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She lost track of it after that, but it wasn’t really the paper dragon she was thinking about, was it?
    ‘ Oh come on,’ she thought uneasily.  ‘There were no dragons.  Dragons don’t exist.’
    She looked down at the griffin shivering and peeping in her arms.
    ‘There were no dragons!’ her brain insisted.
    Taryn began to pack.
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    6.  Homecoming
     
    R edmond, unchanging during all the remembered years of her life in Washington, had grown up.  Apartments and business complexes, identical in shape and color, lined streets where Taryn remembered comic stores, dentists, and ice cream shops.  The park was there, but all the climbing toys were different.  The school was there, but it was blue and white now, instead of green and gold.  There were streetlamps and stoplights where Taryn remembered only long stretches of road.  The pastureland where the Saturday craft fairs were held in the summer (and where gypsies sometimes came to camp) was now a parking lot for a seventeen-screen movie theater and a two-story mall.  SugarPie’s Ice Cream Parlor was gone; she passed three McDonald’s. 
    And the library, her wonderful castle of concrete and black glass, was closed.  It had been replaced by a modern building down the street, one complete with computer rooms and a children ’s theatre, and no doubt all kinds of books that there had been no room for before.  The old library remained, derelict and depressed, in a parking lot much smaller than she recalled, now cracked and carpeted with hip-high stragglers of grass.
    Taryn had driven through the night and into the morning with Aisling sleeping and peeping in the pet carrier in the back seat.  She had fed him twice more.  He had vomited three times.
    Now she walked across the crumbling asphalt of her library ’s parking lot and looked at the building that had once given her so much joy with eyes that brimmed with tears.  Her heart was breaking.  It had been a kingdom all its own, once upon a time.  Now it was a body no one had bothered to bury.
    Taryn walked around the side of the building, too big now to stroll along the narrow ledge with all its ins and outs, but watching it with envious eyes.  Her reflection, shrunken and dim in the desolate windows, was the only one who could walk there safely now.
    She was not alone when she came back around to the front of the building.  She wasn’t sure if she was surprised or not. 
    The lady sat on the same steps.  She was dressed in the same sparkling, colorful, impossible clothes.  Her hair was still black as ink, kinked and curled as a politician ’s promises.  She was hunched slightly, her hands at work.  Taryn could hear her humming, see her rocking comfortably back and forth as she took the early rays of the sun.
    There were no dragons.
    Maybe they flew away.
    ‘ You were six !’ shrieked her exasperated brain.  ‘Maybe they were never there !’
    Hesitantly, Taryn approached the stair, holding her pack cradled in her arms.  “Hello?”
    The lady on the stairs hummed a little louder, that was all.  Between her fingers, pink paper was deftly twisted into dragon ’s form.
    “ I had one of those when I was a child,” Taryn said.  “A blue one.”
    “ Aye?”  The woman’s fingers curled around the pink dragon, uncurled, and it was blue.  The woman’s head cocked.  One dark eye twinkled beneath ringlets of black.  “For a pretty, aye?”
    “ For a teaser,” said Taryn.  She reached into her pocket for a bill and handed it over without looking at it.  She accepted the blue bit of paper with a sinking heart and stared at it in her palm.
    There were no dragons.  Not singing in the lady ’s hair, not sleeping on her shoulders.
    For a moment, Taryn was a child again, and remembered (or imagined she remembered) the hurt and confusion of watching dragons buzz just inches, inches , in front of her mother’s face and seeing no