Tiger Lily

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  The boys caught up and followed them in. All shirtless, they stood like statues in the low waves. They hollered to each other over the sounds of the waves, frolicked in the surf for a while, until finally and inevitably the tide moved them inland, into the mouth of the lagoon, where the water got warmer.

  It was quieter now, and Tiger Lily and Peter fell behind. Up ahead in the darkness, the boys could be heard talking about their favorite pirate stories, afraid and pretending not to be. Their bodies were gangly in the shadows, mostly grown, but still growing.

  They stayed close to shore, Tiger Lily swimming and Peter walking beside her, pulling himself forward with his hands like tortoise fins. The water droplets hung from his wet hair like diamonds. They passed the Never bird’s nest, ingeniously built to float despite its heavy load of sticks and limbs and, eventually, enormous eggs. Some mermaids perched on a nearby shore, watching them with curiosity, but as Peter had promised, they stayed away.

  As they moved through the water, the silence stretched between them. Tiger Lily didn’t look at him directly, but I studied him from her shoulder.

  Where on land Peter was a jackrabbit, in the water he was slow. Uncertainly, Tiger Lily slowed her pace to wait for him. She was thinking that she had never known anyone like him, and that he had kissed her neck and decided he hadn’t liked it, or forgotten. She wanted to forget too. The water smelled muddy and thick, and they could still dimly hear the ocean crashing behind them. Tiger Lily rose and submerged, over and over, relishing the quiet of the darkness underwater. Only I could hear her heart beat fast in the dark. I floated on a lily pad whenever she went under, and rested on her shoulder when she surfaced again. Passing the time, Peter reached into the air and scooped me into his left palm, as if he were catching a firefly. I blushed.

  Up ahead, Slightly talked as the boys swam close by.

  And then, the crashing.

  It all happened in seconds. A beast—enormous and covered in tough skin, like a rhino’s—appeared through the undergrowth, just behind the beach where the two mermaids lay watching the swimmers. It snatched one of the mermaids into the air with its massive teeth as the other shot into the water to safety. The captured creature let out a loud, piercing screech. She flipped and struggled, but it wasn’t enough. The beast charged back into the woods, carrying her in its mouth. Her screams continued for a few more moments, then went silent. Peter dropped me, and my wings hit the water.

  And here is when something extraordinary occurred.

  For a faerie, falling into water means you are as good as dead. I tried to lift myself up, but my wings were waterlogged and glued to the lagoon’s surface. I could feel my legs dragging under.

  Faeries have ways of telling each other things, but all of these involve the slapping together of our wings. I slapped mine feebly against the water, and I knew no one would hear me; to Tiger Lily and Peter it would just be a tiny noise, unimportant. But just as they were retreating, I saw Tiger Lily pause, and turn around, and swim back. I didn’t even hope she was coming for me, so impossible was the idea to fathom. But suddenly I felt the water change underneath me, and her hands scooped me up as I caught my breath. She looked at me directly and without a change of expression, then quickly laid me against her shoulder, careful to spread my wings flatly against her. She waded up toward the muddy beach. Peter was still staring at the opposite shore.

  The boys were all frozen, in shock over what had just happened.

  “Did you see that?” Tootles asked ridiculously.

  “It was horrible,” Slightly said.

  They all chattered about what they’d seen, amazed and thrilled at the power of nature. They didn’t notice Peter was silent, or when he slipped out of the water and walked back to the burrow.

  Tiger Lily watched him go, and then slid out to follow him. I tested my wings. The water had mostly slid off of them, but I stayed where I was, resting as she walked.

  When Tiger Lily found him in the kitchen, Peter was sitting in a corner, holding Baby and singing to him just under his breath, so I couldn’t hear the tune.

  “Did you know her?” she asked. He shook his head.

  He tousled Baby’s hair, then looked up at Tiger Lily. “The woods have rules.” He put Baby down gingerly in his trough with his bottle. “But the rules are ugly.”

  “It’s nature,” she said thoughtfully.

