“Honey,” he said, “did you have an imaginary friend when you were a kid?”
“Sure. Her name was Doris. She had red hair in pigtails and a lot of freckles. She was dumber than I was.”
“What happened to her?” he asked.
“I guess she went where imaginary friends go when they’re no longer needed. Out of awareness, out of mind.”
“Did anyone else ever see her?”
I helped myself to more popcorn. It really wasn’t that bad. “Of course not. What are you getting at?”
“Humor me,” he said.
He was leaning on his elbow watching me, strangely serious, considering that both of us were naked, covers drawn up to our chins because the apartment was cold, and a bowl of stale popcorn was balanced on my stomach.
“Okay. I’m humoring you. No one else ever saw Doris. Now it’s your turn. Tell me about your imaginary friend.”
“One more question first,” he said. “What if someone else had seen her? More than one saw her?”
I shook my head. “Then she wouldn’t have been imaginary. And it would have freaked me out when she went away.”
He had yet another question. “Did you know Doris was a product of your imagination?”
I had to stop and think about that. Finally I had to admit that I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think so.
“You said one more question,” I said then. “You’re over the limit. Just tell me where you’re going with this. Is it something about your imaginary friend?”
“Yeah,” he said. He took some popcorn, more, I thought, to buy a little time than because he wanted it.
“Suppose an imaginary friend isn’t always a playmate. Not a Calvin and Hobbes situation, or Christopher and Pooh, and not a red headed Doris. Suppose it’s an object.”
“Okay. A stretch, but I’m supposing. Your friend was a little unusual. Then what?”
“Suppose it’s a staircase,” he said slowly.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed and nearly choked on popcorn, and I upset the bowl. When I could speak, I said, “Your imaginary friend was a staircase?”
He nodded, and I laughed harder until he had to pound me on the back for fear I would really choke.
We had to get up, of course. You can’t roll around on a bed strewn with buttered popcorn and salt. There was more that came out in bits and pieces that night.
Vernon had had the ability, or whatever it can be called, to project, conjure, imagine, do something, and make a staircase appear, one that anyone else in the room could also see. It stopped when he was six or seven, the way Doris stopped appearing to me at about that age. His father had done the same thing. Not every generation did it, he said that night, sometimes it skipped, but it always returned, possibly as far back as when the ancestors were leaving the trees and opting for houses with indoor plumbing.
I didn’t believe a word of it. But it came to pass. What a useful phrase, one that should not be discarded or scorned. Jason’s first staircase appeared when he was three, while we were still in a New York apartment.
I was reading a magazine article and Jason was playing with blocks and a truck that he crashed into the blocks over and over with a cry of, “Whoosh!” I glanced up from the magazine when he became still, and there it was, a fully formed staircase, with a banister. Except for the fact that it ended where the wall met the ceiling, it looked exactly the way a staircase would look in any house with an upstairs.
I screamed, “Vernon!” and I grabbed Jason and held him against me as hard as I could as I backed away from the apparition all the way to the wall.
Vernon ran in, looking as frightened as I was. He saw the staircase and said, “We don’t have an upstairs.” The staircase vanished.
Jason reacted to my terror and began to cry, and I was shaking. After Vernon got us both calmed down again, and Jason resumed his play, Vernon said, “Honey, it doesn’t do anything. It’s just there. All you have to do is say we don’t have an upstairs and it’s gone.”
He stayed close to us the rest of the afternoon, but we didn’t talk about it until Jason was in bed. “April,” he said earnestly that night, “there’s nothing dangerous about it. He doesn’t have a psychological problem any more than I did, or than Dad did. He’ll outgrow it, exactly the way I did, the way you outgrew Doris.”
“But it will freak out anyone who suddenly sees a staircase appear,” I said. “And someone will.”
He shook his head. “It just happens in rooms, in closed-in places, never outside. We’ll move to a warmer place where he can spend more time outside. We’ll home school him until he outgrows it, and avoid house guests for the next few years. Can you cope with that? Is it asking too much?”
