She vanished just as the year ended and we looked for her everywhere, in all the hidden nooks and crannies of our Victorian foursquare. Mae, of course, was adamant that Ava – Mae’s imaginary, but in her 10-year-old mind very real, friend – had stolen her and stashed her away somewhere as a prank. I didn’t want to fight her too hard on that topic, knowing from past experience that denying Ava’s existence only made Mae dig her heals in with an all-knowing pigheadedness only pre-teen girls possess. At the same time, I often wondered with slight unease if 10 wasn’t a little bit old to still believe in imaginary friends and awkwardly tried to push Mae into finding companions her own age. But this she stubbornly refused with a similar determination, stating that the other children at school were “immature” and “boring” and that she only liked Ava.
And then there was the damn doll. Which wouldn’t have been the hugest deal if Missy hadn’t been Mae’s favorite almost since birth. So after a few nights of listening to Mae cry herself to sleep without Missy by her side, even I was alternately cursing Ava and imploring her to give Mae her doll back – and the kid wasn’t even real!
Which is what I kept telling myself while exhausting every possible hiding place inside the house and then fully turning my attention to our small yard, front and back. I even combed through the trees and bushes at the back of the neighbors’ house, just in case Mae had dropped Missy out of one of the top story windows by accident and had felt too guilty to tell me about it.
***
As I tucked Mae into bed on day 5 of our fruitless search, she suddenly said: “Ava says she took Missy cause she’s lonely and misses her daddy.”
Not wanting another confrontation after days of doll hunting and frustrated conversations, I replied indulgently.
“Well, sweetheart, she still had no right taking someone else’s stuff. Especially something as precious as Missy. Where’s her daddy gone anyway?”
“He died,” Mae sighed a little as she distractedly played with her hands. I tried my best to hide the slight shock I felt at my child’s rather morbid imagination and carded my fingers through her long hair in a smoothing gesture instead.
“Really?” I asked gently. “That’s very sad. How did he die?”
“He died in the war.” And after a long pause: “Somebody shot him.”
I didn’t push for more after that, as Mae started to look tired and laid her head on the pillow in preparation for sleep. But when I walked out of her bedroom and pulled the door ajar, I couldn’t help but glance back at my daughter, looking so innocent with her eyes closed and chestnut brown hair fanning out above her quilt, and wondered what made her young mind include such gruesome details in her childlike imaginings.
***
“Mummy,” Mae asked me a few days later, looking up from her drawing as I put dinner in the oven. She hesitated for a moment, eyes downcast and little fingers idly shifting the pencils around on the worktop. “I told Ava you could look up her dad’s name online, find out a bit more about him, where he was fighting and such? She’s hardly seen him the past few years and can hardly remember him before then. I told her you can find anything on the internet these days. Please?”
She lifted her eyes pleadingly and I didn’t have the heart to resist those puppy eyes.
I half successfully managed to suppress the sigh that made its way to my lips at the thought of another pointless exercise, but managed a weary “Of course, sweetheart” and the beaming smile she sent me almost weighed up against trawling the internet for something I was sure we weren’t going to find. Almost.
***
As expected, our online search turned up the grand total of nothing, although, as it turned out, you can’t exactly find anything on the internet these days. Currently serving US soldiers, for example, don’t just feature in a publicly available database. To find a current or past member of the US army, you need to send a letter to the relevant branch, and that’s about 20 steps further than I was willing to take this whole ‘Ava’s dad’ thing. Even a perfunctory Facebook search proved futile.
Mae reluctantly agreed to drop the topic for now, but I was more perturbed by the whole situation than I was letting on to my daughter. Especially as she kept feeding me tidbits of information, supposedly about her best (imaginary) friend’s father. Like where did she get the name Milton McIntyre from? And how did Mae all of a sudden know so much about army ranks and divisions? Had she read it in a book or magazine somewhere? The details Mae recounted of Ava’s stories, supposedly originating from the letters her dad had sent home from the front, were baffling to say the least and I was left with one of two options – either my daughter was an incredibly talented and creative budding novelist, or she was getting her information from a secret source she wasn’t prepared to share.
