The Pillow Friend Page 4

  The first room she looked into was a bedroom, decorated in shades of pink and cream, with a canopied, four-poster bed, a pink Princess telephone on the marble-topped table beside it. Impressionistic pastel drawings of ballerinas adorned the walls; the curtains, like the bedspread, were thickly flowered. There was a large, gilt-framed mirror on one wall, below it a dressing table, its glass surface covered with rows of tiny perfume bottles, each one different, more perfumes than she'd ever seen in one place outside a drugstore counter. She was briefly tempted to open and sample a few, but resisted the urge—that wasn't why she was here—and continued down the hall to check out the other rooms.

  There was a room in yellow and white, with twin beds, white-painted wicker furniture and flower prints on the walls, and what appeared to be the master bedroom, full of dark, heavy furniture she assumed were antiques, with a connecting bathroom. There was also a sewing room and another bathroom. There was nothing that looked to her like a child's bedroom, nowhere she felt at home. For a few seconds, standing in the upstairs hall of a strange house, Agnes was scared, but then she felt the weight of Myles in her pocket, against her hip, and remembered she wasn't alone. She took him in her hand, and then she could move again.

  Back along the hall to the white and yellow bedroom. If it didn't feel like hers, at least it didn't feel like it belonged to anybody else. She took off her sandals, pulled back the coverlet on one of the beds, and settled Myles onto the pillow. Then she lay down with her head beside him.

  “Are you awake?”

  Agnes surfaced groggily. She expected her mother, but when she opened her eyes she saw a strange lady, plump and blond, her painted face pushed far too close to her own.

  She gave a yelp and wriggled to try to escape. Something knocked against her head: Myles. She grabbed him and held on tight to the one familiar thing in this terribly strange place.

  “Do you know where you are, dear?” said the strange lady. Beyond her, Agnes saw another person, a black woman in a white uniform. “Can you tell me your name and where you live?”

  Don't talk to strangers. That ritual admonition had been drilled into her so regularly that now it rose up and blotted out everything else. She shook her head. She had no idea where she was, or how she had come to be here, surrounded by strangers, but she knew that strangers were dangerous. She would never accept candy from them, get in their cars, or answer their questions.

  The woman sighed. “Come on, sweetheart, you must know your own name! You're a big girl. . . . How about your phone number, so I can call your mother and tell her where you are?”

  When they tried to lure you into their cars, strangers might pretend they knew your mother. Agnes wouldn't let herself be fooled. She set her mouth firmly.

  “I'm sure she doesn't live in any of the houses on our street—I've never seen her before, have you, Jewel?”

  “No, Ma'am.”

  “Where do you live? Were your parents visiting someone nearby? Did you wander off and get lost?”

  But Agnes wasn't talking, and after a while the stranger gave up trying to win her trust. She sighed and stood up. They were still both on the bed, Agnes having refused to go anywhere with the strange woman. “I guess I'd better call the police. Jewel, please stay with her, all right?”

  It had to be a trick. Agnes had learned in school that the police were there to help protect children against strangers. If a stranger bothered you, you could always go to the police for help.

  Jewel sat down on a white wicker chair, looked at Agnes and shook her head. “You in trouble now,” she said. “The police. Mmm, mmm, mmm. You don't tell them where you live, they put you in jail.”

  Although she was desperately thirsty, as well as hungry, Agnes refused all offers of food and drink. She asked to go to the bathroom and, when she was alone in the small room, drank water from the tap.

  The police arrived, two men in uniform, and Agnes told them her name and address as soon as they asked, aware of the strange lady's exasperation.

  “And how did you come to be in Mrs. Carter's house? Did somebody bring you here?”

  “No, I walked.”

  “Did you knock at the door?”

  She shook her head. “No. I just walked in. It wasn't locked.”

  “Had you been here before? Do your parents know Mrs. Carter?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why did you go inside like that? Do you usually go into strange houses?”

  “It didn't feel strange.” She hesitated. She couldn't tell them about Myles; even if she did it wouldn't explain what she'd done. “I thought I knew it; I think I recognized it.” That, at least, approached the truth of what she had felt.

  One of the policemen said to the other, “There's a house on Pine Shadows looks sort of like this one.” He looked at Agnes. “Maybe this house looked like one where your friends live?”

  She nodded uncertainly.

  “But why did you go to sleep?” asked Mrs. Carter.

  “I was sleepy,” she said simply, and was surprised when they all laughed.

  Her parents concluded that she'd suffered from sunstroke. She lost her allowance for a week as punishment for crossing The Boulevard without permission, by herself, but the much greater sin, of going into a stranger's house, went unpunished. Probably because they couldn't understand why she would walk into a strange house and fall asleep, her parents interpreted her behavior as illness. She had stayed out in the hot sun too long, lost her way, and then, feeling dizzy, had entered a house that seemed familiar to ask for help. Inside, feeling worse, she had stretched out on a bed and fallen asleep.

  Agnes knew that it hadn't happened like that, but she never contradicted her parents' story. She wasn't entirely sure herself why she had done it. She'd had some notion that in another place Myles would speak to her as he had spoken to Marjorie and to Leslie. Maybe she was trying to find a special place where magic could happen, or maybe she had thought that in a different house she would be a different person. She was home again now in the same house, still the same person, but what she had done had made a difference. Finally she had made contact with Myles, and she was certain he would speak to her.

  But that night was the same as every other night, despite her certainty. Myles looked again like a lifeless doll, and he did not speak to her as she lay awake in bed while the house around them settled into silence as everyone else fell asleep. Finally she, too, drifted toward sleep, and as she drew closer to that far shore she thought she heard someone whispering.

  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.

  a rose

  never mind. Shrinking, and as my situation . . .

  and I longed to

  You would never

  it was the promise of

  unspeakable things

  in the garden, moving swiftly across

  neglected, in the shadows, waiting for

  Indeed! Pray tell

  a wind down the alley

  the touch of your hand, or a breath

  I should like to . . . I have never . . . when shall we ever

  In the fire. Like something marvelous.

  To recover what I had lost and quietly return

  Again, but I must not repeat

  resourceful

  small and gleaming

  there in the doorway

  beneath the overhanging

  trees, moving

  invisible figures

  when you finally understand what

  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 al
ways 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.