  “I have a lot of disagreements with nature,” he said, looking confused, and his downy brows wrinkled over his eyes.

  She walked up to him and put a hand on his forehead, as if he had a fever. It was an impulsive movement. She didn’t understand him, or herself.

  He moved his arm around her waist and pulled her close and placed his head on her stomach, as if there was something to listen to there. His concentrated, worried look softened.

  She let her hand rest on top of his head.

  He gazed up at her, every trace of the vicious hunter gone, his eyes wide and unsure.

  “You didn’t come back.”

  “No,” she said. “I couldn’t,” she stammered. “A man arrived.”

  Peter looked at her. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” he finally said.

  “I’m sorry,” she replied reluctantly. I had never heard her apologize for anything. Even now, it came out in a murmur.

  “We’re together, right? You are with me. You’ll come back again now, for sure, right?”

  She nodded, her body softening in relief. She felt suddenly, violently thankful. He held himself against her tighter, and breathed into her suede tunic. She didn’t think of Giant right then. When she thought of it later, she wondered how he hadn’t come into her mind at all.

  “I’ve never seen anything like you,” Peter said.

  I was too absorbed by my own thoughts to feel envious of Peter’s arms around her waist, and the way he clung to her. It’s not that I was angry at him. He was a scattered, distracted boy, and I knew he hadn’t meant to drop me.

  Really, I was thinking about Tiger Lily pulling me out of the water.

  You think you know that someone sees you one way, and barely at all, and then you realize that they see you in another. That was the night I realized Tiger Lily had seen—really seen—me all along.

  NINETEEN

  The oldest people in Neverland had banded together and lived in a remote corner of the island inhabited only by dinosaurs. They were called the ancients. They were those Neverlanders who had survived beasts, floods, river crossings, and the heat and diseases of the island so that now they were centuries old.

  Peter asked Tiger Lily if she would like to go see them, and she said she would. He explained that Slightly had told him that he should take her to do something alone together, and that that was the first thing you were supposed to do if you wanted to be with someone. “It doesn’t mean we’re together forever or anything,” he’d added, blushing. This particular outing would take three days, which Slightly said was exactly the right amount of time. There was envy in the eyes of the boys as Peter explained it all to Tiger Lily.

  And so Tiger Lily told Giant she was going off on a woman’s journey, and she simply asked Tik Tok if she could have three days to herself, no explanation. Because he trusted her, he consented. They set off one morning before dawn, with sacks of food attached to their belts.

  Their path cut a big swath across the island, near the forests where the cannibals lived and below the pine-covered mountain homes of the Cliff Dwellers—as far as Tiger Lily had ever gone (on shaman trips with Tik Tok). Beyond that, the forest was so dead and dusty that people rarely traveled there.

  As they walked, they each kept a secretive eye on the other. Tiger Lily watched Peter’s hands as they traveled from leaf to leaf of the trees they passed. Peter’s eyes, I saw, continually touched her two crow feathers as they swayed, the long thin line of her back pouring up to her neck, the graceful swiftness of her legs.

  They kept apart from each other, but it was as if a string attached their fing
ers, because they could each feel each other’s hands even though they carefully kept their hands apart. I knew because I could almost see that invisible string, could practically swing from it. And the more Tiger Lily’s fingers tingled in his direction, the closer she kept them to her body, away from him. For miles, Peter asked if she wanted or needed to slow down. But Tiger Lily couldn’t have been less tired. She was too awake.

  As they walked, he told her stories, filling the empty spaces, and talked about the pirates. “I’m glad they exist,” he said. “It gives us something to focus our energy on. And it makes us learn to be sly.” The rationale didn’t quite make sense to Tiger Lily, but she respected that it did to Peter. She told him about the truce the pirates had with her tribe, but he already knew.

  Along the way, she picked plants for them to eat, pulling tamarinds from low branches, cracking open palm nuts to share. She showed Peter how to find hog plum, and how to chew on the stem to get the juice out. She grinned at Peter around the stem sticking out of her mouth, making a face, and he laughed. “We don’t have people to teach us those things,” Peter said. “Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t be so hungry all the time.”

