Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “It was stupid. One of those dark spells of loneliness that I thought meant everything. Little did I know, it meant nothing. These monumental moments of our childhood, they’re just one bend in the river, a tight curve filled with boulders so you can’t see beyond. The river roars on across distances we can’t even imagine. I was about to jump when I heard someone coming. It surprised me, so I hesitated, threw myself on the couch, grabbed some random book, pretending to read. You came in, and you saved my life. So here, in the Neverworld, I had to save yours.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound emerged.

  “I thought for sure you were on to me,” she said, shaking her head. “Like, back at the Warwick police station, how I suddenly appeared downstairs with you. You knew I was the one who removed the papers from Jim’s case file, right?”

  “What?” I whispered.

  “It wasn’t the Masons. It was me. I hid the files in another box so they’d never find them.” She took a deep, unsteady breath. “Because it was all there. Jim’s texts to you. I didn’t want them to suspect you. That was why I was so against going back to Vulcanation. I didn’t want them to find out the truth. So as soon as we landed, I snuck away so I could dismantle the ladder from the Foreman’s Lookout before anyone else saw it. I climbed up fifty feet, got a million splinters, but I knew I had to present a compelling scenario with such assurance that they’d all be blind to the truth.”

  “What?”

  She studied me with a soft smile.

  “You know, Beatrice. You were there.”

  Chills ricocheted down my spine.

  “I saw you. Coming back from the quarry.” She squeezed my hand. “You have nothing to feel guilty about. Whatever happened, I know you acted with a full heart. I never doubted you. And I never will.”

  All my blood drained into my feet. I was going to be sick.

  “Jim loved you. But he didn’t see you. He was incapable of that. You were the one to keep him propped up. You were his scaffolding. He could be riveting, and addictive. And you loved him, and we rarely see those we love as they are.” She sighed, hunching her shoulders. “That’s what killed me the most. Why I could never be your friend. Why I couldn’t stay around you. You made me so mad, Bee.”

  She shook her head, staring at me, her face a wild pool of emotion barely contained.

  “I’ve seen it before. It happened to my sister. She loved a boy, and that love made her put herself last and forget herself, and it killed her. Your love was that unquestioning. It made you do things that were dangerous. That ripped me up.”

  “What are you talking about, Martha?”

  “Nowhere Man. Jim’s musical? Everyone gushed about how brilliant it was. And it was. But it was strange, wasn’t it, how suddenly after weeks of whining, being unable to write a single word, Jim had it all come together on the eve of his debut at Spring Vespers? Like magic?”

  She stared at me, her face grave.

  “You were the magic.”

  I was unable to speak. I felt as if a glaring light were suddenly shining into my eyes.

  “You showed them to me the night of the snowstorm. Those dream soundtracks. I never forgot them. I committed the words to heart. I recognized your voice immediately when Jim showed me what he’d written. ‘You’re my Sunday best, my new-car smell, / You’re Château Margaux, no zinfandel.’ ” Martha shook her head. “Jim thought nothing of passing off your words as his own. Did he say he was just borrowing them? That he’d give you credit later? He swallowed everything around him, leaving nothing behind.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s so funny. For such an energetic person, the space around him was always so cold. And anyway, his grand plans for himself always exceeded his actual talent.”

  She shrugged with a look of resignation. I felt a wave of hot emotion in my chest.

  “Jim didn’t steal the lyrics from me,” I said. “I gave them to him. They were just sitting in a drawer in the dark, no use to anyone. I had to help him.”

  Martha surveyed me so intently, I felt light-headed.

  “Everything I’ve done in this Neverworld,” she said, “the good, the weird, the absurd, the exhausting, was for you. Pushing the discussion in a calculated direction. Asking you the pointed questions so I’d appear impartial. Distracting the others from seeing the rot that kept bubbling up around you all the time. Mold, breaking glass, tar, oil, tumbling trees, falling Lookout Towers—God, Bee, it was like trying to hide a typhoon swirling around you, all because of this secret you were hiding. That you were there that night.”

