Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  It had to do with the boating accident. Jim and a friend had taken out a speedboat on Mecox Bay, and they’d crashed into a fisherman in a skiff. When Jim woke up in the hospital, he heard the story from his family and the police—all corroborated by articles in the East Hampton Star. No one except Jim was hurt.

  The fisherman happened to be none other than Alonso Ornato, the owner of Honey Love Fried Chicken. But this wasn’t the whole truth. Alonso had had his four-year-old daughter, Estella, in the boat with him. She was killed on impact.

  This should have resulted in a charge of manslaughter against Jim, which meant, as a minor with his father’s connections, at most, given that he’d been drinking, he’d have gone to a juvenile facility for a few months, maybe even weeks, and would have been released on probation.

  That wasn’t good enough for the Masons.

  Instead, they decided the incident shouldn’t have happened at all. So they decided to erase it from history and redesign the past. They struck a deal with Alonso Ornato. They would take care of him and his family for the rest of their lives—monthly allowances, new houses and cars, Ivy League educations for his other kids, bottomless loans for his business—all in exchange for erasing Estella from the boat that day. She would die in a car accident instead.

  Mr. and Mrs. Mason arranged the whole thing with the assistance of Torchlight. They drove Alonso’s car into a tree, artfully inflicting the right kind of damage so the police wouldn’t ask any questions.

  “Wipe the spill off the kitchen counter,” said Jim. “Remove all signs of rot. Fumigate the foul odors seeping through the basement. All for me. So I’d suffer no shame. No heartache. No pain. I could continue my life guilt-free, like a diet drink. I could soft-shoe toward my golden destiny.” He stared blankly at the pavement. “They don’t realize they’ve destroyed me.”

  I touched his arm. “That’s not true. You can still do something.”

  You are such a liar, whispered the voice in my head. What can he do now? He’s dead.

  “Like what, Bee? It’s gotten inside my head. It’s why I’ve been sick, why I can’t write a goddamn decent note anymore. I’ll never pick up another instrument. Because their poison is inside me.” He hit the side of his head scarily, over and over. I grabbed his hand to make him stop. “They’ve killed me, don’t you see?”

  “You should contact a newspaper. Turn them in to the police.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Sure. I’ll turn them in. That’ll solve everything. My family will be destroyed. My brothers and sisters will have convicts for parents. The whole world will loathe us. We’ll become poster children for all that’s depraved. All to placate my guilty conscience. What good would it do? That girl will still be dead. That’s the worst part. I can’t do a goddam thing. I’ve gone over it and over it.”

  He began to cry again, head in his hands.

  I stared out into the parking lot with a strange feeling of desolation and calm. Jim was right. Even if he were alive and this moment were real, what could he do? Start a foundation in Estella’s name? Write a musical about it all? The awful thing was, what the Masons had done was like toxic gas, pervading everything.

  We stared ahead in silence, holding hands. It felt as if we’d both removed our glasses, and now we saw for the first time that the world had never been as beautiful as we’d always thought. It was a vision lost, never to come back.

  “At least I have you, Beatrice,” said Jim, squeezing my hand. “You save me.”

  But you don’t have me. I’m not even alive. Neither are you.

  We’re ghosts. We’re air. We’re approximations.

  I felt a painful lump in my throat. I wanted to cry, for him, for myself. My legs were growing heavy. It was the wake. I didn’t know how much time I had left. It seemed to be moving through me faster now. My head felt as if it were melting.

  Jim frowned, surveying me. Perhaps he was wondering how I’d known to follow him here. Then I realized he had noticed the black mildew covering the cracked curb we were sitting on, and the pavement quietly splintering under our shoes.

  I lurched to my feet, staring down at him. There was one last thing I had to know.

  “You wouldn’t, because of this, do something terrible, would you?”

  He squinted up at me.

  “You wouldn’t throw your life away.”

  “You mean commit suicide?” He looked insulted.

  No.

  “I have to go.”

  I turned and took off running, though when he began shouting my name, asking where I was going, I threw back my head and turning, laughing crazily, I shouted, “I love you, Jim Mason. I always have.”

  I ran out of the parking lot into the six-lane highway. Cars honked. A woman in a passing car rolled down the window and started to scream at me. “Get out of the way! Honey, what are you doing out here? Honey?” I could hear Jim calling me, but I stepped in front of a cement truck and closed my eyes.

  * * *

  —

  August 30. Wincroft. 6:12 p.m.

  “Beatrice? Bee! Beatrice!”

  Martha, Kip, and Whitley were waiting for me in the library.

  There was no sign of Cannon.

  “You made it, Bee,” said Whitley, hugging me.

  “What happened after we left?” asked Kipling.

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I slipped past them, heading straight to an upstairs bedroom. Minutes later, returning downstairs, my suspicions confirmed—I’d found what I’d been looking for—I explained where I’d gone. I told them about the connection I’d made between the man in the chicken costume handing out heart balloons, whom Vida had mentioned, the Honey Love fried chicken coupon left in Jim’s case file, and the email in Edgar Mason’s in-box.

  I told them about Estella Ornato.

