My Kid's Imaginary Friend Knew the Name I Left Behind in a City I've Never Mentioned

I want to start by saying that I am not a superstitious person. I grew up in a house without religion, I have a graduate degree, I have spent the better part of my adult life being the one in the room who offers the reasonable explanation. I'm writing this down because writing things down is how I think, and because I've reached the end of my reasonable explanations, and I need someone outside my own head to tell me I'm missing something obvious.

My son is five. He's been talking about Maren since last February — a girl, he says, about his age, with dark hair and shoes that are too big for her. Standard imaginary friend material. I read the parenting literature. Imaginary companions are developmentally healthy, often more common in only children, frequently vivid in ways that can surprise adults. I was not surprised. I asked about Maren with genuine interest. I set a place at the table twice, as a joke that he took seriously. It was sweet. It was normal.

The first thing that wasn't normal happened in April. We were driving, and he was telling me about something Maren had said, and he mentioned in passing that she called me by a name I hadn't heard in eleven years. Not my married name, not Mom, not any nickname my family uses. My college name — the surname I used for the first twenty-six years of my life, before I married and moved and became deliberately, thoroughly someone else. I asked him to repeat it. He repeated it. He said Maren told him that was my real name, my first name, and that I'd had it a long time before I got the new one.

I told myself he'd overheard something. A document, a phone call, a conversation between adults that a child in the next room absorbs without anyone realizing. It's possible. It's the kind of thing that happens. I believed it for about a month.

In May he told me Maren knew where I used to live. He described the building — exterior stairs, green railing, the mailboxes that were always getting jammed. An apartment I rented for fourteen months in my early twenties, in a city three states away, before I knew my husband, before I knew anything much. I have no photographs of that apartment. I have never described it to anyone in my current life. There is no version of events in which my five-year-old encountered a description of that building.

I told myself memory is strange, that children sometimes produce details that seem impossible and turn out to be assembled from fragments we don't remember providing. I wrote a list of every way he could have known. The list had seven items on it. I spent two weeks eliminating them one by one.

In June, Maren apparently told him a nickname. One nickname, used by one person, my college roommate Dara, who called me something that was a private joke between us and who I haven't spoken to in eight years and who has never met my son and who is not findable by any ordinary means because she went off social media completely around 2019. He said it at breakfast, casually, the way kids say things — just relaying information, no weight on it. I put my coffee cup down and asked him to say it again and he said it again and then asked if he could have more orange juice.

Photo: Dara, via images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com

I called Dara. It took me three days to find a number. She answered, and I told her what my son had said, and there was a silence, and then she said, carefully, that she hadn't told anyone that name. Not ever. Not even her husband. She asked me if I was okay. I said I was fine. I said it the way you say it when you're not.

The photograph is the part I haven't been able to sit with. There was a photograph — one photograph — from a period of my life I don't discuss. I'm not going to describe what was in it or why I burned it, because those details aren't the point and they belong to me. I burned it in the sink of that apartment with the green railing, in 2009, and I have never described it to a single person alive. My son told me, in September, that Maren had seen a picture of me when I was young and that I looked sad in it and that Maren felt bad for me. He described the photograph. He described it accurately.

I've been trying to write this paragraph for three days. I keep getting close and stopping.

Last week he came to find me in the kitchen and said Maren had a question for me. He asked it in the flat, earnest tone kids use when they're delivering a message they don't fully understand. I heard the question. I understood the question. The question contained the name of a person and a specific date and a detail about that date that I have never spoken aloud to any living person, not my husband, not my mother, not a therapist, no one.

I told him to tell Maren I wasn't able to answer that.

He went back to his room. He came back a few minutes later and said Maren said that was okay, she already knew anyway, she just wanted to see if I'd say it out loud.

I'm not going to write down the question. I've thought about it, and I've decided that writing it down is the one thing I'm not willing to do. I don't have a rational explanation for that feeling. I'm choosing to listen to it anyway.

Maren hasn't come up since Tuesday. I don't know if that's better.