A Nest of Nightmares

A FRIEND IN NEED

Photographs lie, like people, like memories. What would it prove if I found Jane’s face and mine caught together in a picture snapped nearly twenty years ago? What does it mean that I can’t find such a photograph?

I keep looking. My early life is so well documented by my father’s industrious camera work that Jane’s absence seems impossible. She was, after all, my best friend; and all my other friends – including one or two I can’t, at this distance, identify – are there in black and white as they run, sit, stand, scowl, cry, laugh, grimace, and play around me. Page after page of birthday parties, dressing-up games, bicycle riding, ice-cream eating, of me and my friends Shelly, Mary, Betty, Carl, Julie, Howard, Bubba, and Pam. But not Jane, who is there in all my memories.

Was she ever really there? Did I imagine her into existence? That’s what I thought for twelve years, but I don’t believe that anymore.

I saw her in the Houston airport today and I recognised her, although not consciously. What I saw was a small woman of about my own age with dark, curly hair. Something about her drew my attention.

We were both waiting for a Braniff flight from New York, already five minutes late. A tired-looking man in uniform went behind the counter, made a throat­-clearing noise into the microphone, and announced that the flight would be an hour late.

I swore and heard another voice beside me, like an echo. I turned my head and met her eyes. We laughed together.

‘Are you meeting someone?’ she asked.

‘My mother.’

‘What a coincidence,’ she said flatly. ‘We’ve both got mothers coming to visit.’

‘No, actually my mother lives here. She went to New York on business. Your mother lives there?’

‘LongIsland,’ she said. It came out as one word; I recognised the New Yorker’s pronunciation.

‘That’s where you’re from?’

‘Never west of the Hudson until two years ago.’ Her sharp eyes caught my change of expression. ‘You’re surprised?’

‘No.’ I smiled and shrugged because the feeling of familiarity was becoming stronger. ‘I thought I knew you, that’s all. Like from a long time ago, grade school?’

‘I’m Jane Renzo,’ she said, thrusting out her hand. ‘Graduate of Gertrude Folwell Elementary School and Elmont High, class of ’73.’

Jane, Jane Renzo, I thought. Had I known someone by that name? There were distant resonances, but I could not catch them. ‘Cecily Cloud,’ I said, taking her hand.

‘What a great name!’

Our hands unclasped and fell apart. She was grinning; there was a hint of a joke in her eyes, but also something serious.

‘But it doesn’t ring any bells?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it does, it definitely does. Sets the bells a-ringing. It’s the name I always wanted. A name like a poem. I hated always being plain Jane.’ She made a face.

‘Better than Silly Cecily,’ I said. ‘The kids used to call me Silly until I got so used to it that it sounded like my real name. But I always hated it. I used to wish my parents had given me a strong, sensible name that couldn’t be mispronounced or misspelled or made fun of – like Jane.’

Jane. Memory stirred, but it was like something deep in a forest. I couldn’t get a clear sight of it.

‘We all have our own miseries, I guess,’ she said. She looked at her watch and then at me, a straightforward, friendly look. ‘We’ve got time to kill before this flight gets here. You want to go and sit down somewhere and have some coffee?’

The rush of pleasure I felt at her suggestion was absurdly intense, inappropriate, as if she were a long-lost friend, returned to me when I had nearly given up hope of seeing her again. Trying to understand it, I said, ‘Are you sure we haven’t met before?’

She laughed – a sharp, defensive sound.

Hastily, afraid of losing our easy rapport, I said, ‘It’s only that I feel I know you. Or you remind me of someone. You never came to Houston when you were a kid?’

She shook her head.

‘College?’

‘Montclair State.’ We had begun to walk together in search of a coffee shop, down the long, windowless, carpeted, white-lit corridor. It was like being inside a spaceship, I thought, or in an underground city of the distant, sterile future. We were in Houston, but we might as easily have been in New York, Los Angeles, or Atlanta for all the cues our surroundings gave us. It was a place set apart from the real world, untouched by time or season, unfettered by the laws of nature.

‘It’s like the future,’ I said.

Jane looked at the curving walls and indirect lighting and gave me an appreciative smile. ‘It is kind of Star Treky,’ she said.

We came to rest in a small, dim, overpriced restaurant which was almost empty, in contrast to the bar on one side and the fast-food cafeteria on the other. I saw by my watch that it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. We ordered coffee, causing the middle-aged waitress to sigh heavily and stump away.

