Chapter Text
EIGHT months, and Dorothy Gale still wasn't sleeping right.
She'd lie awake in her Kansas bedroom and think about the Scarecrow's laugh, how it had been the nicest sound in the whole world. The sort of laugh that made you feel like everything might turn out all right, even when you were in dreadful trouble. She thought about the Tin Man standing watch every night, checking the road. About Nimmie, kind and sweet. About Lion trying so hard to be brave.
It ached so dreadfully if she let it.
She loved being home. She did. But sometimes she missed Oz so much it hurt. She just didn't say much about it anymore. She knew better by now than to talk about Oz at the breakfast table. Not because she was ashamed, not even a little bit. She knew it had all been real, as sure as she knew the smell of rain or the sound of the barn door in the wind. But after a while, she learned people looked at her strangely when she talked about Oz too much. She'd been careful ever since. Smiling, she said she was just fine. Changing the subject before Uncle Henry or Auntie Em could look too close. She thought she was doing a good job of it.
That morning looked like any other, at first. Aunt Em at the stove with sleeves rolled up and the smell of hot biscuits filling the kitchen. Uncle Henry behind his paper. Coffee steaming in thick white mugs on the table, and the loose board on the porch creaking every time the wind caught it.
Dorothy came in from finishing her morning chores with her hair half-braided, reaching for her coat, already trying to remember if she'd finished her arithmetic. Toto trotted in after her with muddy paws, and Aunt Em warned him not to track dirt across her kitchen floor.
"Leave that, Dorothy, dear," Aunt Em said, without turning. "You're not going to school today."
Dorothy stopped. "I'm not?"
"Sit down and have your breakfast, honey."
Dorothy looked at Uncle Henry. He turned a page. She sat down and reached for the butter.
"Good morning, Uncle Henry."
"Mornin'," said Uncle Henry, without looking up.
"Good morning, sweetheart." Aunt Em set the biscuits down and smiled, warm and loving, but worried clear through. She'd looked like that for the last eight months since Dorothy had come home. "You sleep all right?"
"Oh, just fine, Auntie Em, really," Dorothy said.
"No bad dreams?"
"No, ma'am."
Uncle Henry turned a page. Toto put his chin on Dorothy's knee, and she gave him a corner of a biscuit under the table, which she absolutely wasn't supposed to do, and Aunt Em was kind enough not to notice.
"Henry," Aunt Em said quietly. She sat down and folded her hands together, the way she did when a hard thing needed saying proper. "I think we ought to tell Dorothy."
Dorothy looked up. "Tell me what?"
Uncle Henry cleared his throat. "Well, now. Your Aunt Em found a doctor over in Millport. Name of Worley. She wants you to go see him today."
"A doctor?" Dorothy said. "But Uncle Henry, I'm not sick."
"Nobody said you were sick," Aunt Em said, a little too quickly. "Dorothy, honey, nobody said that."
"Well… what kind of doctor is he?"
Aunt Em glanced down at her hands. Henry looked over at her, then back at Dorothy. "He's a… talkin' doctor," Henry said. "That's all."
Dorothy looked at him, then at Aunt Em, and her stomach dropped right down to the floor. Outside, the loose porch board knocked again in the wind, and the chickens were making their usual morning fuss, and everything was carrying right on like it was a perfectly ordinary day.
"Oh." Dorothy's voice came small. "Because of what I told you. About Oz."
"Now, Dorothy…" Aunt Em's voice softened, wavering just a little. "I worry about you, that's all. I love you, and I worry. And I thought… maybe it might help, talkin' to somebody. Somebody who knows about these things."
"But I'm all right, Auntie Em, truly I—"
"Dorothy, please." Aunt Em reached across and laid her hand over hers. "Eight months, honey. Eight whole months."
Dorothy looked at her aunt's hand over hers. She looked at Aunt Em's face, all worried and sad, and her eyes started stinging before she could stop them.
"But I know what I saw, Auntie Em. I truly do," Dorothy said. "I know it just the same as I know you, and this kitchen, and that crack in the ceiling over Uncle Henry's chair. It happened. It truly did."
Aunt Em pressed her lips together. "I know you believe that, dear."
"But you don't really think I made it all up, do you?"
"Now, Dorothy," Uncle Henry said, firm but gentle. "Nobody's sayin' you're tellin' stories. Your Aunt Em's just worried. That's all."
Dorothy looked at him, and then at Aunt Em, and Aunt Em's eyes were so tired and worried and so full of love that the ache in Dorothy's chest got heavier.
