A few days later, Shira began showing signs of improvement. She jotted down fewer and fewer words in her notebook each morning, and at the same time, clear descriptions began to appear. She was also more responsive to Nelly and me, her empty gazes gradually replaced by long, intelligible sentences, by smiles and bright notes of laughter, alongside petulant glares and fits of prepubescent rage I’d never thought I’d be so happy to witness. Two and a half months after they had first emerged, Shira’s dreams began to disappear. Dr. Mendelson thought perhaps Shira’s mind had managed to fix itself. In her opinion, the girl had suffered from a disorder that made her remember every detail of her dreams. That it was very likely Shira was still dreaming as before—years every night—she simply didn’t remember it anymore. But she added that it was equally likely that everything she was saying was “a bunch of hooey.” That she could come up with a few other interpretations but had no way of proving any of them. She suggested we continue to bring Shira to the sleep lab so they could further explore the problem, but we refused. Nelly said the child’s rehabilitation was more important right now than the sleep lab’s chance of winning a Nobel Prize, and I agreed, although I wouldn’t mind a family trip to Stockholm.

Even though Dr. Mendelson’s theories sounded very convincing, I couldn’t stop thinking that Nelly had been right all along. There was no medical mystery here; the whole story was actually pretty simple: One day Shira had decided to escape into her dream, and the next, she got tired of it and decided to come back to us. I shared my theory with Nelly but she ruled it out, saying that she never really believed the whole “escaping into her dreams,” that it was just something she had said in a moment of despair. I think that if she knew what had happened there, with Nabil, she might have thought differently. It made no sense that one day the girl almost falls off a cliff and the next starts to get better. Maybe at that moment something had occurred to bring her back to reality. Anyway, I decided to leave well enough alone. To make peace with the fact that not all mysteries in life have a clear answer.