He stared at the quilt, which had turned so obligingly into the Atlantic for her. It stared back at him. He tried to picture it moving, turning a greenish-blue, but the fabric remained still and exactly as Nan had stitched it—a patchwork riotthat always made him think of the last gasp of fall, orange and brown and cold starry nights.
After a long stretch of nothing, Beatrix cleared her throat. “What are you thinking about?”
So he described the image in his mind, the waves and the color, and she shook her head. “I don’t think that’s specific enough. What time of day is it? Is the air warm or cold? Imagine thesmellof the ocean, the sounds?—”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve never been in real life.”
She looked at him as if he’d admitted a horrifying secret.“Never?”
“There was always some reason not to go on a vacation after I graduated from the academy, and before that …”
He didn’t have to put it into words. She knew how poor he’d been.
She took his hand. “I wish I’d invited you. I wish we’d been friends.”
“I think your mother would have vetoed that,” he said, the instant before considering that her mother was a dangerous topic of conversation. “Besides,” he said hastily, “we’re going now. I hope. What does the ocean sound like? Crashing waves?”
“More of awhoosh, unless it’s stormy. Rhythmic. Calming. Hypnotizing, really.”
He pulled her closer. “Tell me about the rest of it.”
“Well—you can smell the salt, taste it in the back of your throat and feel it on your skin, sticky-tacky, after you run into the water. And youshouldrun in because if you try to go in bit by bit, you’ll give up. That’s how cold the water is.But once you’re entirely wet, you won’t want to get out. Oh—and early morning is otherworldly. The sun sparkles on the water. Dolphins swim by. There’s no one else around.”
He could picture all of that. His quilt lay over them, in its oranges and browns and blacks, and he imagined that he’d just jumped into it—not warm as it really was, but cold,socold, breath-knocked-out-of-your-chest cold.
He shivered. Did the temperature drop, or was that just the power of suggestion? The next instant, he felt perfectly warm again, like a man wrapped in a handmade quilt should—and the speed of the change proved what he was doing had worked for just a second until he’d stopped.
He sat up, closed his eyes and took a deep breath, focusing, imagining he could smell the salt.
Salt in his nose, salt in his throat, salt sticky on his skin. Chill water, shocking and invigorating. Mild waves cresting and falling, swelling around them, deep blue-green. Birds flying overhead. He pictured this until hecouldjust barely taste the salt, feel the waves, hear the birds, like a faint echo of the real thing.
The mattress under him sagged. His eyes flew open in time to see it falling away into a fathomless depth that swirled orange, brown and black, and he had to grab Beatrix’s hand and kick to avoid following it down, his feet pushing against something that was not quite water but also not quite fabric. Nan’s quilt roiled around them, rippling outward, growing until it reached the walls and then pushing through, the walls themselves folding into the quilt,everything giving way, until there was nothing but deep-rose sky above them and the quilt below—lapping at their necks. He trailed his fingers in it and this time the feeling was indistinguishable from water. Blues and greens rippled outward, the fall colors disappearing. A seagull flew by, sharing its opinion of their presence.
They were in the ocean. So far into it, in fact, that he couldn’t see anything but.
“Sand first next time, I think,” Beatrix said, kicking in place next to him.
He laughed. The rest of it wasn’t as hard—he remembered the feeling of her sand under his bare feet, the painted-white lifeguard chair, the boardwalk. All of it settled into place a short swim from where they were.
“This is … this is …” he said, struggling to describe it.
“I know,” Beatrix said. And she smiled, which was beautiful to see.
They stayedin the water a long time. When they finally dragged themselves out, Peter collapsed on the sand, eyes closed, and she sat beside him, wondering if it was possible to fall asleep in a dream. Or if perhaps she could simply stay here and never go back out.
What she’d said to him wasn’t entirely true. She didn’t, in the end, think she wasn’t her daytime self, just as she’d stopped believing the dayside fiction that what she got up to at night had nothing to do with her. But now, for the firsttime in this semi-split existence, it was dayside Beatrix she was ashamed of. And she suspected Peter was half-right about her Vow to him—it probablywascontributing to her panic attacks because she wouldn’t give up on Plan B.
She didn’t know what to do. She wrapped her arms around her legs, shivering.
“Come here,” Peter said, taking her hand, rearranging her so she lay pressed against him on the sand. “Much warmer this way.” He waved his free hand to encompass everything in front of them. “How did you realize this was possible?”
She appreciated the distraction. This question, at least, she could answer. “Because we were already doing it.”
“Really?” He gave a thoughtful frown. “Without realizing it?”
“Yes, exactly. I’d taken for granted that we had no power over the setting. That the Vows were dictating it, or something like that. And yet we could manipulate things within it, like our clothes.”
She levered herself up on one arm, the better to look at him. “What if, in that first truly shared dream we had—when I ran from the house and you chased me—what if we were able to make that happen because we just assumed it was possible? I opened the front door and had no doubt I’d see the lawn, so I did—we both did. And when you took me upstairs two nights later?—”
