Madelyn and Joy race again, and Joy loses.
They race again. And Joy loses.
But Joy doesn’t want to stop. She asks Madelyn again and again and again, and I think they race more than twenty times, doing more than twenty laps.
Joy is clearly exhausted and swimming more slowly, but she refuses to stop. Madelyn keeps agreeing to race her, and so now they race again.
I go to sit next to Charlie, who for the last ten minutes has been watching from one of the pool chairs.
“Charlie, this must be boring for you. I would think you just want to play with Joy.”
“Are you kidding?” he looks at me all excited and I see his eyes are dancing. He is happy. “Joy lives in a dream! Anything can happen! And she’s awesome! Look how strong she is! She’s Superman!”
“Hmm. Yeah, well,” I mutter. “She’s hardly Superman.”
Charlie looks wounded. “But I see your point,” I add. And I do.
Joy catches up to Madelyn on the side of the pool. She’s breathing hard.
“It is time to stop, Zhoy,” Madelyn says. “It is enough.”
“One more!”
“Non. Thank you for the races.”
“One day I’m going to beat you!” Joy tells her.
Madelyn smiles wryly. “You will never beat me.” Then, she looks surprised. “Oh! The alarm clock! I have to go!”
And, with that, she vanishes.
The pool vanishes. The chairs vanish, including the ones Charlie and I are sitting on.
The ground - the damn ground! - vanishes!
We begin to fall, when Justin calls out, his arms spread, and suddenly we are standing on an island.
He looks around. “Hmmm. We have to remember that can happen!” he says. “Joy,” he looks at his daughter who is wet and in a swimsuit, now trying to get up from the sandy beach of this island. “Remember to always make the ground solid.”
Joy nods at this new instruction.
“So!” Justin puts a hand around Joy’s shoulder. “How was your first outing to Madelyn’s dream?”
“It was okay.”
“Okay, huh?”
“It was okay.”
He shakes his head. “All right, then. Let’s go back to Bonny’s Revenge, huh?”
Joy nods.
—Told by Grampa Walt