66

The safe warmth of the hothouse mingled with the tide of air from the outside.

“What is it?” I said. “What’s out there?”

His voice was gentle. “The world we live in does not make much sense to us,” said Valfort. “But there is no reason to be afraid.”

Here, surrounded by my tropical plants, I was safe—I knew what was real.

He motioned with his hand—hurry.

The sun outside was bright, and the air was cool.

There was a boy I did not recognize sitting on the grass, holding a large pair of shears. He was toying with them, distracted from the workings of the tool by the sound of my step.

He leaped to his feet, and ran with the shears dangling from one hand, and I could not move.

You’ll hurt yourself.

Think about this, I told myself. Think hard. This is just another trick.

I turned back to see Nona, for some guidance from her. The sunlight was too bright, and I could not make her out.

He was a child perhaps seven years old wearing ordinary children’s clothing, jeans, a bright green T-shirt emblazoned with an alligator, a smiling, cartoonish character.

What was happening was both clear and disjointed.

He tugged my hand. He wanted to lead me somewhere.

I said his name. He looked at me, smiling and squinting against the light.

Could I trust this? Was this happening?

He had gained weight, and he looked more three-dimensional than he had in the past, more real.

My hands, my body, belonged to someone else. Finally, I found myself able to talk once more. “I thought you were gone.”

Gone. The word was a gasp, a solid door.

I couldn’t believe. He was going to vanish in another heartbeat, I knew. He slipped something folded up, a piece of paper, into my hand.

Then, abruptly, as though shy, or unsure of his surroundings, “Are you still sick?”

“No,” I said. “I take medicine.” Then, my voice breathless, I said, “You aren’t sick, either.”

Stuart did not answer.

“I trim trees with those,” I said. “They’re very sharp.” I uttered the words with a feeling of incredulity, someone experimenting in a foreign place with a strange language.

I wanted to hear his voice again. I wanted to believe it was possible.

“They’re big,” he said.

I saw how large and ancient this house must seem to him, and this garden, these shears.

He spoke before I could respond. “It might come back,” he said.

I must have looked confused.

“My sickness,” he said.

It might. That was the weight of our lives.

“He was in remission,” said Nona, “that night you tried to find him. He had already begun to recover well enough to be sent home.”

And then I believed it. The heft of the shears as I took them from Stuart, worried that he might cut himself, reminded me that this was happening. This was actual—the blades were gray, glazed with years of green. I let the shears fall onto the grass. I knew: This was real.

And I allowed myself joy. I put my arms around him.

Then he released himself and pried open my hand. The paper horses in my hand unfolded just a little, as though coming to life, or perhaps the tension in the paper from being folded allowed them to re-erect themselves.

“These are old,” I said. “I’ll make you some new ones.”

He smiled, pleased at the thought, but took the old ones back, as though to protect them against harm.

“I like the old ones,” he said.

I made him other horses, and frogs that jumped, and a paper airliner, one that flew, gliding in a way that delighted him, and he unfolded it carefully, and refolded it in a new way so he could keep that, too, in his pocket.

We clipped a hedge so he could see how the big shears worked, and he raked the leaves and the stems, piling the cuttings using a tool that was too long for him, and when we were done he ran to get the bicycle I mentioned was in one of the buildings bordering the garden.

It took awhile, and there must have been a moment in which I told myself that this was not happening. This was not real. You see, some voice in me must have murmured—he’s gone.

He came back again steering a bicycle that cast ripples of sunlight on the grass from its bright, slowly spinning wheels.