The Pillow Friend (4 page)

She stroked Myles with her forefinger, gazing at him wistfully for a long moment before she put him back into the pencil box and went into her classroom.

As she waited that night for Myles to speak to her she began to feel that maybe he was waiting for her to do something first. She wondered if there was a magic word which Marjorie had forgotten to tell her.

“I know you can talk,” she said. “Marjorie told me so. She told me you used to tell her stories at night. It's okay, you can tell me stories now.”

But he didn't. She knew that he could, if he would, because he wasn't like any other doll. She could feel his life, a dormant vitality, even though he never moved. Why was he refusing to speak? She wondered if she had done something wrong. When her mother refused to speak to her, it was because Agnes had offended her. But what wrong could she have done to Myles in the short time she had known him?

“Is it your name?” she asked. “Did I choose the wrong name for you? Marjorie didn't tell me. Myles seemed right, but—how'm I supposed to know what to call you if you won't tell me? Please talk to me—please, tell me your name. Tell me what's wrong!”

The thin strip of yellow light marking the boundary of her dark bedroom suddenly expanded as the door was opened. “Agnes? Did I hear you say something?”

She shut her eyes tight and kept very still. After a little while the door closed, but she kept quiet a little longer in case her mother was still listening.

Finally she picked the doll off her pillow and held him suspended just above her. The white blur of his face in the darkness was like a tiny, distant moon to her near-sighted eyes.

“Who are you?” she whispered. When he did not reply, she drew him down close enough to feel the hot breath of her words as she spoke. “You're Myles, and you're mine. Marjorie gave you to me, so you're my pillow friend now and you have to talk to me, okay?” His silence continued. The small figure never moved as her hand closed more tightly around the fragile body, squeezing it harder and harder until abruptly, furious and ashamed, she opened her fingers and closed her eyes and felt him fall, bouncing off the side of her face, then slithering down the pillow to come to rest half on her neck, half off, still unspeaking. She closed her eyes on tears.

Eventually she fell asleep, but it was not the deep, easy sleep she was used to. Instead, it was as if she continued to listen for Myles even as she slept, as if her awareness of his presence in the bed was too strong, too vital to relax. She woke several times believing that she had felt him move, that he was about to creep away from her in the dark.

In the morning, for one heart-stopping moment she thought he had gone because he was no longer beside her head on the pillow. She jumped up and pulled the covers all the way back and found him about halfway down the bed. She stared at him for a little while before she picked him up, wondering if he had traveled that far on his own, or if she had pushed him away in her sleep.

Despite her mother's cautions and her own feelings about his difference from other dolls, she tried once to play with him, introducing him into the dollhouse one afternoon after school.

The dollhouse had been built by her father. He had also made one for the twins before she was born, but this was his masterpiece. It had a hinged front, and he had designed it to look like their own house. The resemblance was closest from the outside, when the front was closed—a shingled, gray, two-story wooden house with white shutters and a white front door—because although the floor plan was the same inside, with kitchen, utility room, hall, living room, and den downstairs, three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, the furnishings were different. It was both familiar and strange.

Myles dwarfed the family who lived in the dollhouse, and looked awkward in conjunction with most of the furniture, although he was not actually too big for the space. She put him in the kitchen, her favorite room, thinking he would be better there because the wooden table and chairs, a recent acquisition to replace the pink plastic set she'd had at first, were actually too large for the dollhouse family. She'd been right about the new furniture being his size, and the feast which was spread out on the tabletop—the loaf of bread, the bowl of fruit, the plate of pink meat—were all just about in proportion. But when she sat him on a chair he looked all wrong with his legs thrust out before him (they had not been made to bend). It was obvious that he did not belong, so horribly obvious that she was ashamed of herself for having put him there. In her haste to remove him she knocked some of the little dishes off the table and left them there, where the sight of them, the next time she played with the house, would recall her shame and the feeling of frustrated sadness she had carried away with Myles.

School ended and summer vacation began. She continued to sleep badly, and Myles continued to keep his silence, but still she hoped and waited for the night he would reveal himself to her for what he really was.

The days were bright and mercilessly hot. Agnes' mother, or Leslie's, took them swimming at the country club three or four mornings a week. Apart from those mornings in the pool, or the weekly visit to the library, she liked the evenings best. Her father was teaching her to ride a bicycle, and sometimes the twins would include her in running and hiding games, imaginative variants on hide-and-seek which they'd invented and taught to all the children in the neighborhood. The cooler evenings, in the couple of hours of light between dinner and bedtime, provided time for her best games with Leslie, when they became explorers, or pirates, or spies, riding their bicycles or climbing trees.

One long afternoon they worked at the table in her bedroom creating a wonderful map, with a coded rating system, of all the climbable trees in the four blocks that comprised their immediate neighborhood. The pecan tree in her backyard was pretty good, but they both agreed that the best tree of all was the huge old oak on the corner at the other end of the street, in Mr. and Mrs. Darwin's front yard. The Darwins were an elderly, childless couple, but they were the friendly natives who never objected to having their yard taken over and used as a playground. Rosamund and Clarissa had given up climbing trees as being too childish shortly before becoming, officially, teenagers. If that was the kind of deal you had to make to become a teenager, Agnes thought it was definitely not worth it. She was pretty sure that she and Leslie were the only children who played in that tree now. There was a hollow in a branch near the top which they called their “cubbyhole,” and they left treasures and messages in it which no one else had ever found.

