The whispering in Max’s room began two months after Colin’s death.
Maggie had always had freakish hearing abilities ever since she was a little girl. The slightest imperceptible sound could wake her in the middle of the night. The rustling of tree branches like sandpaper being rubbed together, the slight whistling sound the wind made right before a storm, a murmur in a crowded room – she could hear it all. Her sister Gretchen had called her Lassie and the nickname stuck. A week before he died, Colin had even remarked on this skill when she’d woken him up from a nightmare he was having.
“You’re very odd, Lass,” he’d said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with a grin. “You were out cold. How’d you know I was having a bad dream?”
Maggie sighed and lay back beside him. “The sheets. They kept making a scrunching sound while you jerked.”
“Sorry,” he’d said, kissing her on the side of the head. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
But that wasn’t all that had awakened Maggie. There was an undercurrent of…something she couldn’t quite describe. It had been following her around for days, hovering over her like some invisible cloud. The feeling intensified whenever she was around her husband. She couldn’t understand it – Colin was fine. He was the same smiling, happy-go-lucky guy he always was. He played with Max after work right before dinner like he always did and he made love to her with the same passion he’d had for her when they’d first met seven years before.
He’d collapsed at work a week later. Heart attack, the doctor said, and Maggie still couldn’t believe it. Colin didn’t spend all of his free time in the gym, that was true, but he was active, didn’t smoke, only drank socially, and he ate well – she didn’t understand how a seemingly healthy thirty-five year old had just up and had a heart attack. His own father had died at fifty two years before Colin’s death, but Jim had been a heavy drinker and smoked a pack a day for most of his adult life. His passing had not been much of a surprise to anybody. Hell, Maggie was shocked he’d made it as long as he did from the stories Colin had told her about her father-in-law.
Max hadn’t reacted much to Colin’s death. When Maggie’s mother-in-law broke the news to him because Maggie was too emotional to do it herself, Max only cocked his head to the side and frowned.
“Daddy’s in heaven?” he’d asked Grandma Ruth.
Ruth nodded and hugged the boy to her chest. “Yes, sweetheart – your daddy’s in heaven with grandpa.”
Max pulled away from his grandmother and bit his lower lip, thinking. “Is he coming back?”
“No, sweetie,” Ruth said, wiping the tears from her face with her knuckles.
Max climbed down from the couch and walked to the living room entrance. He turned back to his stunned grandmother and quietly sobbing mother. “At least he’s not by hisself.”
He’d turned on his heel and ran up the stairs to his room to play with his toy trucks.
Maggie had been worried about him ever since. It wasn’t normal. His father had just died and Max acted as if he was only out for a quick stroll around the neighborhood. He didn’t cry, he didn’t ask about Colin – it was almost as if Colin had never existed. Max was five-years-old. No kid that age was that well-adjusted that the death of a parent shouldn’t even register with him. The sinking feeling she’d had the week before Colin’s death, the feeling she could now describe as foreboding, was back whenever she looked at Max.
Then the whispering started.
Every night like clockwork Maggie woke at three a.m. with a full bladder and the desperate need to relieve herself. She climbed out of bed and stumbled down the hall of her small ranch house to the bathroom. As she sat on the toilet, her vision blurry from sleepiness, she thought about Colin. She’d thought about him every night for the last two months. That first night without him was the hardest. She cried herself to sleep on the living room couch. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in their bed knowing that at any point in the night she could roll over into the empty place where he once slept and not feel his warm body pressed against hers. The sheets would never rumple again and wake her at all hours of the night – when she was out, she was out – she’d miss that. She thought it was funny how you could miss the most random things about a person when they were no longer around.
As she walked down the hall back to her bedroom, she came before Max’s bedroom door and froze. It was closed like it always was, that wasn’t the issue. What stopped her was the faint sound of someone talking on the other side. She’d put Max to bed almost nine hours ago – what was he doing up? And who was he talking to?