"Oh, all right," she said.
Aunt Em blinked. "All right?"
"I'll go see him. If it'll ease your mind any." She picked up her biscuit and took a bite.
The relief on Aunt Em's face came quickly and bright, almost too big. "Oh, thank you," she said, squeezing Dorothy's hand. "Thank you, honey. We'll go right after breakfast."
"Yes," Dorothy said. "All right."
Aunt Em got up, smoothed her apron, and went back to the stove.
Under the table, Toto made a small, unhappy sound.
"I know, Toto," Dorothy told him quietly, while Em's back was turned. "But she needs this. So we're going."
He looked up at her with his big, warm eyes, and she looked back at him, and they had a whole conversation without saying a single word. They were both awfully good at that.
The ride to Millport took the better part of an hour. Aunt Em talked the whole way, nervous chatter about the Henderson family's fence and the Briggs girl getting married. Dorothy let her aunt's voice fill the cold morning and thought about the composition book hidden under her floorboard. Forty-seven pages she'd written to friends nobody believed existed. The little carved figures on her windowsill that she checked every morning to make sure they were still real.
Aunt Em was somewhere in a story about apple butter when Dorothy felt it. That warmth. It started in her feet and crept upward, slow and steady, like it already knew exactly where it was going.
Dorothy glanced down and nearly gasped.
The silver shoes. They were on her feet again.
Her breath caught. They just wouldn't stay gone. Eight months she'd been home, and still they kept coming back. In her bedroom. In the barn. Once at the breakfast table, hidden beneath her skirt, where nobody else could see them. Sometimes she'd wake in the middle of the night and find them waiting there, shining faintly in the darkness as though they'd never left at all. And now they were here. Right out in the open. On the way to see a doctor who already seemed convinced there was something wrong with her. She shoved both feet as far back under the bench as they'd go and yanked her skirt down over them, heart pounding so loud she was sure Aunt Em could hear it over the horses.
"—and I said to her, well, Clara, if you're set on puttin' up apple butter you'd best do it before the first frost—"
Dorothy stared straight ahead. The shoes were warm against her feet, bright as anything, and the winter light was catching them. She could feel it. They wouldn't let her forget. Wouldn't let her pretend.
"Dorothy? You listenin', honey?"
"Yes, ma'am," Dorothy said quickly. "Apple butter. Before the frost."
Aunt Em gave her a small look. Dorothy kept her face as ordinary as she could, which was hard when you were hiding magic shoes under a wagon bench. She pressed her feet together and thought at the shoes as hard as she could: Oh no, please. Not now. Not today of all days.
The shoes stayed right where they were.
"—though I suppose it's her own concern what she does with her preserves," Aunt Em went on. "Dorothy, you're lookin' a little peaked, dear. You feelin' all right?"
"Just cold," Dorothy said. "Just a little cold, Auntie Em."
Aunt Em reached over and tucked the lap blanket tighter around Dorothy's knees, and Dorothy held perfectly still and didn't look down and didn't breathe right for a good thirty seconds.
The Millport water tower showed up against the pale sky ahead of them. The shoes went warm one last time, like a goodbye or maybe a warning, Dorothy couldn't tell which, and then they were gone. Her old black winter boots were back, scuffed and ordinary and right where they were supposed to be. She let out a long breath through her nose.
"There it is," Aunt Em said, nodding ahead. "We're most there, honey."
"Yes, Aunt Em," Dorothy said. "Almost there."
She didn't look down again for the rest of the ride.
"It's just a talk, Dorothy, dear," Aunt Em said as they rolled into town. "That's all it is. He's a kind man. Gentle. There's not a thing to be afraid of."
"Oh no, I'm not afraid," Dorothy said, and she meant it.
"Well. That's good." Aunt Em kept her eyes on the road. "He sees all sorts, Dorothy. Folks that've had a hard spell. There's no call for shame in it."
"I know," Dorothy said. And then, after a moment, "Aunt Em."
"Yes, honey."
"Don't you believe me? Even a little. Even just a piece of what I told you."
Two fence posts went by before Aunt Em answered.
"Now, Dorothy…" she said, quietly. "What I know is you're my girl. And I love you. And your Uncle Henry loves you. And we just want you well. That's what I know."
"That's not quite what I asked."
Aunt Em's hands tightened on the reins.
