Our mother read us fairy tales from books our grandmother had given us as “Yule” presents. They had been our father’s childhood books. He did not approve of his old books. If he came in when she was reading to us at bedtime, he would stand with his arms crossed.

“Tut, tut. Apsara, you’re filling their heads with stories designed to make children afraid of the woods rather than feel at home there. They’re stories engineered to rob children of their innate ability to connect with nature.”

At first my mother would just wait for him to finish preaching and he would eventually go outside.

When he started taking the book out of her hands and gently closing it, she stopped reading to us. We cried and Ocean pointed at us and clucked that this was exactly what he was talking about — our mother had filled us with needless fright. He took over our bedtime stories then. Ocean told us about animal spirits and magical beings. And his plans for the property. He had started to convert the old barn. All he needed was money, he said. The universe would provide. Morgaine snuggled in his lap and dangled on his every word as he stroked her hair. She would reach up and play with the driftwood talisman hanging by his collarbone.

My mother got a nursing job down in the Valley at the hospital. Although Ocean had been happy when she’d originally abandoned her career to join him as his muse on his mystical journey, now he was thrilled she was bringing in money. When we did career day in school, he told me he was a currency trader. I thought this had something to do with ocean swells, but never asked about it for fear I would sound silly. He was working on a computer program that would make us rich. Apsara could do her part now.

“Like I haven’t been doing it all along,” she snapped back at him.

While having children had made my father more of a child himself, what he called a free spirit, it had made our mother more cautious and protective. He would send us out to play and she would come out and tell us where it was safe to play.

My father was pleased with how my mother understood how to interact with a variety of people in what he called “the mainstream world.” They all loved her and no one treated her like “a flake,” as they treated him. She could infiltrate linear society. She could move in all worlds, with no barriers. He wasn’t able to do it with the same ease, he said. She’d roll her eyes at this and sigh. By then she was reluctantly living at The Mists, as most people called it. My father had decided to call the property “The Mists of Avalon” when he was looking for people to join. He got the name from the title of a recently published novel my mother was reading. She told him it was a reinterpretation of Celtic myth, from a female perspective, and that if he had read it he would know it was not the right name for the property. But my father insisted it was the perfect name. He didn’t need to read the book. Ocean knew what was in it without even seeing the words.