Maggie was weird, but she was my best friend. She lived in my childhood home, but she wasn’t my sister. She wasn’t a cousin, or a family friend, or anything like that. She had lived there as long as the house had stood, maybe longer. She never talked about the time before that.
As long as I knew her, Maggie never changed much. Her age was fluid, but not in the way that everyone’s is. She was a bit older than me when giving me advice, and a bit younger when getting on my nerves. Her long black hair hung loosely in the space around her head, as if she was always underwater. I never heard her footsteps or watched her walk anywhere. She was simply where she needed to be at all times.
When she was cold, her teeth chattered in a way that made my hairs stand on end. She was always cold.
The more I learned about the world, the more I noticed things that reminded me of Maggie and helped me make sense of her. Have you ever petted a lizard or a snake? Rub it from head to tail, and it’s incredibly smooth. Go the other way - against the grain of the scales - and it’s rough, bumpy, and just feels wrong. That’s what Maggie’s voice sounded like. Like going against the grain. Like a voice played in reverse.
Maggie didn’t have a right hand. Not like an amputee, or someone with a birth defect. If you looked at her shoulder and traced the length of her arm with your eyes, you’d see that it gets smaller and smaller, but never really goes away. If I looked where her right hand should be, I’d feel sick to my stomach. I remember taking calculus in high school, learning about asymptotes that approach zero but never really reach it. That’s what her arm was like. Infinite, but practically nonexistent. Always approaching nothingness.
I know what you’re thinking: I had an imaginary friend. Occam’s Razor, right? The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Usually.
Maggie was made entirely of impossibilities, and of course no one else ever saw her. On the rare occasions that a friend from school would come over to play, Maggie stayed hidden. My parents would get uneasy when I’d talk about her. “You’re creeping us out,” they would say. “Please, just stop.” I learned not to talk about her to anyone else.
How did I know that Maggie was real? To put it simply: I had to. Maggie was my only true friend. She was my anchor to this world and almost all of my childhood memories. If she wasn’t real, then “real” was meaningless to me.
When my parents would fight, I would crawl under my bed with a flashlight. I found myself under my bed often. Maggie was always there. I would absentmindedly peel paint chips off the baseboard and ramble on about the difficulties of my cozy, middle-class upbringing while Maggie would draw. Her drawings weren’t good, at least not in the traditional sense, but they made me feel something. Isn’t that what art is all about?
When she was finished with a drawing, Maggie would present it to me with a shy but prideful smile across her face. I would lift the loose floorboard under my bed and stuff it underneath. I amassed quite a collection throughout the years. On really bad days, I would look through them and smile. Pictures of me and Maggie playing in the basement, hiding under the bed, eating popcorn on the couch.
I wasn’t much of an artist, but one day I decided to make a drawing for Maggie. I spent what felt like hours on it. It was my masterpiece. When I handed it to her, she took one look and frowned. “What is this?” she asked without making a sound.
“Me and you, on the Great Wall of China.” I had often dreamt about traveling the world with Maggie.
She ripped the drawing into pieces and scattered it across the floor. “You know I can’t leave this house.”
A lump filled my throat. I didn’t know if I was embarrassed for myself or sad for Maggie. For some reason, only one thought came to mind. “What happens when they tear this house down?”
She looked afraid. “What makes you think they’ll tear it down?”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t everything get torn down one day?”
“Then I’ll squeeze down the bathtub drain. Didn’t you say there’s a reservoir nearby? I’ll swim to it.”
“You can swim?” I asked.
“If I have to.”
The next day, Maggie handed me a drawing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your picture was nice. I shouldn’t have ripped it up.”
The focal piece of the drawing was a red sedan. A man sat in the driver’s seat, his door open. He had auburn hair and a mole on his left cheek. It was me, as a grown-up. Outside of the car was Maggie, her hair scattered and flowing - even in the drawing. We were waving to each other.
I gestured to the blue background that surrounded the car in all directions. “Are we in Heaven?” I asked.
“We could be.”
From that day forward, I couldn’t take a bath without thinking of Maggie being sucked into the drain. I often had dreams that I was following her. They may have been nightmares. I was never really sure.
One day, when I was in high school, Maggie appeared in the corner of my bedroom. “What are you doing?” she asked, staring at the cardboard boxes scattered about.
“We’re moving,” I said, looking at anything but her. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said. “You have to stay.”
“It’s not up to me. Dad is getting transferred. I’m still a kid. Technically, I mean.”
“Will you visit?” she asked.
“It’s… far.” I replied.
“How far?”
“Like, ‘across the country’ far.”
“Well what am I supposed to do?”
I didn’t know what to say. I pushed my bed to the side and lifted the loose floorboard. As I reached for the stack of drawings, Maggie’s hand grabbed me by the wrist. She was ten feet closer now, without taking a single step.
“If you’re leaving, the drawings stay.” she said. It wasn’t a request, but a command.
“Why?”
“If you take them, you have nothing to come back for.”
