Free Music Makers by Kate Wilhelm

him there to wait for the night train.
    My bed feels warm after the cold outside, and I’m hardly even settled into it before I fall asleep.
    It was a dream, a wish fulfillment nightmare, I tell myself, coming awake very early. It is still dark outside, and I hurry from my room to go downstairs to turn up the thermostat and start a pot of coffee before Mom and Dad begin stirring. The house is very quiet. Too quiet.
    While waiting for the coffee, I go down the hall to the bathroom and push the door open, and then on to his bedroom, where the door is already open, the way he left it in the middle of the night. In a panic, I run to Mom’s room, but it is as empty as the rest of the house. A piece of paper on her pillow stirs in the draft from the open door. A handwritten note, dated and signed, from her to me, the letters spidery and uneven.
    “My dearest Christy, I love you. I’m taking him out to catch the late night train.”
    An Ordinary Day With Jason

    BEFORE WE WERE MARRIED VERNON TOLD ME about the family trait that he feared would be so off-putting that I would tell him to get lost. We were in bed on Sunday night, where we had been most of the time since Friday. We were eating stale popcorn, the only food left in my apartment. On Friday we had planned a dinner out and a movie, but the rain had turned to freezing rain mixed with snow.
    We made the final commitment that weekend. And he told me. It came up in the most innocuous way.
    “Honey,” he said, “did you have an imaginary friend when you were a kid?”
    “Sure. Her name was Doris. She had red hair in pigtails and a lot of freckles. She was dumber than I was.”
    “What happened to her?” he asked.
    “I guess she went where imaginary friends go when they’re no longer needed. Out of awareness, out of mind.”
    “Did anyone else ever see her?”
    I helped myself to more popcorn. It really wasn’t that bad. “Of course not. What are you getting at?”
    “Humor me,” he said.
    He was leaning on his elbow watching me, strangely serious, considering that both of us were naked, covers drawn up to our chins because the apartment was cold, and a bowl of stale popcorn was balanced on my stomach.
    “Okay. I’m humoring you. No one else ever saw Doris. Now it’s your turn. Tell me about your imaginary friend.”
    “One more question first,” he said. “What if someone else had seen her? More than one saw her?”
    I shook my head. “Then she wouldn’t have been imaginary. And it would have freaked me out when she went away.”
    He had yet another question. “Did you know Doris was a product of your imagination?”
    I had to stop and think about that. Finally I had to admit that I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think so.
    “You said one more question,” I said then. “You’re over the limit. Just tell me where you’re going with this. Is it something about your imaginary friend?”
    “Yeah,” he said. He took some popcorn, more, I thought, to buy a little time than because he wanted it.
    “Suppose an imaginary friend isn’t always a playmate. Not a Calvin and Hobbes situation, or Christopher and Pooh, and not a red headed Doris. Suppose it’s an object.”
    “Okay. A stretch, but I’m supposing. Your friend was a little unusual. Then what?”
    “Suppose it’s a staircase,” he said slowly.
    I couldn’t help it. I laughed and nearly choked on popcorn, and I upset the bowl. When I could speak, I said, “Your imaginary friend was a staircase?”
    He nodded, and I laughed harder until he had to pound me on the back for fear I would really choke.
    We had to get up, of course. You can’t roll around on a bed strewn with buttered popcorn and salt. There was more that came out in bits and pieces that night.
    Vernon had had the ability, or whatever it can be called, to project, conjure, imagine, do something, and make a staircase appear, one that anyone else in the room could also see. It stopped when he was six or seven, the way Doris stopped