by A. C. Wise
“Yes,” she says.
The word passes her lips, and it seems to come from somewhere beyond her. She looks past John, to the hedge, as if she could see the horizon beyond it. Perhaps a fresh start would be the best thing after all, a new life that protects her brothers from her, protects her from herself.
“Oh, Wendy. I’m so glad. I’ll speak to Dr. Harrington straight away and arrange everything for your release.” John catches her hands, pulls her to her feet and kisses her cheek. “And Ned, of course. You’ll have the opportunity to meet Ned, but I’m certain you’ll be very happy with him.”
Does John intend to bring him here, to let him see her caged in this place? What sort of man would be willing to marry her not only knowing the truth of her, but seeing it with his own eyes?
Ned. That name again. It doesn’t ring like a clear bell, signaling the morning, a bird trilling up the dawn. It falls flat, like a stone. Ned. The sound of a window shuttered against the sky.
She knows without asking that he doesn’t have hair the color of copper and flame. That he doesn’t know how to crow like a rooster. That he cannot fly. John’s words flow over her, and Wendy fails to listen. Then John leaves, promises to return soon trailing behind him. She’s left alone beneath the tree with one shattered cup only half cleaned up, and the other full of liquid gone cold.
She picks up one of the shards, lifting it to see the sunlight stream through it. How easy would it be to bury the shard in her skin? In Dr. Harrington’s skin? Could she do it?
She lets it fall. That is the way the old Wendy Darling would think, but she is going to be a new Wendy. Shouldn’t the thought make her happy? Then why is her chest so tight? Why is it so hard to breathe? She hurries across the lawn to where she’d promised to meet Mary after her brother left. Mary rises as Wendy approaches, leaving the embroidery spread across her lap to fall to the ground.
“What happened?”
“I… I’m getting married.” Wendy’s shoulders hitch. She puts her face in her hands. Her cheeks are dry, but she shakes her head in disbelief.
Mary touches her shoulder, a simple, comforting thing. She doesn’t ask what’s so terrible about the idea of marriage, and for that, Wendy is grateful.
“It means leaving this place.” Wendy speaks between muffling fingers. “But…” She shrugs. Her shoulder blades feel like wings stripped of their feathers.
“If you had your choice in leaving,” Mary asks, “where would you go? Would you go back to Neverland?”
The question startles Wendy. She lowers her hands. Once upon a time, the answer was simple, so that it was barely even a question. The word yes is on her tongue, quick as a heartbeat, but she falters. Mary waits patiently on her answer; her eyes make Wendy think of pine bark after a hard rain.
Neverland isn’t her home, but is London really her home either? She doesn’t belong with Michael and John, and besides, they ought to have lives of their own. Where then? She wants to say with you—after all, Mary is the only other home Wendy has known—but it seems unfair to need another person so much. Could she be a home for Mary too? Could they need each other enough to make a life away from this place? And even if they could, who would let them? The world is full of men granting and withholding permission, leaving women like Mary and herself to exist by their sufferance alone.
Suddenly, it all feels so hopeless. Wendy shakes her head, letting out something like a laugh.
“Neverland.” She leans her head against the tree and closes her eyes. The harder Dr. Harrington and John worked to take it away from her, the more fiercely she held on, until Neverland became something else entirely. But it isn’t perfect, and it isn’t a home. Because home means family and consequence, and taking the good with the bad. Neverland is simply a place to run away and hide.
Wendy feels around the edges of the hole left inside her, the thing behind the locked door. She’s tired of it. Weary to the core.
“Neverland is a lie.” She opens her eyes and looks at Mary. “I don’t mean it isn’t real, because it is. I mean things there aren’t what they should be. Neverland is a story, a little boy’s idea of pirates and Indians and mermaids. Except Peter isn’t really a boy. He’s something else. I don’t know what he is, but I think he made himself into the idea of what a boy should be, and sometimes that’s a very dangerous thing.”
Wendy takes Mary’s hand, lacing their fingers together and looking at them joined, light and dark.