"I know it ain't." Her voice caught a little, then steadied. "I don't know what to make of… where you say you were. I don't, Dorothy. But you came back to me." She swallowed. "And I ain't slept proper since you been gone. I just need you safe. That's all I'm askin'."
Dorothy looked at her aunt's face and had to blink quickly and look down at Toto instead. "I'm all right," she said, wobbly. "I truly am, Auntie Em."
Aunt Em reached over without looking away from the road and put her hand over Dorothy's, and Dorothy turned her hand over and held on tight, and they rode the last stretch into Millport without saying anything else.
Dr. Worley's office was on the second floor of a red brick building on Clement Street. Dorothy tied Toto's lead to the post herself and crouched down to him.
"I'll be back in just a little while, Toto, darling," she told him.
He looked at her and whined.
"I know, Toto," she said. "I don't like it either. But I'll be right back."
He sat down, which meant he understood and wasn't happy about it.
"Good boy," Dorothy said. "You're a very good boy, Toto." She straightened up and followed Aunt Em inside.
When Dr. Worley opened his door and called her name, Dorothy thought he looked exactly like Aunt Em's voice had sounded in the wagon. Kind and gentle, kind and gentle, over and over. He was thin, with grey at his temples, and his eyes were warm enough. But they looked the same whether he was looking at her or at his notepad, and that made Dorothy feel funny inside.
His office had the shade pulled halfway down even though it was morning, and the lamp on his desk was already lit, and everything looked dim and yellowish, like the end of a day that hadn't even started yet. It smelled like wood polish, and underneath that, a sharp, clean smell that reminded her of the hospital where she'd gone when she was seven and broken her wrist falling out of the hayloft. Dorothy sat in the chair across from his desk. Aunt Em sat to her left. Dorothy looked around the room, all the way to every corner.
There was a chair against the wall beside the bookcase that didn't match the rest of the furniture. The armrests were wider than they needed to be, and the leather was worn in funny places. Not from sitting. Not from anything ordinary. Dorothy looked at it for a moment, then looked back at Dr. Worley.
"Well, Dorothy." He smiled at her. "Your aunt has told me a little about how you've been getting on. I thought we might just get acquainted today. Talk a little. Nothing to worry about at all."
"That's very kind of you, Dr. Worley, sir," Dorothy said, as politely as she could.
"How are you feeling today?"
"Just fine, thank you."
"Sleeping well? Eating well?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good." He wrote on his notepad without looking down at it, and Dorothy's hands went tight in her lap. "I'd like to hear a little about what you experienced last fall. In your own words, whenever you're ready."
"Oh, well," Dorothy said. "I went to a place called Oz."
She said it the way she always said it, because it was true and wonderful and she hadn't stopped believing it for even one day. When she got talking about her friends, she forgot to be careful.
"Tell me about that," Dr. Worley said.
"Our house got picked up by the cyclone and came down in a country called Oz, in Munchkinland, and I landed right on top of a wicked witch, which I felt just terrible about, even if she hadn't been very kind to the Munchkins at all, the people who lived there, and the Munchkins were ever so pleased about it, they had a celebration and everything, but I was terribly sorry all the same. Her sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, wanted those silver shoes something fierce."
Dorothy glanced down at her feet for just a second, then back up.
"They're magic shoes. Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, gave them to me; they'd belonged to the dead witch, you see. I walked to the Emerald City on a road made of yellow bricks to ask the Wizard to send me home. I made friends along the way: a Scarecrow, a Tin Man, a Lion, and a Munchkin woman named Nimmie and her Hedgehog. The Wizard wasn't quite what everybody thought he was, but he was a good man underneath it all, from Omaha, Nebraska, as a matter of fact, if you can imagine. And Glinda told me the shoes could take me home if I asked them properly."
She looked him right in the eye.
"So I did. And here I am."
Dr. Worley nodded along, and when she finished, he was quiet for a moment, writing on his notepad. Then he set the pen down and folded his hands.
"Dorothy." His voice was gentle, the careful kind. "What you're describing is very detailed. Very consistent." He said it like those were the wrong things to be.
"Thank you," Dorothy said, because she didn't know what else to say to that.
"Children who've been through a frightening experience," he said, kindly, "sometimes the mind helps them through it. Makes it mean something." He glanced down at his notepad. "The friends. The road. The way home. These are very natural things for a child to—"
"I didn't make them up," Dorothy said. "They were real. They're still real, right now, somewhere."