There were also things to do indoors, during the heat of the day. Often she played with Leslie, but, for the first time this summer, Agnes found herself wanting to spend more time on her own. Myles wasn't the only thing she couldn't share with her friend—there were also books. Agnes had fallen in love with reading, but Leslie couldn't understand why anyone would want to sit quietly with a book outside of school. It puzzled and hurt her that Agnes would rather read than play with her. One day that hurt came spilling out.

They had been at Leslie's house all morning, playing with dolls, and then outside in the inflated wading pool, with the hose and the Slip 'n' Slide, splashing and shrieking and scooting along on their stomachs through the wetness. Leslie's mother, Jane-Ann, had given them lunch, and after lunch they'd been sent off to Leslie's room with instructions to stay there and play quietly for at least an hour, so Jane-Ann could have a rest.

“Maybe I should go home?”

“No, you can't go home. Let's play games. We can play Candyland.”

So they had played Candyland and Go Fish and Old Maid and Beetle, and all the time Agnes had been fretting, impatient to get away, her mind wandering off to the stack of library books waiting for her at home. She had read the first one last night, but the others called to her, tempting, tantalizing, each one different, exciting, new. The one she wanted to read next was called
My Favorite Age
. She had peeked at the first page that morning and was in a tingle of excitement trying to imagine what would happen next. She had expected to go home for lunch, after which it would have been easy to curl up in the big leather chair in her father's den, surrounded by his books, and lose herself in the undiscovered pleasures of a new library book.

“Aggie, will you just play
right
?” Leslie threw down her cards and Agnes stared at her in astonishment. She was crying.

“What's the matter?”

“I don't know! You don't want to play with me, I don't know why. Aren't we best friends anymore?”

“Of course we are!”

“Then why don't you tell me things like you used to? Why don't you tell me the truth about him? Why don't you ever let me hear him talk?” She gestured at Myles, on the floor, and Agnes reached down without thinking to cover him with her hand.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think I'm stupid? You told me what your aunt said about her pillow friend, and then for your birthday she gives you that doll. It was her doll, wasn't it? Well, it's obvious. You carry it around with you all the time, it must be special, but you don't play with it. So what is it with that doll that you won't tell me?”

Although Leslie left pauses for her to speak, Agnes was unable to say anything. She had not told Leslie anything about Myles, because there was nothing to tell. It had been nearly two months now since her birthday, and Myles had still not spoken, or moved, or given her the slightest sign that he was the special, magic doll she still longed to believe in. She continued to hope, and always kept him near her, to be ready for the magical moment, but her faith was getting a little wobbly.

She had not meant to keep a secret from her best friend; she had only been waiting until there was something to tell, something to share. She couldn't share her doubts; she was afraid that as soon as she voiced them, they would become the truth, and Myles would become ordinary. Aunt Marjorie would be revealed as just another grown-up who told stories to credulous children—stories Leslie would have been too smart to swallow.

But now she had to say something. “He
is
special. It's just, it's hard to explain why, he just is. I know he is. I wasn't keeping that a secret from you. It's—it's just—well, there's not that much to tell.”

“Does he talk to you?”

“Sometimes.” The lie was out before she had time to think. “Sometimes, late at night, when we're in bed, just before I go to sleep, he'll tell me a story or something.”

“Neat!” Leslie's blue eyes were round and shining; the faintly freckled skin of her face fairly glowed as she leaned forward, drinking in the story. “Like what, can you tell me one?”

“Maybe . . . not right now. It's hard to remember all the details, you know, after a few days.”

“Next time he tells you a story will you tell me?”

Agnes nodded.

“Promise.”

“Yes, I promise. Leslie, I wasn't trying to be mean, or anything, not saying anything before, I just didn't think you were interested.”

“Well, of course I'm interested! Geeze, Louise! Honestly! Some people's children!” They laughed at the phrase which was their own adaptation of a frequent exclamation of Leslie's mother, and they were close again, closer than before, despite the guilt Agnes felt about her lie, a guilt that was worse for knowing she could never, ever confess it.

They played happily together for the rest of the afternoon, and when it was time to go home—her mother had called to say that dinner would be on the table in five minutes—Leslie walked her halfway. At the halfway point (which had been instituted at their mothers' insistence, to keep them from walking endlessly back and forth with each other) Leslie asked, “Could I keep him tonight?”

It was like something cold and hard sticking halfway down her throat, like swallowing a cube of ice. She looked at her friend's eager, pleading, loving face and knew she could not deny her. They had always shared everything. Even Leslie's most valuable possession, the square-cut emerald ring she'd inherited from her grandmother, too large to wear, had been in Agnes' pocket, and her jewelry box, for a day and a night despite the fact that Leslie was strictly forbidden to take it out of the house. Although Myles, too, was valuable, Agnes was under no such prohibition, as her friend knew perfectly well. Selfishness was her only reason for wanting to say no, and selfishness was not allowed between best friends.

“He probably won't talk to you. He doesn't always talk, and . . .”