Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  Vida was going to find Jim and call an ambulance.

  He would be fine. Everything was fine.

  I don’t remember sprinting back through the woods and across campus. The next thing I knew I was barreling up the steps to the fourth floor of my dorm, racing down the hall. That must have been when Martha saw me. She lived on my floor, studied in the corner common room. I hurried to my room and locked the door, stripping naked. Everyone says I’m the good one, the kind one, so that means I am, doesn’t it? It means I always do the right thing.

  I folded the La Perla underwear back into the tissue paper at the back of my drawer, returned Whitley’s top to my closet. I found my phone where I’d left it on the bathroom sink. It was 1:02 a.m. No messages. My hands trembling, I managed to wipe the lipstick off, splash my face with cold water, yank the grass and leaves out of my hair.

  The realization of what I was doing hit me like a slap in the face. What was I doing, not calling the police? I had to go to Jim. My love. I began to dial 911, but the conversation I was about to have with the dispatcher made me stop.

  My boyfriend is lying dead in Vulcan Quarry. He fell. Please send an ambulance.

  Are you there? Where are you?

  I ran away. I was jealous of another girl. I was angry. I loved him. We’d had a fight.

  Cannon. I needed Cannon, the problem solver. I ran across the courtyard and climbed the oak tree to his room on the third floor of Marlborough. I knocked on his window. No answer. I pulled it open. There was no one there.

  Kipling. Kipling would help me. He had a tower room in Eldred. I climbed back down the tree, raced across campus, slipped in through the fire exit, up the back stairs. His room was empty too. When I ran along the gable to Whitley’s dorm room and knocked on her window, she too was missing.

  What was going on? Where was everyone?

  Martha. Racing back to Creston, I could see her light on in the window on the fourth floor, but imagining her flat response as I confessed to her, weeping, frightened, sent me running straight back to my room, my heart scuttling around like a rodent in my chest.

  I crawled into bed, staring at the ceiling. I kept telling myself to call my mom, but I couldn’t move. Questions exploded in my head like grenades: If I’d never decided to surprise Jim, would he still be alive? Had he wanted to see Vida, not me? Had I loosened the rungs from climbing up and down and then up again? Where were my friends? Had Jim managed to call them for help, and were they with him right now, hearing all about what I’d done, that I’d let him fall and left him there? Had I killed Jim?

  I had to go back to the quarry. From there I’d call the police. I climbed out of bed, yanked on jeans, a T-shirt, boots. I ran all the way out there again, petrified, certain Moses was going to catch me. When I arrived it was after four. My entire body shaking, I stepped to the spot under the Foreman’s Lookout where the ladder was, and stopped.

  Jim was gone.

  There was no sign he’d ever been there.

  No blood. A few blades of bent grass. Otherwise, there was nothing.

  Vida had found him and taken him to the hospital. Or, by some miracle, he’d gotten up and walked away unscathed, which meant he loathed me now. They all did.

  I returned to my room, staggered. All I wanted to do was die.

  I wandered through the next day like a zombie. When I thought of the night before, the memories were distorted, as if I’d made them up. Had it actually happened? There was no sign of Jim. No one had seen him. Whitley, Kip, and Cannon all acted friendly but stiff. They said they’d been in their rooms all night. Martha claimed she’d slept in the library.

  A day later, the news arrived: Jim had been found dead in the quarry lake.

  It was impossible. I didn’t understand. What had happened after I’d run away? What had Vida done to Jim? Why were my friends all lying? What were they afraid of?

  To find answers, I’d gone to Wincroft.

  And all along, Martha had known my secret. Martha had been cleaning up my every move, all the while protecting me.

  How had I never seen it? How could I have been so blind?

  * * *

  —

  When I opened my eyes, I was propped up in a hospital bed. The room was in sharp focus: pale yellow walls, counters and tabletops, an air conditioner, a vase of flowers, a teddy bear with a helium balloon proclaiming GET WELL SOON. In front of me sat a plate of hospital food, a pink cup with a straw.

  There was no longer something lodged in my throat, though it felt scratchy and raw.

  “She’s awake,” blurted my mom, turning from the window.

  “My dear sweet Bumble,” said my dad, stepping toward me.

  They hurried over, peering anxiously at me. My mom was gripping a wad of Kleenex, her hair standing vertical in places from sleeping in a chair. My dad had more gray hair than I remembered.

  “Don’t try to talk,” he said. “All is well. You’re at Miriam Hospital in Providence. You were in a car accident, and you sustained a head injury. Bleeding on the surface of the brain. The doctors took care of it, and you’re going to make a full recovery, okay, kiddo?”

  I could tell my dad had instructed my mom not to talk very much, because she was nodding at everything he was saying, trying not to cry.

  Just tell me my friends are still alive. They’re recovering in rooms down the hall.

  “You’re going to rest,” said my mom, squeezing my hand.

  I looked past her across the room, where there was a framed print of a beach scene on the wall and a dry-erase board sign reading Your nurse on duty is LAURIE.