“What about you,” Wendy asks. She is half afraid of the answer, but she doesn’t know what answer to give to Mary’s question, and so turns it back on her instead. “What would you do if you could leave tomorrow? Where would you go?”
Mary looks startled in her own right, and Wendy’s breath catches a bit, her pulse wanting to go faster. This feels different than the stories they’ve told each other over the years, of what they would do if they ever escaped. Those were mere fantasy, a way to survive. This is frighteningly close to real. Not running away from something, but running to something, a real life, a new home, a different kind of family.
“Would you…” Wendy hesitates. The thought of Mary going back to Canada, an ocean between them, is too much to contemplate, so she asks a different question instead.
“Would you look for the man who married your mother?”
Revenge. She doesn’t say the word aloud. Would she strike back at Jamieson if she could? And Peter? If Mary was given the chance, would she lash out at the man who put her here?
“No.” Mary snaps her answer. The wet-pine of her eyes looks darker still, the black at their center going almost all the way to the edges to swallow up the ring of brown.
“I don’t want anything from him, and I don’t owe him anything either. We were never family. He isn’t anything to me, and he isn’t worth even a moment of my time.”
Mary’s grip tightens, matching the vehemence of her words. It’s a different kind of anger than she’s seen in Mary before, and it makes her wonder whether Mary is trying to convince herself with her words. The man who married her mother means nothing to her, and yet he is a wound that hasn’t entirely healed.
“I wouldn’t go back to Canada either.” Mary answers Wendy’s unspoken question, and relief stings her eyes. She swallows hard as Mary goes on. “I don’t… My people are there, but I don’t know them, not really. I was so young when I left. I don’t know where I belong.”
Wendy almost shouts here, with me, but she holds her tongue. It isn’t her place to presume, no matter how much she aches at the thought of leaving Mary behind, going out into the world to marry a man she doesn’t even know.
“I’d like to travel,” Mary continues, “but it isn’t easy.”
Mary lifts their clasped hands; the sun dapples through the tree overhead and hits the contrast in their skin, speaking for her. Mary lowers her head, as if afraid her hope will betray her if she speaks too loud.
“Ever since I’ve been working in the kitchens here I’ve started to think that I would like to have a little bakery, my own shop, but…”
Mary raises their clasped hands again, the same answer, and it strikes Wendy that Mary doesn’t expect to ever leave; she expects to grow old and die without ever seeing the world outside the walls of St. Bernadette’s again. Wendy’s pulse snags on hurt, a vicious anger rising through her. The world of men and their rules, forever saying what women—especially women who look like Mary—can and cannot do.
The unfairness presses on Wendy’s skin, and her body feels too small to contain all the injustice.
“Are you really going to do it?” Mary asks after a moment of silence.
“Get married? I suppose.” With her free hand, Wendy plucks at her sleeve, trying to imagine herself clad in a wedding gown. “Play pretend. Play wife and mother.” Wendy tries to smile, and it hurts, a deep ache that goes all the way through her. “It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.”
* * *
“Wendy.” Tiger Lily touches her own throat wh
en she speaks, as if speaking physically pains her. Her voice is a cold wind blowing from a lonely place. It hurts to hear it, and Wendy’s name in her mouth is a terrible thing.
For a moment, Wendy can only stare, wanting to undo everything done to Tiger Lily and bring her back to the girl she remembers. Tiger Lily’s twig-hard fingers brush Wendy’s cheek. They’re almost bone, and Wendy has to fight not to flinch away from the touch. The wonder in Tiger Lily’s eyes— that is real, that is human, despite the ruin of her flesh, and Wendy keeps her gaze there as if she could forget the rest of what Tiger Lily has become.
“I started to think I dreamed you.” The words scratch, and Wendy touches her own throat reflexively. “The girl from the other side of the stars.”
Tiger Lily’s lips crack when she smiles, but there’s no blood. A lump rises in Wendy’s throat, and she can’t swallow it down. Tiger Lily, trapped here while Wendy was locked behind St. Bernadette’s walls; had the rest of Neverland forgotten so that Tiger Lily been doubted and disbelieved too, told Wendy was only a story or a dream?
