the first time knew what it was not to believe her ears: they told her that the child had spoken, but Sophie didn’t believe it, and couldn’t imagine answering. It would have been like speaking to some part of herself, some part that had suddenly and inexplicably become detached from her and then turned to face her, and question her.
The child laughed a small laugh; she was enjoying this. “You don’t,” she said. “Do you want me to give you a hint?”
A hint! Not a ghost, and not a dream, for Sophie was awake; not her daughter, certainly, for her daughter had been taken from her over twenty-five years ago, and this was a child: yet for sure Sophie knew her name. She had raised her hands to her face, and between them now she said or whispered: “Lilac.”
Lilac looked a little disappointed. “Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”
Sophie laughed, or sobbed, or both at once. “Lilac,” she said.
Lilac laughed, and made to climb up on the bed with her mother, and Sophie perforce had to help her up: she took Lilac’s arm, wondering, afraid that perhaps she would herself feel her own touch, and if she did, then— then what? But Lilac was flesh, cool flesh, it was a child’s wrist her fingers circled; she drew up Lilac’s real solid weight with her strength, and Lilac’s knee pressed the bed and made it jounce, and every sense Sophie had was certain now that Lilac was here before her.
“Well,” Lilac said, brushing the golden hair from before her eyes with a quick gesture. “Aren’t you surprised?” She watched Sophie’s stricken face. “Don’t you say hello or kiss me or anything?”
“Lilac,” Sophie only said again; for there had been for many, many years one thought forbidden to Sophie, one unimaginable scene, this one, and she was unrehearsed; the moment and the child were just as she would have imagined them to be if she had allowed herself to imagine them at all, but she had not, and now she was unready and undone.
“
“You say, ‘What a surprise,’ ” Lilac reminded her, whispering close to her ear.
Lilac’s odor was of snow and self and earth. “What a surprise,” Sophie began to say, but couldn’t finish it, because tears of grief and wonderment flew up her throat behind the words, bringing with them all that Sophie had been denied and had denied herself all these years. She wept, and Lilac, surprised herself now, thought to draw away, but Sophie held her; and so Lilac patted her back gently to comfort her.
“Yes,” she said to her mother, “yes, I came back; I came a long way, a long long way.”
Walking From There
She may have come a long, long way; for sure she remembered that this was what she was to say. She remembered no long journey, though; either she had awakened only after most of it had been sleepwalked away, or in fact it had really been quite short…
“Sleepwalked?” Sophie asked.
“I’ve been asleep,” Lilac said. “For so long. I didn’t know I’d sleep so long. Longer than the bears even. Oh, I’ve been asleep ever since a day, since the day I woke you up. Do you remember?”
“No,” Sophie said.
“On a day,” Lilac said, “I stole your sleep. I shouted ‘Wake up!’ and pulled your hair.”
“Stole my sleep?”
“Because I needed it. I’m sorry,” she said gleefully.
“That day,” Sophie said, thinking How odd to be so old and full of things, and have your life inverted as a child’s can be… That day. And had she slept since then?
“Since then,” Lilac said. “Then I came here.”
“Here. From where?”
“From there. From sleep. Anyway…”
She awoke, anyway, out of the longest dream in the world, forgetting all of it or nearly all of it as she did so, to find herself stepping along a dark road at evening, silent fields of snow on either side and a still cold pink-and- blue sky all around, and a task she’d been prepared for before she slept, and which her long sleep had not forgotten, ahead of her to do. All that was clear enough, and Lilac didn’t wonder at it; often enough in her growing up she’d found herself suddenly in strange circumstances, emerging from one enchantment into another like a child carried sleeping from a bed to a celebration and waking, blinking, staring, but accepting it all because familiar hands hold him. So her feet fell one after the other, and she watched a crow, and climbed a hill, and saw the last spark of a red sun go out, and the pink of the sky deepen and the snow turn blue; and only then, as she descended, did she wonder where she was, and how much further she had to go.
There was a cottage at the bottom of the hill, amid dense small evergreens, from whose windows yellow lamplight shone out into the blue evening. When Lilac reached it she pushed open the little white gate in its picket fence—a bell tinkled within the house as she did so—and started up the path. The head of a gnome, his high hat doubled by a hat of snow, looked out over the drifted lawn, as he had been doing for years and years.
“The Junipers’,” Sophie said.
“What?”
“It was the Junipers’,” Sophie said. “Their cottage.”
There was an old, old woman there, the oldest (except for Mrs. Underhill and her daughters) Lilac had ever seen. She opened her door, held up a lamp, and said in a small old voice, “Friend or Foe? Oh, my,” for she saw then that a nearly naked child, barefoot and hatless, stood before her on the path.
Margaret Juniper did nothing foolish; she only opened the door so that Lilac could enter if she liked, and after a moment Lilac decided that she would, and went in and down the tiny hall across the scatter rug and past the knickknack shelf (long undusted, for Marge was afraid of breaking things with her old hands, and couldn’t any longer see the dust anyway) and through the arched doorway into the parlor, where a fire was lit in the stove. Marge followed with the lamp, but then at the doorway wasn’t sure she wanted to enter; she watched the child sit down in the maple chair with broad paddle arms that had been Jeff’s, and put her hands flat on the arms, as though they pleased or amused her. Then she looked up at Marge.
“Can you tell me,” she said, “am I on the right road for Edgewood?”
“Yes,” Marge said, Somehow not surprised to be asked this.
“Oh,” Lilac said. “I have to bring a message there.” She held up her hands and feet to the stove, but didn’t seem to be chilled through; and Marge didn’t wonder at that either. “How far is it?”
“Hours,” Marge said.
“Oh. How many.”
“I never walked there,” Marge said.
“Oh. Well, I’m a fast walker.” She jumped up then, and pointed inquiringly in a direction, and Marge shook her head No, and Lilac laughed and pointed in the opposite direction. Marge nodded Yes. She stood aside for the child to pass her again, and followed her to the door.
“Thank you,” Lilac said, her hand on the door. Marge chose, from a bowl by the door of mixed dollar bills and candy with which she paid the boys who shoveled her walk and split her wood, a large chocolate, and offered it to Lilac, who took it with a smile, and then rose on tiptoe and kissed Marge’s old cheek. Then she went out and down the path, and turned toward Edgewood without looking back.
Marge stood in the door watching her, filled with the odd sensation that it had been only for this tiny visit that she had lived her whole long life, that this cottage by the roadside and this lamp in her hand and the whole chain of events which had caused them to be had always and only had this visit for their point. And Lilac too, walking fast, remembered just then that of
