Now
So it’s been a few years since I last spoke to either of my parents- they divorced when I was about eighteen, and I didn’t get along very well with them by that point (moved out of the house aged sixteen for the first time, and many “moving-outs” occurred afterward). After going to college, I tried to keep in touch with both of them- be cordial, of course. After all, they’re the ones who raised me. Even if they weren’t perfect at it.
It started when my father and I got talking one night about a week ago. He’d finally got himself a new smartphone- joining us in the 21st century- and he was texting me to “test it out”. I knew my old man well enough to figure he was just lonely, and like a kid in a candy store he was spamming me with emojis almost compulsively. Annoying, but innocuous enough. Strange how the older the texter, the heavier the reliance on poor spelling and emoticons. My mother is the worst offender- she’s an elementary school teacher and a harsh mistress when it comes to her own kids’ spelling, but doesn’t hesitate to throw in a healthy amount of “ur” and “where r u” of her own accord.
I’d poured myself a not-so-small glass of wine and was settling down for the evening, book in hand, when I saw my phone flash, recognising my father’s first name instantly. I never kept the two of them as “Mom” and “Dad” in my contacts. When asked about it, I say it’s just out of habit of keeping everyone’s full name programmed on my phone, but really it’s because I cringe a little when forced to call either of them that. “Mom” and “Dad”. Too personal for two people whom I in all honesty know very little about.
“hey dad here :)”
“Hey, Dad- what’s up?”
“moms brithday next week, remember”
”*Birthday. Yeah, of course I remembered.”
“you forgot a few times when you were little :)))))”
“Yeah yeah and no one ever let me forget it”
“you were a bti goofy in general anway always forgetting stuff and messing about”
“Haha well your genes to blame I guess”
I realised I was smiling despite myself, happy to exchange so many affable words with my father after this long.
“i always loved how creative you got with your storiries and sutff, rly creatve”
”*Stories? Im guessing that’s what you mean. Yeah I always loved making stuff up I guess [shrug emoji]”
“not so great with other kids your age but loved hiw close you were with your imaginary friends”
I smirked and stopped myself for a second. Another sign of my father’s detachment during my childhood. I laughed, thinking it funny- I didn’t have any imaginary friends as a kid, even when I was young. As an only child in a frigid household, I only remember feeling very alone on weekends, parented by the TV and my hefty book collection most nights after school.
“not sure what you mean [upside-down smiley], never had any imaginary friends”
The speech bubble popped up, indicating my dad was typing, then abruptly stopped for a few seconds before starting again. A sure-fire sign that he was about to say something and then thought better of it. For all its flaws, texting had the advantage of letting people retract any faux pas with greater ease.
“you dont remember maddie?”
I stopped smiling. Not out of anger, but surprised by the way the name affected me, like an old rusty bell was clamoring for the first time somewhere deep in the back of my mind. Here I was, hearing the first echoes.
“maddie?”
“yeah your imaginary friend maddie. mom and i always found it a bit creepy, bit too ‘the shining’ for our taste but more wholesome than anything”
Great. Thanks, Dad. Glad you saw me as two parts Danny Torrance and only one part disappointment.
But there was something to that. Something recognisable. A faintly familiar taste. The way a certain smell or sound evokes a memory so faintly that you can’t even tell where or when from. But a memory you know is buried somewhere down there anyway.
Memories of being visited by a little girl at night.
How did I not remember that?
“you there still?”
I looked down at my phone and saw that I’d sat without replying to my father for three minutes. I hadn’t even noticed. Maddie… Maddie… Wasn’t that just a girl I knew from school?
“yeah, still here dad.”
“you went away for a second”
“Just tired. I don’t remember maddie, what are you talking about?”
The speech bubble.
“just a little friend of yours. you never liked to tell us about her because you wanted to keep it secret haha, very cute. you were six or seven i think.”
I just sat there, dumbfounded. Did my father raise another child? Or did I just remember nothing about my own life as a child? I tried to think of a reply, but just couldn’t. All of a sudden, I couldn’t stop picturing my six-year-old self. Tiny, chubby, a tuft of bright blonde hair dangling down to my eyes.
A dark night, moonlight streaming in through the window. A little girl at the door. Was I just making it up on the spot? Tell someone not to think about elephants, and lo-and-behold, all they can think of is…
“ill levae you to get your rest, talk soon :)”
My father shrewdly detecting my reluctance to speak- one of his more insightful moments.
“sure, night dad”
The house quickly seemed a lot emptier. The air appeared to grow thicker, denser, quieter. I became acutely aware of how silent everything was.
And then I remembered that a little girl used to visit me in the night.
Then
The night is thick with electricity and warmth, as summer nights often are before a thunderstorm. I used to await them eagerly by the window, peering out onto the block and hoping to see the first few thin branches of lightning burst from the hot purple sky and connect with the ground, counting the seconds to see how far away they were.
The first flash. The sky lit up and I felt my spine tingle reflexively. A primal reaction to danger.
One… two… three… three and a half…
BANG!
Just over a kilometre away then. Maybe three quarters of a mile…?
My skeleton jumped circles around my skin when I heard a knock at the door. I turned to see it was my mother. Just my mother.
“Watching the lightning?”
I nodded without smiling. My mother dealt with the intricacies of my childhood more deftly than my father, who was often obstreperous and brimming with bluster. But it meant that the moments when my mother lashed out or showed reticence towards me were all-the-more damaging. I was scared of her judgement. Sometimes I would wish that I was invisible just so that she couldn’t see me. I would have fewer chances to disappoint her that way.