She pressed her ear up against the door and listened. There was silence. She waited for more sounds to emanate from his room, but nothing came. Maggie stood up straight and yawned, shaking her head. Maybe she hadn’t heard anything after all. The house had been so silent since Colin’s death, maybe she was desperate for any noise at all so she was making things up in her head. As she started back toward her room, she heard the sound of giggling coming from Max’s room.
She stopped dead in her tracks. Okay, I didn’t imagine that, she thought. Maggie went back to Max’s door and heard the distinct sound of whispering. She curled her fingers into a fist, but her hand froze pre-knock. She was wide awake now and her stomach was tied in inexplicable knots. Why was she uneasy? Max was probably talking in his sleep. He’d done it a couple of times when he first started talking, though after a while, he’d gotten to be like his mother, dead to the world as soon as his head hit a pillow.
Maggie steeled herself and tapped gently on the door. “Max?” she called out. “Are you awake, buddy?”
The whispering stopped. Max didn’t answer.
Maggie gripped the copper door handle and gave it a turn. It didn’t open. The door was locked.
She frowned. Max never locked his bedroom door. In fact, it was a house rule that no doors were to be locked at bedtime in case of emergencies. Max knew that.
Maggie knocked again, this time a little louder. “Max? I heard you talking in there – come open this door, please.”
The sound of the window being slammed shut greeted her in response. Before Maggie could get really angry for being ignored, she heard the faint sound of the lock being undone and the door opened part way. Max stood ruddy cheeked and barefoot in the doorway, his hair tousled and his Spiderman pajamas wrinkled. He was wide awake, Maggie noticed, but was rubbing his eyes and squinting as if he’d been woken by his mother’s knocks.
“Yes, mommy?” he said, his voice airy, speech slightly slurred.
Maggie pushed his door open all the way and went into the room. She glanced around as Max trailed behind her. Nothing seemed out of the usual. His racecar comforter was halfway on the floor like he’d kicked it down while sleeping or after climbing out of bed; the oak toy chest Grandpa Jim made him sat under the window, closed. The only light on in the room was the night-light Maggie’d plugged into the wall by Max’s bed when he was three and discovered his fear of the dark.
Maggie’s eyes trailed back to the window. Something about it was…wrong. She walked over to it and peered out into the night. She saw nothing. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see, but she must have been expecting something because the knots in her stomach undid themselves and her thudding heart slowed back to its normal rhythm.
She turned the shutters on his windows closed and stared at Max. He’d climbed up into bed and pulled his covers up around his chest.
“Max, did you have this window open?”
“No, mommy.”
Maggie frowned and sat beside him on his small bed. She folded her hands in her lap leveling him with a serious gaze. “You know how I feel about lying, Max. I heard the window close. Why’d you open the window?”
Max propped himself up on his pillows. He stared down at his tiny fingers splayed along the edge of his comforter. “Edgar told me to open it.”
“Who’s Edgar?”
Max fingered the comforter, but didn’t speak
.
“Max, I asked you a question now please, answer me. Who’s Edgar?” Maggie felt impatience growing inside of her.
The little boy sighed and looked her in the eye. All pretense of having been asleep was gone as he stared at her with wide, blue eyes. Maggie’s heart skipped. When he looked at her like that, he looked so much like Colin.
“Edgar’s my friend.”
“Your friend?”
Max nodded.
“How did you meet this friend?”
“He came to my window,” Max said, his voice low. A sly smile crossed his lips. “He said he’s coming back to get me so we can play.”
Maggie’s unease returned, but she forced a smile for Max’s sake. He seemed excited about the possibility of seeing this “friend” of his again.
“Where did Edgar go?” she asked, scooting down so that she was next to her son.
Max shrugged. “I don’t know. You made him leave.”
“How’d I make him leave?”
“When you knocked on the door, Edgar said he had to leave or he’d get in trouble and he left, but he said he’s coming back ‘cause we’re friends now.”
Max yawned and Maggie took him by the shoulders and gently laid him down. “Go to sleep, silly boy. And no more locking doors in here, understand?” She kissed him on the forehead and rubbed her nose against his. Max giggled and pecked her on the cheek before rolling over and closing his eyes.
