There are traditional fairy-tale characters, too. Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, the seven swan brothers and their sister. None of the villains, but otherwise it seems as though every character Wentworth ever painted is standing out there in the yard. All the companions of my childhood that I used to people the stories I made up in my head.

I’d forgotten all about them, though how I could have done that seems impossible. But seeing them now fills me with a confused delight.

It’s like finding a box of childhood toys that you haven’t looked at in thirty years. You never think of them. It’s like they never existed. But if you come upon that box and open it, the memories all flood back. Each toy you pick up, no matter how small and inconsequential, looms large once you hold it in your hand again.

Some things you can’t forget. Bad things. Awful things. Sad things. When you’ve had a childhood like mine, you just try to put it all out of your mind. But seeing this crowd of memories come to life in the yard, I realize it’s so important to remember that there were good things, too. Maybe they only lived on paper, or in my head, but they sustained me through those long, unhappy years.

“Without you,” Tom says, “we wouldn’t exist.”

I turn to look at him. “So, you’re like Eadar?”

Eadar are the inhabitants of the half world—what Joe calls the between. Beings created out of imagination, who exist only as long as someone believes in them. They’re like my friend Toby Childers, the little man who was my companion the last time I got lost in the otherworld. Some are only wisps of beings—born from a daydream and fading quickly away. But others—like the beloved characters of favourite books—can become so real that they take on a life of their own.

Tom looks puzzled until I explain it to him.

“Exactly,” he says. “We are Eadar, made real from the page by the power of your imagination.”

I look out again at the crowd . . .

“But I haven’t thought of any of you for so long,” I say. “How would you all still be here if you need belief to exist?”

“You were that powerful. You are that powerful.”

“Here,” I say.

He nods. “Yes, here.”

I’m trying to figure this out, but I must be totally dense because I really can’t see where he’s going with all of this.

“So, what are you saying?” I ask. “that you’re . . . grateful?”

“Indeed,” he says. “How could we not be? And we’ve come to you now to remind you that the child you were did good, as well.”

“For you, maybe, but that doesn’t change what happened to Mattie.”