I had no answer, and he put his arms around me and drew me closer to him. “Honey, Dad’s okay, as you well know, and I seem to be okay. No lasting effect, no damage. Just a few somewhat irregular years ahead, and it’s over. Please, April, try to see it that way.”
I had to admit that he was more than okay. He writes elegant articles for magazines like
The National Geographic
and
Archeology Review
. Anthropological discoveries, architectural wonders, basket weaving in Bolivia, dances in Tibet, things like that and they are always well received, as are his photographs. And Dad, his father, is the owner of a prestigious horse breeding farm, his horses prized and ridden by royalty, he boasts. He claimed that he made very little money from it, and Vernon explained that it was true, because he had practically an army of workers on the farm, managers, trainers, farm workers, and so on.
That night Dad joined us and between them they made it sound very simple, almost commonplace. When the staircase appeared, I could make it disappear by saying we don’t have an upstairs. We should not make an issue of it with Jason, who seemed unaware of it. And Dad would find us a house as soon as possible where Jason could spend a lot of time outside. Also, Dad would spend more time with us, and with three of us no one person would be burdened by being watchful at all times. We especially should not let Jason realize there was anything weird about stairs that appeared and vanished. It was just another part of the mysterious world he found himself in.
Dad found the house we’re living in now, a few miles from Roanoke, in an affluent subdivision with two sections, A and B. The A section is completed and most of the houses there are occupied. The B section is mostly empty lots with only three complete houses. Two on the far end, and ours. Apparently the developer ran out of money, couldn’t get credit, lost interest or something and Dad was able to get a good deal on a lease for this house.
Across the street from our house is a park with a clubhouse, a large children’s playground, a wading pool, and a covered pavilion. In our own fenced back yard we have a whole playground, swing, sliding board, a jungle gym to climb, and a sandbox.
Jason is enraptured by trucks, and has a fleet of ten or twelve that he plays with in the kitchen when I’m busy there. If there’s a pause in the roars, the whooshes and crashing sounds, I’m quick to glance around and say the magic words if necessary. “We don’t have an upstairs.” The roars and whooshes and crashes resume and all is well.
My ordinary days might strike others as extraordinary, but I’ve found that anything that you get used to takes on the cloak of ordinariness rather quickly.
We all share household chores, and Dad’s available as a babysitter when he’s at our house. Vernon and I go to the movies, have dinner out now and then, and there’s bus service nearby to a big mall and also to downtown Roanoke. I know why both Vernon and Dad want to make my life as easy as possible. Vernon’s mother abandoned them when he was four, and Vernon’s desperately afraid I might decide to go back to my old job in New York. Not a chance. I worked for a soulless insurance company. Besides, I love him too much to think of leaving. I think his mother was a twit who probably ran off with the UPS man.
Most mornings Jason and I go to the park and playground where I read or chat with other adults and Jason romps and plays with other children. We get back to the house in time for lunch and then a nap for Jason.
The day everything changed we arrived back home and saw two men talking to Dad in the living room. They were both wearing dark suits, and my first thought was missionaries.
That day, with the strangers in the house, I hurried Jason past the open arch to the living room and on to the kitchen. I was fixing his lunch when Dad entered.
“Insurance salesmen,” I said. “Missionaries.”
“Nope. Researchers. They’re studying memory loss and drafted me to be one of their subjects.”
I stopped cutting up an apple. “What do you mean, drafted you?”
“It seems,” he said, “they’re into a study of a new drug to arrest memory loss. It starts at an early age, but after about sixty it speeds up. They want people from sixty to sixty-five to participate in a fifteen-year study to see if the stuff works. They enrolled a couple of guys at the clubhouse, and someone mentioned that I was sixty-two, and they came after me to add to the study. They give tests now and then to see what’s going on. They’ll be back the day after tomorrow to give me the first test before the stuff has had time to take effect.”
“Dad, please don’t tell me you’ve agreed, that you let two strangers give you a drug without checking them out thoroughly first. Please tell me you didn’t do that.”
“April,” he said, “they showed me their credentials. They’re medical researchers.”
I called Vernon out from his study. “Tell him what you just told me,” I said to Dad.
