Make-Believe
He’s careful in his placement, my five year old, as he lines up the houses. His town stretches through the room.
Hi, mom. His words are so small I could eat them without chewing. I could consume them in one swallow. Do you want to play with me?
He points to where the hospital is, where the fire department is, where the school is. When he finishes, he moves cars around, their little wheels coasting over cracks, the roads’ puzzle-piece nooks like potholes.
And where do you live?
He looks at the town. He has constructed and mapped out the mini-world, yet he hasn’t considered his place in it. Finally, he decides. He keeps his eyes on the little building. The hospital. In this world, it is a happy building. The colors are bright, the people are smiling. They are plastic and so are their concerns. Nothing in this carpet town is real.
He holds his gaze down because he’s afraid to meet my eyes, afraid for me to see what he’s holding there, and he’s afraid to see if I’m holding the same in mine.
You live there?
Instead of turning to me, instead of affirming, he moves a little person - the one he has decided is him - and walks it along the road toward the hospital. He moves past the zoo he has made. He doesn’t stop at the playground he has created. In fact, now that I see him moving within this town, the hospital is at the center of everything, and when he arrives there, he shuts the door behind his mini-self and sets his hands on his lap and twists toward me, to where I stand in the doorway.
It’s okay, he says. I like it there.
The first time we took his father to the hospital, I dropped him off at a friend’s. But then the trips became more frequent, the emergencies more emergent, and now when we pass the hospital he knows it so well it isn’t just the place where he was born.
Oh yea? I ask, enter his room, and think of what he might like against everything I hate. What’s your favorite part? This is my way of shifting the association. It’s not a question posed in a negative. It’s not a probing question about what it’s like to see your own father connected to machines, or about the deathly smell of the hospital, or about that time we both slept wedged on a chair until one of the RNs moved us into a room with a couch so he could spread out, his first sleep-away from home.
I like the food. He smiles and motions for me to come look. When I crouch to where he is on the other side, I see inside the spliced open side of the make-believe building, the rooms little boxes that he has filled. He shows me the room that must be his father’s room and he shows me the snacks. Pretend food, miniatures, a stockpile.
The food. I picked him up early from school one time, my husband incoherent in the passenger seat. I yelled his name across all the other little faces, little bodies, their little worlds wrapped up in playing make-believe in nothing that was real and from the urgency in my voice he came running across the playground quicker than he’s ever come to the calling of his name.
I stood outside of the car motioning for him but keeping one hand stretched out, reaching toward my husband, my body splayed between these two people.
It was hours until my husband was settled into a bed and the IV dripped and the fluids did what the fluids should do.
I tugged at my little man’s tender hand, told him Let’s go, and we snuck off to the cafeteria.
It was late. They were nearly shutting down for the day, but we loaded up on overpriced snacks. I let him pick whatever he wanted. We ate our makeshift dinner on a cold table at the center of an atrium, a room too wide, too open to feel any sort of comfort, and exhaustion rolled over me like nausea.
Maybe we should leave the hospital, I say and scoop up the small toys.
But what about dad? He asks and grabs his little father from his little hospital bed.
He can come, too. This, again, is my way of encouraging something positive into the space between us. Let’s take make-believe dad from the make-believe hospital and go to the make-believe park where the make-believe sun is always shining. The effort of positivity strains but we do it anyway, and that’s where the little versions of ourselves sit through the day when the real versions of ourselves can’t.
Katie Strine is a fiction writer from Cleveland, Ohio, where she earned an MA in English. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been supported by the Kenyon Review.