  A bony teenager with a mop of blond hair was sitting in a chair by the door, staring at me. It took me a moment to realize it was Sleepy Sam, the British teenage boy I’d scooped ice cream alongside all summer at the Crow.

  My mom followed my gaze. “You remember Sam.”

  “He’s come here every day to read to you,” said my dad.

  Sam shuffled over.

  “Really glad to see you open your eyes, Bee. Welcome back.”

  My dad clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Sam’s a world-class dramatic reader. Who knew? He does all the different voices. Fifty characters? No sweat. He could have a big future on the West End.”

  It was then that I noticed the book under Sam’s arm. The cover was silver with a collage of birdcages and steam trains, rosy-cheeked characters wearing top hats. The legendary cult saga of future pasts. Present mysteries.

  The title sent a shock of adrenaline through me.

  The Dark House of Elsewhere Bend.

  “Good morning, Beatrice.”

  A silver-haired doctor in a white coat and green scrubs entered carrying a clipboard and a paper coffee cup. He was accompanied by an Asian woman, also wearing a white coat.

  “Welcome back,” he said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m one of your physicians. Dr. Miller. It is a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  He was leaning over me, shining a light into my eyes. When I looked past it to his face, I gasped.

  I’d recognize him anywhere. He was and would forever be etched into my brain, floating in front of me whenever I closed my eyes for the rest of my life: those green, all-seeing eyes, the mahogany baritone, the elegant, exhausted manner suggestive of a retired ballet dancer whose every step held thousands of hours of rehearsal and a faint ache.

  It couldn’t be. It’s impossible.

  “When can she move to the rehab facility?” asked my mom.

  “A few days. The weakness on the left side of her body and some of the short-term-memory difficulties should improve over time. But it can take months.”

  The Keeper.

  He asked me to raise my arms, hold up three fingers, and bend my knees. He asked me if I knew what year it was, who the president of the United States was, my ag
e. I was dizzy. I could hardly focus on anything he said, gaping as I was so incredulously at his face. He’d set down his paper cup on the tray in front of me. The tag on the tea bag dangled over the side.

  He grabbed the cup, took a sip, turned on his heel. He whispered something to my parents as they moved after him to the door. Then he slipped out with the woman in tow, vanishing down the hall.

  My mom and dad had no choice but to tell me, even though I knew.

  Kipling St. John.

  Whitley Lansing.

  Cannon Beecham.

  Martha Ziegler.

  They were dead.

  I moved to the rehab facility and spent six weeks there, wandering the linoleum hallways with my soft-grip adjustable cane, practicing going up and down stairs and raising my left arm, which trembled and shuddered with a mind of its own. I snuck onto the public computer after dinner the first night I was there and read about it.

  The accident was reported in the Providence Journal, the Warwick Beacon, and USA Today. All the articles used the same phrase: “shocking loss of young life.” It also came up in a Republican Nation editorial about drunk driving and its prevalence in New England communities with a rising unemployment rate. Every story led with photos of Whitley, the textbook dead blond dream girl, then moved on to Cannon, Kipling, and Martha, always mentioning Martha’s full scholarship to MIT. My name was mentioned at the very end, the name of the lone survivor, the lucky one.

  Their Facebooks became memorials. I wasn’t surprised. It had happened with Jim. Kids they barely knew at Darrow and friends from their hometowns posted messages like my heart’s broken and the world is empty now, littered with prayer emojis, anonymous comments of life is pain, and GIFs of Heath Ledger.

  I’d missed their funerals. I’d been in the hospital. So I read about them. All their hometown newspapers did follow-ups to the tragedy (because the initial articles had racked up hundreds of Shares and Likes), featuring photos of some red-eyed family member reading a poem in a church pulpit. The blown-up, framed picture of Kipling/Cannon/Martha/Whitley stared out from the easel beside them, their unwitting happiness and total lack of understanding of what was to come a powerful reminder that life, among many things, was all hairpin curves.

  Linda Tolledo speaks during a service for her daughter, Whitley Lansing, who died in a car accident.

  There was even an ongoing memorial of flowers, photos, candles, and teddy bears being left on the side of the coastal road at the crash site. People took pictures of it and posted them with hashtags like #rip and #neverforget.

  They never suffered, the police told my mom and dad. They all died on impact.

  I survived because I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt. I’d gotten tossed out, landing in a cluster of bushes, while the others were trapped in the car as it barreled down the ravine.

  Little did anyone know the real reason that I’d survived: I had lived a century inside a second. I had died thousands of times, learned about and loved four people in a way few ever had the chance. I had called a place home where details such as life and death didn’t matter, where what did matter were the trembling moments of connection in between.

  And afterward, you felt nothing but awe for every second of your little life.

  * * *

  —

  So began life outside the Neverworld.

  It was different from what I remembered. I was different.