‘Actually, I’d rather have a shot of Tullamore Dew,’ said Jane. ‘Or a large snifter of brandy.’

‘Did you want – ’

She shook her head. ‘No, no. Better not. It’s just that the thought of seeing my mother again has me wanting reinforcement. But I’d be less capable of dealing with her drunk than I am sober.’

I looked at her curiously because she had struck me from the first as a capable, almost fearless person. ‘You don’t get along with your mother?’

‘Something like that. I moved out here to get away from her, and she still won’t let me be. She calls me every night. Sometimes she cries. She won’t believe that I’m grown up and that I have my own life to live, a life I’ve chosen. She’s still waiting for me to give up this silliness and move back home. My sisters got away because they got married. But in her eyes I’m still a child.’

The waitress returned, setting our coffees down before us with unnecessary emphasis. I watched the dark brown liquid slide over the rim of my cup, to be caught in the shallow white bowl of the saucer.

‘You’re lucky if you and your mother can relate to each other as people,’ Jane said.

I nodded, although I had never given the matter any thought; I’d simply taken it for granted. ‘We have disagreements, but we’re pretty polite about them,’ I said.

This made Jane laugh. ‘Polite,’ she said. ‘Oh, my.’ She peeled the foil top off a plastic container of coffee whitener. ‘You’re so lucky . . . to have had a happy childhood and a mother who knows how to let go.’

It seemed at first acceptable, the way she so calmly passed judgment on my life, as if she knew it; then, suddenly strange.

‘I think I had a fairly normal childhood,’ I said. ‘Very ordinary. At least, it always seemed that way to me.’ It had been suburban, middle-class, and sheltered. I saw my experiences reflected in the lives of my friends, and I found it hard to believe that Jane had come from a background terribly dissimilar. ‘You were unhappy as a child?’

Jane hesitated, stirring her coffee from black to brown. Then she said, ‘I don’t remember.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. I don’t remember my childhood. Most of it, anyway. It’s as if I went to sleep when I was five and didn’t wake up until I was twelve. The years in between are a blank.’

I stared at her, trying to understand. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t doubt that I had forgotten much of my own childhood, but there remained a satisfyingly large jumble of memories that I could rummage around in when the need arose. Some of the things that had happened to me remained as vivid in my imagination as if they had just happened: the day I had broken my bride doll, a rabbit-shaped cake my mother had baked one Easter, the taste of water warm from the garden hose at the height of summer, the Christmas when I had been ill, games of hide-and-seek, classroom embarrassments . . . I had only to let down the barriers to be flooded by memories, most of them far more intense than the recollections of anything that had happened to me as an adult. To be without such memories was to be without a childhood, to lack a certain identity.

‘I can remember a few things from when I was very young,’ Jane said into my stunned silence. ‘None of them pleasant. And my sisters have told me things . . . it’s just as well I don’t remember. The things I’ve forgotten can’t hurt me.’

‘But why? What happened to you? What was so terrible?’

‘I’m sure other kids survived a lot worse. In fact, I know that for certain. There’s no telling what will make one kid break and another survive, or what kind of defence mechanisms are needed. I work with emotionally disturbed children, and some of them have every right to be, given their backgrounds, while others come from loving families and just . . . crack over things that other kids take in their stride. All I can say about the things that happened to me – well, I had my way of dealing with them, whether it was a good way or not. Forgetting, blotting it out, was part of it.’

She sounded defensive and apologetic. I tried to look reassuring. ‘You don’t have to. If it makes you uncomfort­able, don’t talk about it.’

‘No, that’s it, I do want to talk about it. But I don’t want to bore you. I don’t want to burden you with my old stories.’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to listen, if it helps you to talk.’

‘I think it might help. Well . . .’ She cleared her throat and took a sip of coffee, looking at me self-consciously over the cup. ‘One of my earliest memories is when I was about four. My mother was forty-nine and menopausal. She was crazy that year, more than usual. Any little thing could set her off, and when she got angry, she got violent. I can’t remember what it was I did, but it was probably something as minor as interrupting her while she was thinking – I got swatted for that more than once. At any rate, she started screaming. We were in the kitchen. She grabbed the carving knife and came for me, yelling that she’d cut off my hands so I couldn’t make any more trouble.’

‘Jane!’