“But you’re here now,” Tiger Lily says.
“I’m here.” Wendy makes herself fold her arms around Tiger Lily again, feeling her hollowness. She is skin wrapped around bone, with nothing else inside.
“What happened?” Wendy draws back, wiping at her cheeks.
“Peter.” Tiger Lily spreads her arms, a dry, rustling sound, and her lips crack again, her expression grim this time.
Peter, of course, Peter. Wendy knew before she asked. Anger and guilt war inside her. If she’d stayed, she could have stopped this. She could have saved Tiger Lily and the mermaids.
“Don’t,” Tiger Lily says, as if reading Wendy’s thoughts. “Don’t blame yourself for him.”
Wendy lets out a breath, and a small measure of the tension inside her unwinds. She wants to believe what Tiger Lily says is right, and yet blaming herself feels like the only useful thing she can do. Peter is a breaking storm, too vast a target for her rage, leaving only herself in his stead.
“Come,” Tiger Lily says, jostling Wendy from her thoughts. “We’ll talk.”
Tiger Lily tilts her head, a gesture for Wendy to follow. As she does, Wendy glances at the trees, wondering suddenly whether there are eyes and ears listening. The birds could be spies for Peter, even the leaves themselves, for all she knows. The creeping feeling of being haunted returns, even though the source is different this time.
Tiger Lily leads her between narrow-trunked trees, ducking beneath branches and looped vines like massive snakes. Her footsteps barely make a sound. When she first saw the trees shake their branches, Wendy had thought of ghosts. Looking at Tiger Lily now, she wonders whether she was truly wrong.
Tiger Lily bends to lift a heavy section of ropy vines, revealing the entrance to a cave. Just one of the many cracks and fissures and secret tunnels riddling Neverland. Wendy remembers Tiger Lily telling her once it was possible to travel all the way across the island and never see the sun, like a whole second Neverland buried underground.
Wendy ducks through the entrance, and as she does, the ground shudders, a distant rumble of thunder. Glancing over her shoulder, she sees a faint smudge rising above the trees, a claw mark in smoke dragged across the sky at the center of the island.
It’s clearer than when she first glimpsed it from the beach, and darker too. Now, it makes her think less of a flock of birds and more of a living shadow streaming across the sky.
Wendy’s muscles lock up, her legs refusing to carry her inside. Peter holding her hand, leading her into the dark. In here, Wendy, it’s the best secret ever. A struck-match smell, but so much bigger. Rain-drenched fur, meat left out to spoil.
There’s something there. Something she should remember.
Her fingers skim the wood of the door in her mind and it trembles, like a vast breath rattling it from the other side. Splinters catch at the pads of her fingers. Cracks craze the door’s surface. Panic tells her to run, run, run, and never stop.
Tiger Lily touches her hand, and Wendy starts, biting back a cry of surprise. She pushes the fear away, willing the tightness clenching at her to let go, and steps into the cave.
The struck-match smell recedes. The only scent in this cave is the memory of smoke, ghost-faint, but nothing more. No blood and heat and iron.
Wendy’s eyes adjust, showing her a circle of smoothed logs surrounding a cold fire pit. Above them, a natural chimney leads up through the rock, letting in a shaft of pale, rain-washed light—the color of the sky right after a storm. Soot from old fires darkens the cave walls, but there are deliberate markings too, made in red and black paint.
Wendy moves closer, studying them. She thinks of the days she and Mary had spent hidden away in forgotten corners of St. Bernadette’s halls, Mary trading Wendy story for story. Wendy had told stories of Neverland, and in exchange, Mary had told Wendy the Kainai legends her mother passed on to her as a child.
She remembers Jane, standing at the counter in their kitchen, barely tall enough to see its surface, watching Mary knead bread. Mary had told Jane those same stories, sketching pictures in the flour scattering the countertop. Blood Clot Boy, and Napi, the Old Man who first made people, and who tried to steal the Sun’s pants.
A sob catches in Wendy’s throat. The memory is so close, she can feel the heat of the kitchen, smell the baking bread. She’d told her own stories to Jane, stories of the Little White Bird and the Clever Tailor, but she should have told them truer.