Maggie stared at the small boy’s curly head one last time and closed his door behind her. She’d gone back to bed with a foreboding feeling.
That feeling intensified as the whispering continued night after night. Like clockwork, she’d get up at three and go to the bathroom. And every time she’d go back to her room, she’d hear Max talking to himself. She’d knock on the door and tell him to go back to sleep, then go back to her own bed. Sometimes she’d open the door and find him sitting on his toy chest with the window open and she’d scold him for opening it. Maggie had never left his window open at night. She wasn’t scared he’d fall out, and if he did, he wouldn’t have much of a ways to go seeing as how the entire house was one level and the window was only a couple feet off the ground. She was worried about kidnappings. Many children over the years had been snatched right out of their own beds at night while their parents slept only a few feet away all because the windows had been left open. Max knew that under no circumstances was he to open his window without her permission and that if he got hot at night, to either turn on his fan or open his bedroom door to the cool hallway.
Every morning after the whispering, Maggie would ask Max what he was doing. He told her he was talking to Edgar. The more Max talked about this friend, the more unsettled Maggie became. Especially when he told her that Edgar was not a little boy, but a grown man.
“So he has an imaginary friend – big deal,” Kelly said as Maggie sat a frothy cappuccino in front of her.
Kelly was Maggie’s best friend and a child psychologist. They’d met in high school and had been practically inseparable. When Colin died, Kelly had even temporarily moved in with Maggie and Max to help take care of the boy while Maggie was grieving and could barely get herself out of bed.
Maggie pulled a barstool out from the island in the kitchen and sat across from Kelly, blowing on her own mug of coffee. “You don’t think this is strange? The talking to himself thing?”
Kelly took a sip of her cappuccino and licked the foam from her lips. “No, I don’t. You want my professional opinion, Mags?”
Maggie nodded and Kelly set down her mug, staring at her friend with a grave expression. “My professional opinion is that you worry too much.”
Maggie swatted at Kelly’s hand as her friend laughed. “You’re supposed to be shrinking my child, not me.”
Kelly snorted. “I’m not shrinking anybody. I’m not on the clock.”
Both women peered out the kitchen window and watched Max run around the backyard chasing butterflies with an open jar. His hair flopped over his face as he giggled and shrieked with delight when he was thisclose to snagging a butterfly, but it flew from his grasp.
“He seems okay to me,” Kelly said, taking another sip of her drink. “He’s five. Most kids that age have imaginary friends. I had one. Didn’t you?”
Maggie thought about it for a moment. It wasn’t ever something she thought about before, but it now occurred to her that she never did have one. At least she couldn’t remember ever talking to someone who wasn’t there. Then again, she had three older sisters so she never lacked for company or playmates as a kid.
She thought about Colin then. He’d told her once that he’d had an imaginary friend when he was little. Colin had had an overactive imagination in general. Once when he was in first grade and went to Sacred Hearts Catholic Elementary, he’d told the class that his parents had been seriously injured in a car crash the day before and were in the intensive care unit of the hospital hooked up to life support. His teacher had brought all the children down to the chapel and led them in prayer for the speedy recovery of his parents.
When Ruth came to pick him up that afternoon, Colin’s teacher had almost wet herself in fright. She believed in miracles, but surely that one had worked itself a little too quickly. It had to be devil’s work. And when Ruth found out the story Colin had told his classmates, he’d been punished for weeks for that little stunt.
A pang went through Maggie’s chest. She walked over to the sink and turned on the water, listening to the calming rush of liquid hitting the inside of the aluminum bowl.
Kelly came up behind her and rubbed her back. “You were thinking about him again, weren’t you?”
Maggie nodded. Kelly stroked the back of her hair and gave her friend a squeeze. “It’s all right, Mags. Everything is going to be okay. With you and with Max.”
Maggie shut the faucet off and flashed Kelly a weak smile. “Thanks for being here.”
“Of course. And trust me on this – give Max some space. Let him have this imaginary friend. He'll grow out of it when he’s ready.”
