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Irma Loudermilk’s son always did like to ask questions, from the first moment he could utter, “Why?” “Why does grass grow?” “Why does a car need gasoline?” “Why is it harder to go up hill than down hill?” Eventually she taught him to read (he caught on shockingly quickly) and got him a library card, and hoped he’d be able to answer most of them on his own now, but the questions just changed in nature, to the rhetorical (”Did you know that…?”) and the speculative (”What would happen if…?”). She’d thought the inevitable, “Mama, Jacky says Daddy’s not my real dad, so who IS?” would be the most difficult one she’d have to face, and was relieved to have gotten through it with a nice lesson in genetic diversity on top of it. But she never expected the one that came a few months later, when he was eight.
“Mama, why did you never tell me about Kerry?!”
“What are you talking about, Cary,” she groaned, trying to pack their two brown bag lunches and sign school papers while juggling her morning coffee. “You’re Cary.”
“No, not me-Cary. GIRL-Kerry. K-E-R-R-Y.”
Irma froze. Her stomach dropped, and her coffee nearly did, but before she could utter, How did you find out about…, he continued.
“She says you’re her mama, too. How can you have another kid and not tell me? Why doesn’t she eat supper with us? Where’s her room? I can’t figure that out, it must be near mine, because we can talk at night clear as anything—”
“Wait, this, this girl-Kerry is talking to you?”
“Yes; maybe the radiator pipes are forming an acoustic tunnel between our rooms that makes the sound seem louder. Did you know that if you stand at one side of an elliptical dome and whisper, someone on the other side can hear you but the people in the middle can’t?”
“Stop, Cary, hold on. When did…how often does this girl-Kerry talk to you?”
“All the time!” he said earnestly. “I thought I was talking to myself for the longest time, but a couple weeks ago she wanted to play with my trains so she came to my room, and told me her name, and even then I wasn’t sure she wasn’t a figment of my imagination, but she’s a real solid person, and last night she told me you’re her mama, and she looks just like the picture in the hallway of you when you were little, so WHAT’S GOING ON?”
Irma set all the morning chaos down on the counter and knelt to look her son in the eye. “Cary.” She placed one hand on his shoulder, the other on his chest. “Slow down. Breathe. Easy. Don’t work yourself into an asthma attack.” Cary nodded. “Do you have your inhaler?” He nodded again. “Do you need to use it?”
He shook his blond head, gulped a couple of times, and finally said, “I’m a-all right. I just want to know what’s, what’s true.”
She shut her eyes and breathed out quickly. “I don’t know right now. We can talk about it when I get home from work. I can promise you do not have a sister locked away in a mysterious secret room in this house, though.” She chuckled a little in the hope of making him laugh, but he simply frowned back.
“How can you n-n-not know whether you have another kid or not?”
“It’s …more complicated than that. We’ll talk tonight. In the meantime?” She put on a serious face again, which wasn’t difficult. “Don’t mention girl-Kerry to anyone else. Not to your teacher, not to the other kids, nada to no one, you hear me?”
He nodded again, looking more puzzled than sulky.
“Okay, then. Let’s get breakfast and off to school.”
She saw him safely join the group with the crossing-guard and returned to the house, where she glared at the phone. There was no avoiding it. She grit her teeth and dialed.
“Yello,” came the answer.
“Ray. Did you tell Cary about Kerry?”
“What the—Irma, nothing you just said makes any sense.”
She sighed and tried again. Slower. Just like she’d tell Cary to do whenever he got worked up. “Cary was with your folks last weekend. I know they’re too smart and decent to have brought her up, so did you talk to him?”
“First of all, I don’t have anything to do with your son, and second, brought who up?”
Don’t engage, she told herself. “The girl Kerry we thought we were having. He starts talking about her out of nowhere today, Ray, spells it just the way we did, too, K-E-R-R-Y, where else could he have gotten that?”
“Oh. Her. The ‘Lakota’ girl you said we were having.”
“Do not even start. My point is, he’s not supposed to know about her. He doesn’t need to know about her. You think he doesn’t feel like enough of a freak in this family already without his own dad telling him ‘oh by the way, you’re really supposed to be a little Indian girl’?”
“I’m not his dad.”
“I’m not even going there today.”
“Then why do you keep insisting—“
“HE SAYS SHE TALKS TO HIM, Ray.”
“…What?”
“Yes! Tell a little kid he’s a genetic mistake who probably ate his twin sister in the womb, he has a psychotic break! Imagine that!”
“I nev-”
“The busybodies around here would just love any excuse to prove I shouldn’t be raising a little white boy on my own. Especially one as smart— you know he’s a genius, right? Certifiable, they say. And then they ask who his daddy was as if I couldn’t possibly have spawned a genius myself.”
