follow the bumpy asphalt road to its rounded end. I am just about to turn toward the house when I hear a noise. A boy’s voice carried by the breeze.

Bobby.

I turn toward the sound, listening. It’s him. Gripping my cane more tightly, I hurry past the swing set and go into the trees.

There he is, kneeling in his forest church, playing with action figures. Giant trees ring and protect him. Sunset slants through the great, down-slung boughs in purple-hued rays. The ferns and moss are lime green with new growth.

As I limp toward him, my heart is beating too quickly. The spongy, damp ground swallows my footsteps. So it is that he doesn’t hear me approach until I say, “Hey, Bobby.”

At the sound of my voice, his hands freeze. The action figures clatter together and go quiet. Slowly, he turns to look at me.

He is exactly as I’ve imagined him—black, curly hair, bright blue eyes with long lashes, and a missing pair of teeth.

But the way he frowns at me is new.

“Bobby?” I say after a confusing minute. “It’s me. Joy.”

He doesn’t smile. “Sure it is.”

“I’m sorry I went away, Bobby.”

“Everyone said you were imaginary anyway.”

“I guess I was then. I’m not now.”

He frowns. “You mean...”

“I’m here, Bobby.”

Hope flashes across his eyes. The quelling of it is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. “I ain’t falling for it. I don’t wanna be crazy anymore.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Quit trying to trick me.” His voice catches on that. I can see how hard he is trying to be sane and grown up. And how much he wants to believe in me again.

“I know it’s impossible,” I whisper. “And totally Looney Tunes, but will you trust in me one more time?”

“How?”

“Just come here.”

He shakes his head. “I’m scared.”

I smile. That kind of honesty will save us in this crazy situation. “Me, too. Please? Believe in me one more time.” I can’t help remembering my dreamed-of Christmas morning where I said the same thing to him.

Slowly, he gets up and comes toward me. When he’s almost close enough to take my hand he stops. He doesn’t reach for me. “Are you real?”

“That’s the first thing you ever said to me, remember? Then, I didn’t know what you meant, I didn’t understand. But I’m real now, Bobby. Believe me.”

He won’t touch me, but I see that hope come back into his eyes. “You broke your promise.”

“Yes, I did. And I’m sorry for that.”

“How come you have a cane?”

“That’s a long story.”

“I waited for you to come back. Every day...” His voice breaks. I can see how hard he’s trying not to cry.

“I have a present for you,” I say softly.

“Really?”

I reach into my pocket, half expecting it to be empty.

It’s not. My fingers coil around the cool, smooth bit of carved stone. I pull it out and hand it to him. The white arrowhead looks like a tiny heart in my palm.

Bobby gasps. “It’s white. My mommy always promised me...”

I move slowly toward him and drop to my knees in the dirt. “She showed me where it was, Bobby. On Christmas Eve night while you were sleeping.”

“Really?”

I nod. “Sometimes the magic is real, I guess.”

Tears glaze his eyes. I know how long he has waited for an adult to say these words to him. He takes the arrowhead from me, closing his fingers tightly around it.

“I knew it,” he whispers. “I’m not crazy.”

“You can keep it in your pocket always, and when you get scared or feel lost or confused, you can hold it and remember how much she loved you.”

I open my arms.

He launches himself at me. I catch him easily, but lose my balance. My cane drops to the side, and we fall to the mossy ground in a tangled heap. For the first time, I’m really holding him.

His kiss on my cheek is slobbery and wet... and real.

“Hey,” he says, drawing back, “you’re warm.”

“I wasn’t before?”

He shakes his head solemnly. “When you touched me, it was like... the wind.”

We sit up, look at each other. “Hey, Bobby O’Shea. It’s nice to really meet you.”

“I thought you were like... Mommy. Gone.”

I touch his cheek; it is softer than I ever imagined. “No. It just took me a long time to find my way back.”

“How were you here?”

I wonder if there will ever be an answer to that. If I will someday know why my dream was a flawed and tattered version of reality or how I ended up here when I was hooked up to machines in a white bed in Bakersfield. For now, all I can do is shrug and say the thing I do know. “Magic.”

