The Pillow Friend (6 page)

Her eagerness to hear more woke her into an echoing silence. Only as she fell away again did she begin to hear the voice again. This time, she made some sense of what it was saying. But she could not be sure. The words, and the images that accompanied them, might just have been the beginning of a dream.

She was determined not to confuse dream with reality. From the beginning, before she'd ever set eyes on Myles, she had wanted him to be real. She wanted her dream to come true, she didn't just want to pretend, to have an imaginary pillow friend. The words had to come from Myles; she wanted to hear his true voice. It was so tempting, now that it seemed to have begun, to give in, to let herself believe that what she was hearing was not simply from inside her own head—but she fought against the easiness of it. Leslie had tricked herself, she'd decided. Myles had never spoken to her friend. Agnes wanted real magic; she wasn't going to settle for pretend.

Magic had rules, she knew that from her reading. Things didn't just happen because you wanted them; Myles was not a mechanical doll designed to speak to anybody; she would have to earn his companionship, learn the rules of his magic. She knew she had started on that path. Their relationship had changed on the day that Leslie had given him back to her. He had let her see him for the first time as he really was—as he
could
be. For the first time, when she looked at him, he had looked back. Now she had to find out how to make herself the kind of person he would talk to.

She couldn't simply go and live in another house, among other people: the police would bring her home again if she tried. She was stuck with her family and the name and address they had given her, so she would have to work on the things that were within her power to change. Parents and teachers would tell you what you were supposed to do to be a good girl and win their approval, but Myles was not so helpful. She had to guess what he wanted of her, but when she guessed right she was rewarded with another thrilling glimpse, another moment of contact with his real and living self.

Sometimes she went into other people's houses, but now she was careful not to get caught. She would eat something out of their refrigerators, or move small objects to different places. Some of the things she did were bold and daring, they required bravery and skill, while other actions were more like penances—having to eat six olives, or spending the whole night on the floor beside her bed. She didn't know where the ideas came from—they were dares, not commands, but they came into her head like suggestions from someone else rather than ideas of her own. She couldn't imagine why Myles should care what she ate or where she slept, why an old photograph from the family album had to be destroyed, or one of her sisters' lipsticks stolen, why certain trees had to be climbed or neighbors spied upon, but she did everything that came into her mind to do and was rewarded by the certainty of being on the right track, drawing ever closer to Myles.

She began to hear him speaking at last. It was always very late at night, just as she was on the verge of sleep, and it wasn't at all as she had imagined it would be. He didn't tell her stories; he didn't even sound as if he was talking to her. It was more as if she was catching fragments of a conversation he was having with someone else. She could only catch a few words at a time, and they didn't make much sense to her. She felt the temptation to try to make them make sense, to weave those few words and sentence fragments into a story, to create for herself what she had hoped he would tell her. But she resisted that urge, and concentrated on what he told her, trying to make sense of it by writing it down in a notebook she kept beside her bed.

Although she was glad to have been successful at last, the reality of her relationship with Myles was not as she had imagined it would be. It did not make her happy.

Summer ended and it was time to start school again. On the first day, Agnes abruptly made up her mind to go into second grade alone. She took Myles out of the pencil box and put him back on her bed. She felt a little guilty about it, because he might not like being left behind, but there was also a great sense of relief as she ran down the stairs swinging her empty book bag so it slapped against her bare legs. If Myles wasn't with her she wouldn't be tempted to do things that might get her into trouble. And if he punished her by keeping quiet at night—well, maybe that wasn't the worst thing that could happen.

As soon as Agnes got home she rushed straight upstairs to tell her doll about her day, and start winning his forgiveness. Her room was tidy, the clothes she'd left on the floor had been put away, her bed was made, and Myles was gone.

If her mother had taken him off the pillow when she made up the bed she might have put him on a shelf, or in the dollhouse, or on the table. He was in none of those places, nor was he even—and she emptied it completely to make sure—in the toy basket.

“Mom! Mommy!” Shouting, she ran out into the hall and straight into Rosamund, who grabbed her and shook her slightly. “Stop that yelling! Mother's not feeling well, she's lying down in her room. Tell me what's wrong.”

“I want my doll.”

“You're big enough to fetch your own toys.”

“He's gone! I left him on my bed and now he's gone!”

“Well, she must have moved him when she made your bed. If you'd make your own bed up you wouldn't have this problem. Come on, I'm sure we can find your doll without bothering Mother.”

But no matter where Rosamund looked, Myles was not to be found.

“Are you sure you didn't take him to school? The way you were carrying him around all summer, I can't believe you left him at home.”

“We don't take dolls to school in second grade,” she muttered.

“Oh, we're all grown up now, huh? Look in your book bag anyway.”

Although she knew she hadn't taken Myles to school, her sister's question raised another possibility in her mind. What if Myles had been so annoyed by being left behind that he had tried to come after her, or hidden himself somewhere, to make her sorry?

Well, she was sorry, and she waited anxiously for bedtime, when she was sure he would return to punish her.

But Myles did not return, not that night, or the next, or the one after that. This was her punishment, she realized, not a temporary absence but total loss. She had been tested and found wanting.

She mourned him, she grieved, but her unhappiness was far from consuming. She was too young, their relationship had been too odd and difficult, there was too much else to think about, too many things to learn at school, new friends, a new teacher, books to be read, games to be played. Her days were very full; it was really only at bedtime that her thoughts turned, sadly, to her lost companion.