  She shook her head, biting her lip.

  “I even spent a million hours talking to this kooky professor with scary facial hair and bad breath at Brown to learn the art of persuasion, to implant the idea in all of their heads that you had to go on, because you had to be the one to tell our story.”

  My mind was crawling stupidly over her words like a crab, trying to make them out.

  What was she talking about? I had voted for Martha. Martha was going to live.

  “I couldn’t tell you what I was doing because you’d have tried to stop me. You’d have messed it all up. We had to get to the bottom of Jim’s death for the vote, but you had to stay beyond blame. You had to remain Sister Bee.” She shook her head. “I’m only telling you all this so you’ll know. So you’ll see. Because we all have our words tucked away in notebooks in drawers in the dark. You can’t just give them away, Bee. They’re yours. Like a fingerprint. Like your children. They are the light that shines your way. Without them, you’ll be lost.”

  She reached out and gently tucked loose strands of hair behind my ears.

  “Never, ever give away your words again.”

  Martha. I was so wrong.

  “Anyway.” She removed her glasses, folding them, carefully setting them on the seat beside her with a faint smile. “Chapter Seventy-Two. This is only the beginning.”

  She stood and, mumbling something that sounded like breadcrumbs, she dove into the water, kicking into the turquoise depths.

  I sat there, shaken, unable to move.

  So absolutely wrong.

  I lurched to my feet, shading my eyes.

  “Martha!”

  There was no sign of her.

  Whitley and Kipling, swimming a few yards away, turned in alarm.

  “She was just here. Martha. I—I have to tell her. I have to let her know—” I was untying the skiff, grabbing the oars, crying as I steered the boat between the trees. “Martha!”

  I jumped overboard, swam into the darkness, reached out into the empty cold.

  When Whitley and Kip hauled me back into the boat, I was sobbing.

  “She was just here. And now it’s too late. Too late. Don’t you realize? Martha. She’s never coming back. I have to tell her. She’s gone, and it’s too late now to tell her—”

  “Shhh,” said Whitley, hugging me and wiping the tears from my cheeks. “It’s all over now, Bee. Look around. It’s almost gone.”

  * * *

  —

  Look around. It’s almost gone.

  If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood.

  We didn’t speak after that. We didn’t need to. All we did was wrap ourselves in the blanket, and gaze out at the water.

  Cannon was already somewhere else.

  The sun was setting. It had turned the bold orange of children’s paintings, and it was casting a warmth on our faces so gentle it seeped into us, filling every dark hole and lighting every corner. I’d felt this way before, back at Darrow on some ordinary Tuesday with my friends, when one of them said what I felt and life sharpened into focus, as it did sometimes. There was a momentary stillness, a sense of the eternal in the strands of our laughter like windblown ponytails, in the touch
of our shoulders, side by side.

  Something began to happen to me. Whether it was death or some other state in the mystery of all life, I didn’t know. It pulled me to the bottom of the boat, leaving me staring up at the vast yellow sky. They had more time in their last wake, Kipling and Wit. But they would feel it eventually. I could see them crouched beside me, whispering words I couldn’t hear, uncertain yet unafraid, their hands warm as they squeezed mine, waiting for what came next.

  I would never let go of them. Never.

  Then their faces dissolved into the darkening day, and I slipped away.

  I was floating in milky space.

  Something hard was shoved down my throat. I heard footsteps.

  “Good morning.” A man was speaking. “How you holding up?”

  There was a clattering noise. Someone was beside me.

  “I know this is difficult. As I explained yesterday, we’ll be taking this one step at a time. Her weaning parameters look very good. So I’m hoping to remove her breathing tube today. We need to see if she can follow commands.”

  There was a flurry of activity, hushed whispering. A hand touched my arm.

