Playing with the Dead

I was three. I remember it so vividly. We moved from the center of the state to the top. It was the last house at the end of a dead end street, a cute and quaint brick house that backed up to a large field with wheat hay as high as sycamores, at least to a three year old. There was a small vine of green grapes climbing a post that held the clothes line in the back yard and two fruit trees in the front, a plum tree and a pear tree whose branches were low enough for me to reach and climb, though I never made it very far. Our neighborhood was so rural only about five other families lived in the subdivision in the making. Our street T’d into another, a dead end to the left and the road back to town to the right.

A warm summer evening my cousins and I went for a walk down the street and turned to the left. At the very end of the road, where asphalt turned to grass and trees stood a tiny dilapidated building. The windows had been shattered by rocks thrown by delinquent children. The door was hanging from its hinges and dirt and pine needles covered the cement walk way. Curiosity unwavering we walked around the little building. At the back was the ruin remnants of a picket fence and cement side walk in the shape of a perfect rectangle. The center was dirt and pine needles. Saplings had begun to sprout, nature stealing back what had been stolen from her.

“Looks like it was a pool,” Tommy, the oldest of my two visiting cousins had said glancing around us nervously.

The air was thick and consuming. I assumed it was the unforgiving Alabama humidity but Tommy seemed disturbed.“Lets go back to your house,” he said taking my hand and tugging me along. I wanted to play more but I was also thirsty and we hadn’t brought and drinks so I didn’t protest too much.

** * **

It had been a month since my cousins visited and we discovered the dirt filled pool. I was playing out side close the hay, wondering if I would get lost if I tried to explore the golden forest when from the stalks walked a young girl that appeared to be close to my age. I was so very excited. I introduced myself and smiled brightly when she told me her name in turn, Alyssa-Beth.

She wore a simple white sundress and plain sandals. Her hair was the color of a freshly minted penny, her eyes were the shade of green that would make a cat envious. A galaxy of freckles dusted her cheeks and nose and her pink lips curved in a perfectly innocent smile. I didn’t question where she had come from. I was too happy. She was only the third child (other than me) to move into our neighborhood and the first girl.For the next year she came to play with me every single day.

She taught me how to braid clover into bracelets, climbed trees with me and instilled in me a love of ghost stories.I had always been plagued by nightmares. Dark, shadowy figures had haunted me for so long that, even at the innocent and influence-able age of four I was more annoyed than afraid at the waking up in the middle of the night every. Single. Night. so her stories never actually scared me. If anything, confronting the darkness in the middle of the day helped me to conquer them so that I actually sleep.

Then it happened. I almost drown.

I was at a pool with my mom and cousins. I had forgot my floaties so I was bound to the stairs where I could actually touch. My mother had decided to go in my grandparent house and leave me with my cousins. My cousins decided shortly there after to get out of the pool and play Jacks on the cement walk way leaving me alone but in eye sight on the steps of the pool. A browning oak leaf had surfed upon the breeze to land in the pool in front of me. I reached for it, bored of just sitting and splashing. I could play with it, allow my imagination to turn it into a boat upon the high sea.

If I stretched just a little bit more I could reach it.Arms stretched in front of me my foot slipped from the step into the depth. Water rushed over my head, my nose ans lungs burned as water rushed in to replace the air. My eyes were fixed on a blue cloudless sky as I fought to get gather enough breath to scream. I heard a splash near by but what that splash was I can not recall… My assumption for the many years that followed was that my cousin had leapt in to save me having heard my frantic and panicked splashing.

The year after I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle like the cute puppy that just had too much energy for suburban life. I can’t say I wasn’t happy and I’m certainly not resentful. I was given the life every little girl dreamed of. I was gifted a puppy that actually got to sleep inside with me, my first Christmas present was a pretty grey blanket appaloosa pony (a real one that I could ride). I was flourishing. Though, the oddest things tended to be said or not allowed to be said…

If I mentioned Alyssa-Beth I was told she was just my imaginary friend and I needed to stop talking about her. Of course I argued that she was real. She was my friend from when I lived with my mother. After all… if she was imaginary wouldn’t she have just followed me to my house in the middle of my state? But she didn’t, so that meant she was real, right?If I talked about my Grandpa Billy or Auntie Am I was told we didn’t have relatives by those names. I of course, being naturally oppositional, refused to believe it.

They were real. They loved me, and I loved them. I knew enough by that age, from watching way too much animal planet, that you had relatives on both the maternal and paternal side of a family. My aunt was my mothers sister so that left a whole half of a family that was mine but not my aunts that they could belong to.I was in my teens when I reconnected with my biological mother. During a casual conversation I brought up the memory of my almost drowning.

As I wove my memory into words my mothers face grew a confused expression. At the end of my story she said, “you’ve never almost drown”. How was that possible? I could still feel the liquid fire burning me from the inside out. For years I suffered with PTSD, screaming in terror anytime water so much as touched my face. Bath time was a triggering nightmare. How could years of suffering and fear be derived from a falsity?That night I slipped into slumber perplexed and contemplating.

That night I had a night mare I hadn’t had in years. A dream of drowning. But this time I didn’t stare up at a mocking sky as birds flew overhead. I stood on the pools edge and watched a girl flailing and fighting for life. Struggling to breath, to scream. Praying for salvation as her face slipped beneath clear surface. I was watching me, her die.A splash pulled my attention to a man that leapt in to save her, me, but the face of the limp, lifeless form that he held in his arms was not mine.Alyssa-Beth. Her penny hair dripping. Her emerald eyes glassy and lacking the light of life. Her pink lips were parted and pale and water trickled from the corner as if her lungs had filled to the point of over flowing.

** * **

I awoke with sweat beading my brow, my chest was tight, my lungs burned and I struggled for oxygen. My hands shook with unease as puzzle pieces long scattered clicked into place one by one. There was a reason that no one could recall my red headed best friend that I had played with for well into two years. There was a reason why I was the only one with the memory of a water related near death experience.

The memory was not mine and my very first best friend wasn’t alive.