  “I’ll teach you,” Tiger Lily offered with a shrug of her shoulders.

  “Did your mother teach you?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a mother,” she said. “Like you.” For some reason, Peter was glad to hear it.

  That first night, they made camp in a cave. They wouldn’t reach the ancients until the following afternoon.

  After they ate, they sat on the dirt floor by their fire and listened to the noises outside. A wolf howled somewhere far off. Tiger Lily had cut her knee on a thornbush, and she rubbed at the wound unconsciously.

  “Peter, why don’t you think the pirates are dangerous?” she asked.

  Peter looked at her. “I know how dangerous they are. But I don’t want the boys to know. I think it’s probably a matter of time really, till they find us.” He looked up at her. “I want the boys to be happy. How could they be happy knowing?”

  Tiger Lily took this in with worry. And Peter picked at tiny pebbles on the ground. He looked up at her from under his eyebrows.

  “Something about you makes me feel like I can tell you things like that. You’re so still. It’s like, you’ll just hear it.” He smiled wryly. “I can’t even hear what I’m thinking most of the time,” he said, his brow wrinkling. “My brain’s noisy.” He was right about that.

  “But you’re so happy,” Tiger Lily said.

  “Yeah, I’m happy,” Peter said brightly to the fire.

  They sat and looked at each other.

  Peter gave her a crooked smile. “The way I see it, ignoring things is important.”

  Tiger Lily thought about home, and her engagement. Peter’s eyes turned to me.

  “Why does this faerie follow you everywhere?” he asked. “Do you think she’s plotting to murder you in your sleep?” he teased. My wings and the tips of my feet tingled with anger. But then he reached a finger toward me gently, and the anger melted. “Let’s name her Tinker Bell,” he said, like I was their child. He swooped his hand underneath me. “Hi, little Tink.” Hearing him say it thrilled me—a name Peter had invented, just for me.

  Tiger Lily nodded. “Okay.” Peter let me go, and turned back to her.

  “I’ve never had someone like you around before. What do people do who are together?”

  Peter could be like that, so suddenly guileless that it caught at your heart. Tiger Lily held her breath and said nothing. I could see that her approval meant the world to Peter, and that he was hanging there, waiting for it.

  “Peter, I shouldn’t keep coming to see you. I’m supposed to …”

  Peter shook his head hard, annoyed. “If you have reasons for not coming back, I don’t want to know them. I just want you to come back anyway. Ignorance, see?”

  Tiger Lily sat still as Peter crawled toward her and settled beside her, looking at her cut knee. The way he stared for so long at her knee made her blush, and she knew he must see it. He put his hand on the scrape, which hurt and made her flinch, and then leaned forward and kissed it, then sat up and kissed her lips, hesitant at first and then with more force.

  Peter sat beside her and kissed her for a long time. Tiger Lily’s heart was racing, her thoughts a blur. Then he abruptly pulled away. He seemed upset with himself for being so little of a gentleman, and moved to the other side of the cave to sleep. I knew Tiger Lily would rather have held on to him, to keep him next to her a little longer, but she let him go in silence. I watched him pulling off his shirt to go to sleep. His chest was concave. There was a long scar on his lower back. And a little birthmark on his stomach.

  Tiger Lily had already turned to the wall, and they both pretended the other wasn’t there for the rest of the night. I lay in the crook of Peter’s arm for a while, and could see he didn’t sleep but only closed his eyes. I watched his eyelids flutter, the creases and the fine rims. And then I went and settled into Tiger Lily’s hair and drifted off. In the morning she woke to Peter crouched beside her, studying her, looking tired.

  “Time to get up,” he said.

  They reached their destination at midday.

  Everything here was old and overgrown. The ferns were enormous, big enough for a person to use as a bed. The insects were thick and swollen. The dragonflies were five times my size, and I hid in Tiger Lily’s hair, though if she felt me trembling, she didn’t act like she noticed.