She shrugged, smiling wryly. ‘I’m sure I remember the knife as bigger than it really was. And maybe she wouldn’t have hurt me at all. But what did I know? I was a little kid. And when somebody comes at you with a knife, the instinct is to get the hell away. She chased me all through the house. I finally hid in a cabinet and listened to her looking for me. One of my sisters got my father, and he managed to calm her down. But nobody knew where I was, and I was afraid to come out. I crouched there in the dark, beneath the bathroom sink, for hours, until I decided it was safe to come out. I hadn’t heard her screaming for a long time, but I was afraid that she might be tricking me and that I’d open the door to find her on the other side, the knife in her hand and a horrible smile on her face.’

‘Was she insane?’ I asked quietly.

‘No.’ The denial came too quickly. Jane paused and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Define the term. Generally, she could cope. Was she really over the edge, or just trying to scare me into being good? It’s hard to decide even now. She was very unhappy at that time in her life, and she’s always been a very self-dramatizing person. We all have our own ways of dealing with life. What’s insane?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, although I thought I did. ‘Was she violent toward you most of the time? Did you go in fear of your life?’

‘Sometimes. It was hard to know where you stood with her. That’s the worst thing for a kid. I couldn’t count on her, I didn’t know how to get the right responses. Sometimes she would be very loving, sometimes what I did would make her laugh. At other times the same thing would have her screaming at me. But more often she turned her anger against herself. She must have tried to kill herself – or at least she pretended to – half a dozen times. I remember her lying on the floor in the living room with an empty bottle of pills and a half-full bottle of vodka. She told us she was going to die, and she forbade us to call for help. We were supposed to sit there and watch her die, so that she could die looking at the faces she loved most. We didn’t dare move. Finally she seemed to have passed out, and Sue, my oldest sister, tried to call Dad. But the second her hand touched the telephone, my mother sat up and started screaming at her for being a disobedient bastard.’

‘Lord,’ I said, when Jane paused to sip coffee. I tried to imagine it, but could not quite achieve the child’s point of view. ‘How did you survive?’

‘Well, I blotted it out, mostly. I had my imaginary life.’ She smiled.

‘How do you mean?’

‘When you were a kid, weren’t there some things which seemed just as real to you as real life, although you knew they were different? The things you didn’t tell grown-ups about, although they were every bit as real and important – if not more so – as life at school and at home?’

‘You mean like pretend games?’ I asked. ‘I used to pretend – ’ And suddenly I remembered. ‘Of course! That’s who you remind me of.’ I laughed, feeling silly. ‘Jane. I had an imaginary friend named Jane.’

Jane’s smile was somewhat wistful. ‘What was she like?’

‘Oh, she was everything I wanted to be and wasn’t. Practical and neat instead of dreamy and disorganized. Her hair was dark and curly instead of straight and mousy. She read a lot, like me, and knew all kinds of wonderful games. She had my favourite name, of course.’ I shrugged and then laughed. ‘She was like a real person. She didn’t have any magical powers – except, of course, that she disappeared from time to time. She was actually rather like you, I guess. Isn’t that funny, that my imaginary friend should remind me of you?’

Jane didn’t look as if she found it particularly odd or amusing. She said, ‘I had imaginary friends, too. Except, at the time, they weren’t in the least imaginary to me. The life I made up for myself was more important to me than my real life. It was my escape. It was how I survived the childhood I don’t remember – the things that really happened to me.’ She paused to sip her coffee and then went on.

‘I was six years old. I was wearing a brand-new brown velvet dress with a white lace collar. I’m not sure why, but I think I was going to a party later in the afternoon. I was feeling very special and happy, and I was sitting at the dining room table eating my lunch. My mother sat next to me and nagged me. She kept warning me to be careful. She kept telling me how expensive the dress was, and how difficult it would be to clean if I got it dirty. She told me not to be as clumsy as I usually was, and she warned me that I’d better not spill anything on myself. So of course, I did. I slopped a little bit of milk onto my dress. At that, she grabbed me and pulled me up out of my chair, screaming at me that I was messy, disobedient, and a complete disgrace. I didn’t deserve to have nice clothes. I was an animal. I ate like a clumsy pig and I didn’t deserve the nice meals she fixed for me. I should never have been born. Nobody could stand to be around me. I should be kept in a cage where I could spill my food all over me to my heart’s content. Screaming all the way, she dragged me up to the attic and left me there to meditate on my sins.’