“Well,” he said in a very deliberate way, after he retold it, “I said they gave me the drug, but I didn’t say I swallowed it. Now did I? See?” He fished in his pocket and came up with a little white pill.
“We don’t have an upstairs,” Vernon said in a loud voice then, and I didn’t even bother to turn to see the staircase before it vanished.
“Brain drain dudes,” Jason said. “Brain drain dudes.”
Vernon rolled his eyes and I said helplessly, “Some of the older kids at the playground. He’s picking up a lot of words there.”
Dad held the pill in the palm of his hand and regarded it thoughtfully. “Funny thing,” he said. “I’m sure I never mentioned to anyone how old I am.”
We were all looking at the pill, and Vernon said in a strained voice, “Dad, I think you’d better put that in something.”
The pill in Dad’s hand was changing, there were tiny thread-like wisps emerging on one side. Dad touched it gingerly with his fingertip, enough to roll it a bit and the threads vanished.
“I think you’re right,” Dad said. Vernon got a plastic baggie out and Dad let the pill fall into it. He zipped the baggie closed. He tilted his head slightly in the direction of Vernon’s study and said to me, “I guess we’d better let you get on with giving Jason his lunch.” They walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway to the study, entered and closed the door behind them.
It seemed to take forever to get Jason to eat, then to read him a story and tuck him in for a nap. The staircase never appeared while he was in bed, and I was free as soon as he was bedded down. I hurried to the study. No one was there.
They could have gone out without passing through the kitchen, and evidently that’s what they had done, and I was furious. A pill that grows and retracts tendrils, strange men passing out pseudo drugs, appearing and disappearing staircases, suddenly it was all too much. At that moment if the UPS man had come knocking, I would have been tempted to get in his brown truck and go wherever he was going.
Dad’s car was still in the driveway and our car, Vernon’s and mine, was still in the garage, so they couldn’t have gone far. Sometimes when Vernon was stuck on an article he went for long walks through our half of the subdivision, and I decided that was what they were up to.
Walking, talking, leaving me out of it altogether, whatever it was. Thinking about it only made me angrier. Then I heard a dog barking and Vernon came into the living room where I was and he was leading a dog on a leash.
I sank down onto the sofa and closed my eyes for a moment. They were both still there when I opened them again. “Where did that come from?” I asked.
“Pet store,” he said. “Cute, isn’t he? He’s a cocker spaniel.”
“Vernon, I may be losing my mind,” I said carefully. “Would you like to explain anything to me? Anything at all before I start screaming.”
The dog had black and white spotted long hair, with the requisite oversized silky ears, big soulful eyes, a plume of a tail that was wagging his whole body at the moment.
Vernon sat down next to me and unleashed the dog. He began to run around the room sniffing everything, including me.
“He’s for Jason,” Vernon said. “He’s housebroken, not quite two years old and answers to the name of Spotty.” He took a rubber ball from his pocket and held it up, as if to prove a point.
“What in God’s name is going on here?” I demanded, and heard my voice rising before I even thought of yelling.
Vernon took my hand. “April, please believe this,” he said, “I never meant to deceive you, lie to you, but there are a few things I didn’t mention before. I was afraid to,” he said and he sounded sincere, abject even. “I was afraid I’d lose you,” he added in a low voice. “I love you so much it scared me, thinking that I might lose you.”
It’s hard to stay mad at a man who sounds like that and says that, but I did. “So, what lies, what deceit? How did you get that dog home from a pet store? Both cars were here! Where’s Dad, and why did those men come and give him a pill that puts out tendrils?”
I would have gone on, but he put his hand on my mouth and said in an agonized voice, “I’ve been a fool and I’m sorry. Please promise you’ll hear me out before you say anything else.”
I nodded and he removed his hand. “That night, when I told you about our family, it was clear that you didn’t believe me,” he said, holding my hand. “I should have told the rest, but . . . Anyway, I didn’t. He’ll outgrow it at about six or seven, that’s true. But not forever,” he said. I yanked my hand loose. “Just hear me out,” he said again and I put both clenched hands in my lap, prepared to listen before I lit into him.