“I never said that,” she tells me. “I wasn’t sure. I only knew that if you came back, it would be a long time before it happened.”

“Why have you let me back now?”

“I didn’t do anything,” she says. “You closed yourself to this world. But something else let you break through tonight.”

I laugh. “Yeah, I got drunk. Which is weird because I was pretty tipsy last night with Mona, but I didn’t find myself here. Maybe it’s just the difference between wine and whiskey.”

She gives me a noncommittal look.

“Perhaps that is it,” is all she says.

“Well, it’ll play hell on my liver, but it’s good to know how to do it again.”

Because I’ll get drunk every night if it means I can dream myself back here once more. I feel alive for the first time in years. Young. Whole. Not broken. Not in pain.

“You don’t need to drink to cross over again,” she tells me. “Not now that you’ve remembered how to reopen the door.”

“But I don’t remember doing anything different, besides getting drunk. What if I can’t do it again?”

She studies me for a long moment.

“Is it so bad for you in the World As It Is?”

“Well, yeah.” Then I sigh. “No, not totally. I don’t know. I try not to think about it because it’s too depressing. But here in this dream, being able to put that old broken body aside and be here again . . . I haven’t felt this alive in a long time.”

“Then I wish I could help you be able to make the journey whenever you wish.”

“Why can’t you? You’re like this big old powerful spirit, aren’t you?” She shrugs. “Perhaps the woman you’ve based me upon is, but I’m not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not really here,” she says. “Or rather the me that you think I am, isn’t really here. I’m only a memory that you’ve called up out of yourself, given a temporary existence while you visit the spiritworld.”

“Aw, come on. Don’t go all Alice on me.”

“Alice?”

“You know, like in the Lewis Carroll books where everything’s contradictory and screwy and confusing.”

“I’m sorry for the confusion.”

I give a slow nod as it starts to sink in.

“So you’re not real, are you?” I ask.

“I could lie,” she says, “but that would only be you lying to yourself, and that’s something you’ve never done. You’ll hide things from yourself, but you don’t lie.”

“Maybe I need to start. Maybe I wouldn’t be living in a broken body if I did.”

“The car that struck you was nothing you brought upon yourself. Nor were the unwelcome attentions of your brother and foster parents and the others when you were a child.”