“How can you tell?”
“I can feel it.”
Toby raised an eyebrow.
“What? You can’t?”
He shook his head.
“Can’t you feel the air get heavier—the cold get heavier?”
“When is it going to snow?” he asked.
“Soon. Sometime tonight. Maybe even in the next hour.”
“Shall we wait for it?”
“At least for a little while,” I replied.
I leaned my head against the scratchy wool of Toby’s collar and listened to its banjo twang. The sky had split into two levels. In the background, a drape of blue black had fallen. In front of this curtain, gray-tinged snow clouds had appeared. They flew so close to the river, I felt that if I climbed one of the trees on the riverbank, I might be able to reach out and comb them with my fingers.
Directly above our heads, the snow clouds were tied into a line like a chain of paper dolls. They looked like the skyline of a fairy-tale Arabian city. Domes and fortresses were clustered on one side. A lengthy barricade with an ornate watchtower sat in the foreground. Behind it was a steep hill dotted with small houses. A brief gust of wind shifted the pattern. Part of the fortress wall vanished, and more domes appeared.
“You’re cold?” Toby asked.
“Yes. But I like it.”
“Did you see Constantinople?”
“Babylon.”
“Perhaps it was Moscow. The Kremlin.”
“It was Mesopotamia.”
“The Taj Mahal.”
“No. Persia.”
“Or maybe, it was the Taj.”
“The casino in Atlantic City?”
“Or Disneyland. That magic castle or whatever it’s called.”
I laughed and turned back to the clouds. “Maybe it’s Vegas,” I said.
Toby smiled.
“Will you miss it?” I asked.
“Of course. But it’s still there.”
I nodded. Toby pulled me tighter. “And you’ve already gone back and done what you needed to do.”
A long, thin breath escaped through Toby’s lips. “I don’t know.”
“The problem with being a magician is that you seem to love things more in their absence.” This was why Toby had come back—this and something else, I was only beginning to understand.
We turned back to the sky. For a while, my clouds took the form of ocean liners trundling through a lightless sea. Then they were massive suspension bridges. Then a lobster. Then a swimmer. Then a phoenix. I looked over at Toby and wondered what he was seeing—what form his clouds took.
“Do you think that you find the shapes in the clouds or that you shape the clouds with your mind?” I asked.
Toby shrugged.
I looked at the sky. I saw mesas rising from a desert—the same titanic tea tables Toby and I had driven past on our way to Intersection. And then on top of one of the mesas, a head emerged and looked around. From underneath the head, an adolescent body unfurled—the teenage waitress.
The cloud bank lowered until it was almost at the level of the river. The cloud-form Greta was standing, one hand on her hip, in front of the blue ranch house. I felt a strange tingle and looked down to see that my ring had changed to cloud gray. The waitress beckoned to us. Toby stood up. He pulled me up, too. The cloudscape grew wider and more detailed. A highway stretched behind the house. There was Jim’s Big West Donut. And at the end of the road, I could see the Las Vegas Strip.
As the clouds rolled past, I saw the road leading into Vegas. The famous WELCOME sign. I saw the Laughing Jackalope Motel. The panorama came to a halt in front of the Winter Palace. Fireworks the color of crystal were shooting out of the onion-domed turrets. I could just make out the distant sound of the St. Petersburg Orchestra tuning up inside. And suddenly I knew that the moment Toby and I set foot in this cloud-world, it would take shape, solidify into his perfect desert, his perfect Vegas. He would be back to the scene of his mistake.
He tugged at my hand. “We won’t have to be strangers now.”
I shook myself. I knew that once Toby discovered the possibility of gliding from one world of his imagining to the next, he would never rest. He would always be leaving me behind, returning less and less often, until one day, he would cease to appear.
“I belong here.”
Toby didn’t need to save Greta anymore; it was that he could. And this possibility and all the possibilities it led to were that undeniable calling that had been summoning him since the day his blocks had first opened his eyes to magic. It was only now that the voice had solidified and grown insistent. He would live between the worlds of his imagination, saving Greta in one, Eva in other. Testing the limits of his craft, rewinding time, and doing it again. I don’t think he planned to stay in one place for long. Not even the Las Vegas stage could hold him. He would save his greatest magic for himself, skipping between places summoned by his fantasies and dreams.
Toby extended one leg. His foot hovered between the river and the clouds. He let go of my hand. He had not come back to me; he’d come to say good-bye. I looked back at the villa, at the warm light just barely visible through the tree. Then I sensed a movement at my side. I turned back and saw the clouds close around the back of Toby’s wool coat. And without a word, the magician disappeared. Like Greta and Max, he didn’t say good-bye.
I remained at the edge of the dock. The cloud cover lifted, rising to its accustomed height.
“Toby,” I said quietly. But there was no response. I lay on my side. I closed my eyes, feeling the sting of tears. Before I left the dock, I took off my ring and dropped it into the river. Then I clenched my hand tight, and when I opened it, I was holding the key to the blue ranch house.
On the great lawn, an enormous bonfire was burning. The revelers had joined hands and were dancing around it, the flames