“I thought you weren’t even going there today.”
“But what do you care if they take him away from me? You gave him up years ago.”
“Irma, calm down. How do you even know he’s had a psychotic break? Maybe he just has an imaginary friend. He’s, what, six?”
“EIGHT. And it doesn’t matter. If they even suspect my kid’s gone crazy, I’m gonna lose him.”
Mama thinks I’m crazy, Cary thought on the walk to school, somewhat dispassionately. The nervous, placating tone in her voice wasn’t lost on him (he was, after all, a genius). And was he crazy? Kerry seemed real, even if her being there didn’t quite make sense. The truth was, sometimes he talked to her in places that definitely weren’t connected by radiator pipes, and they could still hear each other, clear as anything. How could that be unless she was just a figment of his imagination?
He wanted to talk to her now, just to double-check, but he was surrounded by other kids, and things didn’t go well when other kids caught him talking to himself. Not that things went well when he talked directly to other kids, either. Or even when he wasn’t talking, but there were other kids around, sometimes. And Mama was worried he’d tell someone about Kerry!
Kerry laughed at him, too, but it was different from other kids. Kerry laughed because she actually thought he was funny. She didn’t mind him using big words, or having to carry an inhaler, or that he stuttered when he was nervous and didn’t have an opinion on football. She certainly didn’t care that he looked so different from his mother (who was also her mother?), and that was something even grownups seemed wary about. Imaginary or not, Kerry was the best friend he had. If that made him crazy, well then, he liked being crazy!
But he also liked rational explanations. And he intended to get to the bottom of this one.
After school he searched for hidden rooms. He paced every inch of the house, calculating the distances between each wall. He was in the basement shining a flashlight into every nook of the ceiling directly below his bedroom when he heard her. Cary? What are you doing?
“I’m looking for your bedroom.”
She scoffed. Well it’s not down here.
“Well, I might find some apparent design flaw that would indic—”
“It’s upstairs, doofus.” He turned around—because that time he had clearly heard her behind him— to find her waiting impatiently at the bottom of the stairs. Right. He supposed he could have just asked her all along.
“I-I was asking Mama about you this morning,” he said as he followed her up the stairs. “She was really strange about it. I don’t know if, if she even believes in you.”
Kerry stopped and made a face. “That’s silly. I’m right here.”
The confusion he’d felt earlier in the day came back. He wasn’t sure how to say this. “Ah-a-are you?” Kerry pinched his arm, hard. “Ouch! What-”
“That here enough for you?” She glared at him and he gawped back for about two seconds. She broke first, and as soon as she started laughing, he did, too.
“Okay, okay, I believe in you! You are indisputably right here…here…why are we here?”
“You wanted to find my bedroom.”
“This is…my bedroom.” He felt confused again, but Kerry was still grinning at him and he couldn’t stop giggling.
“I know. And it’s my bedroom. So?” She hadn’t managed to stop giggling, either.
He had a feeling they were becoming hysterical. “But where do you sleep?”
“In the bed, duh!”
“There’s only one bed!” Yes, this was definitely hysterics. “And it’s my—”
A door closed at the far end of the house. “Mama’s home. She was going to tell me what she knows. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Hey, wait….”
He was vaguely aware of her running up behind him, but couldn’t stop. He ran down the hall and skidded toward the front door. “Can we talk about Kerry now?” he said breathlessly. “Girl-Kerry.”
Mama set down her bag and gave him a sort of saddish smile. “Hey, kiddo.”
“You said you were going to tell me about Kerry. She says her room is my room. How does that even make sense?”
“Cary, listen, buddy.” She crushed him into a deep hug. “This is all I want to say about it. Whatever you’ve heard, whatever anyone thought before you were born, it doesn’t matter. YOU are my son, and I love you just the way you are.”
“I… know?”
“So don’t give any more thought to girl-Kerry, you hear? You are all the Cary I need.”
“I’m… I’m not sure we’re actually on the same page about Kerry, Mama.” Mama just laughed and noogied his hair, which annoyed him, to be honest. He was trying to be serious. “What does she have to do with before I was born? She’s here now.”
Mama paused. “Just because I thought I was having a girl,” she said slowly, “doesn’t mean you have to reinvent her for me.”
“But I didn’t…you were going to call the girl ‘Kerry,’ with a K?”
“Yes. It’s a good name for a boy, too. Have you ever seen Cary Grant? Oh, my, there’s a handsome man!”
Cary ignored this. “And I bet it would have made more sense, genetically, for her to look like you? Instead of someone like me, no matter how many hidden recessive genes and mutations?”
“Cary, this is exactly why I didn’t mention her before! Forget her! You’re my Cary!”
“You still don’t believe she’s here, do you?”
“I gave birth to you.”