She smiled back and me and, crossing her arms as if cold, crossed the threshold to my room and sat beside me on the windowsill, large enough even to accommodate two adults. I had left the window slightly ajar, and the spittle of the incipient storm began to slip through the gaps. My mother wrapped her arms around me and we watched the next dozen flashes together, each accompanied by a magnificent and deafening crack as nature reasserted herself as a force beyond measure. Each time I counted, the interval lengthened. I realised with disappointment that the storm was moving away already.
“Don’t stay up too late,” my mother said, breaking the comfortable silence. As she kissed my forehead I closed my eyes and listened to the patter of raindrops, felt the soft warmth of her embrace around me. As she moved away, I felt anxiety begin to build within me. The night was drawing close, and with it all of its terror. All of its dark. She moved out of my room and into the blackness of the hallway.
Even now I can remember how terrified I was of the dark. Even as a young teen, I found it difficult to fall asleep without spending hours opening my eyes and checking corners, keeping the light on all night, sometimes only catching an hour or two of shuteye. I never remembered why until I remembered… her.
A little girl watching me from behind the doorway, peering into my room from the hall.
I remember turning off the lights and closing the door. I always made sure to do this slowly, afraid that by slamming the door I would awaken something in the house. Though when this thought occurred to me, I was never thinking of my parents. I was afraid that something else might wake.
I had a little digital clock, and on nights that I couldn’t sleep, I would watch the hours tick by as the red digits counted down the minutes of the night. During the darkest nights, their pace was glacial. The darkest nights drag the longest.
The lightning and thunder had ceased, but rain fell with a steady rhythm outside my window. Light shone in from the street through the damp glass, covering my ceiling and walls with that unmistakeable pattern- inky black spots on white walls, small raindrops projected onto the wallpaper and casting shadows across my room.
It was almost 3am when I realised that the door to the hall had slipped open. Once again, my spine tingled with unpleasant warmth. Instinctive terror. I felt eyes on me through the dark slit that had appeared between the door’s edge and the wall, the small crack through which the hall was visible. But I couldn’t see anything.
The door creaked slowly open at 3:13. I couldn’t move. Or speak. Cold beads of sweat appeared on the gooseflesh of my skin and soaked into the pillow and blanket. I felt helpless, trapped beneath a cotton chrysalis of wet sheets. The door was wide open, the doorway a tenebrous black rectangle framing the hall.
My eyes adjusted. Slowly. Very slowly. There was the whisper of a hint of an impression of an outline. Faint, very faint. A trick of the light?
I became aware that I was staring at a face. A pale, white face, staring back at me. Eyes fixed, unblinking. I was frightened the way only a child could be frightened. Fear of a kind so fundamental and powerful, the type of fear only a child could feel. When they know so little about the world. When they still let themselves see monsters in the dark.
But the fear vanished when the face grew closer. A little girl, an inch or so taller than me, glided soundlessly into the room. She swayed absentmindedly, shifting her balance from foot to foot the way bored children often do. Her eyes locked with mine. My mother’s eyes. She was a beautiful girl of about nine. Her hair, the same shade as mine, glowed with a spectral hue in the pale moonlight.
I felt myself trying to say something, but the words kept sticking in my throat and catching themselves on my tongue.
“Who… Who…”
She replied by strolling to my bedside. She didn’t blink. She didn’t quite seem to “walk”, either. She seemed to just slide over the floorboards. Her figure grew closer until her face was level with mine. I felt her hand reach out and touch me behind the ear.
“Do you want to watch the rain with me?” she asked. Caught somewhere between fright and wonder, I nodded wordlessly. She pulled back the bedsheets and took my hand in hers. I became aware of how cold, how deathly cold her hands were. But there was a warmth there that I couldn’t quite describe.
She guided me to the windowsill and sat beside me. I stared out of the window, nervous to look directly at her, though I could still make her out in the corner of my eye. I kept expecting her to fade away into darkness and disappear. I kept expecting to wake back up in my bed, finding it to be morning already and finding this to be a dream. But the moment never came.
But the moment didn’t last. Her grip turned hard and firm and icy, and I began to feel sharp pain building in the joints of my fingers and the bones of my hands. I almost cried out, begging her to stop. To let go. Then I turned towards her and made out her face- passive, expressionless. My eyes began to water, but it didn’t move her. Just kept her dark eyes on mine, didn’t break her stare.
“It should have been you,” she said, twisting my wrist viciously the way children sometimes did to me on the bus to school. Hot pain shot up my arm, but before I could cry out, she put her palm over my mouth. I could feel her skin against my lips- she was cold as ice. Her flesh was without a trace of warmth, or the natural clammy dampness you’d expect from the skin of a palm.
“Cry out, and I kill you. Understand?” I nodded, mute, unable to bring myself to make a noise.
“Tell anyone about me, I kill you. Nod.” I nodded.
“Good.”
Without another word, she released my wrist and glided back towards the door, once more giving the impression of floating rather than walking. But when she had just stepped beneath the arch of the frame and into the hall, she turned back to me, sheepishly (almost coyly) peering around the doorframe at me, looking like a child who was afraid of being scolded. I could tell she was trying to feign remorse, trying to widen her eyes and affect some air of innocence. But my blood was still cold from the cruelty she’d shown me. From the pain she had inflicted. She spoke but a few words before vanishing into the darkness.
“You better be more fun tomorrow night.”
Now
I’m typing in a cold sweat, getting the words onto the screen before the memory fades again. How the hell didn’t I remember this? How the hell did I forget about her?
How long until I remember what happened that next night?