The first night she knew it wasn’t a garden she had been in, but it was familiar even so, and naturalistic in a way that wasn’t like a dream at all. The second night she was there again. She recognized exactly the things she’d seen the night before: the fountain, the little stone wall, the magnificent stands of peonies in pink and fuchsia and white. Most of all she recognized the scent. She wasn’t sure she had smelled anything in a dream before, but this smell got into every part of her.

The next night she was joyful to find herself back in the same garden a third time. It was the same place in all its particular beauties, but this time she decided to investigate further. She went through a rustic pergola blazing with red clematis and found a low-walled garden surrounded by blooming pink dogwoods and populated by about a million butterflies beating their wings in slow motion amid daisies, snapdragons, zinnias, and cosmos. The butterflies came in every color, pattern, and size, and stood perched in their strange, stuttering suspension. And then all at once they took flight. They whirled around over her head, and she felt panic at the thought that she had scared them away. But then the flying spiral thickened and slowed until it was all around her and she was the center. She blinked her dream eyes, and all the butterflies went back to their slow-beating perches on the flowers.

The fourth night she investigated even further. By the fifth night she was so excited to begin dreaming that she went to bed at nine o’clock. It was still a little light out. She hadn’t gone to bed so early since she’d gotten her tonsils out in sixth grade.

She was happy in the garden, happier than she could remember being since she was very young, long before the troubles started with Dana. She felt a kind of wonder there, which brought to her sleeping mind a deep, mysterious, inexplicable aspect of how it felt to be a child. Each night she lay in her bed waiting to fall asleep, scared she wouldn’t go back to the garden, begging her waking self to please go back, and each night she went back. She wished she could swap her days for her nights, her reality for her dreams. Were you allowed to change from one side to the other?

She’d never slept so much in her life. Yet still she yawned through her days at the health-food store and yawned her way through dinner, longing to get back to bed and her garden.

The sixth night she dreamed she crossed a miniature bridge over a narrow stream and explored a new part of the garden. Most of the plants were unfamiliar, coarser and spinier, and the smells were different. It wasn’t beautiful in the same way, but the air felt magical to her. Some of the plants were so distinctive she studied them for a long time, and as soon as she woke up, she got out a notebook and sketched them before the memory could fade. The next night she left her sketchbook and a set of colored pencils next to her bed, and when she fell asleep and went back to that part of the garden she studied more of them, seeming to know in her dream that she would be sketching them later. She recorded them as well as she could—smelling them and feeling the texture of their leaves. The next morning she woke early and spent the two hours before work on her drawings.

When she got home from work that evening, she took out her beloved American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers and, with a thudding heart, tried to find real plants to match her drawings. It took a while, but she found some unmistakable matches. She discovered all of them came from one section of the book: the medicinal herbs. Feverfew, chickweed, goat’s rue, blue cohosh, everlasting. This new part was a medicine garden.

It wasn’t until the eighth night that she saw another person in the garden, over by the butterflies. At first she thought it was Dana, and she felt joyful, but she quickly saw that it didn’t look like Dana and it clearly wasn’t Dana. It was a woman in her twenties, it appeared, who had light gray eyes and freckles and shiny dark hair.

“I know you from somewhere,” Lucy said to the woman in her dream.

“Of course you do, darling,” the woman replied.

When Lucy woke she lay in bed for a long time, trying to hold the face of the dream woman in her mind. She knew her from somewhere, but she couldn’t think of where.

When she got up she went into her closet and found the monograph from the gift shop at Hastonbury. She turned to the chapters on the gardens and stared at the photographs, incredulous. It was no wonder the dreams were so literal. This was Constance’s mother’s garden. This was the garden she had lived in as a little girl a couple of lifetimes ago. She shut the book again. She didn’t want to supplant her dreams quite yet.

She spent the weekend making drawings of the garden in her dream and, when she was satisfied with them, comparing them to real pictures from Hastonbury. Her dream garden was far lovelier and more complete than in the photos in the monograph or the ones she found online, but hers matched them in every particular she could find. But it was the picture in the back of the book that stopped her heart. She’d glanced at it before, but she’d never really looked. Now that she did, she knew exactly who it was. It was the woman she’d dreamed in the garden. Of course it was. It was Constance’s mother.

By the morning after the twelfth night she knew what she wanted to do. She found the application online and printed it. She spent the day filling it out and included the best of her schematic drawings from her dreams of the Hastonbury gardens and her sketches of the herbs. On a whim, she also included her three favorite drawings of her unbuilt swimming pool.

On the thirteenth day she put it all in a large envelope, brought it to the post office, and mailed it. On the fourteenth day she began to weed her garden.

She walked downstairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door, letting the screen door slap behind her. She walked across the yard and sat down cross-legged on the grass in front of her hydrangea bush. She gave Sawmill a last look in his snake eyes. She’d always thought that snakes represented evil and duplicity, and she’d always figured Dana had gotten him as one more badass parent-punishing act. But as Lucy admired his calm little head, she didn’t think that anymore. She thought of his skins over the years, the spent versions of himself he’d left behind as he was constantly reborn. Maybe that was what he meant to Dana.

“Time to be free,” she said solemnly. She put her hand down to the ground to see what he would do. He clung to her for a few seconds. But then he reached his head out courageously. He unspooled from her wrist by inches, reaching out and hovering over the unfamiliar earth. At last he dove down to the soil and slithered away inside the grass of her old pleasure dome.