  Tiger Lily didn’t feel these were her woods, and neither did I. They slowed their pace, and seemed to anticipate something jumping out at them at any second. They climbed a rise, which promised to crest just beyond the tree line.

  Almost at the same moment they reached the top, a horn blew. They hid themselves in some tall grass, and looked down into the small valley.

  Below, there were the ancients, or a group of them, gathering. Some had a shock of white in their otherwise dark hair. Others looked very young. With my sharp eyes, I could see that many had grown their finger- and toenails impossibly long, now brown and crackly and old looking. They moved slowly toward each other, one foot in front of the other. They stood still together, and one minute passed into the next. They stood and stood.

  “I don’t understand why they move so slowly,” Peter said, troubled.

  “Maybe when you’re so old, you don’t have any places to hurry away to,” Tiger Lily said. She felt guilty. It seemed like they were looking on a private sight not meant for their eyes.

  They lay watching for a long time, and the ancients barely moved. Occasionally one would wander into the group, or wander away, but generally they stayed together and did very little.

  “So that’s what it’s like to live forever,” Peter said. For reasons I didn’t know, there were tiny tremors in his muddled heart.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well.”

  “Let’s go,” Peter said. And, unceremoniously, as if they hadn’t walked for miles and miles to see the sight, he turned and began walking away. Tiger Lily watched him for a moment, surprised, and then caught up with him.

  That night they slept in the open, by a fire Peter had lit. Peter didn’t kiss Tiger Lily except on the forehead, and he retreated to his bed quickly.

  The next day he was quiet for the whole walk home. But at the place where she was going to say good-bye, and when he seemed to be thinking of something else as she turned to go, he suddenly pulled her close and hugged her tight, and rested his chin against her cheek. “Thanks for coming with me.”

  Tiger Lily made her attempt at a smile. After having felt the need to glower at other children for most of her life, smiles never came easily to her face. But this one was half all right.

  “I miss you already,” he said.

  Tiger Lily wanted to say it back. But she held on to the words greedily, too caught in the habit of keeping herself a secret. And Peter—half sadly, half expectantly—let her go.

  TWENTY
/>
  The rains began to let up a little more each day, and one morning Tiger Lily came out of her house to see the sun winking at her as she walked into the middle of the village. The hot season had arrived. This was usually Tiger Lily’s favorite time, when the jungle—having soaked up the rains—was at the height of its greenness. It lasted for about the cycle of three moons. But today, it worried her. She knew at the end of it lay the dry season, and her marriage.

  Phillip had taken to walking the village, or rather, hobbling it. People kept a wide berth when he came shuffling down a path they shared, and pressed themselves against the houses on either side to let him pass. But they had also adopted him as a sort of pet.

  “What’s the white one up to this morning?” Silk Whiskers, one of the older warriors, would ask as he watched him walk by the well or sit by the fire, and the others would pipe in with their latest observations.

  “I saw him yesterday whistling at a parrot,” Stone would say.

  “He has walked that circle eleven times by my count,” Red Leaf’s brother, Bear Claw, would throw in.

  Still, weak and slow as he was, the village was starting to catch the shape of Phillip’s personality where it overflowed his wispy edges. He recoiled from too much raucous laughter. He wrinkled his forehead when the men drank caapi water, and looked concerned and unhappy as they were transported into deeper and deeper trances. He was clearly put off by Tik Tok’s womanly dresses and hairstyles. During the day, Tiger Lily still brought him food and sat with him. Occasionally Tik Tok showed up with a potion he’d mixed for a speedy recovery, and each time, Phillip stared at him like he was a foreign creature, and a puzzling one. He kept a very spare bed. He didn’t eat meals with the tribe but just ate the grain and beans plain. While everyone gathered at the riverbanks to fish, he would bring the one book he’d arrived with and read, which made the villagers poke each other and laugh quietly as they watched him. He was kind, and smiled gently at the children. He didn’t seem to grieve for his lost ship and his lost life with the same wild, inconsolable terror and pain that the villagers seemed to feel at loss.