Joy is crying into my chest and doesn’t stop. I hug her with one hand, but awkwardly. I don’t know how to comfort a child who feels responsible for two deaths. I don’t know how to comfort a child who survived a slave camp for a day while figuring out how to save the other children.
What did happen there? I wish she would stop. My shoulder still hurts.
“Little Pirate, if you keep crying, you will make me cry,” says Master Mind. “I do not wish to cry at this time.”
I laugh at Master Mind’s joke. Then I realize he was not joking.
He is going through quite an emotional transformation, discovering great vulnerability in anything that has to do with Joy.
“In lieu of crying, I will leave you for a few seconds,” he says and goes into the tunnel.
“Joy,” I say softly. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t control any of it. The girl slipped. Master Mind fired. None of it is on you.”
Her crying turns to snivels. “You’re wrong. It is my fault. It’s my fault that I freed them, it’s my fault that I made them permanent. It’s my fault that they died.” She says that with such certainty, not arguing with me, but simply showing me a truth she believes I will one day see.
“The girl fell,” I argue reasonably. “That is not on you.”
“She fell and died because I made her real. Red told me years ago. Things that I love will die forever. I loved them. I wanted to save them. I made them permanent. Two died. If I didn’t love them, they wouldn’t have died. And now they can’t ever come back.”
She looks up at the faraway mushroom the kids must have gone into. “They’re alive. But they can die now in other people’s dreams. Just like I can. Just like you can.” She wipes tears from her cheeks. “I freed them. And now they’re free to live and free to die. That was my gift to them. And their deaths are on me.”
Chills run down my spine as she talks. I look at her face to check if she’s really only seven and a half years old or has it all been an illusion? How does she have that depth? How can she have those thoughts?
Master Mind comes out of the tunnel, carrying another jetpack.
“This is your jetpack, Pirate Father,” he tells me. “The Little Pirate will wear it so we can return. There is one more jetpack in the dream, but I do not wish to reenter it, for risk the Dreamer will return.”
“He destroyed it,” Joy says simply. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”
She puts on the jetpack. Master Mind picks me up gently. He will carry me.
“We’re not going home, though,” Joy says. “Grampa’s been shot. We have one more stop.”
(To be continued…)
—Told by Grampa Walt