Only Child

ONLY CHILD

(Note: This story involves themes of death, including children.)

I was an only child. No siblings for me. Except for my sister, who lived in the drainage culvert behind the house where I grew up.

The drainage culvert wasn’t much more than a giant, concrete-lined ditch at the base of the hill where my childhood home was built. Growing up in Southern California, the ground was so parched and dry that the first rain of the year didn’t do much more than run off the hard-packed dirt. Not that there was much dirt available to absorb what rain did fall. My neighborhood was all asphalt and stucco. Water bounced off the landscape like lice off a hot skillet. The culvert collected all that water and flushed it through a tunnel to the nearest river, which always went from a sad trickle most to the year to a swollen, churning monster after the rain.

People died fairly regularly when they were camping or walking by the river, not realizing how fast the floodwaters could fill the ravine when a storm blew through. I remember a child at my elementary school died in one of the floods. We had a school-wide assembly, and they brought in counselors. The boy who died was in a different grade than me, and I didn’t really know him, so it didn’t affect me much. I remember being much more upset when the family dog died that same year. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but in my defense, I was still very young, and I was probably a little self-centered from being an only child. Except for my sister in the culvert.

My sister was what you would probably call an imaginary friend. We would have conversations, and she knew all the people I knew and agreed with all my most adamant opinions, such as which Goosebumps books were the best and that McDonald’s had superior French fries to Burger King. The important things. I only spoke to her down by the culvert, though. She wouldn’t come visit me elsewhere.

I was deeply fascinated by the culvert. It was the closest thing to a natural wilderness that I had access to at the time, and I would often launch little expeditions down there to explore and see my sister. Crawdads lived in the pathetic stream of green water that always flowed at the bottom of the culvert, waving their claws in agitation whenever I approached. A pack of coyotes visited the culvert sometimes, always eating a few neighborhood cats before moving on.

The culvert was hardly my little secret. I’d frequently find fresh glass from broken beer bottles, blackened stubs of illegal fireworks, and the butts of purloined cigarettes amid the sunburnt chaparral and cat bones, evidence that older kids had snuck down the denuded hill and partied. One time after a storm, I found a hopelessly rusted pocketknife that I naturally deduced had belonged to the sewer pirates that surely lived in the tunnel at the end of the concrete channel.

But there was one place I truly believed only I knew about, and that was where my sister lived. A gravel trail ran beside the culvert, allowing anyone to look down into the trough as if they were walking along the precipice to a small canyon.

At a bend in the culvert, where the ridge of the hill hid the closest houses and it was easiest for me to believe I was exploring uncharted lands, perhaps wielding a stick as a sword, there was a dead, toppled-over willow tree. The tree’s branches, which had all turned gray with age and sunlight, lay in a sort of broken mound. It looked a bit like a cartoon haystack, except it was the color of bone.

But there was something under the mound. An old playhouse. In my young mind, it must have been a century old, but it had probably only been there for a couple of decades at most. Unlike every other child’s playhouse I had seen, this one was made of wood rather than plastic. That alone almost made it feel like some artifact from a different era. Before it was crushed by the fallen willow, the house had probably been a roughly four-foot-by-four-foot cube. Big enough for a small child to sit inside with a few treasured toys. The walls were made of horizontal slats with a little door and window.

When it was brand new, it would have looked like a little pink cottage. Now, most of the paint had peeled away, and what remained had faded to an exhausted-looking shade of pale mauve. The roof had been crushed under the tree, and the whole house sat crooked. You had to duck under the bleached boughs of the willow to find what remained of the house, probably snapping a few of the arthritically brittle branches as you pushed your way forward. An adult never would have seen it while walking along the trail.

I never went in what remained of the little house. For one thing, the interior was so thick with spiderwebs that it always looked like there was some sort of ragged, dusty mist trying to inch its way out of the structure. I’d always peek through the window though, looking down at the mysteries that lay within. An off-brand Barbie doll, mostly hidden by the cobwebs. A patchwork of different colored fur clumps, presumably detritus from many, many long-devoured cats. And a bit of tattered tarp sticking up out of the dirt, which always seemed to wave tantalizingly in the breeze.

But also, my sister was always far too insistent that I go inside the house. Left to my own devices, maybe I would have eventually worked up the nerve to duck inside the splintered doorway to claim a souvenir or see what was buried in that tarp, but I never liked being told what to do. And the more she told me to step inside, the less I wanted to. But I always came back, always drawn to that small, shattered house that I alone seemed to know about.

Even at the time, I knew it was silly to call the voice I spoke to my sister. I called her that because she liked it. And because she knew my name and all about the house where I lived. She knew about the weird wallpaper in the bathroom that my mother hated but never worked up the willpower to remove. She knew about that jacaranda tree outside the kitchen window that always got seed pods everywhere. She knew about the neighbor, who was a long-time elementary school principal, and his four daughters. Though my sister said the neighbor only had one daughter, just an infant, when she knew him. Those shared experiences were what I always imagined it would be like to have a sibling.

To be clear, I never saw my sister. I would simply hear her voice. We would play a game where I would try to find her. Usually, she tried to lead me into the playhouse, but I would always say that I could see inside and knew she wasn’t in there. She would go silent, pouting for a while. Sometimes she would tell me to leave her alone if I didn’t want to play properly, and I would go home.