Dr. Worley smiled at her. It was a perfectly kind smile. He was already writing again before she'd finished saying it, little scratches on his notepad, and Dorothy went cold all the way through. He'd made up his mind somewhere around the Munchkins. Maybe before. He had his word for it, and his notepad and his kind smile, and none of those things had any room in them for a Yellow Brick Road. He wasn't mean about it.
Dorothy's hands clenched in her lap. "Dr. Worley, sir," she said, "I did have friends. And a road. And a way home." She wasn't correcting a mistake anymore. She was just saying what was true, plain and straight, the way you'd say the sky was blue to someone who kept insisting otherwise. "I know they were real. I know it just the same as I'm sitting here. And writing things down doesn't make them not real."
He nodded like he'd expected that and had already decided what he was going to say next. "I understand that's how it feels. That's precisely why we'd like to help you." He glanced at Aunt Em then, just for half a second, and Dorothy's hands started shaking. "With the right care, the right structured rest, the right kind of environment, we can help you find solid ground again. There's a very good facility in—"
Dorothy looked at Aunt Em.
Aunt Em was looking at her lap. Dorothy opened her mouth. She looked at the top of her aunt's bowed head, and whatever she'd been about to say just vanished. There wasn't anything to say. Not to that. Dr. Worley was watching her with his patient face, and Dorothy knew she couldn't stay in this room. No matter what.
"If you please, sir, may I use the washroom?" Her voice came out steady, and she was glad of that.
"Of course." Dr. Worley smiled. "Just down the hall to your left."
"Thank you very much," Dorothy said. "Excuse me."
She took her coat from the back of her chair, turned around quickly, and walked straight out of that office. She didn't go left. She went down the stairs one at a time, not rushing, and through the lobby, and out the front door into the cold December air, and she kept walking.
Toto was right where she'd left him, sitting up straight at the post, watching the door like he hadn't moved one inch since she went in. She paused at the wagon step. The lap blanket had slipped sideways on the seat where she'd been sitting. She reached back and smoothed it out carefully, tucked the edge under so it wouldn't blow away in the wind. Then she took the little paper bag of biscuits Aunt Em had packed for the ride home and set it on the seat where Auntie Em would find it when she came back out. It wasn't much. It wasn't anything, really. But it was the one thing she could do, and she did it. She untied Toto's leash, and he jumped up against her legs, and she scooped him up and held him tight against her chest and just stood there on the wooden sidewalk for one moment with her face in his fur.
"All right," she told him. "All right, we're going."
She didn't decide where. Her feet just went, and she followed, down Clement Street and off the main road and out past the very edge of Millport, past the last house and the last fence post, out to where the town gave way to fields and the fields gave way to just land. She knew Aunt Em would come downstairs soon, looking for her. She knew what her aunt would find. She kept walking because she didn't know what else to do.
The sky was low and grey and looked like it might snow. The wind was coming in hard from the south, smelling of rain that had already fallen somewhere up north. Dorothy pulled her coat tighter over her blue wool dress. Toto rode in her coat pocket with his chin on the edge, watching the road ahead like he always did, like wherever they were going was the most interesting place he'd ever been. She thought about her composition book back home. All those pages she'd filled telling her friends about Kansas, asking how they were getting on.
"She was really going to let him, Toto."
Toto turned toward her.
Dorothy's voice went shaky, and she tried to pull it back because she was not going to cry on a road outside Millport, Kansas. She just wasn't.
"I know Auntie Em loves me, I'm not saying she doesn't, I know she does, but she still sat there, and she still let him say it, and she thought it was the right thing." She shook her head hard. "That's the awful part. She thought she was helping me."
He pressed his chin harder against the edge of her pocket, which was how he said I know.
She walked until Millport was gone behind her, and there was nothing in any direction but flat grey Kansas and the sky sitting low on top of it. She didn't decide to stop. Her legs just did it, at the top of a shallow rise where the creek ran brown and fast below, swelled up from two days of rain, carrying branches and dead grass from somewhere upstream. She sat down in the dead grass at the edge of the rise, and Toto climbed out of her pocket and into her lap, and they both looked at the water for a while without saying anything.
Her throat hurt. There was a lump in it she'd been carrying since Dr. Worley's office, and she was very tired of carrying it.
"She sat right there," Dorothy told Toto. Her voice came out rough. "Aunt Em. She just sat there and let him talk about sending me away." She pressed her lips together. "I know she loves me. I know it. But she still sat there."
Toto pressed his chin hard against her knee.
"I know, Toto, darling," she said.
