They sat, Tuesday and Serendipity, on either side of Denis’s hospital bed. Tuesday had hold of one of his hands and Serendipity the other. The room had no windows and lots of machines that beeped and sighed.
Denis’s skin was the palest gray, and he had a misty quality about him, as if he might fade away at any moment.
“Dad?” said Tuesday. “Dad?”
But Denis said nothing.
Tuesday blinked back tears. She realized that she had believed her arrival would make a difference. That Denis would somehow sense her presence and magically awake.
Perhaps Serendipity had thought the same, for she had been loudly enthusiastic when they had first arrived, telling Denis how Tuesday was home at last, that she was safe, and how she had been on such extraordinary adventures, and didn’t he want to hear all about them?
Both Serendipity and Tuesday had kissed his cheeks and forehead, but Denis had not stirred. His quiet breathing hadn’t changed. Tuesday and Serendipity came to a sort of standstill then. Neither of them knew what to say. Tuesday observed the flowers in the vases all along the shelf above her father’s bed and on the table at the end of his bed. There were roses in every color: lipstick pink, deep red, vivid orange, buttercream, vanilla cream, snow white. The ones Serendipity had brought this day, their petals not yet open, were a gentle shade of mauve.
Serendipity explained to Tuesday that it had become a daily habit to bring fresh roses to Denis’s room. Along with balloons. The balloons, bought from a street seller outside the hospital, floated about the ceiling with messages of “Get Well,” “We love you,” “Congratulations!” and “Happy Birthday!” and “It’s a Boy!”—which might have seemed strange to some people, but which Tuesday knew Denis would find hilarious, when at last he woke.
Not all of the balloons had words on them. Others were just one color, and very sparkly, or else they had stripes or spots, rainbows or stars. The room could easily have been depressing with all the tubes and drips and monitors about the bed and the beeping noises and ticking clock and the gray chairs and pale lemon blanket. But Serendipity had managed to fill it with color. The bright balloons over her head reminded Tuesday of the worlds she had left behind, spinning above the Gardener’s Conservatory, and she wondered how Silver Nightly was doing and how his new dog was settling in and what he was going to name her.
Denis slept on, if being in a coma was anything like sleeping. Tuesday had no way of knowing.
“Is he dreaming?” she asked Serendipity.
“Maybe,” said Serendipity. “I hope they’re lovely dreams if he is.”
“Do you think he hears anything?” Tuesday asked after another stretch of silence.
“Well, if he can’t hear us, I hope he hears the sea. Or you laughing. Or all of us playing cards. Or the breeze in the trees at City Park. Or the birds…”
Tuesday heard the crack in her mother’s voice as she said this.
“He’s going to be okay, Mom,” she said. “He’s going to wake up.”
“I’m sorry. But now that you’re home, I feel even more desperate to get him home again too.”
“Maybe he needs a story,” said Tuesday.
Serendipity wiped her eyes. “Perhaps you’re right. And that way I could get to hear it as well. I mean all of it this time—not the rushed version.”
And so Tuesday began at the beginning. Holding her dad’s hand and telling it to him as if he were awake and listening, she talked of her walk in City Park a whole week ago and how the thread had zoomed in from out of the blue and caught her up. Then she told him how she had met Vivienne at the tree and how they had visited the Library. She described the packed dining room and the pots of chili beans and meeting Silver Nightly, not forgetting the bit about how Cordwell Jefferson had actually lost his foot. Then she described how Vivienne, who had not been able to visit the Library, had waited as if frozen until Tuesday and Baxterr returned. She described the hike to the Mabanquo River and the night they had spent swimming in the hot pool, the picnic they had made, and how good it had been to sleep under the towering ferns. Then she told of Vivacious doing its magical thing of growing from a tiny boat into a dinghy and the night they had spent on the Mabanquo River, and the torrential rain and discovering, at daybreak, that the world had been crushed against another world that was pouring its ocean down on top of them. Next she described the terror of being grabbed by the vercaka and being flown higher and higher so that she thought at any moment she would become vercaka bait—or get dropped from a great height and end up like a splodge of strawberry jam on the ground.
Serendipity shook her head and chewed her lip but said nothing.
Tuesday continued, describing her fall instead between the worlds and waking up on the Gardener’s couch with all those worlds, floating like the balloons around the hospital ceiling but thousands more, and all spinning and all different shapes and sizes. And how the Gardener was very old and fragile and terribly forgetful. How he had all manner of strange sayings that made no sense, and quite a lot of sense all at once when you stopped to think about them.
Serendipity’s eyes had grown very large, but she did not interrupt, only squeezed Denis’s hand and nodded to Tuesday to go on.
Tuesday described what it was like to be the Gardener. She neglected to mention the part about accepting the role of the Gardener forever. She had heard her mother refer to it as “poetic license”—when the truth required a little massaging.
Tuesday went on to relay all that Vivienne had told her about the battle of the City of Clocks and finally being reunited with Baxterr and Vivienne. And how at last Blake, the Librarian, and Silver Nightly arrived. Tuesday talked about how she had heard Denis was ill and how urgently she had wanted to come home and how Silver had become the Gardener. And finally how they had visited the world of the Winged Dogs and Silver had found his own dog, and Tuesday and Blake had flown home on Baxterr and arrived this very morning.
When she was done, Tuesday watched Denis’s face expectantly, but there was no change. She laid her head down against his hand on the blanket. Everything was very quiet. And then the hand twitched. It moved. It patted her head. She sat up, startled. She stared at Denis, and Denis stared back.
“Dad?” said Tuesday, wondering if this was simply a strange phenomenon.
“Denis?” said Serendipity, also gaping at him as if he were an apparition that might disappear at any moment.
Denis smiled at both of them and blinked.
“My,” he said, “that was a good story.”