Island of Lost Girls
Page 22
Rhonda hadn’t been into the woods in years. Shortly after the play, they’d all stopped using the path that connected their houses, choosing to walk back and forth the long way, down the road. Now Rhonda understood why.
The woods seemed smaller, to Rhonda, closer somehow. The trees had grown, filling in and making the clearing darker than she had remembered, even on a bright day. She looked up, trying to recall which pine it was that Tock had shot her arrow from. She thought she could pick it out, but couldn’t be sure. They all looked nearly the same.
The girls climbed into Clem’s old Impala and Rhonda followed, squeezing into the front seat beside them.
“Where are we going?” Rhonda asked. Suzy was at the wheel in her dark funeral dress, her hair held back with a ribbon.
“To see the octopus,” Suzy said, matter-of-factly.
Rhonda looked to her right. The disarranged pile of wood that had once been their stage was black and sickly green with decay and moss. The police had pulled boards aside to expose the hole beneath. Rhonda turned away, unable to make herself look down into the hole they had once all taken turns hiding in. The hole where they changed costumes and which they used to make the most dramatic entrances and exits. Rhonda remembered falling in her dreams, how she thought she might never stop. She thought of her old retainer, pulled from that hole, held in an evidence bag now, packed away beside the remnants of Daniel’s T-shirt and jeans. She scanned the ground, wondering where they’d buried the bogeyman, struggled to remember what she’d written on her piece of paper. What had she been afraid of then? Peter not loving her? That she would grow old and forget things? Had she written something as simple as spiders? Or something far more sinister?
Under a few boards off to the side, Rhonda spotted a torn bit of cloth and recognized a piece of the painted scene from the play. Blue waves, a bit of palm tree, now blotchy with mildew. Their Neverland, was, Rhonda realized then, a lot like Ernie’s Rabbit Island.
SUZY BROUGHT THE sub gently to rest on the ocean floor. She, Kim, and Rhonda got out and sat in the bed of pine needles, which was actually soft sand. They sipped tea and ate small cakes. Rhonda looked around at the ruined stage, at the trees that enclosed the clearing. She thought, for a moment, that she had seen the flash of Tock’s flaming arrow pass in the corner of her eye. A bird squawked, and in its squawk Rhonda heard Peter Pan’s crow.
The octopus was a fine host and said many things that sent Suzy and Kim into fits of giggles. “Silly octopus,” they said. Then, all at once, Suzy got serious.
“The octopus says you can tell us about Grandpa Daniel now,” she said.
Rhonda froze, imaginary cake in her mouth, the invisible cup of tea spilled onto her lap.
“What about him?” she asked, her voice as calm as she could make it.
“Tell us a story about him,” the little girl asked.
“I’m sure your father could tell you lots of stories,” she said to Suzy. “And your mother, Kimberly, she could tell you what you want to know.”
“But we want your story,” Kim whined. “You knew him too.”
Rhonda thought about it. About these little girls, who had just watched a man they never met be buried. A man whose body the police had found bludgeoned to death in the woods. Their grandfather. Of course they were curious.
“Well, let’s see,” began Rhonda with some hesitation. “Once upon a time, your Grandpa Daniel decided that his son Peter—that’s your daddy, Suz—should be able to fly, so he made him a pair of wings…”
So Rhonda told the story, leaving out the part about Peter alone on the workshop roof, about Aggie coming at Daniel with a shovel. She found herself stretching the truth a little to say that yes, maybe Peter had flown that day, just a little bit, just enough. And, as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy. Daniel would be a saint now that he was dead. A beautiful man who made his child wings.
RHONDA AND THE girls got back in the sub and began moving toward the future, somewhere off at the edge of the horizon. They rose up out of the sea that was the past, out of the swell and surge of memory. Suzy was pulling at the gear shift, turning the steering wheel. Rhonda worked imaginary hand cranks and stopped occasionally to hold her two hands in front of her face, making them turn the periscope as she searched the horizon for some sign of the familiar.
“Land!” Rhonda finally shouted.
“Surface,” Suzy ordered. “We’re home.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my editor, Jeanette Perez, and to everyone else at HarperCollins who helped make this book a reality.
Thanks to Dan Lazar, my wonder-agent.
Thanks to Dudley and Janet Askew, owners and operators of The Maple Valley Café in Plainfield, Vermont. Much of the early work on this book was done at Table 8, fueled by their perfect omelets and awe-inspiring home fries.
Thanks to all my friends and family who have been so indulgent and supportive while I figure out this whole being-a-novelist thing.
And, of course, thanks to my readers. This book wouldn’t exist without you.
About the Author
JENNIFER MCMAHON is the author of Promise Not to Tell. She grew up in suburban Connecticut and graduated from Goddard College in 1991. Over the years, she has been a house painter, a farm worker, a paste-up artist, a pizza delivery person, and a homeless shelter staff member, and has worked with mentally ill adults and children in a few different capacities. She lives in Vermont with her partner, Drea, and their daughter, Zella.
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OTHER BOOKS BY JENNIFER MCMAHON
Promise Not to Tell
Credits
Cover design by Mary Schuck
Cover photograph by Jock Sturges
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS. Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer McMahon. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MARCH 2008 ISBN: 9780061807589
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