“Do you think this is his way of grieving? Coming up with a male friend to replace his dad? I don’t think I’ve seen him cry at all since…”
Kelly took Maggie’s hand for comfort. “Maybe. But like I said before – all kids are different. Just like adults grieve in their own ways, so do children. Just because he didn’t have the reaction you did doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with him. He’ll get through it.”
Maggie repeated that mantra to herself every night as the whispers wafted out from under his door.
One night, as Maggie pulled the covers back on her bed, about ready to call it a night after a long day of work, cooking and taking care of Max, he knocked on her open door.
“Mommy, can I come sleep in here with you?”
Maggie’s brow knit in confusion. “Sure, sweet face.”
Max padded over to her bed and climbed up, taking the spot where Colin used to sleep. Maggie bit her lip to keep from crying and climbed in beside him. “What’s going on? Why do you want to sleep in here tonight?”
She couldn’t remember the last time Max had slept in her room. He didn’t watch scary movies, or TV in general (he preferred books or running around outside), so he was rarely scared. And most things he didn’t understand he approached with a quizzical disposition that was far beyond his years. That too he got from his father.
Max cuddled up to Maggie and looked up at her with those wide, blue eyes. “I’m afraid.”
Maggie stroked his cheek. “Why, baby?”
Max didn’t answer. He buried his face in her chest and wrapped his arms around her. Maggie held him close to her, inhaling the scent of his shampoo.
“Is Edgar going to visit you tonight?”
Max stiffened and Maggie tilted his face up to meet his eyes. “What?”
His wide eyes narrowed and his lip poked out. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Okay. We won’t talk.”
She kissed him on the top of the head, reached over to her bedside table, and turned off the light.
The next night, Max was back in her room sleeping in her bed. And like the night before, he didn’t want to talk about Edgar or why he was afraid. Maggie called Kelly the following morning on Kelly’s lunch break.
“Something is wrong with him, Kel. I can feel it.”
Kelly sighed into the phone and Maggie could imagine her friend rolling her eyes in exasperation. “Maggie, what do you think is the matter?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I called you.”
“So he’s not talking to his imaginary friend anymore? I thought that’s what you wanted?”
“I did, but you don’t see the look on his face when I ask him about Edgar. You don’t feel how his body gets stiff as a board when I mention him. How can he be afraid of someone that doesn’t exist?”
“Maybe he’s not afraid. Maybe he’s finally ready to move on from this imaginary friend, but he doesn’t know how to so he’s making up an excuse for why he no longer needs him and he’s sublimating these feelings onto you.”
“So what do I do?”
Kelly paused. “You need to make him face what’s bothering him. The first step is getting him back into his own room. Once he does that, I think he’ll start to feel normal again.”
Maggie hung up, a bit relieved. But in the back of her mind she had the nagging thought that things couldn’t be that simple.
That night, Max came into her room in footie pajamas carrying his own pillow.
“Mommy, can I sleep in here?”
Maggie remembered her talk with Kelly. Her gut was saying that she should let him spend the night with her, but her brain told her that Kelly was right. At some point, Max needed to face whatever was bothering him so he could move on from it. She took him by the shoulders and walked him back to his room.
“I’m sorry, buddy, not tonight.” She turned on his bedroom light and picked him up. Max struggled against her and whined as she laid him on his bed.
“Mommy, please don’t make me stay here.”
Maggie frowned and stroked the hair off his forehead. “Why do you not want to be in your room?”
“He’ll come for me,” Max said, his voice trembling with fear. “He wanted to play with me, but he was doing bad things and I don’t want to play with him no more. Don’t make me stay where he can get me.”
Maggie breathed and counted inwardly to ten for strength. “No.” She stood with her hands on her hips, firm in her rejection. “Max, Edgar is not real. And he’s not coming back for you. You’re safe here. You need to sleep in your own bed tonight and you’ll see that he won’t hurt you, understand?”
Tears trailed down Max’s face and his lips quivered. It was almost enough to break Maggie’s resolve. She wanted to scoop him up in her arms and take him back to the master bedroom, but she knew if she did, he’d never be self-sufficient.
She leaned over