  And it wasn’t just the scar of a reverse question mark wrapping around my skull above my right ear. My hair hid the scar, but it was there if you looked for it, my tattoo, my memento. To outsiders I seemed confident, if a little solemn. I was less prone to biting my lip and tucking my hair behind my ears. I no longer worried whether people liked me, or whether I was pretty or had made a mistake. I wasn’t afraid to eat in a crowded cafeteria at a table alone or talk to a cute boy I didn’t know, or to sing karaoke, audition, give a speech. All the things people spend so much time worrying about in this world—the Neverworld had unchained me from all that. I was no longer in a hurry to fill silence. I could just let it sit forever like a bowl of fruit.

  My parents’ friends whispered, “Beatrice has really come out of her shell,” and “You must be so relieved.” They marveled when they heard the news that I had transferred to Boston College, was majoring in music theory and art history, working part-time at a video game company, volunteering at a nonprofit that had people read books at bedtime to foster children.

  It was those kids I told about the Neverworld Wake.

  I told no one else, not even my mom and dad. Somehow I knew that those children, with their wide eyes and knowledge of the dark, their kingdoms of morning and hide-and-seek, naptime, and snack, that they, of everyone, would understand. I told them I’d visited the secretest, wildest wrinkle in all the world. That one day, they might find themselves in one too, some lost dreamland between life and death, where past, present, and future are a jungle and hell can become heaven in the blink of an eye.

  “How do we go there?” a girl whispered.

  “If you’re chosen, it’ll find you. But the trick is not to be afraid. Because it isn’t so different from this world after all.”

  Had the Neverworld been real? Or had it been a side effect of my injury, the right-sided subdural hematoma requiring a craniotomy for evacuation, eleven days passed in a coma, intubated and sedated. Sam had read me the book. One of my physicians looked like the Keeper. Had it all been in my head? Had my senses, as I slept, pulled details from the boisterous world in motion around me, spinning it into a reality that existed only for me?

  Of course the Neverworld had been real, though I could never prove it.

  I tried to. I tried to corroborate all the secrets. I discovered that while some things did check out—Mrs. Kahn did live down the road from Wincroft with her collection of snow globes; there was an exclusive marina called Davy Jones’s Locker, a Ted Daisy who lived in Cincinnati, an Officer Channing at the Warwick police station who worked in traffic—others didn’t. There was no mention of Estella Ornato on the Internet. Honey Love Fried Chicken had once existed, but it had been replaced with a Foot Locker the year before. The White Rabbit, the Black-Footed Sioux Carpet—there was no way of verifying them.

  So many of the dots we had connected could not be connected here.

  The only real evidence of the Neverworld’s existence was time. It no longer ran in a straight line for me. Instead, now and then, it looped and lost its balance. An hour would pass in the blink of an eye. I’d sit down for a history lecture and my mind would wander so completely, the bell would ring and I’d realize in shock that everyone was packing up to leave, an entire class’s worth of notes scribbled across the dry-erase board, which seconds earlier had been bare.

  I’d look around, wondering if the Keeper was nearby, standing in a flower bed planting tulips or atop a ladder trimming ivy, because I recognized this out-of-body interruption for what it was: aftershocks of the Neverworld, instability, just as Martha had warned. My locomotive was skidding ever so slightly along the tracks.

  I still thought of Jim. But he was no longer the ghost who haunted me. I saw him as a boy, beautiful and unsteady like the rest of us. I saw our time together closer to what it probably was—something between the wild imagining of love and the real thing. Sometimes in that shaky in-between we found each other and it was real. Other times it trembled and broke like a wild kite with too fragile a string. If Jim hadn’t died, our love would have stopped and turned off the lights like the carousel in a traveling carnival, the music, played later, not as beautiful as I’d always thought. We would be barely remembered. In twenty years, we’d find each other on Facebook or whatever came after that, and we’d marvel at how ordinary we’d become, how all the glory we swore we’d seen in each other’s eyes was gone.

  I thought of my friends every day. Sometimes when I closed my
eyes I could feel them beside me. I imagined where they were now. Because they were somewhere. And together. That I knew. I prayed that they were happy—or whatever lay beyond human happiness.

  I think they were.

  Mostly I thought of Martha, who she was and what she had done for me. There wasn’t a moment of my life that I didn’t owe to her. Sometimes it rendered me listless and sad, made me say no to the frat party, the Sunday-night pizza feast, the Spring Fling, and I’d hole up alone in my dorm, drawing or writing lyrics, left with the painful truth of it, how the people who change us are the ones we never saw clearly at all, not until they were gone.

  I’d remember how Jim had insisted that one day I’d think with wonder: I was friends with Martha Zeigler. That’s how big she’s gonna be.

  He had been right.

  I shouldn’t have lived. It should have been Martha. I was never the good one. I saw very little as it truly was. But that was what Martha taught me. We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It’s so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rock star, trust the good girl.

  That’s never their only story.

  We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.

  The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities, bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they’re no longer there.

  * * *

  —

  Two years after the accident, I published a dream soundtrack.