Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend (21 page)

I walk down the hall to the door that is closed. If Max is upstairs, he would be in a room with a closed door, I think. I pass through the door. Max is not in the room. It is a baby’s room. There is a crib and a toy box and a rocking chair and a bureau with a basket of diapers on top. There are blocks on the floor and a little blue train engine and a little plastic farm with little people and little animals.

Max would not like the little plastic farm because the people do not look real. They are little pegs with faces, and he does not like those kinds of toys. He likes realistic toys. But the little farm animals and the little people are standing outside the little plastic barn, so the baby must like it.

Then I realize it. Mrs Patterson has a baby. I can’t believe it.

There is a closet in this room, too. A long closet with sliding doors, but one of the sliding doors is open. There are shelves stuffed with tiny shoes and tiny shirts and tiny pants and tiny balls of socks.

But no Max.

Mrs Patterson has a little baby. This does not seem right. Monsters are not supposed to have little babies.

I leave the baby’s room and walk into the room on the other side of the hallway. This is Mrs Patterson’s bedroom. I know it right away. There is a bed and a dresser and another television hanging on the wall. The bed is made but it is not piled with pillows and there is a bottle of water and a book on the headboard. There is a little table beside the bed with a clock and a pile of magazines and a pair of glasses. There is stuff in this room. Not like the guest bedroom.

There is a bathroom attached to the bedroom and a big closet without any doors. The closet is almost as big as Max’s bedroom. Lots of clothes and shoes and belts but still no Max.

I shout, ‘Max! Are you here? Can you hear me?’ Just in case I didn’t see him.

No one answers.

I leave Mrs Patterson’s bedroom. I stop in the hallway and look up to see if there is a trapdoor on the ceiling leading to an attic. Max’s mom and dad have a trapdoor with stairs attached, so when you pull a cord, the trapdoor opens and the stairs unfold and you can climb up into the attic. There is no trapdoor. No attic.

I go back down the stairs.

Instead of turning back into the living room, I turn left. There is a hallway to the left that leads to the kitchen and there is another living room across the hallway. Couches and cushy chairs and little tables and lamps and another fireplace and a shelf full of books, but no Max.

I walk through the living room and turn left into a dining room. A long table with chairs. A little table with more photographs and a tray of bottles. I turn left again and walk into the kitchen. Lots of kitchen stuff but no Max.

The first floor is a living room, another living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. That is it. No Max anywhere.

No Mrs Patterson.

I walk through the house again, faster this time. I find a bathroom that I did not see the first time because the door was closed and a coat closet was by the front door.

No Max.

Then I find the door that I am looking for in the hallway to the kitchen.

The basement door.

Mrs Patterson is in the basement with Max. I know it.

I pass through the door and onto stairs. The lights in the stairway and in the room at the bottom of the stairs are turned on. The room at the bottom of the stairs is carpeted and looks like another living room. There is a big, green table in the middle of the room with no chairs around it and a little net stretched across it. It looks like a tiny tennis court. Like a tennis court for dolls. There are couches and chairs and a television down here, too, but not Max.

And no Mrs Patterson.

There is an open door on the other side of the room. I pass through it into a room that looks like a normal basement. The floor is made of stone and there are big, dirty machines in the corner. One is a furnace, which heats the house, and one is a water pipe machine, but I do not know which is which. There is a table with hammers and saws and screwdrivers hanging on the wall above it, all just as neat as Mrs Patterson’s closet and lawn. The whole house is neat. The water bottle on the headboard was the only thing that looked out of place in the whole house.

That’s it. There are no closets or stairs down here or anything.

No Max. And no Mrs Patterson.

I lost her again. In her own house.

I run upstairs into the kitchen and shout Max’s name. I run to the garage to check if Mrs Patterson’s car is still in the garage. It is. The engine is making the ticking sound that cars sometimes make after they are turned off. Her coat is still on the hook next to the washer machine.

