AN UMBRELLA FULL OF DREAMS
Andrea stuck the point of the umbrella hard into the dirt, where it stood up on its own and began to spin. It unfolded as it spun, revealing dozens of thick, yellowed pieces of parchment attached to its underside, each paper bearing an image drawn in charcoal upon it. A sea monster with angry eyes and baring an open mouth full of teeth, the bubble dream she had walked past with the Sandman after they first met, with kids contained in tiny balls and floating with smiling faces. The umbrella continued to spin, faster and faster, and the dozens of pieces of paper turned into hundreds, then thousands, moving too fast now for anyone to catch a single image at a time.
The umbrella spun so fast it lifted from the dirt and flipped over right side up in the air above Andrea’s head, then floated higher and higher until it must have been fifteen feet off the ground. Then Andrea saw it: dangling from a tightly tied piece of twine, straight down from the center of the umbrella, a black iron key swayed slowly in the middle of the wild flurry of parchment.
The entire crowd stared up at the spinning object in the sky, the only sounds around them the whir of the umbrella and the rustle of moving paper.
A gust of warm wind blew through Reverie’s square, bringing with it ribbons of silver and blue that turned in the air like funnels. The wind kicked up clouds of dirt and Reverie debris: candy wrappers and bits of glitter and the scent of the first snow mixed with a summer rain. The top hat flew off the head of the fake Sandman, the drawing of his dream rose into the sky and disintegrated to dust, and the precise and confident ringmaster before them fell away to reveal the boy from the parchment. The crowd of Reverie children gasped once more. There he stood, a desperate boy, just like Andrea, who couldn’t find his way and had forgotten himself in the depths of great loss. A boy who, unlike Andrea, had not yet found a way to heal.
The ribbons of silver and blue descended and wrapped themselves up around the fake Sandman and the dream versions of his sister. They grew wider, then joined together and billowed out like a balloon, lifting off the ground and looking more and more like a circus tent by the second.
Next the wild wind took the boy and his dreams inside the newly created tent, spinning them up and over the waving dream tent flags and the nightmares, which slowly retreated to the tents from which they came. The wind set them down in a vacant space just a short distance away, the place that the fake Sandman had offered to Andrea for her perfect wish.
Only then did the storm die down and the umbrella slow and float back into Andrea’s waiting hand. She held it open long enough to tug the ebony key off its string, then snapped the umbrella shut.
“What did you do to him?” Francis asked, astonished.
“He’s safe. And there’s an exit to the dream, though it might not be easy for him to find it,” Andrea said. “But besides that, it’s not up to me to decide what happens to the boy who claimed to be the Sandman.” She looked to the Dream Clock and to the friendly-looking face upon it. “It’s up to the real one.”
With the key in one hand and the umbrella in the other, Andrea walked to the tower. Penny pulled in alongside them. The Reverie children crowded in, too, waiting for whatever came next.
With shaking hands, Andrea held her breath and slid the key inside the lock, exhaling only when it turned and clicked.
The door creaked long and low as Andrea pulled it open, like a great metal yawn.
Before her stood a huge hill, a mini mountain of shimmering, glistening dream sand. Sand that thrummed with magic. Sand strong enough to put anyone into a deep and deathlike sleep.
Andrea had to hope that in this mountain, somewhere, rested the heartbeat of Reverie. That they would be able to find him, and wake him, and finally, finally go home.
“Penny, you know some of these kids, right?” Andrea looked back to her friend.
Penny nodded.
“They’re going to have to be careful,” Andrea said. “But we need some people who are willing to dig.”
Several children, along with Penny, Andrea, and Francis, went to work on the sand, wearing goggles borrowed from a Mad Scientist dream. They dug their fingertips in deep and pushed it aside, still careful not to send any floating into the air.
A group of kids carried in heaps of burlap bags from one of the shops on the fairway. They bagged up the sand, tied the bags off, and passed them to others standing outside the tower, where more children waited to carry the sand and pile it up in the square. The work was long and hard and heavy, but a firm sense of hope buzzed in the air around them, and the children made progress quickly.
Andrea caught Penny sneaking off to one side and scooping a bit of sand into a small glass vial. Penny shrugged, only slightly embarrassed at being caught. “Just a trinket,” she said before slipping the vial into her dress pocket. “Something to remember this place by.”
Andrea was wiping the sweat off her forehead with her shirtsleeve when Francis yelled for her to come and see.
As Andrea grew closer, she saw what had made Francis call out: Still and silent, aged and ancient, and surrounded by silver dream dust lay the wrinkled, sleeping face of the man from the Dream Clock. The children in the tower gathered all around him and counted to three before lifting him, careful to turn away as the sand fell off his body and onto the floor. They hoisted him through the door and set him down on the ground in the square, while the frozen hand of the clock looked down on all of them, waiting.
