Imaginary

Mama and Papa didn’t understand that he wasn’t imaginary. Mama said imaginary like she really meant dream or hope, and when Papa said it he always sounded as though he’d missed the words fucking childish and landed on imaginary instead. I tried to explain that he was invisible, not imaginary, but that seemed to siphon away at their conviction instead of fortify it.

Mama asked if he was my guardian angel. He was my guardian. I couldn’t say he was an angel. He looked nothing like the creatures in the stained glass windows of the church we went to Sunday mornings. He looked nothing like the paintings I saw in a picture book at school that looked more like a catalogue for the L’Ouvre than a children’s story.

I didn’t have a name for him at first. I thought of him as an echo, because he arrived after spring, in June, when the damp was tapering and the heat was swelling and bleaching the rocks in the river, schorching the grass and turning our yard into a burnt brown rug. The air was filled with breathlessness and swelling like it would pop. He appeared, cool and dark like soil that had been rained on, like an echo of spring. I was trying to sleep under my bed, which was cooler than under my sheets. I was covered in sweat, everything sticking to me, and flipping onto my stomach, then my back when sweat pooled on my stomach. Outside the window cicadas were already humming, too loudly to hear thoughts. Frogs chirped. Birds didn’t bother. It was too hot for their song.

It was black. Outside the room. Inside of it. Even with the fan whirring and blowing a weak cold breath across my tummy, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t think I would ever sleep.

I turned my cheek against the floor. It was sticky but cool, the ridges of the wood so pronounced I could feel it as I rubbed the side of my face against it. I whispered a word into the dark, to test it. House. Language dissolved in the dark, as if the neural mechanism to turn sounds into words could be eclipsed by the dark. House sounded made up. It delighted me endlessly to say it, over and over, hushed.

House, said a voice that was not my own, joining in.

He was on top of the bed, speaking over the edge of it, down to me. His voice was smooth, like butter softened by the summer heat. It was deep like nighttime. I giggled so loudly that Papa came stomping down the hall in his boxers and Coca Cola logo t-shirt to tell me to shut the hell up because the middle of the night was no time to make noise and it was already too goddamn hot and loud to sleep. If I wanted to goddamn play I could do it when the sun came up. He didn’t mention my invisible friend.

But I didn’t stop talking. We traded nonsense words through the night, in whispers, both of us trying to speak more quietly than the other until we couldn’t hear the words we exchanged at all. House, sugar, gecko, bat… We played with my dolls and I tried to show him how to use a yo-yo, but he just liked to watch me do it, even when I tangled the string and had to get it undone, slowly, in the dark, feeling for the knot.

One night, before bed, I was having tea with him, when Mama came and stood in the doorway, with a can of beer in her hand, condensation gathering on her fingers, her eyes narrowed, or maybe just looking narrowed because they were red and puffy. I looked up at her, because he did, and said, “Mama?”

Mama didn’t look at me at first. She looked at the window, like I’d spoken from outside. The heat made her curls stick to her neck. Her curls were shiny, her lip stain fading, but I thought she was beautiful. Mama was always the prettiest person, I thought.  Then she turned to me. “What?”

“I don’t know what name to choose. I want a good name. He needs one.”

Mama’s red lips pursed. One of her eyebrows was critical of me. “Who’s he?”

“My… guardian.” I tried out the word on my tongue. It tasted like house did in the dark.

“Why can’t your guardian think up his own name?” She didn’t sound indulgent or amused, but not angry about him, like Papa was. She didn’t care what his name was, and that bugged me, made my throat sticky.

“He wants me to name him. But I can’t think of anything good.”

“Spot,” Mama said.

I shook my head. There was an age when you realized your parents didn’t have the answer to everything, and I wasn’t at that age yet, so answers that didn’t satisfy me still left me feeling betrayed. “That’s a dog name. He needs a good name.”

“Alshat.”

Alshat was a star’s name. Mama had probably learned it in her days at university, which we almost never talked about because one time I’d asked my parents if I was going and Mama had gotten a sour, pinched look on her face while Papa’s cheeks and ears turned red. But Papa didn’t know Alshat was a star’s name. Mama called him Alshat when she asked if he was coming to dinner, or asked if he needed an extra seat at the table. Papa told me that if I didn’t stop pretending Alshat was real, I was going to get my head shoved in a toilet at school because people don’t like retards, Ginny.

Mama and Papa got into a lot of fights over that summer. It was too hot not to fight, and too hot to stay in the same room, so once they were done shouting they always went into separate rooms, or Mama left the house while Papa knocked something over. They were fighting in the kitchen while Mama made gravy and Papa tested the meat to see if it was done cooking, glaring at its pink insides. Alshat and I were sitting quietly at the table in the dining room to wait for dinner. I’d put out all the plates, but Papa had shoved the meat back under the grill, so I guessed it would be a while before we ate.

“-dying out here. This heat. There’s nothing to paint. Nowhere to study, for Christ’s sake,” Mama said. The wooden spoon she used to stir the gravy traced a wobbly shape in the air as she talked and gestured. Alshat was watching it too. “Not that you care. What’s wrong with university? Too hard or do you really not care about living in this dust bowl with no idea what’s out there in the world? Do you even know who Van Gogh was? Do you know him from your brother?”

“Don’t condescend to me. I bring home your food. What fucking right do you have to talk to me like that?” Papa snarled, sounding more like an angry cat than a man.

“I have every right,” Mama said. “I-”

“Alshat, don’t say that,” I said, putting my hand on the table between us. I leaned in and whispered, “We can go to my room and finish having tea. Or we can build a castle.”