Maybe she is outside. I am being silly because I can’t lose a person inside her own house, but I still feel like I should panic. Something is wrong. I know it. Even if Mrs Patterson is outside, where is Max?

I hold my hand up in front of my face and look at it closely, checking to see if I can see through it.

It’s still solid. I am not disappearing. Max must be okay.

He is somewhere and he is okay. Mrs Patterson knows where Max is so I just need to find Mrs Patterson and I will eventually find Max.

I go outside. I pass through the sliding glass doors in the dining room and step out onto a deck at the back of the house. Steps lead from the deck to a small patch of grass and down to another set of steps and the pond. It is a long, narrow pond. I can see houses on the other side of the pond, and I can see the lights from other houses to the left and right of Mrs Patterson’s house through the trees. Mrs Patterson’s neighbors don’t live very close to Mrs Patterson, but I don’t think she would ever bring Max outside.

There is a dock in the water at the bottom of the steps and a little boat floating next to it. A paddle boat. Max’s mom tried to get Max to ride in one when we went to Boston last summer but he would not. He almost got stuck before his mom finally stopped asking him to give it a try. It was one of those times when I thought Max’s mom might cry because all the other little boys and girls were having fun in the boats with their parents but Max would not.

Mrs Patterson is not on the deck. There is a table with an umbrella and a bunch of chairs but no Max and no Mrs Patterson.

I jump off the side of the deck and run around the house. I run and look and run until I have gone all the way around the house and am back on the deck, staring out at the pond again. The sun is low in the sky so all the shadows are long. The sunlight makes sparkles on the water.

I shout Max’s name as loud as I have ever shouted anything in my life. I shout again and again and again.

The birds in trees answer my calls, but they are not answering me. Only Max can hear me, and Max is not answering.

I feel like I have lost my friend all over again.

CHAPTER 34

I go back inside the house. I must have missed a room or a closet or a cupboard. I stand in the dining room and shout Max’s name again. My voice does not echo because the world cannot hear my voice. Only Max can hear my voice. But if the world could hear my voice, it would repeat it now. It would echo again and again. That is how loud I yell Max’s name.

I walk through the downstairs again, slower this time, making a loop from dining room to kitchen to living room and back to dining room. I stop in the living room with the television and look at the photographs in the silver frames. There is a baby boy in all three pictures. He is crawling in one picture and standing up in another, holding onto the side of a bathtub. He is smiling in all three pictures. He has brown hair and big eyes and a chubby face.

I still can’t believe that Mrs Patterson has a baby. A baby boy. I say it aloud to make it seem more real. ‘Mrs Patterson has a baby boy.’ I say it again because I still don’t believe it.

I wonder:
Where is Mrs Patterson’s baby? At nursery school?

Then I have an idea. Maybe Mrs Patterson’s baby stays with a neighbor while she is at work. Maybe Mrs Patterson walked over to the neighbor’s house to pick her baby up.

That is it. I know it. Mrs Patterson left the house when I was upstairs or in the basement but she did not drive her car. She went to get her baby from a neighbor’s house or maybe from a nursery school down the street. Someplace close. Maybe she picks up her baby and walks home every day because fresh air is good for babies and she can ask him questions about his day even though he can’t answer because that is what mothers do.

I am feeling relieved now. I do not know where Max is, but as long as I follow Mrs Patterson, I will find him. As long as I do not lose her, everything will be fine. Maybe Max is in another house with Mrs Patterson’s husband. Maybe Mr and Mrs Patterson have a vacation house in Vermont like the one that Sadie McCormick likes to talk about whenever someone will listen, and maybe Max is there right now. Far away from where the police would look.

That would be a smart thing for Mrs Patterson to do.

Take Max so far away that the police would never find him.

Far away from the parents she doesn’t trust and the school she thinks he shouldn’t go to.

But that is okay. If I stay with Mrs Patterson, she will eventually lead me to Max. Even if he is in Vermont, I will find him.