Reverie’s magic skittered around the square as if suddenly remembering what it once had been. But the Sandman’s chest didn’t move. Dream sand still sparkled in the full moon’s light, all over his face. Someone handed Andrea a paintbrush. She went to work, tenderly brushing each grain from his ancient eyes.
“Please wake up,” she whispered to the old man as she worked. “Please wake up. We need you to help us get home.”
She teased the final grains out from a deep crease and fell back, setting the brush down on the earth. Andrea didn’t know how long it would take for him to wake up—if waking up was even still possible for someone who had been buried in dream sand for so long.
All of Reverie stilled, frozen in expectation, until at last the old man took one great breath, a breath big enough to carry the universe inside it and also to cradle the smallest living creature and keep it safe.
And the world of Reverie—the dream tents, the children, and the clock tower—all exhaled with him in relief.
Andrea stood. Here he was. The real man behind Reverie. The one who could save them.
“My, look at all the children,” he said, sitting up and taking note of the scattering of sand surrounding his body, the purple circles under the children’s eyes, and the time on the Dream Clock.
He looked so fragile, so confused. So sad.
“Now, let’s see . . .” A wrinkled hand moved upward, pulling off his nightcap and setting it down beside him. “The last thing I remember . . . a young man, a frequent visitor. A sad boy. It was time to go home. All the other children had left, but he refused. Then he snatched my umbrella. I’ve sustained quite the bump.” The Sandman patted the spot where the umbrella must have met his head. “Then he dragged me to the tower. I must have fallen asleep as the Dream Clock chimed that it was time for the new children to come in.” The Sandman’s twinkling gaze landed on Andrea. “Tell me,” he said. “How long have I been sleeping?”
So Andrea told him what she knew. She told him her story, and Francis’s story, and as much of Reverie’s story as she had uncovered during her time there. Penny helped fill in the gaps with her own tale and details Andrea hadn’t yet had time to learn, while Francis and some of the other children chimed in as needed, too. They talked about the frozen clock, and the years that had gone by, and the missing children, and about how they all very much wanted to go home.
Finally, Andrea told him about how she had gotten hold of the umbrella and where his imposter could be found.
When they had finished, the Sandman shook his head and tsked, wiggling the toes inside his slippers, placing the cap back on his head, and raising a hand for Andrea to help him rise to his feet.
“I have quite the mess to clean up,” he said, addressing all the children. “But it can be done, and it will be done, and it is none of your trouble.”
Andrea handed the Sandman his magical umbrella. He gave a sad, small smile and took it from her, testing the weight of it in his arm.
“So heavy,” he muttered, his words edged with regret. “Reverie is simply bursting with dreams.” The Sandman turned back to the tower that had nearly become his tomb. “Oh, Hubert. How I wish things had gone differently for you.”
Hubert. So that was the fake Sandman’s name.
Snap.
Just then a great shift jarred the Dream Clock tower and the ground beside it. The children looked up to find the hand on the clock had moved, finally, one notch closer to Awake.
“We’ll speed it up a bit tonight, children.” The Sandman flicked a wrist at the clock, and it again lurched forward. “Some of you have been here nearly as long as I’ve been asleep, and I think we’re long due for the light of morning.”
Hope swelled in Andrea’s chest, quickly followed by the icy fingertips of panic. Her eyes remained fixed on the clock while her hand reached blindly for Francis. He caught her arm and wrapped his own hands tightly around it.
“I’m pretty sure I’m real,” Francis said, his words coming fast as another chime rang through the square. “I remember everything. I want to go home so bad. I’ve been here so long.” Her little brother laughed sadly to himself. “I can’t tell anymore what’s real and what’s a dream, even if it’s me.”
“Well then,” Andrea said. “I think it’s past time we get you home.”
Francis smiled, relieved. Andrea was glad for it. Even if he was about to fade away, Andrea wanted her last moments with her brother to be sweet and kind and laced with the love she would feel for him forever.
The sea of children followed the Sandman as he shuffled toward Reverie’s gate. “So many new shops,” he muttered. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
Andrea ran her fingers along the wood of a nearby stall as they passed it by, a shop weighted and worn and rugged as textured pages. She suspected it was a Reverie original like the Star Builder dream and the rides that had been hidden away, which now could be restored into what they were always meant to be. As could Reverie itself.
The clock lurched forward again as the Sandman and the children reached Reverie’s gate.