Papa slammed one of the cupboards in the kitchen closed. It banged, once, then twice as it bounced. Mama looked ready to kill. “Fine!” Papa shouted at his fist. “Go to your fucking room, Ginny. Go!”

“Don’t you dare speak to her like that!” Mama growled. “Ginny, baby, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about your daddy.”

I wasn’t worried about Papa as much as I was about her. I didn’t like the scraped sound of her voice, or her gentle hands curled like claws, reaching for me. I hopped off my chair, Alshat behind me, and bolted for my room. I pulled it shut, even though it was like putting cardboard between myself and the hallway. I lay under my bed, the fan pointed at me, tracing my fingers in the dusty, and another in the sweat on my tummy. The dust stuck to my hot palms. “Alshat. I don’t want you to say that again, all right? They were just having a fight.”

Alshat apologized and found new words to make un-real. Then he started to sing. It felt like a siren, like an ambulance coming down the road, like the promise that something bad had happened and it was only going to get worse until it didn’t.

The next day I went to the front door and looked for my shoes. They were usually under Mama’s but Mama’s weren’t there. I put on my shoes and looked for her boots, the ones with the little hills and the holes at the toes that made her look beautiful and made men look at her when we went to the proper grocery store. Mama was gone with the shoes. Papa came out of his room to make coffee and grab a bear, and in the afternoon he went to the backyard and starting putting together the flattened cardboard boxes we kept in the shed. He made one phone call during dinner, and I watched him while I ate spaghetti from a can. I couldn’t hear the person on the other side of the phone but I guessed it was Grams, because he kept saying No, She’s your daughter, and Well, she’s all right, I didn’t tell her anything, I don’t know what the hell to say, She’s fine, Really?

“Ginny,” he said, holding out the phone as far as the cord would stretch. “It’s your Grandma. Talk to her. Stop talking to your invisible friend, talk to Grandma, come on.”

“Yes, sir.” I took the phone- somehow the cord stretched a little bit more to read me, all the way down on the kitchen floor, because the received was high on the wall. The phone smelled like Papa’s beer and cigarettes. “Grams?”

“Ginny. Oh, baby,” she said. She sounded a lot like Mama, but like Mama’s voice on a scratchy record. Mama had never smoked. “I’m getting a bus. I’ll be with you the day after tomorrow, all right?”

“Mama’s gone,” I said. “Alshat, stop.”

“Al- what? I know your Mama’s gone. You’re going to be just fine, sweetie,” Grams said. When she said it I knew that Alshat had told the truth, and he hadn’t listened to me the night before when Mama and Papa were fighting.

Grams came two days later, with her small bag full of things that smelled like her house in the larger town. She cleaned the linens and I helped her hang them on the line in the garden. She prodded Papa until he took a shower, then vacuumed his room while he was in the bathroom, then the living room, and my room. She set up a chair at the table for Alshat, even though Alshat was tall enough that he could stand during meals. She asked me to stay quiet at night because she was a room away from me and could hear me talking to him.

Alshat stayed all summer. Grams did too. The branches on the trees sagged, like the heat took something out of them as well. The air over everything shimmered, like the earth had become a furnace. Papa ate in the garden, or his room, and didn’t give Grams the chance to vacuum his floor a second time. When we ate I spoke to Alshat when Grams was staring at nothing, the way Mama sometimes did. But Grams heard me, when Mama didn’t. She looked disappointed when I only gave her one-word answers to questions. But I didn’t have anything to say to her at the empty table.

“You’re excused,” she said, voice laced with sadness. “You can go to your room, Ginny. You and Alshat. Except- listen. Even if your Mama doesn’t come back, you know maybe she’ll send you a letter, right? You know she loves you, right? She didn’t leave because of you, baby. You know that, right?”

I nodded and waited for her to finish. Sometimes people needed a few moments to let the words coalesce and sort themselves out on their tongue before speaking them. Grams leaned across the table and patted my hand. She had painted nails, like Mama, but her hand was covered with wrinkles, like the folds in laundry. She raked my wrist with her nails as she pulled her hand away. Alshat was looked at the spot on my wrist she’d touched.

“And here,” she added, picking up something from one of the chairs. It had been pushed under the table so I hadn’t seen the shopping bag sitting on it, but it had a plastic bag inside of that, and in that there was a Polaroid camera. It was black and plastic-looking with a few stickers on it. “It was your Mama’s. She said you could have it. She said you could have anything of hers you wanted. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I remember smiling, so wide it almost hurt, because I’d never had my own camera. And Grams looked happy to give it to me, and I could feel Alshat excited beside me. “How many pictures can I take?”

“As many as you want,” she said. “We’ve got extra rolls of film. Try to make these ones last at least a week, all right? I have to go into Golden Lake to get more film, and I don’t want to do that too often.”

I nodded. I didn’t say thank you. I was already running to my bedroom. I kicked the door shut and told Alshat to pose for the camera. He didn’t want to pose anywhere except under the bed. I lay down on my tummy and slithered halfway under the bed, turning the camera on, the bulb leaping up, ready for action. It was dark under the bed, even though the sun hadn’t gone down and my room was bright with sun. “Say cheese,” I said, like the photographer who took our school photos.

Alshat didn’t say anything. I took his picture and listened to the camera spit it out, looking at the shiny grey surface of it before I waved it around, waiting for the grey to resolve into shadows, into shapes, into Alshat. I held up the picture to show Alshat himself, like wide crocodile-mouth, his eyes like slashes of light, the outline of him, which was all that appeared in the dark, and all that showed up on film.

Your Mama is never coming back for that camera.

“I know that, Alshat,” I said.

Alshat’s eyes were all colour in the Polaroid picture. No pupils.

Do you want me to get rid of your Papa too?

Art by RovinaCal

Text by Lucie MacAulay