“Old Tom and I wanted nothing so much as to keep you, Franny, but Old Tom said we couldn’t not try to unwish it, not when there was such a cost to others, their lives. So he tried to use his own unused wish. He went into the garden and unwished mine. But nothing happened. I was never so happy, never so happy as when you were there still in my arms after his wish. So then what to believe? Either what he had been told was true, you cannot unwish something, or the whole thing was bunk; your appearance concurrent with my wish was a coincidence. We could never be sure. I think really we didn’t want to know. I think, myself, that is why Old Tom never tried to use his wish again after that. That is, until the Maddens were in such trouble. The whole legend of the night garden might have been true, or it might not. In the end we had no real proof and we didn’t have to take responsibility for all that other stuff that might have happened as a result of my wish.”

“But you didn’t ask for all the other stuff to happen. It just happened.”

“As things do,” agreed Sina.

“As things do. I’ve tried to write it. About the UFOs and ghost and mermaid and such. All the magic. But I can’t. I can’t pull it through—not that kind of magic, I can’t use them to call up what I want to convey. I can only sense it.”

“No, no,” said Sina. “I can’t make the clay become … that thing. I thought maybe giving the mermaid legs, you know, because it was really Miss Macy, but that didn’t help.”

And then we weren’t mother and daughter or adopted mother and adopted daughter or even friends. Though I sat on her lap, we were colleagues. We understood the longing and we understood the difficulty.

And then I thought I had a brilliant idea as we rocked there so full of despair. “Sina,” I said. “I have an idea.”

“What?” she asked as we both gazed out to sea.

“What if we just give up? We can just stop trying.”

Sina laughed.

“No,” I said. “I mean it. If we didn’t try … it would all still be here. What if we gave up having it come from us, through us, what if we gave up us?” It was not an easy idea to explain.

“But what would we be, then?” asked Sina.