He thinks about that. “Okay.”

The resilience of children. If only we could hold onto that. I smile. “So, what have you been doing since I left?”

He grabs my hand and gets to his feet. “Come on.” Tugging hard, he leads me out of the clearing and toward the house. I can tell he’s impatient with my speed, but the cane and my limp will only allow me to move so fast. I laugh and beg him to slow down.

As we move through the yard, I notice how shadowy everything is here on the edge of the deep woods; night falls quickly here, unlike in my dream world where everything seemed to go slowly.

Bobby tightens his grip on my hand and veers left. We go around the house and up a small rise. There, behind the house are five small cabins. Two are obviously old, and three are of brand new construction.

He goes to the closest one—a new one—and opens the door. I follow him inside, stumbling over the threshold.

It’s dark in here. Behind me, he flicks a switch and light comes on.

We are in a small, beautifully constructed cabin with wide plank pine flooring, unfinished walls, and big mullioned windows that overlook the lake. To the left, a door is partway open; in the space, I can see a bathroom tiled in white with a claw-foot tub.

“He didn’t know what to do with the walls. It wasn’t on the list.”

“Oh.” I’m confused. Before I can question him, he re-takes my hand and leads me out of the cabin.

“He fixed ’em all up and built the new ones. ’Cause of you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bobby, I...”

He stops and looks up at me. “You know. The list.”

“What list?”

He reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a worn, yellow piece of paper. It appears well worn, as if refolded endlessly. He opens it, hands it to me. “We look at it every day.”

I look down at the well-used piece of paper.

Ibeas.

chng nme/rmantic

pant trm

flwrs

fix cbns

websit

no crpt flr

“Oh,” I whisper, shivering although I’m not cold. “How...”

Bobby shrugs. We both know there is no answer to my unvoiced question. It’s like the arrowhead: magic. As impossible as it is, some part of me was here, and I left these words behind.

“I told my daddy you’d come back,” he says quietly. When he looks up at me, I am filled with a kind of love I’ve never known before.

I bend down and take him in my arms, holding him tightly.

He is the first to pull away. It couldn’t have been me.

“Come on,” he says, taking my hand again, pulling me toward the house. As we cross the yard, a wind kicks up. Suddenly the world is full of falling petals. It’s snowing pink.

At the door, Bobby stops and grins up at me. “Let’s surprise him.”

“Oh, it’ll be a surprise,” I say, feeling my stomach knot up. It is one thing to get a boy to believe in magic; it’s another thing entirely to pin such impossible hopes on a full-grown man.

Bobby knocks on the door. Footsteps rattle inside the house.

I tighten my hold on his hand.

The door opens and Daniel is there, looking almost exactly as I pictured him. He is not quite as lean as I imagined, and his hair is shorter.

But it’s Daniel, all right.

Bobby is moving from foot to foot so excitedly, he seems to be dancing the Macarena. I, on the other hand, am as still as stone. “Look, Daddy. She’s back.”

I try to smile, but can’t. All he has to do is shut the door or turn away and I’ll be lost. “Open the damn door,” I say, my voice catching on the swear word, just as Bobby had known it would. “It’s cold out here.”

“Joy?” I hear the confusion in Daniel’s voice, the disbelief.

Bobby laughs. “I knew he’d know you.”

I don’t understand. “How do you recognize me?”

“Bobby drew about a million pictures of you,” he says in that lovely brogue of my dreams. “And he talked about you ’til I couldn’t stand it anymore. But...”

“But what?”

“You’re beautiful.”

Heat climbs up my cheeks. I feel like a teenager, being noticed by the football captain for the very first time. It is a feeling I thought I’d never experience again. “This is insane,” I whisper.

“Joy.” The way he says my name is like a prayer. It wrenches my heart and gives me hope.

Without thinking, I move toward him, put my hand on his arm. My cane falls to the floor in a clatter, forgotten.