“It’ll take some doing,” the Sandman said, “but I wouldn’t be me if I weren’t able to play a little bit with time. I expect you’ll all find yourselves in a home quite familiar.” His wise eyes scanned the crowd. “You’ll feel older, I’m afraid. Especially those of you who’ve been here quite long. The world will look the same, you will look the same, but you will find yourselves changed on the inside. I can’t undo that . . .” His voice trailed off, tinged with sadness. “For some of you, your return will be more complicated than the rest.”
He turned to Andrea, Penny, and Francis, and then passed his gaze over all those gathered at the gate. “Thank you, dear children, for all that you’ve done.”
For so long Andrea had been frozen like the Dream Clock, trapped in the same place, unable to find escape, but that was all over now. She pressed her lips into a tight smile as a fresh set of tears fell down her cheeks. Tears that remembered her initial joy at finding this place. Her terror at realizing she could never go home. And all the healing her heart had done inside Reverie’s walls, even though at times it had felt like she would never find her way through the pain.
The Sandman opened his umbrella and began distributing sheets of parchment to the children. “Your dreams,” he said above the murmur of the crowd. “You bring them in when you arrive and take them with you when you go. You’ll take them back in through the mouth. Let them dissolve on your tongue.”
“We eat our dreams?” Francis asked as the Sandman handed him his nightmare sketch.
The Sandman chuckled and gave an exaggerated wink. “They don’t taste like paper, I promise.”
Penny received her dream and took a bite. She inhaled as a signature Penny Periwinkle look of pure delight spread across her face.
“It tastes like brown sugar and toasted marshmallow and . . .” She rolled it around on her tongue. “Root beer float!” Her smile faded when she saw Francis holding his dream with tentative, shaky hands.
“Go on.” Andrea nudged her brother with a gentle elbow. “He said it wouldn’t taste bad.”
Francis grimaced, then balled the dream together and stuffed it in his mouth, swallowing it down fast.
“Well?” Penny, having just finished her own dream, stuck a hand on her hip and waited for Francis’s response.
“It tasted . . . like black licorice.” Francis curled a lip but seemed to be doing all right, given the fact that he had eaten a nightmare.
Now it was Andrea’s turn. Her dream, the memory of the night they lost Francis, melted on her tongue, flavored with milky moonlight and vanilla and crisping leaves in the fall.
“It’s almost time,” Penny said to her friends, a wistful look on her face as the clock once again chimed.
“Will you be okay?” Andrea’s heart pinched. “Will you be lonely when you return?”
Penny sighed. “It won’t be easy for me when I go back. I guess I could come here again, if I wanted, but I think it’s worth it to wait for the real friends who care for you just as you are, even if they don’t show up right away.” She took Andrea’s and Francis’s hands and squeezed them one final time before letting go. “Because I know that people are out there, somewhere in the tangled mess of space and time, waiting to be my friend.”
Andrea gave Penny a hug and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
Having handed back all the dreams, the Sandman made his way back to Reverie’s gates. He cleared his throat, and the murmuring crowd hushed at the sound. The bells on the clock chimed, and the Sandman began to sing, soft and soothing, a lullaby Andrea had heard once before.
“Return, dear ones, to where you came.
May this sweet reprieve give you strength.”
The gate to Reverie creaked slowly open. The children crowded closer, their bodies warm and worn. Their hearts ready to return home.
“Should your heart tomorrow be once more built of sorrow,
Take comfort and here return once again.”
“It won’t be perfect,” Andrea said quickly to her brother once the Sandman finished singing. Now she was the one talking like the hourglass was nearly empty. “Our family will look different than we wanted. But there’s no way I’m going home without my little shadow. We’ll always have each other.”
Please, Andrea thought. There was no chance she’d ever make the mistake again of thinking that running away from her problems would somehow fix them. She had to hold on to the hope that there would be good memories to build once she returned. Memories that would help heal the holes that were there for now and help her to live with the bittersweet holes that would ever remain.
Though she had once thought herself too old for wishing on stars, Andrea turned toward to the sky and found one of the small, blinking pricks of light in the darkness. She closed her eyes and wished on that star. Right then. Right there. Wished that the warmth she felt when she held Francis’s hand meant he was real and not one of Hubert’s wish creations. That when she finally did wake up from Reverie, Francis would be there by her side. But she wouldn’t know for sure until it was finished. And the only way home was to continue walking forward, even through the pain.
Please. Andrea begged, from the wild beating of her tender heart. Please let him be real. Let us both go home.
With Francis’s hand still warm in hers, Andrea looked back at Reverie one final time. The other Reverie children watched from where they stood, their eyes no longer dew-filled and dreamy but awake and crystal clear. The wise old Sandman smiled at them in his silly pajamas and slippers and cap.
And a scent like the salted air before a rainstorm blew through the fairway, a strong wind swirling around them as a tornado of raindrops and sleep sand and tears and dreams and nightmares fell from the sky.