My stomach clenched with sympathy at Jane’s level, matter-of-fact tone.

‘But the odd thing,’ Jane went on, ‘the odd thing was that I liked the attic. I always had liked it. Being taken up there and left was no punishment at all. I was always begging to be allowed to play up there, but she would never let me. I could only go up there when my father went, to help him clean, or to get out the Christmas ornaments, or to store old clothes away. I suppose I liked the attic so much because it was outside her domain. She would send my father up for things instead of going herself. It was the only place in the house that didn’t belong to her.

‘And that was where she left me. Where I couldn’t mess up any of her things. I was left all alone up there under the roof. It was cold and quiet and filled with cardboard boxes. I was very far away from the rest of the house. I couldn’t hear my family downstairs – for all I knew, they might have gone out, or just disappeared. And I knew my mother couldn’t hear me or see me, either. I could do anything I wanted and not be punished for it. I could think or say whatever I liked. For the first time in my life, it seemed, I was completely free.

‘So I pretended that my family didn’t exist – or at least that I didn’t belong to it. I made up a family I liked a lot better. My new mother was pretty and young and understanding. She never lost her temper and she never shouted at me. I could talk to her. My new father was younger, too, and spent more time at home with us. My real sisters were so much older than me that they sometimes seemed to live in another world, so my new sisters, in my made-up family, were closer to my age. I had a younger sister who would look up to me and ask me for advice, and I had a sister exactly at my age who would be my best friend. She was good at all the things I wasn’t. And instead of being ugly, with kinky hair like mine, she was pretty with long, straight hair that she would let me braid and put up for her.’ She stopped short, as if on the verge of saying something else. Instead, she sipped her coffee. I waited, not saying a word.

‘I know I invented them,’ she said. ‘I know it was all a game. But still it seemed – it still seems – that I didn’t make them up but found them somewhere, and found a way of reaching them in that faraway, warm place where they lived. I lived with them for a long time – nearly seven years. When I remember my childhood, it’s the time I spent with my make-believe family that I remember. Those people.’

I wanted to ask her their names, but I said nothing, almost afraid to interrupt her. Jane was looking at me, but I don’t think she saw me.

‘I sat all alone in that cold, dusty attic, and I could feel the house changing below me. I was in the attic of another house. I could hear the voices of my new family drifting up to me. I could imagine every room, how each one was furnished. When I had it all clear in my mind, I went downstairs to see for myself. It was the same size as my real house, but completely different. There was a small chord organ in the living room that my make-believe mother played in the evenings, all of us gathered around to sing old-fashioned songs. The family room had a cork floor with woven Indian rugs on it. There was a deer head over the television set; my make-believe father liked to hunt. The wallpaper in the kitchen was gold and brown, and the cookie jar was shaped like a rabbit dressed in overalls. There was a big oak tree in the back yard that was perfect for climbing, perfect for playing pretend games in. It could be a pirate ship, or – ’

My skin was crawling. It was my house she was describing. My parents. My childhood. ‘What about the front yard?’ I asked.

‘Another oak tree. We had lots of acorns in the fall. There was a magnolia tree on one side, and a big brick planter box built out of the front of the house. It was great to play in. I’m amazed those blue flowers managed to grow with us stomping on them all the time. Your mother – ’

‘It was you,’ I said.

She shut up and looked down into her coffee.

‘Why didn’t you say?’ I asked. ‘Why this game? Why pretend you didn’t know me? Did you think I’d forgotten? Jane?’

She gave me a wary look. ‘Of course I thought you’d forgotten. I wasn’t sure myself that any of it had happened. I never thought I’d see you again. I thought I’d made you up.’

‘Made me up!’ I laughed uneasily. ‘Come on, Jane! What are you talking about? What’s the point of this whole story?’

‘It’s not a story,’ she said. Her voice was high and stubborn, like a child’s. ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe it.’

‘What is it you want me to believe? We were friends when we were children. We both remember that. But if you tell me that you grew up in New York, and I know that – ’

‘Why did you say you had an imaginary friend called Jane?’

‘Because I thought – ’ And I stopped and stared, feeling the little hairs prickling all over me as I remembered. ‘Because you disappeared,’ I said softly. ‘Whenever you left to go home, you just vanished. I saw you come and go out of nowhere, and I knew that real people didn’t do that.’ I was afraid that I was sitting at a table with a ghost.