But especially if it had rained recently and the water was high in the culvert, I would hear her voice from near the edge of the turbulent water instead of the playhouse.

When I heard the voice from the water, I would usually go sit by the edge of the culvert. I always had to lean forward to hear what my sister was saying when we were so close to the seething water. Most of the time I could only pick out her tone and not exact words. Pleading sometimes. Petulant other times. Saccharine sweet or insistent and bossy, depending on her mood and how cooperative I was feeling that day.

I would sit and watch the water shoot into the drainage tunnel at the end of the culvert, surging with shocking force after a good rain. I wanted to find my sister. I wanted to go to her. I didn’t necessarily realize it at the time, at least not in these terms, but I was often lonely without any siblings. I was shy and not very social and had trouble making friends, so it was so very enticing to hear someone asking me to jump in the water with them. Or to climb into the crooked playhouse and join them. It was why I kept coming back, even though I didn’t want to do those things.

I think being an only child made me stubborn too, though. Or perhaps just a bit spoiled. I was used to getting my way. I was more than capable of ignoring my parents’ attempts to convince me to eat my vegetables, and I’m sure I was a holy terror for some of my teachers to deal with when I was being a brat. But I had willpower to spare, so I never climbed into the shattered playhouse. And I never splashed into the rushing water to greet the shape I thought I could make out under the murk, no matter how the voice implored me. Begged me. Cajoled. Threatened.

Today, it seems strange that I wasn’t more incredulous about just how insistent my imaginary sister could be. I was young and it was just one of hundreds of phenomena that I was aware of but didn’t understand. The impending threat of Y2K. The stock market. Monica Lewinsky. The voice from the broken playhouse. All beyond my comprehension and not worth asking additional questions about. They simply were.

I was upset when my parents told me that we were moving. My father’s work had promoted him to some sort of regional manager position, albeit in a different region. I had a few friends. I had a favorite teacher. I had my sister to think of.

We moved back to Southern California a few years later after another promotion, but to a different city in the same region. Aside from a few hazy memories, I mostly forgot about my sister. I made new friends. Some of the great unanswerable questions of my childhood became distinctly more answerable as I progressed through school and moved away to college. When I thought about my sister at all, she was one of those curious memories of a child with an active imagination. Relegated to the dustbin of memory along with the monsters in my closet and comic book characters I imagined I’d write about some day.

My mom still lives in the area. I visited her a few months ago, as a matter of fact. Before I caught my flight back, I made a little pit stop by my childhood home. I wanted to see what I remembered and to snap a photo of the old house to show my wife. I also walked down to the culvert. It hasn’t changed much, though I didn’t see any cat bones. I also didn’t see the fallen willow tree or any signs of a smashed child’s playhouse. At the time, part of me wondered if I hadn’t made up the playhouse just like I made up my sister. I didn’t even mention the culvert to my wife when I went home, though she has heard the story about my imaginary sister before.

I would have forgotten all about it except my mom recently sent me a picture. She had gone to console a longtime friend whose grandson had recently passed away in an accident. Drowned after being swept away following a severe rainstorm. A senseless tragedy, obviously.

Except the picture she sent me was of the grandson’s backyard, where part of the memorial service was held. They had a wooden playhouse in the backyard. It was old. Built like a little cottage, with horizontal slats and a window and door. It had been repainted and repaired at some point, but I still recognized it.

I’ve looked up some old news articles from my hometown. There have been so many drownings. A statistically unlikely number. Mostly children. So far as I can tell, most of them had siblings. Maybe that’s important. Maybe it isn’t.

The restored playhouse has been bothering me. I can’t prove it’s the same one I saw all those years ago. It seems unlikely that anyone would repair the old thing. But the one that I saw in the picture sat a little crooked in its frame. And you can tell some of the boards are newer than others. In the end, it doesn’t look so much repaired as healed, like an abused dog that’s been rescued and finally eating regularly. 

I called my mom up not long after she sent the picture, trying to be as nonchalant as I could. I asked her if she knew anything about the playhouse. She told me that the family had sold it, since it was now associated with too many sad memories. Some nice couple with a pair of sons had bought it, and they actually lived a short distance from where I had grown up. Their house even backed up to the hill where the culvert lay.

My attorney has asked me to explain what I was doing in that family’s backyard that night with an axe. She told me that I’m lucky I was only charged with trespassing and property destruction. Not even a serious property destruction charge, since the damage to the playhouse was much less than the police originally believed. I thought I had smashed the thing to kindling, but apparently not.

The police investigation into my case took a backseat after one of the boys who lives at that house disappeared. They didn’t even get around to photographing the damaged house, mostly intact, until after the boy’s body was fished out of the drainage tunnel, his lungs filled with silty water.  They even looked at me as a suspect at one point, but I had an ironclad alibi. And besides, the surviving brother insists that it was their imaginary friend who convinced them to play down by the water that day.

Next time I’ll try arson. My attorney wouldn’t like that I’m writing this part down, but she’s only supposed to release this if they find me in the water. One way or another, I intend to stop my sister. She keeps making only children, but I can make myself an only child again, too.