was also very emotional. Her moods could change with breathtaking suddenness and she was never the least bit inclined to rein them in. Yet she could still be so appealing, so charming, even in the midst of the most unreasonable behaviour. I loved that about her, that complicated wildness.”
“Who knew about Torgon? Did you tell anyone? Your father, for instance?”
“Kind of,” she replied and became thoughtful for a moment.
“I’m hearing something more in your voice,” James said. “Did your father not approve?”
“It’s not so much that he disapproved. Just that he didn’t get it, so there wasn’t much point in telling him. I spoke to him about it, but he didn’t ‘hear’ me, if you know what I mean.”
“Can you clarify that a bit?”
She considered James’s request, then nodded. “Like, for example, I remember once when I was eight. I was on my annual visit to his house here in Rapid City. I came every August to stay a week with him and my brothers. It was the highlight of my life in those days. Not Christmas, not my birthday, but that last week in August when my dad took his vacation and I got to come and stay with him.
“I slept on this rollaway bed that he put in the corner of his bedroom. For a long time, it had become my practice to go to the Forest during that period between getting in bed and falling asleep. I liked to do it then as it was a nice relaxing time and I didn’t get interrupted. At the Meckses no one ever even noticed because I was up in the attic, so I’d never paid much attention to whether I was talking out loud or not. But, of course, in Dad’s small apartment, he heard me and came in to see what I was doing. I remember him silhouetted in the doorway, asking, ‘Are you talking to one of us?’ I said no, that I was just playing.
“He came on into the room then and sat down on the edge of the bed and said, ‘You seem to be having an awfully good time in here by yourself. What are you playing?’
“Torgon had been coming to me for about a year by then and I was really into all the details of her life. For example, she was the elder of two daughters and had this sister four years younger who was named Mogri, and I knew all about the kinds of things they had done together growing up. I knew tons of other stuff too. The Forest society had an incredibly rigid hierarchy of castes and which caste you were born into counted for everything there. It determined who you were, what work you could do, which other members of society you could associate with. The highest caste was a religious ruling class that consisted of the Seer, the benna and their offspring. They were almost like a royal family, because they had absolute rule. The next highest caste was the elders, who made laws and arbitrated on civil matters. Then it was the warrior caste, and then the merchant caste and the traders, and so on and so forth. The very lowest caste was composed of the workers, the people who did manual labour. They weren’t even allowed to live in the same part of the village as those of the higher castes. They were actually walled off and kept out of the main village, except to do their work. Torgon and her family belonged to this lowest class. Her mother was a weaver, and her father built and repaired carts. Because she was low-born, it had come as a huge shock to everyone – including Torgon herself – when she was identified at nineteen as the next benna. So suddenly here she was, thrown from the lowest class to the highest. She was twenty-three at the point she had appeared to me in Adler’s vacant lot, and even then, she was still finding it hard to adjust in her work.”
“Goodness, that is all complex,” James said, thinking these were most extraordinary thoughts for an eight-year-old to be having. Trying to envisage Becky saying things like this to him, he could easily imagine how disconcerted he would feel as a once-a-month father to find out Becky spent most of her time playing pretend games about holy people and caste systems, and worrying over an imaginary twenty-three-year-old’s vocational problems.
“The thing is,” Laura replied, “I did know that. By the time I was eight, I had already realized other kids didn’t think about these kinds of things, or if they did, then not in this kind of detail. I didn’t know why I did. I didn’t know why it was in my head and no one else’s, but it was. When my dad asked me what I was doing that night, it was like he had come in partway through a movie. I was following the storyline and everything made sense to me, but how did I catch him up on that when he didn’t know all the stuff that went before?
“And I remember that sense of confusion. I lay there, studying his face in the gloom and not saying anything because I didn’t know what to say. I could tell by his expression he was hurt. He thought I was keeping things back from him on purpose, that I was probably sharing these stories with the Meckses because they were my everyday folks but not with him, because he wasn’t around enough. Which wasn’t true at all, because I didn’t share it with anyone, but I could tell he was thinking that. So I told him I was playing make-believe because I wasn’t sleepy yet, and was filling time until I was.
“My dad gave me this special smile he always saved for whenever he was going to do something he thought would really please me, and he said, ‘You know what? I’ve got a good idea. I think you deserve a later bedtime. From now on, you can stay up an extra half-hour each night. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To stay up later?’
“I said yes because I could tell he wanted me to be really happy about it, although the truth was, I didn’t want a later bedtime. I preferred going to bed when I did because I wanted to be with Torgon.
“He smiled warmly. ‘And one of these days, you’ll grow up, Laurie. When you’re little, pretending is lots of fun, but as you get older, you don’t need to pretend anymore because you have real things to think about and real things are always much nicer.’”
Laura leaned back in the chair. “I remember my father kissing me then and pulling up the covers. Tucking me in, and leaving. Torgon was gone for the moment and I was there alone, lying in the darkness.
“I’d always known, of course, that people outgrew their imaginary games. By eight most of my friends already had. I’d convinced myself, however, that I was going to be an exception to this and it would never happen to me. I’d hold on to Torgon and the Forest forever. That night, however, was the first time it dawned on me that I might be wrong. Maybe I wouldn’t be different, and someday Torgon would be gone.
“This huge, aching loneliness washed over me in that moment and I started to cry. I was thinking, if losing all this is growing up, then I don’t want to do it. But what if I had no choice? What if the time came when I could no longer see the Forest? What if my mind stopped being able to fill up with its sights and sounds and scents? What if I was no longer privy to the complexities of Torgon’s life? I remember thinking that I’d have too much mind for my head if Torgon wasn’t in it. She was different than my pretend games like Butterfly the Pony. Torgon was organic. She was not so much something I’d created as something I’d discovered. She was my other half, the part of me I needed in order to be whole. She was the union of me and not-me.”
Laura’s session stayed with James in a way that didn’t usually happen. Part of it was undoubtedly the strangeness of this imaginary companion. People motivated to come into therapy because of the breakdown of a marriage usually talked about relationships. James had already noticed that Laura wasn’t going to be drawn into conversations about Conor. He could accept that perhaps that relationship had broken down so far that there was going to have to be some new groundwork laid before Laura could be coaxed back into a bond with her son. However, as the breakdown in her relationship with Alan had been the reason she herself had given for agreeing to therapy, James had assumed that was where they’d start. That she’d chosen instead to talk about her relationship in childhood with an imaginary person was curious but also gripping.
Part of the session’s staying power was also the manner in which Laura spoke. While living in New York James had made the acquaintance of several writers, mainly because Sandy thought they made impressive guests at dinner parties. He had often been less than impressed. Most had seemed joyless and unpleasantly pretentious, forever fretting about the demands of their “gift” and, in equal measure, the world’s lack of appreciation thereof. Laura’s dissimilarity to those former dinner guests was