As if she read my thoughts, Jane reached across the table and gripped my hand. There was a sullen, challenging look on her face. Her hand was warm and firm and slightly damp. I remembered that, as a child, too, she had been solid and real. Once her firm grasp, just in time, had kept me from falling out of a tree. We had tickled each other and played tag and helped each other into dressing-­­up clothes. She had liked to braid my hair.

Jane took her hand away to look at her wristwatch. ‘We’d better go,’ she said.

I thought of the first time I had seen her, coming down the attic stairs. I was surprised to find a stranger in my house, but she had looked back at me, perfectly at ease, and asked me if I wanted to play. We were friends in that instant – although I couldn’t remember, now, what we had said to each other or what we played. Only that first moment of surprise remains hard and clear and whole in my mind, like the last time I saw her disappear.

Usually when Jane left she simply walked away and I did not see where she went. She was different from my other friends in that I never walked her home and we never played at her house. I didn’t even know where her house was; I knew only, from things she had said, that it was in a different neighbourhood.

But that last day, I remember, we had been playing Parcheesi on the floor of my bedroom. Jane said goodbye and walked out. A few seconds later I thought of something I had meant to ask or tell her, and I scrambled to my feet and went after her. She was just ahead of me in the hallway, and I saw her go into the living room. She was just ahead of me, in plain sight, in daylight – and then she wasn’t. She was gone. I looked all through the living room, although I knew she hadn’t hidden from me; there hadn’t been time.

I couldn’t believe what I had seen. Things like that didn’t happen, except on The Twilight Zone. I was eleven-and-a-half years old, too old to have imaginary friends. I never saw Jane again.

Until today.

And now she was standing, preparing to leave me.

Hastily I stood up, pushing my chair away from the table. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

She looked at me and shrugged. ‘Why do you think I know? I thought I’d imagined you, and here you are. But I grew up in New York, you grew up in Texas. We couldn’t have known each other as kids. But that’s what we both remember.’

‘And now what?’

She smiled at me ironically. ‘And now the plane is coming in. Let’s go.’

We walked together through the featureless corridors in silence. It felt right and familiar for me to be at her side, as if we’d never been apart, as if we’d walked together many times before.

‘I wish she wasn’t coming,’ Jane said suddenly. ‘I wish I could have told her no. I wish I didn’t have to deal with her. Will I be running away from my mother all my life?’

I touched her arm. She was real. She was there. I felt very close to her, and yet I knew, sadly, that she must be lying to me, or crazy. One of us must be. I said, ‘You’ll be all right. You’re strong. You’re grown up now and you’ve got your own life. Just tell yourself that. Your mother’s just another woman. She can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.’

She looked at me. ‘You always thought I was braver than I really was. It’s funny, but your thinking that made me try to live up to it. In order to be as brave and strong as you thought I was, I did things that terrified me. Like the time I climbed from a tree up onto the roof of the house – ’

‘I was terrified!’ I said. Her words brought it back vividly, those moments when, from my own precarious treetop perch, I had seen her thin, small figure drop to the dark shingles of the roof, the breath catching in my throat as if I were the one in danger.

‘So was I,’ she said. ‘But it was worth it for the way you looked at me. I’d always been a quiet little coward, but to you I was wild and daring.’

Through the big window we saw a bright orange plane land and roll along the runway.

‘Thank you,’ said Jane. ‘I needed a friend today.’

‘Not just today,’ I said. ‘Now that we’ve found each other, we’ll get together again, often.’

She smiled and looked away. I followed her gaze and saw the plane docking.

‘That’s ours,’ I said, turning my head to look at her. She was gone.

I whirled away from the window, scanning the crowds for her dark hair, her white blouse, her particular way of moving. She was nowhere to be seen.

There hadn’t been time. I had turned my head only for a moment. She had been right beside me; I could feel her presence. From one second to the next, she had simply vanished.

Feeling dizzy, I moved indecisively a few steps this way, a few steps that. There was no point in searching for her. I already knew I wouldn’t find her. I wondered what airport she might be waiting in; I realised she had never said where she lived. Was she able to find me because our lives briefly intersected in the bland, anonymous limbo of an airport, or could she have come to me wherever I was, because of her need?

I am waiting, wondering if I will ever see her again. Jane is real; she exists; I know I didn’t imagine her. But did she imagine me?