  “Beatrice? Can you open your eyes for me?”

  I blinked. All I could see were streaks of color.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Beatrice?”

  “There. There she goes….”

  “Bumblebee?”

  “Can you show me two fingers?”

  Dizziness. I was floating in a swamp. I tried to lift my hand. My throat was on fire.

  “What about your other hand? That’s great. Wiggle your toes.”

  Someone was leaning over me. Suddenly a light beamed into my eyes, sending a hot purple pinball knocking around my skull.

  I blinked again.

  That was when I saw a TV on the wall. It was a morning talk show, the sound muted, the date at the bottom of the screen snapping into focus.

  7:21 a.m. September 10.

  I was alive.

  * * *

  —

  As I fell back into the warm, watery darkness, my final conversation with Martha drifted through my head. It felt like she’d just left me moments ago. Her confession had turned me inside out. It was the secret I’d kept so deep inside my heart it had actually remained buried, out of sight, like a missing airplane that had vanished with such totality, some questioned whether the passengers had even existed.

  Whitley hadn’t realized how right she was.

  When you think about it, we all killed Jim.

  No one had ever questioned me—not my friends, not the police, not my parents. No one. Because I was the good one, Sister Bee.

  I’m going to the quarry. Meet me.

  In my dorm room, I listened to Jim’s message over and over again, staring out the window at the empty lawn. I was so alone. I loved him. Yet I hated him. I hated how he could make me feel so alive, then invisible, as if he were a magician and I was the rabbit in his hat. I was desperate to see him, forgive him, to banish him from my thoughts. I wished he’d never seen anything rare in me. The prospect of being without him was too painful to imagine.

  I jumped out of bed, threw off my pajamas, and slipped on the sexy lingerie I’d saved up for, the tight white jean shorts Jim liked, the white off-the-shoulder Gucci top borrowed from Whitley. I was going to sleep with him. It was a stupid decision, but it filled me with excitement, a concrete resolution I could hold on to like a towrope. I put on eyeliner and mascara, Whitley’s red MAC lipstick. I pulled my hair out of its usual ponytail so it fell down my back. I pulled on my Converse, threw two candles into my backpack, yanked the comforter off my bed.

  Then I went running out to Vulcan Quarry.

  By a stroke of luck, I was so distracted by my decision to sleep with Jim that I left my phone on the sink in the bathroom. Later, I would gather that the detectives, pinging the cell towers on the night Jim died, saw that mine hadn’t moved, providing me with an alibi. Yet if they had questioned me, I doubted they would have suspected I was lying. No one ever doubted anything I said.

  And they should have.

  When I arrived at the quarry it was 12:15. There was no sign of Jim. He hadn’t arrived yet. The night was cool, the sky clear, stars bright. We always met at the base of the Foreman’s Lookout and did the ascent on the ladder together. This time, I went first. I wanted to set everything up, to surprise him. I couldn’t wait to see him, to forget it all, to go back to how things were in the beginning. I was scared too—scared to be with him again, scared of the doubt in my head. As I climbed, I noticed that some of the nails holding the ladder’s wooden rungs were looser than usual. Others were actually missing, especially in the final few feet where you reached the hatch.

  Halfway up the ladder I stopped, noticing not just that my hands were shaking, but that I had ripped my entire left shin without realizing it. It was bleeding, gruesome-looking. I looked like a skinned possum. I started climbing down again. I didn’t want Jim to see me like this. I was lopsided, overtired. I was ugly, unlike Vida Joshua. Vida Joshua was a siren. I should go back to my dorm. That was the right thing, the safe thing.

  I was almost on the ground when I stopped again. I was being a coward, meek, living so pianissimo, as Jim used to tell me. Why was I always so afraid of things happening to me? I began to climb up again—Carpe noctem! Whitley was always shrieking with her head back. Seize the night. Why couldn’t I do it for once? When I reached the landing, I noticed that some of the nails holding the ladder’s wood rungs were rattling.

