Well, it was a hospital. What didn’t they know about her?

She twisted and buried her face in the pillow. Was it really crazy to be Mandy Whitacre? Could she, should she ever, everallow herself to think that her entire life, everything she had ever been and known, was only a delusion? How could that be? She couldn’t have made up her mom and dad, the schools she went to, the friends she had, the ranch, their church, getting saved and baptized, raising her doves, learning and showing her magic, grilling hamburgers in the backyard with the youth group, taking classes at NIJC. All of that was real and every day was a new discovery, something she never thought up before she got there. Life happened to her and she lived it.

She sighed. Okay, then. She really was Mandy Whitacre, and nobody was going to change that.

So what about waking up in the year 2010? It was easy to make up a wild sci-fi explanation, something like an Outer Limitsepisode: some wacky scientist at the fair was showing off a time warp generator and she’d accidentally walked into its vortex and been transported forty years into the future. It made a great explanation. Everything she was experiencing fit right into it. The only problem was, it was loony above loony.

So, could it all be a delusion? Could she really have imagined and made up things like a CAT scanner, computers, cell phones, flat TV screens, Google (she still didn’t know what that was), and little square plastic things that put out music without playing a tape or a record? She couldn’t have imagined Dr. Angela and June and Dr. Lorenzo and stony Nurse Baines. She couldn’t have conceived of the questions they asked and the words they used, and how her whole world could shrink down to this sterile, hypercontrolled cluster of little rooms.

Or … could she? She’d always had a creative imagination. She liked making up stories. Had she slipped a gear and put herself into a story she was making up? Maybe she’d slipped a gear and put herself into her own magic trick, the queen imprisoned in a stranger’s pocket.

She rolled onto her back and stared at the flat, white ceiling, featureless except for the hangingproof light fixture. Could she be imagining that light fixture? Was it part of a delusion? It looked real enough. How could she tell the difference?

Well, she would start with what was real. Daddy was real. The ranch was real. Maybe she was wrong about the dates, but she knew where home was, and that would be the place to sort all this out—not here. In this place, she was crazy; at home, she was Mandy Whitacre and nobody there would look at her funny or jot down little notes or make her take pills. And she didn’t have to be afraid. If she could get home, she could have all the time she wanted to work out this mess.

With her eyes focused on the bare white ceiling above her—in other words, on nothing in particular—Mandy’s mind drifted over memories of homecomings throughout her life: getting off the school bus and walking along the white paddock fence that bordered North Lakeland Road and always noticing the height of the hay in the field: short, taller, ready, then mowed short again; short, taller, ready, then mowed short again. It was a long walk when she was in the first grade wearing a dress, tights, and Mary Janes. The walk was shorter when the hayfield became the llama pasture and she was wearing fishnets and a skirt to her midthigh. By the time the white fence was replaced and the llama pasture divided off for some horses, she was in an embroidered blouse, flared jeans, and sandals and didn’t think about the distance; she was driving a Volkswagen Beetle and too busy thinking about everything else.

The mailbox grew a little more rust each year and went through several sets of reflective, stick-on letters and numbers: WHITACRE, 12790. From there the gravel driveway with the potholes and rain ruts went up a hill between two pastures toward the big white house with the gabled roof and wraparound veranda. Every time she walked or drove up that driveway her line of sight would clear the crest of the hill and she would see the dove house Daddy made for her out of a secondhand tool shed they brought in on a trailer, then the horse barn, and across the alleyway from that, the smaller barn for the llamas. The last thing to peek over the brow of the hill would be Daddy’s machine shop, with the old tractor parked alongside …

Dane wore his sunglasses to drive, checking out the city of Spokane as he drove through on I-90. On the left was downtown, with its classic brick buildings and modern vestiges of the 1974 World’s Fair. To the right, on a hill overlooking the city, were the hospitals: Shriners Hospital for Children, Deaconess Medical Center, Spokane County Medical Center. He looked back to the freeway. He’d had quite enough of hospitals, they only brought back all the memories … although the Spokane County Medical Center caught his interest for no particular reason. He looked back once.

Above Mandy, the ceiling went blue, like a cloudless summer sky. She blinked. Still blue. Maybe she’d been staring at all that white too long. Her eyes fell toward the wall …

She saw—she didn’t think she was imagining it—a white paddock fence running along a two-lane country road, the uncut grass obscuring the bottoms of the posts and reaching past the first rail; a gravel-lined ditch between the fence and the road shoulder; a robin perching on a fence post.

She did a double take, then sat halfway up, resting on her elbows. Her lazy stream of memories had come to a close at the old tractor next to the machine shop. This white fence was here without her remembering it, and so was the robin until it flew away.

She tried to relax the very interested look from her face as she peered past the white fence and out the doorway to the nurses’ station, now sitting in the high grass of the pasture.

Freaky. Not scary, freaky. How was her acting? Convincing? She couldn’t let them find out about this!

Rolling onto her side and passively resting her chin on her hand, she took in the double exposure, or more like a double location, two places sitting right on top of each other. Three aspens with white-striped trunks and quaking green leaves stood in the community area—she could see them through the wall.

It was all so lovely and so much what she wanted to see that she was captivated, not frightened. She lay there quietly, motionless for several minutes, just watching the grass wave in the breeze and the robins, blue jays, and finches flit about in search of worms and wild seeds.

The vision faded. The blue sky surrendered to the white ceiling, the grass faded from the nurses’ station; the white fence and the white-striped aspens dissolved as the walls of her room became solid … almost. Maybe it was Mandy’s eyes not used to the darker room after being “outside,” but everything in the room looked dimmer, and the edges of things—the edge of the doorway, the edge of the counter at the nurses’ station, the edges of Tina, the nurse now standing there—were shimmering, as if Mandy were watching them through little heat waves.

Things sounded different too, muffled, as if she had her hands over her ears, which she didn’t, with a low, rumbly hum like a big appliance whirring away somewhere deep under the floor. And there was a smell—pungent, like singed hair, like something burning. She crinkled her nose.

Trying to relax and not look weird in any way, she sat up and swung her feet down to the floor. The floor was cold linoleum, but now it felt soft and warm, as if her feet had come to rest on a thin, fuzzy carpet. Looking down, she marveled at how the floor gave a little under her feet, as if it had turned to rubber.

Shelooked fine, not dim, not wavering. The edges of her legs, arms, and feet were sharp and clear, and stood out in stark relief against everything else. So she was there, but everything else was only sort ofthere.