Sometimes she took up her bedside notebook to read and reread the words which were all that he'd left her, looking for an answer she never found.

They made no more sense on the tenth reading than they had the first. One day when she was bored she copied some of the lines onto another page and set herself the task of weaving them into a story. It was surely not the story that Myles had been telling to his invisible audience, but she found it strangely satisfying. There was something exciting about giving his words more meaning, and it was not long before writing in this way became her favorite bedtime activity, better even than reading.

That was the year she began to write, not just the private, bedtime stories, but poetry, in school, encouraged by her teacher. Some of her poems appeared in the school's mimeographed magazine, and one of them was singled out and won a prize.

That was the year she made friends with Nina Schumacher, who would gradually, over the next couple of years, replace Leslie as her best friend.

Second grade was also the year of air raid drills, and seeing a teacher cry; of the demonic Russians who wanted to destroy the world; of President Kennedy on television telling his fellow Americans that if the Russian ships did not turn back we might soon be at war. It was a particularly bad time for her mother, who often did not emerge from her darkened bedroom all day, leaving her family to cope as best they could.

By December the Cuban Missile Crisis was over and the world was not destroyed. Whether or not it was connected Agnes never knew, but the worst of Mary Grey's personal crisis had also passed. On December 15, she bought herself a new turquoise dress with matching shoes and put on her rarely worn mink stole to go out with her husband to celebrate their fourteenth wedding anniversary.

The twins were left in charge. Agnes had a bath and got into her nightie early, her agreement with her sisters being that she could stay up until they heard their parents' car on the drive—then she had to jump into bed and pretend she'd been asleep for hours.

Getting to stay up late always sounded like such a treat, but the twins would never play with her for very long and she didn't like watching television as they did, so she soon grew bored. She was tired of reading and didn't feel like writing. She was casting about for something else to do when she thought of her parents' closet and the Christmas presents which were sure to be hidden there.

That closet was strictly off-limits, and not just at Christmas time. It was full of her mother's clothes, many of them expensive designer dresses which had not been worn since before Agnes' birth. Before the twins were born Mary Grey had been a model (“mannequin,” she said, which made Agnes imagine her frozen into a lifeless posture like the human-sized dolls in the windows of the big downtown stores) and had special discounts at Battlestein's and Neiman-Marcus. The old clothes were kept carefully stored in plastic wrap or garment bags. “They'll come back in fashion someday, and as long as I keep my figure I don't have to worry,” said her mother. “So I want them kept nice. I don't want your grubby little paws all over them.” Sometimes as a special treat she would give her daughters a fashion show, mincing along an imaginary catwalk in the living room. But it had been many months since she'd been in the mood to do that.

That night Agnes felt a wistful longing for her mother, as if she had been away for much longer than a few hours. She'd had so many headaches over the past few months, so many days when she was not to be disturbed, lying in her darkened bedroom, unhappy and as unreachable as if she were in another country. Although she'd been in a good mood all day, not enough time had passed for her family to relax and take her presence for granted again.

Agnes went into the master bedroom and closed the door quietly behind her. In the dark, she held her breath as she eased open the closet door and then took the big step over the threshold, from carpet onto bare wood and into the unmistakably charged atmosphere, cool and quiet and filled with the grown-up smells of cotton and silk and wool and leather, lavender, shoe polish, aftershave and her mother's perfume. In that rich air she entered an exalted state, an intense excitement that was also profoundly peaceful. Surrounded by her parents' clothing, their personal possessions, she felt a secret access to their lives; unseen by them she could draw near, becoming closer to them than was normally possible. If she ever dared to take one of her mother's precious old dresses from its protective wrap and put it on she would know the things her mother knew, would almost be her mother. That was why her mother forbade her to touch them, and that was why, someday, she would have to disobey. She reached out and felt for the light cord, grasped it, pulled, and the light came on with a satisfying snick and golden glow.

Brightly wrapped presents glittered at her from the shelves above her head, but even more interesting were the various shapes, not square but rounded or bulging, more than half-hidden by brown or white paper bags, or rough cocoons of tissue paper. She sighed with pleasure but made no effort to reach or touch them. She preferred the anticipation to knowledge. It was more fun to glimpse the mystery and tantalize herself with guessing than to know for certain what she would find on Christmas Day.

She sat down and, as calmly as if this had been her own closet, these her own things, and hers the whole night to browse through them, picked up a shoe box and opened it. Ah, the red ones. She smiled as she stroked the smooth leather, then took them out and put them on the floor. She surveyed them, head cocked and forefinger laid along her cheek. “Well, I don't know. I like the color, but don't you have any with higher heels? What's in this box?”

These were black patent leather. She lifted them out and set them beside the red ones. “Hmmm, yes, they are higher, but I don't know. . . . What else do you have?”

She glanced around, hoping for a pair she hadn't tried before, shoes her mother had bought for some special occasion five or six years ago and kept unworn. There was one box half-hidden by others, pushed to the back. It looked promising, but when she took the lid off she was disappointed to see an old pair of brown moccasins—not her mother's usual style, although they looked well-worn. Then she noticed there was something else besides the shoes in the box, something wrapped in white silk. As soon as she picked it up, she knew.