  No one said a word for a long time. Whitley opened her laptop and Googled the name, then read aloud the only information that appeared about Estella’s death, a four-sentence mention in the South Shore Sentinel.

  “ ‘Officials have released the name of a four-year-old child killed Wednesday night in a car accident in Water Mill,’ ” she read.

  “S.O.,” I said to Martha. “I think it’s Alonso Ornato’s son.”

  Sure enough, a search of Ornato and Princeton turned up a Facebook page belonging to Sebastian Ornato, about to start his sophomore year. On his page there was a photograph of him sitting in Firestone Library wearing a Princeton sweatshirt, grinning and making a goofy peace sign.

  “Poor kid thinks he got into Princeton on his own steam,” said Kipling.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Whitley, solemn. “I knew Jim’s family was capable of anything. But erasing the existence of an entire person? Designing a new death that’s more elegant and acceptable to all involved? And getting away with it?”

  “It proves Jim’s suicide, doesn’t it?” suggested Kipling, taking a deep breath. “Jim probably felt so alone. Lost. So he rode his bike out to Vulcan Quarry and jumped.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  They turned to me in surprise. I told them what Jim had said in the parking lot.

  “Well, if it wasn’t suicide,” said Whitley, “then what happened?”

  I dug in my pocket and pulled out the bumblebee pin, placing it on the coffee table.

  Kip widened his eyes. “What is that, child?”

  “The gift Jim bought me freshman year.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Whitley.

  “Didn’t someone steal it from you?” asked Martha.

  I nodded. “I just found it upstairs in Whitley’s jewelry case.”

  Wit stared at me, her face pale.

  “You stole it from me. I know you did. It was one of your notorious thefts. Wasn’t it?”

  “Bee, I’m so sorry—”


  “You never think. Little do you know how your most haphazard gestures inflict such pain. It hurts to be your friend. It always has. But I still love you.”

  Ignoring Wit’s astonished face, I went on to explain how I’d been stuck in the neck with the pin moments before the wake, which had sent me plunging back into the past with thoughts of Jim.

  “I didn’t do it, Bee,” said Whitley. “I swear.”

  “I know. It was Cannon.”

  Everyone gaped at me.

  “He knew you’d taken it, so he stole it out of your jewelry case the first night we changed the wake. He wanted to throw me off track, send the rest of you into a state of perpetual limbo. He doesn’t want us to find out what happened to Jim. He doesn’t want to ever leave the Neverworld.”

  “You think he had something to do with Jim’s death?” asked Martha.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Bee does have a point,” said Kipling with a dubious expression. “Cannon knows if anything goes wrong he’s supposed to meet us here. So where the hell is he?”

  “He’s hiding somewhere in the past or the future,” I said. “There’s really only one way to get to the bottom of what happened to Jim.”

  No one spoke for a minute, all of us doubtlessly thinking the same thing.

  “No,” said Martha, shaking her head. “No. It’s out of the question, Bee. No.”

  “It’s not as dangerous as you think,” I said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I did it already. I went back even farther, five years by accident. The crazy thing about the past is that you never meet yourself. There are no doubles. If you arrive there, your past self exits on cue to make room for you.”

  Martha looked furious. “How long are your wakes now?”

  I shrugged.

  “Ours are only four hours.” She shook her head. “They’re getting shorter and shorter. And it’s getting worse. Every time we go into the past or future, it makes the possibility of a unanimous vote even more impossible. Don’t you get it?”

  She snapped this at me so furiously—eyes bulging, glasses going crooked on the end of her nose—I could only stare back in shock. We all did.

  She fell silent, seemingly embarrassed by her outburst.

  Kipling turned to me. “How long is your wake now?”

  “Six hours?”

  “It’s enough time to try, isn’t it?”

  Martha said nothing, staring sullenly at the floor.

  “If we arrive at Vulcanation at one in the morning,” I said, “even if your wake is four hours, or three, I’m almost positive it will give us enough time to see what happened to Jim.”

  With a pang of queasiness I thought back to his last text. Sent at 11:29 p.m.

  I’m going to the quarry. Meet me.

  They still didn’t know about the texts from Jim. I wasn’t going to tell them.

  “Let’s do it,” said Whitley.

  As the rest of us talked about the logistics of changing the wake, Martha stayed silent, slumped way down in the couch cushions, her expression a mixture of resentment and hopelessness. It appeared my suggestion of venturing once and for all to Vulcan Quarry was flying in the face of her grand plan. It had made her lose control of the group, though what she was so anxious about, and what this meant for the vote, I could only imagine.

  When I woke I was staring at a clear night sky filled with stars, the deafening screech of crickets in my ears. I was lying in thick grass, the long, razorlike blades slicing my bare arms. I was wearing my Darrow uniform. I lifted my head, realizing with a rush of relief that I was outside the quarry, though almost immediately relief gave way to suffocating dread.

  The rusted chain-link fence was only a few feet away. I checked my watch.

  It was 1:02 a.m.

  I crawled to my feet, dizzy, and looked around.

  There was no sign of anyone.