He touches my face, and only then, when I feel the heat of his palm against my cold cheek do I realize how keenly I wanted him to reach for me. His touch is the gentlest I’ve ever known. I sigh, seeing a pale cloud of my breath.

“I feel as if I already know you.”

I nod. It’s crazy, but I feel it, too.

“So, who are you, really?”

“Joy Faith Candellaro. I’m a high school librarian from Bakersfield.”

“Joy Faith, huh? That’s a grand name.” He steps back, makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Well, come on in.”

I step past him and limp into the house. I can feel him staring at me, and I know he has a dozen unanswerable questions—I know because I’ve asked them of myself—but just now I’m caught between worlds, the here and there of my dream and this reality.

There is no registration desk. That’s the first thing I notice. No wall of old-fashioned keys, no counter full of brochures and tourist maps. Like Rain Valley, some of what I saw was real and some was pure imagination. I don’t know how to make sense of it.

I turn to my left and see the lobby. The living room.

Just as in my dream, there is a huge stone fireplace.

The decorations Bobby and I put on the mantel are still there—the polyester pile of glittery snow, the cast resin homes and stores, the mirror skating pond and horse-drawn carriages. In the corner of the room, exactly where I put it, is a Christmas tree, draped in lights and ornaments. Beneath it, a lone package sits.

The single present is long and thin. It’s crudely wrapped and held together by big strips of masking tape. JOY is written on it in red crayon. It is a present for me.

And that’s when it hits me: I never had Christmas this year. My holiday was spent in a white room that smelled of disinfectant and flowers. There had been no magical holiday morning, no presents to open, and no unending games of Monopoly.

No one saved Christmas for me.

Until now. Tears sting my eyes but don’t fall. Of all the people in my life, these two—strangers in the real world—have saved the holiday for me. How is that possible? Or isn’t it?

“It’s March,” I say, looking up at Daniel. Suddenly I’m afraid again that it’s all a lie. “I’m in a coma somewhere, aren’t I?” I step back from him.

“He never stopped believing,” Daniel says to me. “He wouldn’t have Christmas without you.”

“But the tree...”

“It’s our sixth one.”

I limp past him to the tree. I need to feel its pointy needles, smell its sharp fragrance.

These are the decorations he put up, one by one, the mementos of his young life. That one was Mommy’s favorite... I made it in day care.

There’s a new ornament on the branch nearest me. It’s a small picture frame, formed of fired, painted clay. The kind of thing a child would make at one of those pottery places. Inside the red-and-green frame is a stick figure painting of three people—a dark haired man with a big smile, a curly-haired boy, and a red-haired woman. Below the people are our names, written in an adult’s careful hand: Daniel, Bobby, and Joy.

“I made it for you,” Bobby says, grinning. “But Daddy helped.”

I turn to Daniel. My heart feels swollen suddenly, tender. I don’t know what to say to this man who is both a friend and a stranger.

I feel myself starting to cry. It makes me look like a fool, to be moved by something so small, and by people whom I barely know, but I can’t stop the swell of emotions. I’ve felt alone for so, so long now, and now—however impossibly— I feel as if I’ve finally come home. “You must think I’m crazy...”

Daniel wipes the tears from my cheek. “You know what’s really crazy?” he says in a voice so low that only I can hear.

“What?”

“A man my age believing in magic.” He puts his hand around the back of my neck and pulls me in close. “I don’t know how this whole thing happened, or where we go from here, but I know one thing: We’ve been given a gift.” Leaning down to kiss me, he says, “Merry Christmas, Joy Faith Candellaro. We’ve been waiting for you.”

It is a quick kiss, a touching of lips and nothing more, but it reaches deep inside me, warms a place that has been cold for a long time. I lean into him, put my arms around his neck. As if from a distance, I hear a little boy giggle.

“Come on, Joy,” Bobby says. “You have a present to open.”

And I smile. Here and now. It is the best present of my life.

I look up at Daniel and whisper, “Magic,” and I know that for the rest of our lives we will believe.