I don’t answer her. To be honest, I am a little embarrassed by her presence. By how real she is to me, how constant. Most people leave their imaginary friends in childhood where they belong. But Robin has stayed with me. She’s still that feral girl, raggedy, wide-eyed with wonder at the world all around her. In happier times, when I’m busy, engaged with my work and my life, she’s barely around. It’s in the darker moments, when memory comes to visit and stay, or I’m lonely, or the weight of Dear Birdie is too much to bear, she’s as real as Jax.
But the only person who knows about her is Dr. Cooper. I had a session with her a couple of years ago during a time when Robin seemed to be everywhere I looked.
“Robin isn’t so hard to understand,” Maggie said during that session. I’d driven back to see her rather than talk to her on the phone the way we sometimes did. “In your childhood, she was all the things you needed to be to survive your new life. She was a teacher, someone to show you the way of the land. She was a friend, when you’d been wrested from all yours back home. In adolescence, our friends are very significant. They help us to define who we are, who we want to become. She was a comfort in the instability of your home.”
“I get that.” I sank into the softness of Maggie’s couch, grateful for the warmth of the room, the sun streaming in through the windows. “But why is she still with me?”
“Had you not experienced life-altering trauma, she probably would have just faded as you found your way in your new life, as you grew and started to make decisions for yourself. She would have gone the way of all psychological formations of this kind.”
I wonder, is there a place where all the imaginary friends go, some kind of heaven for these “formations” of the troubled young mind. A place where they go and play with each other. I hope so.
“What’s unusual about her,” mused Dr. Cooper, “is that she has remained the same.”
“Why?”
“Because often these friends, if they stay on to adulthood—” she paused here, looking at me in that serious way she has “—sometimes they become darker, in some cases they become a tormentor, possessive maybe, controlling—like an unseparated parent who can’t let go.”
Robin wasn’t dark. Never that. She was all light. I told Dr. Cooper as much.
“Does she ever ask anything of you? Something you don’t want to give?”
I had to think about it a moment.
“She wants to go home, to go back to the land, to the tree house. In some ways she’d be happier living the way my father wanted to live.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Do I want to go back to the place where my father killed my brother and my mother and live there? No.”
“And yet here you are, back in town. Why?”
“Because I needed to talk to you.”
“About Robin,” she said pointedly.
“Yes.”
Maggie nodded thoughtfully. “You have to do some soul-searching here. Who is Robin to you really now? What does she represent? She’s a formation of your psyche. What is she trying to tell you about yourself?”
Robin fades as I drive until there’s no one beside me.
When the phone rings, I answer it via the button on my steering wheel.
“Don’t worry,” I answer. “Everything’s fine.”
“Really.” Jax.
No, I did not leave my phone. I’m not in your spell the way those other women seem to have been. I’m not cashing out my accounts and walking away from everything I’ve built to follow you through whatever dark doorway you’re offering. I think you know me better than that. I saw them, their faces, their shining eyes. Those girls—I’m sorry—but they were broken. I’m not. I’m a survivor.
I’m not worried that you’ll know. Or that if you discover I haven’t followed the rules, you’ll disappear. You’re as hooked into me as I am to you, I think. Otherwise you’d be long gone, wouldn’t you, never looking back and on to your next victim.
“You know,” Jax says, “I asked Siri to let me know when you were leaving that place. Since I track you I can do that.”
“Jax.”
“But it looks to me like you’re not heading back this way. It looks to me like you’re heading in the other direction. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not wrong.”
A sigh.
“Talk.”
I tell her everything. And I mean everything about my past, about Bailey Kirk, about the other women who have disappeared, about your text. There’s a leaden silence when I’m done. I think maybe she’s hung up, or that we were disconnected and I failed to notice because I was rambling on.