  I lit the candles in the grimy room. I turned on the oil lamp on the old wood table where a hundred Darrow students had carved their initials. I spread out my comforter, undressed, and waited.

  Soon I heard Jim. He was talking to himself, his words slurred.

  I rolled to my feet, gathering the comforter around me. I crept to the landing, peering out.

  He was halfway up the ladder. He was also drunk, swinging an arm out as he sang something. It was the lyrics to a new song in his musical, lyrics I had written.

  “ ‘In the dark there grows a tree. / A castle tower shelters thee. When will I stop, when will I see? / There is no poison but for me.’ ”

  Muttering, he began to climb again. I tiptoed back inside and reclined across the comforter. He’d be here within seconds. It was happening. The thought gave me a strange feeling of emptiness. I was making a mistake. It was obvious. I needed to stay away from Jim. I should be asleep in my room.

  At that moment I heard a clanging noise. Jim was screaming.

  I leapt to my feet. Three of the rungs by the landing had fallen away. Jim was barely holding on. He was straining to grab the next rung, but it was just out of reach. Gasping, he managed to swing his leg out so his foot rested on one of the crisscrossing beams supporting the tower legs.

  “Bee?” He blinked up at me, sweat glinting on his forehead. “Oh, God, Bee. Thank God.” He held out his hand. “Pull me up.”

  I froze. He began to shout, his face contorting.

  “Beatrice! What’s the matter with you? Pull me up! Beatrice!”

  * * *

  —

  What happened in those four seconds?

  I’ll never know.

  It was so fast. I saw Jim. Yet I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

  I wished with all my heart I could say it was just panic, but it wasn’t. It was something else too. A little cave inside my heart. Somehow I knew if I pulled him up I’d never be free of him. Maybe Martha was right. Maybe it was about the lyrics he’d taken from me, albums I’d slid in front of him after he’d been sobbing that he was a hack, that he’d never be as accomplished as his father, that it was all over, his dreams were done. I’d gone into my closet and handed him my collection of dream soundtracks, eleven books of lyrics and drawings I’d w
orked on all my life for no reason except they were the one place I could be myself. Maybe it was how he had taken them, sniffing as if I’d only handed him a pen when he knew what they were to me, what they had meant, and started copying my rhymes into his notebook. Maybe it was the question that if he could so easily take my words, would he take everything else?

  My hesitation lasted only a moment. I sprang to life, racing toward him, wedging my feet in the landing door so they were secure, lying on my stomach, reaching to him.

  I was too late.

  He fell. His head smashed a wooden beam, his hat flying off. He hit the ground with dull thud.

  He lay still, five stories below me, a streak of blood across his cheek.

  The next minute was a dream. The realization of what had just happened got bulldozed dumbly around my disintegrating mind.

  Jim’s dead. Jim’s dead. This isn’t happening.

  Madly I ran around the Foreman’s Lookout, shivering, crying, blowing out candles, stuffing the comforter into my bag. I yanked on my clothes. I scrambled down the ladder four rungs at a time, barely making it around the gaping hole, threw myself into the grass.

  I rolled to my feet, staring down at Jim.

  Blood was oozing across the side of his face. His eyes were closed. He was dead. I was certain. I had to call the police. Yet, groping around in my backpack for my phone, I couldn’t find it. Had I left it in the Lookout? Looking up, I realized I’d accidentally left the oil lamp burning. It was then that I saw headlights igniting the grass like wildfire. A car. It appeared, bouncing along the rutted road, a loose hubcap, radio blaring.

  It was Mr. Joshua’s beat-up red Nissan, the For Sale sign taped to the back window.

  Vida Joshua. That was who I thought it was. What was she doing here? Had Jim meant to text her to meet him here, not me?

  The question sent me retreating into the dark, sprinting back through the grass. I needed to go home. I needed my mom. I found the opening in the fence and struggled through.