  I groped my way along the fence, kicking back the grass, the gnarled coils of brambles sharp as barbed wire. Ahead I could see the rusted yellow sign: NO TRESPASSING. Somewhere near was the hole we’d always used. I bent down, forcing aside the weeds, fumbling along the ground. I found the hole and crawled through.

  Far ahead, suspended in the sky, I could see the Foreman’s Lookout. I shivered, trying to ignore the nausea rising in my throat. The old wood tower looked like an abandoned space station in the dark.

  “Bee!” hissed a voice behind me.

  I whipped around. Whitley was waving at me from the other side of the fence. Kipling was behind her, his head barely visible above the ocean of grass. I directed them toward the opening, and within seconds they were beside me.

  “Where’s Martha?” I asked.

  “Missing,” said Kipling, scrambling to his feet.

  “What?”

  “She bailed.”

  “One second she was there,” said Whitley, shaking her head. “The next, nowhere.”

  “She never wanted to come,” said Kipling. “So she didn’t.”

  We eyed each other, unsettled at the thought. Where had she gone? Was she hiding out like Cannon somewhere in the past or future, terrified of what we were about to discover?

  There were so many questions, but there was no time to figure them out. Not now.

  “We need a hiding place,” I whispered. “There’s that cement pipe in the grass next to the entry to the mining shafts. We could stay there.”

  Whitley frowned. “What about the old mapping office right beside the road?”

  I shook my head. “Too obvious. Jim might see us. Then we’ll have interfered with the past, and we won’t find out what actually happened.”

  “Cement pipe it is,” said Kipling, with a cryptic grin.

  We took off, fighting our way through the grass to reach the quarry road. Little was left of it, apart from bits of rock and gravel, and the grass there was only knee-high. As we headed down the path, I noticed after a minute that Kipling was lagging far behind, an oddly bleak look on his face. When he saw I was waiting for him, he glanced up, feigning a smile.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure, child. Splendid. It isn’t every day I get to watch one of my friends get murdered.”

  I put my arm around him for reassurance, pulling him beside me as we trudged on, fighting back the fronds, the wail of the crickets so deafening, it sounded like a million knives being sharpened in my ears. Yet the question blinked glaringly in my mind: How did he know Jim was murdered? He’d blurted it without thinking.

  As if he knew.

  As we walked on, Kipling seemed unconcerned about his disclosure, which made me wonder if it had actually been one. Did he know something? Or was he only giving voice to his suspicion that someone came out here tonight to kill Jim?

  Within minutes we had reached the center of Vulcanation, where the old quarry road made an elongated U past the mapping office, the outhouses, the Foreman’s Lookout. The Lookout was held aloft by four massive steel legs reinforced with crisscrossing beams, the wood ladder stretching up the center like an old, arthritic backbone. There were a few more structures dotting the road—lodging for the miners, little more than heaps of rotten pine logs—and a collapsed crane, which looked like the remains of a great blue whale.

  The three of us paused, looking around, apprehensive. It was totally overgrown and wild, more than I remembered. The tempo of the crickets’ screeching began to quicken as if it were the pulse of the night itself, terrified, on edge.

  There didn’t appear to be anyone here.

  Not Jim. Not anyone.

  Suddenly, a wave of nausea came over me, and I was sick all over the ground.

  “Poor Bee,” said Whitley, brushing away the hair stuck to my cheek. “Maybe we should forget all this and go back.”

  I shook m
y head. “I’ll be fine.”

  Ignoring her worried glance, I stepped past her into the grass. It took a few minutes for us to find the cement pipe, some thirty feet long, only a few feet from the edge of the quarry. As I stepped toward the precipice, I was afraid the ground would start to crumble underneath me, but it held. I stared out, my chest tightening from the shock of how abruptly the ground gave way to total nothingness.

  It was a three-hundred-foot drop, the crater stretching out, a stadium of rock, a vast sky littered with stars, and far below the lake, dark water glistening in the moonlight.

  “Sister Bee,” whispered Kip, stepping up beside me. “I have a funny feeling death will be like this.”

  His voice, eerily flat, sent a surge of fear through me. I wondered numbly if he was about to push me in.

  “It’ll feel like falling, but on and on, never stopping. You know?”

  He was staring at me with a thin little smile. I swallowed, barely able to breathe.

  “Look,” said Whitley.

  Turning, I saw she was leaning against the pipe, pointing at something. High in the wooden tower of the Lookout, a tiny green light was visible in a window. It belonged to the oil lamp some student had smuggled up there years earlier.

  None of us spoke. The conclusion was obvious: Someone had been up there. Or they were up there now.

  “I’ll go see who it is,” said Whitley.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not? I want to see if it’s Jim—”

  “He’ll see you. If you interfere, we won’t know what really happened—”

  “Then let me just see if I can find his bike.”

  “Don’t.” I grabbed her arm.

  “Bee, what’s the matter with— Stop it!”

  She yanked it loose, about to take off, but suddenly the sound of someone yards away fighting a path through the brush made her stop dead.

  None of us moved as we watched the top of a dark head bobbing toward us.

  It was Jim. A wave of horror choked me.

  The grass trembled and shook. Martha stepped out.