And on top of that, Missy was still missing.
***
The holiday season just past had left me nothing short of exhausted. Being a single mother was not easy at the best of times. Being a single mother at Christmas was a whole different ball game altogether. So when I started… let’s say ‘imagining’ things, I simply put it down to delayed fatigue, the stresses of gift shopping and preparing parties and, of course, the constant search for the ever-elusive doll. So if I saw something out of the corner of my eye from time to time… lack of sleep can do funny things to a person. And the sounds? Well, we do live in a 150-year old house and everyone knows old houses live and breathe!
At least Mae had started to give the Ava stories a rest, which I was secretly glad about, but at the same time twisted my stomach with a healthy dose of mom guilt. Surely I ought to be happy listening to my daughter’s stories, whether real or imaginary. I should be proud of her vivid imagination, right? So one night, at bedtime, I softly inquired about Ava and how she was doing and if Mae was still seeing much of her.
“Oh, I see her all the time,” came the reply. “But Ava thinks I shouldn’t talk to you about her anymore, because you don’t believe me anyway. She says you’ll see soon enough.”
I tried to shrug off the ominous nature of those words, but couldn’t suppress a chill down my spine, which slowly settled into my core.
***
One lazy Saturday afternoon, two weeks into the new year and following several well-meaning “Oh, your tree’s still up” comments, even I started looking at the Christmas decorations with mild irritation. Mae was reading in her room and probably wouldn’t show her face until supper time. So, with a heavy sigh, I retrieved the flatpack boxes and shopping bags from the cupboard underneath the stairs and started loading them with string lights, tinsel and Christmas tree parts. Next, I heaved the packed boxes to the top floor landing, eased the hook through the eye and allowed the trapdoor to open and the stepladder to descend.
A good half an hour later, I put the final box away and climbed the final steps to the hatch to survey my work. Admittedly, our attic was in need of a good clear-out. It had never really been a priority since we moved in 5 years ago, but looking over the dusty, cobweb-covered collection of storage and furniture, it suddenly occurred to me that most of the stuff in here wasn’t even ours. I felt a slight thrill go through me at the thought of the treasures that could be buried there and that we had unwittingly inherited with the house. As I’d completed the main task I’d set myself that day, I felt there was no time like the present.
***
About an hour and a full bottle of Pledge later, my treasure hunt had not turned up anything noteworthy. The furniture had been largely left empty and, though it demonstrated good craftmanship, the wood had been nibbled and gnawed at by a variety of rodents over the past decades. I therefore doubted I could use or sell it.
I was about to throw the towel in for the day, when I suddenly spotted some familiar red material, half hidden behind a large oak wardrobe. I stepped closer for a better look, convinced my eyes were deceiving me, but they were not. There she was, all velvet dress and long blonde hair and, most surprisingly, not a speck of dust on her – Missy. I picked up the doll and turned her round in my hands, wondering how she could have possibly ended up here, when I noticed the surface she’d been lying on. Before me stood a large dark-oak chest which, upon closer inspection, had been decorated with intricate relief markings. I pulled on the heavy lid and was surprised to find it unlocked.
Compared to its size, the chest was remarkably empty, save for a bundle of old sepia photographs and a bundle of what appeared to be letters. There were three pictures in total – a family photo with mom, dad and a little girl of maybe 5 or 6, a headshot of the same man in uniform and army hat and, finally, just the mom and the girl, although in the last picture she appeared to be around Mae’s age.
I placed the photos carefully back in the chest and picked up the top piece of paper. I fingered it open carefully, scanning the neatly handwritten words. The letter was dated December 31st, 1917 and appeared to be from a soldier to his wife. It felt almost intrusive to read such a personal message, but my curiosity won out over the sense of indecency I felt. He wrote about the status of the war in France, about the conditions in the trenches and how they had tried to make the best of Christmas. He professed his love for his wife and daughter and how much he was missing them. He clung to rumors that the war would be over soon and he’d be allowed to come home.
As a reached the end of the page, I saw something that made me drop the paper in disbelief.
The letter was signed “Your loving husband, Milton.”
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