flowers poke through the earth in the midst of the audience. The stems stretch, leaves unfurl, and buds blossom until the audience is awash in flowers.
Zach picks a bloom and tosses it in the air. He gestures for the audience to do the same. Eagerly, the kids yank the flowers out of the ground and throw them into the air. The men and women are more hesitant, but then they begin tossing flowers as well. The flowers join the aerial dance, twisting and twirling with the cards until they are all paired, each card with its own flower.
One more kiss, and the flowers melt into the cards, becoming part of the design. The cards tumble from the sky, each with a painted flower on it that wasn’t there before. The children in the audience leap up and catch the cards.
As the audience whispers, laughs, and trades flower cards, I bring out a cup full of water, and I throw it at the audience. The water arcs toward them but never lands. Suspended, each drop sparkles like a star. Zach shapes the water into horses that ride through the surf, a castle that rises out of foam, dragons that breathe water instead of fire.
After drawing the water back to the cup, Zach then transforms me into a dragon, a cat with wings, and a pink rabbit. He repeats this with volunteers from the audience, changing each for a few precious seconds into whatever they choose.
When we end the show, the audience leaps to their feet and claps. Some of the adults have tears in their eyes. The children are jabbering and chattering excitedly to each other. They leave full of beauty, magic, and wonder.
We melt into the oak tree, joining the wood, until the audience is gone.
Afterward, we walk out of the tree.
There is a pile in the center of the stage—blankets, clothes, tinder to light a fire, fresh-baked bread, some oranges that look like clementines. We asked for nothing, but they left it anyway.
The first time this happened, I had wanted to return it all.
“I don’t want to take,” I’d said. “I’m not
“Maybe they feel the same way,” Zach had said. And my objections had died.
We scoop up our gifts and retreat farther into the woods, far enough that we won’t be easy to find. We light a fire and lay beneath the blankets, along with the now-ragged stuffed monkey, as we eat the bread and the clementines. I have never tasted sweeter, and I can say that with glorious certainty.
“Are you happy?” I ask Zach.
“Yes,” he says without hesitation.
“Are you lying?”
“Never,” he says. I ask him this every night; every night, he answers the same. “Are you happy?” he asks me.
I think about it, turn the question over in my mind, compare what I feel to my memories. We are building new memories every day and with every world we see. The good memories are beginning to outweigh the bad memories. “Yes.”
“Are you lying?” he asks.
“Usually,” I say, “but never to you.”
Around us, the trees darken to shadows, and the sky deepens to azure then blue-black. Stars poke through the sky. I’m not tempted to count them. I’m content to lie beside Zach.
“I’d like a home someday,” Zach says suddenly. This isn’t what we usually say.
“You mean, you want to go home? Do you miss home? Your parents?”
“Sometimes, yes, of course. I love them, even as messed up as they are. I worry about them, that they’re worrying about me. But that’s not what I mean. I mean, I don’t want to travel forever. Someday I want a home that’s ours, that we stay in, that we fill with our things and our memories. It should have lots of skylights. Maybe be near an ocean. You know, oceans cover seventy percent of the Earth’s surface, and if you extracted all the salt, you could bury the continents in five feet of salt. It would be nice to be near an ocean.”
I think about a home by the ocean for Zach and me, imagine it with our own hall of photos, and decide it does sound nice. “All right,” I say.
“But not yet,” he says.
“Not yet,” I agree.
We lie side by side for a while more. The bread is gone. The clementines are gone. The cicadas are louder now, and the forest is silent. His body is wonderfully warm beside mine.
“Should we see another world tomorrow?” he asks.
“I’d like that,” I say.
I turn my head to look at him. He turns his. We are only inches away. He smiles at me, and then we kiss. We don’t do any magic. It’s only a kiss, magic on its own.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my nightmares. Without you, this book would never have been born. Also, thank you to my magnificent agent, Andrea Somberg, and to my fantastic editor, Emily Easton, as well as Laura Whitaker and all the other amazing people at Walker who have worked to bring Eve’s story to life. Many thanks and much love to my family, who have given me so many wonderful memories. And a thousand kisses to my children, who make me feel alive, and to my husband, who makes my dreams come true.