I begrudgingly agreed and left the stash buried beneath my bedroom floor. I finished packing as Maggie cried. We never said another word to each other.
I’m older now, as people often are when compared to the past. I have a fiancée, Emma, who is the most loving and supportive person I’ve ever met. I’ve spoken to her about Maggie a few times, but like everyone else, she doesn’t like that. “You should really think about seeing a therapist,” she said once. “You talk about her like she’s real.” That made me angry. I never had a problem with the idea of therapy - hell, it would probably do me a lot of good - but I didn’t like the implication.
Emma can be weirdly jealous of my childhood friend. One night, we had a bit too much wine and she asked me if I was in love with her because she reminded me of Maggie. I told her that they were nothing alike. She took that as a compliment.
A recent business trip took me back to my home state and I was cautiously delighted. The airport was less than an hour from the house I grew up in, and I decided that the first thing I would do was pay Maggie a visit.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the representative from the rental car agency at the airport told me. “We don’t have any SUVs at the moment.” He led me to a red Hyundai Elantra and I laughed, thinking back to Maggie’s drawing. “Would you prefer I find you something else?”
“No,” I said, still grinning. “This is perfect.”
The nighttime drive back to my hometown was uneventful, but brimming with nostalgia. A quiet country highway weaved through the forest where my father would take me camping, past my favorite barbecue restaurant and across the reservoir where we often spent our summer afternoons.
My heart sank as I entered my neighborhood. House after house had been demolished, their lots occupied by piles of dirt and skeletons of soon-to-be McMansions. I breathed a sigh of relief when I arrived at my former residence to see the house still standing. Caution tape surrounded the property. A backhoe was parked in the driveway. I didn’t have much time left.
I was surprised to find the door unlocked, but when I entered I saw that there was nothing left worth securing. The rooms were empty - even the carpets had been ripped up. I immediately called out to Maggie to no response.
I started in the basement, where we would often sit and I would tell her about what it was like to go to school - to go anywhere but here. I saw nothing but concrete walls, devoid of the posters that used to hang there and advertise my favorite bands and video games.
I made my way back to the ground floor, searching the kitchen, the den, the laundry room - looking for any sign that I hadn’t been crazy or overly imaginative as a child. I ascended the staircase and peeked into my parents’ old room. There was a fist-shaped hole in the wall that still hadn’t been repaired.
Finally, I made my way to my old bedroom. It was empty, as they all were. No need to move a bed to find what I was looking for. The loose floorboard was raised ever so slightly. You wouldn’t even notice it if you weren’t looking for it. I lifted it and saw dozens - maybe hundreds - of crude drawings.
It was real. It always was.
Tears streamed down my face as I rifled through the pages. Me and Maggie, looking out my bedroom window into the forest behind our house. Me and Maggie, playing checkers on the living room floor. After a few minutes of reminiscence, I stuffed the papers in my briefcase and hastily made my way back to the rental car. The last thing my fiancée needed to hear was that I had been arrested for trespassing while searching for my “imaginary” friend.
I got in the car and sped out of the neighborhood, making my way to my hotel in the neighboring county. As I was crossing the reservoir once again, I saw a figure ahead of me on the bridge. Long, black hair, dispersed gently throughout the air around her. She was too close for me to stop.
I awoke in a strange room, blinded by a white light overhead. A raven-haired figure stood above me, calling out to me in a familiar voice.
“Baby, are you awake?” The voice was smooth. Head to tail. A normal human being. I was disoriented and disappointed all at once.
“Nurse!” Emma called. “Can we get a nurse? He’s awake!”
She stroked my hair. “Oh my God, baby. I thought I lost you.”
A nurse rushed in and immediately began asking me questions. She asked me my name and who the current president was. Did she not know that herself?
“What happened?” I finally asked.
“You were driving on the bridge that crosses Lockley Reservoir and… you crashed. Your car went in the water.” Emma said. She was clearly still amazed that I was conscious.
“My briefcase,” I asked. All I could care about was the proof. The proof that Maggie was real - that I wasn’t crazy. “Do you have my briefcase?”
“Don’t worry about that, baby,” she answered. “We can replace your things. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
I closed my eyes in anguish. All of those drawings, gone. Nothing was left but the same unreliable memories I’d kept with me for years.
A police officer whom I hadn’t noticed before stood up from a chair and approached me in my hospital bed. He didn’t look as relieved as Emma did. “Sir,” he began. “We need to know the name of the woman who was with you.”
I didn’t understand. “I’m here on a business trip,” I said. “I wasn’t with anyone. I was just visiting-”
“Baby,” Emma said, a look of mistrust on her face. “The man who found you… he said that you weren’t alone. He said that a woman pulled you to the shore. A woman with one arm.”
My chest tightened. “Where is she?” was all I could think to say.
“Well, that’s the thing,” the policeman interjected once more, scratching his head. “He said that she left as soon as you were safe. He said… he said she went back into the water.”