I check my hand. I hold it in front of my face. I feel bad for doing it, but I remind myself that I am checking for Max’s sake even though I know I am checking for my own sake, too. More for my own sake. My hand is still solid. I am okay. I am not disappearing. And Max is okay. Somewhere Max is okay.

I decide to search the house again while I wait for Mrs Patterson to get back. I feel like a police person on television, looking for clues, and that is exactly what I am doing. Looking for clues that will lead me to Max.

I notice a closet in the kitchen that I did not notice before, and I look inside even though I know that Max is not inside. It would be a silly place to hide a boy, and besides, Max would have heard me calling if he was in this closet. It is dark inside but I can see the outline of cans and boxes in the gloom. It is a pantry.

I find more pictures of Mrs Patterson’s son, on the mantle over both fireplaces and on the little tables in the living room. I don’t find pictures of Mr Patterson, which seems strange at first, but then I realize that Mr Patterson is probably the one who is taking all the pictures. Max’s dad does the same thing. He doesn’t show up in many of Max’s photographs because he is always behind the camera instead of in front of it.

There is not a lot of stuff in Mrs Patterson’s house. No piles of magazines. No bowls of fruit. No toys on the floor or baskets of dirty clothes near the washer machine. No dishes in the sink or empty coffee cups on the kitchen table. The house reminds me of our house when Max’s parents were trying to sell it. Max was in kindergarten and Max’s mom and dad decided that they needed a bigger house in case Max ever got a brother or a sister, so they stuck a big sign in the front lawn, kind of like a price tag without any price, so people would know that the house was for sale. And a lady named Meg would bring strangers into the house when nobody was home so they could look around and decide if they wanted to buy it.

Max hated the thought of moving. He hates change, and switching houses would be a big change. He got stuck a few times when he found out that strangers were coming over, so eventually Max’s mom and dad stopped telling him that people were coming over.

I think that is why we never moved. They were worried that Max might get stuck for ever if we moved to a new house.

Every time the strangers came over to look at the house, Max’s parents would push all of the papers and magazines into a kitchen drawer and throw all the clothes on the floor into a closet. And they would make their bed, which they never do. They had to make it look like no one in the house ever forgot to put anything away so the strangers would see what the house looked like if perfect people lived inside.

That’s what Mrs Patterson’s house looks like. It looks ready for strangers to come over. But I don’t think that Mrs Patterson is trying to sell her house. I think that this is just how she is.

I check the upstairs and the basement again, looking for closets that I did not see the first time or any clues about where Max might be. I find more pictures of Mrs Patterson’s baby and a closet in the upstairs hallway. Max is not inside.

In the basement, I find three cupboards, but they are dark and dusty and too small for Max to be inside. I find boxes of nails and a pile of bricks and plastic containers full of clothes and a lawnmower but no Mrs Patterson and no Max.

It’s okay. Mrs Patterson will walk through the front door any minute. Even though I know that Max will not be with her, that will be okay. Just finding Mrs Patterson will be enough. She will lead me to Max.

I am standing in the dining room, looking out the sliding glass doors at the pond, when I hear the door finally open. The shadows from the trees are dipping into the pond now and the orange sparkles on the ripples of the water are almost gone. The sun is too low to sparkle any more today. I turn and walk into the kitchen, toward the hallway that leads to the front door, when I see that it was not the front door that I heard opening.

It was the basement door.

Mrs Patterson is walking through the basement door. She is coming into the kitchen through the basement door.

I was just in the basement a couple minutes ago, looking at the cupboards and finding boxes of nails. Mrs Patterson was not in the basement two minutes ago and now she is stepping through the doorway to the basement and closing the door behind her.

I am more scared than ever.

CHAPTER 35

My first thought is that Mrs Patterson is an imaginary friend and I did not realize it. Maybe she can pass through doors like me and somehow she came home and went into the basement without me hearing her.

I know right away that this is ridiculous.

But she must be something special, because somehow she was in the basement without me seeing her. Maybe she can make herself invisible or maybe she can shrink herself.