She looked at the water. She thought about Scarecrow's laugh, the way it came out surprised every time, like he'd forgotten he was allowed to have one. She thought about Tin Man standing watch every night, checking the road. She thought about Bramble, small and sure of himself, calling Tin Man Da the first time like it was the most obvious word in the world. She thought about Nimmie, how kind and sweet she was, and how she'd seen the goodness in Tin Man when he couldn't see it in himself. She thought about Lion hollering for help before he'd found his courage, and let out a watery chuckle.
Eight months. Eight months of Kansas and Dr. Worley's notepad, and being careful and saying just fine and smiling when she said it, and she was so tired of being careful.
She felt it before she looked down. That warmth. Starting at her feet, slow and certain, moving upward like it already knew where it was going.
The silver shoes were on her feet.
They'd never stayed this long before.
Usually, they disappeared after a few seconds, a few minutes at most. But now they just sat there, bright and still in the winter light, like they were waiting. As if they'd known she'd end up here, at this creek, with nowhere left to go.
"I know," she whispered. She thought about how Dr. Worley's face had looked when he'd reached for his notepad. She thought about the facility he'd mentioned and the way Aunt Em hadn't objected. She thought about going back to that wagon right now and sitting on that bench all the way home and walking into that kitchen and saying just fine and smiling when she said it for the rest of her life. She thought about Oz. She looked at the shoes one more time. Then she looked at Toto. "Hold on tight, Toto," she told him.
Her dog looked up at her with his whole heart in his eyes, tail already going, like he'd been waiting for her to say it. Dorothy pressed Toto close against her chest and looked out at the grey Kansas sky, wide and flat and going all the way to the horizon. Her throat hurt. She thought about Aunt Em. About the kitchen. About Scarecrow's laugh, Tin Man standing watch, and Lion trying so hard to be brave. About waking up every morning for eight months and pretending none of it had been real.
"Oh, Toto," she whispered shakily, "I don't know where else to go."
She clicked her heels together three times.
The light came up from her feet, silver and warm and total, and the creek and the grey sky and the smell of Kansas winter all went away together, and then there was nothing, nothing, nothing, and then the ground.
SHE came back all at once. Not in pieces. Not slow. Just gone, and then here, the ground hitting her hard enough to knock the breath clean out, and then lying face down in frost-dead grass with Toto warm and wriggling against her throat and the smell of Oz everywhere, green and cold and strange and completely, perfectly right.
Dorothy lay still for one moment and breathed it in. Then she pushed herself up. Her arms shook. Her knees were wet through. She'd lost her hat somewhere in between. She sat back on her heels and looked up at the sky. The horizon. Just the last thin edge of it, where the dark hadn't finished coming yet, that color she'd spent eight months trying to remember and never quite getting right. That impossible color that no Kansas sky had ever managed and never would. Her eyes filled before she could stop them. She let them.
"Oh, Toto," she whispered shakily. "We really did come back. We're truly back in Oz, aren't we?"
She was back. She was really and truly back, and she hadn't made it up, not one single bit of it, and the relief of it was so big she couldn't hold it in properly, so she didn't try. She sat in the frost-dead grass of Oz and cried like she hadn't let herself cry since the very morning she'd woken up in her own bed in Kansas and known it was over.
Toto climbed into her lap and stayed there. He didn't fuss. He just stayed. When she was done, she wiped her face with her sleeve and looked around properly.
The field was all wrong. Not the way a field looked in winter, sleeping and grey and waiting. This field wasn't waiting for anything. The grass was brittle and pale, snapping under her when she shifted. The trees at the far edge were bare as bones. The smell beneath the cold was wrong, a low, sour smell that made her stomach turn, as if the ground had stopped growing things, not because it was winter but because it had forgotten how.
"Oh, Toto, it's all gone wrong here," she said.
Toto pressed his chin against her wrist. Dorothy looked down at the narrow path worn through the dead grass, the sort of path made by people who knew exactly where they were headed. Taking a shaky breath, she pushed herself to her feet. Her legs held. Well, that was something. She was soaked through, cold to the bone, and standing somewhere in Oz she didn't recognize. Whatever had happened here while she was gone couldn't be anything good. She could feel it in the stillness. But they couldn't just stay here.
Gathering Toto into her arms, Dorothy started down the path. Being scared wasn't going to help anybody, and it certainly wasn't going to get her there any faster.
"Come on, Toto darling," she said, and her voice came out steady. "Let's go find them."
She followed the path into the dark and didn't dare let herself look back.