He sighed. This was definitely a new variable to consider, at least.
He went back to his room and laid on the bed, staring at the ceiling. After awhile he said, “Kerry, are you there?”
Yep.
“Where?”
Where what?
“Where are you?”
Lying on my bed. In my room.
“You mean…my room?”
That’s what I said.
He looked around just to be certain. There was still only one bed. And he was still the only person lying there.
“Okay, let’s do an experiment.” He got up. “I’m going to find you. You just keep telling me where you are.”
Standing beside the bed.
Cary froze. He rocked his eyes slowly from left to right, but still didn’t see anyone. He turned around—there was a whole perimeter of bed to stand beside— but he was the only one there. He ducked down to search underneath it.
Kerry laughed. Now I’m under the bed. This is a silly game.
“How come I still can’t find you?” He pushed himself up and ran across the room. He flicked the light switch a few times. Kerry burst into fresh giggles. “Okay,” he asked her. “Now what are you doing?”
Turning the lights on and off. Why?
“I’M turning the lights on and off!”
I knew it wasn’t my idea. It’s a silly thing to do.
Cary’s heart raced. He felt his lungs tighten and fumbled for his inhaler. “Oh-ohohohkay,” he gasped after a few long breaths. “One more, one more test.”
He opened the door and shuffled down the hall. “NOW where are we— y-you?”
In the bathroom.
“Okay.” He gripped the edge of the sink and slowly raised his eyes to look in the mirror above it. He was still the only person there, but he wasn’t expecting anything otherwise by this point. “What do you see when you look in the mirror?”
You, of course!
“What, what do you mean ‘of course’?”
That’s what I always see when I look in the mirror.
“Mirrors don’t work that way!” He turned around to frantically wave his arm from the wall behind him, to the mirror, and back. “The light rays bounce off of whatever’s in front of it and the mirror bounces the light right back, you have to see you in the mirror!”
But I see YOU, “see?” She turned around in front of him, pointing at the mirror, and her eyes went wide. She shrieked, “OH!”
Cary turned his head. There were now definitely two children reflected in the mirror. There were now definitely two children, standing side by side, gaping at their reflections, in the bathroom.
“MAMA! MAMA! Guess what!”
Irma looked up to two children running into the living room. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Cary was saying to the girl who was pulling him by the hand into the room— the girl who had just called her “Mama.” Irma blinked at the girl. It was like the childhood picture in the hallway had come to life in full color.
“Cary wasn’t making me up, see? I was just living inside him the whole time and we didn’t know what was going on but I didn’t know you didn’t know, either, really, but now we know everything and look, I can go in and out him any time I want!” The girl disappeared, then reappeared.
Irma groaned and rubbed her eyes. “Oh dear god, it’s catching.”
“Psychosis isn’t contagious, Mama,” said Cary.
“Tell that to Salem, Massachusetts,” she muttered.
“Well, this psychosis isn’t contagious, because it’s not a psychosis, she’s real. You see her, now, don’t you? You hear her. You’re talking to her!”
“I always thought you were talking to me and Cary at the same time but Cary says you didn’t know I was there!”
“But now you do know,” Cary said, “so we can talk about her now, right? Kerry’s a real part of our family, and we can all go places together and eat supper together—”
“Ew, NO.” The girl made a face at Cary.
“Why not?”
“Eating’s WEIRD.”
“Eating keeps you alive,” Cary told her.
“I made it this long, didn’t I?”
“CARY. Ker—” Irma groaned again. “Just…everyone. Whoever’s here. If we are going to survive as a family unit we need to make sure not a single trace of this…Kerry Delusion ever leaves this house. Social Services would be on us in a snap, you understand? This family, for all intents and purposes, is ME and CARY— Boy-Cary, I mean. No offense, sweetheart—OHHHHHH I just said “no offense” to a delusion!”
“Kerry isn’t a delusion!” Cary threw his hands forward as if begging.
But Kerry just said, “Mama?” and knelt by the chair. “I don’t mind if you don’t believe in me yet. I like living inside Cary. You don’t need to feed me or dress me or worry about me at all, I promise. If you want to pretend I’m a delusion, that’s okay. Just…believe Cary, okay? Believe that what he says is true for us, even if not for you? Does…does that make sense?”
“Nothing about this makes sense.” She shook her head, then held out her arms. “But come here, anyway.” She pulled both children into a hug, rocking a little. After a little while she realized the hug had gotten tighter. She held Cary out by the shoulders and blinked away tears. “I don’t see her anymore,” she told him, tentatively, almost as if asking permission.
“That’s because she’s inside me again.” Cary suddenly laughed. “She says, ‘Her? Her who? I’m a delusion.’ She’s joking. I think.”
“Yeah.” Irma pulled him back to hug again. “I think, too.”