befo
re David could make a peep or anyone had even noticed in all the bustle. It was disturbing how easy it had been for Patrick when there were so many potential witnesses.

  Then they drove for what seemed like a very long time to David and stopped at an ice cream stand. Patrick made him eat his ice cream cone in the car, which also surprised him. At this point, David assumed the man would be taking him home, but Patrick insisted he still wanted to spend time with him and there was someone he wanted him to meet. And so they drove for a very long time again to a house, and David was tired and scared and didn’t want to get out of the car, but Patrick carried him inside. There were several barking dogs and a lady with blue hair, and Patrick asked her to go out and bring them some dinner. When she came back with Chinese food, David refused to eat it, and Patrick was very upset with him at first, but then he poured him a bowl of cereal with marshmallows instead. Afterwards, the blue-haired lady made up a bed for David on the couch, but it smelled yucky like dog hair and he had a hard time sleeping anyway because he was so sad and afraid. And then this morning, Patrick had given him more marshmallow cereal for breakfast before shepherding him to the zoo and promising a fun road trip to a place called Montana.

  He wasn’t ever planning on bringing him back, I realized in horror, squeezing David against me. And who was this blue-haired woman? A friend of Patrick’s? A girlfriend, maybe? Most likely, the person who’d been whispering in his ear about his rights. The police wanted to track her down for questioning, and because of the tip that had placed Patrick on the east side last night, they thought she might live there.

  Now that we had David back, all I wanted to do was bring him home to Salsburg. Winston and Duffy would be as overjoyed as I was to see him and hug him and smother him with kisses. Finally, after what seemed like hours, the police had everything they needed from us and allowed us to leave. Jamie offered to drive so I could have my hands free to make phone calls to my grandparents, the Gills, the school, Stacy, and my coworkers at the real estate office, updating everyone. I strapped David into his booster seat in the backseat of the minivan, and he fell asleep before we had even merged onto the highway. When my voice was starting to get hoarse and scratchy from telling the story so many times, I tucked my cell phone back in my purse, slipped my shoes off, and sat barefoot and cross-legged in the passenger seat. I kept turning around in my seat to steal glances at my sleeping son to make sure he was really there and that I hadn’t dreamt our reunion. I prayed the whole ordeal wouldn’t scar David emotionally. I prayed that we wouldn’t spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders, watching for Patrick. But for right now, Jamie, David, and I were all safe together in the minivan, and I allowed myself a deep sigh of relief.