She’d told the stories to protect herself, not Jane, reclaiming fragments of Neverland and stitching them into toothless fairy tales to help her daughter sleep at night. The Tailor had sewn stolen feathers into a fabulous coat for the Little White Bird to help him fly faster and higher than all the other birds and win a race. And all the while in Wendy’s mind, she’d held a picture of herself as a child, sewing Peter’s shadow back onto his body.
Wendy breathes out, forcing the ache from her lungs. She blinks back tears, resting her fingers on the painted images on the wall. A ship with full, billowing sails, the mermaids in their lagoon, a boy surrounded by a group of other boys—the only one not casting a shadow. She moves her hand back to the pirate ship, and turns to look at Tiger Lily over her shoulder.
“What happened to them?” Wendy asks.
“They left.” Tiger Lily moves closer.
“What?” The answer startles her, driving all other thoughts from her mind. “How? Where did they go?”
Tiger Lily lifts her shoulders; her body makes a dry cracking sound like logs settling in a fire.
“There was a storm and a tear in the sky. Hook and his ship sailed through.”
“But I saw the shipwreck on the beach. I climbed inside.” Wendy touches the sword at her hip.
The hilt seems almost to shiver beneath her touch. She felt it herself, the haunted air of the ship, the sense of the pirates still there, and yet gone. Hadn’t she even pictured them falling into the sky?
She tries to remember what happened to Hook when Peter rescued them. The memory is there in fragments, like two contradictory truths overlapping each other. That monstrous beast with its terrible teeth and snapping jaws—she’d seen Hook devoured by it, torn apart, hadn’t she? She’d been horrified. He’d been a villain, but surely he didn’t deserve to be eaten alive? Did she beg Peter to help him? She can’t remember anything but Peter’s trilling laughter ringing in her head, his voice innocent and dismissive, almost cruel.
No one ever dies in Neverland, silly.
Had she seen him devoured, only to have him resurrected again, brought back from seeming-death to continue to serve as Peter’s eternal enemy? And even if Hook couldn’t die, surely he would still feel pain? The thought leaves Wendy chilled. Does Peter really have that kind of power over life and death?
She thinks of the mermaids in the lagoon. She looks at Tiger Lily, her corpse-like face, her sunken eyes, and she knows the answer.
Tiger Lily shakes her
head.
“I hid and watched from the trees. I can only tell you what I saw, not what it means. There were two ships, and they were the same ship. One fell, and one flew through the sky. There was a hole, and through it I could see different stars.”
Wendy’s breath catches, fear momentarily forgotten. Different stars. Her stars? London? Tiger Lily continues.
“Some of the pirates fell screaming out of the sky and they drowned. Not Hook though. Hook survived.”
“How do you know?”
Tiger Lily’s lips finally shape a smile. Her voice still rasps, but for a moment it sounds less pained.
“Stubborn. He would never accept defeat or let Peter beat him one last time. So he must have lived somehow.”
Despite herself, Wendy finds herself smiling too. The expression feels strange, and she calls to mind again the picture of Hook she built for herself on the ship—a broken man, a trapped man, a sad man.
How much worse would it be if he were not only trapped in Peter’s endless games, but caught in a cycle of being killed and brought back to life again, all at a young boy’s whim?
Tiger Lily moves to sit on one of the logs surrounding the dead fire. She draws her legs up, wrapping her arms around them, melancholy taking over her expression. Tiger Lily’s hunched shoulders, the thinness of her body, all of it makes Wendy think of bundled sticks, ready to burn. Tiger Lily rests her cheek on her knees and looks at Wendy.
“I wish I understood how he did it so I could leave too.”
Wendy moves away from the wall to sit at Tiger Lily’s side. After a moment, she puts her arm around her friend’s shoulders and draws her close. It’s easier to touch her now without feeling that shudder of fear. Tiger Lily rests her head against Wendy; it weighs almost nothing.
“Before the pirates, I used to think nothing could ever die in Neverland, but…” Tiger Lily holds her arms out in front of her, letting her cracked skin speak for her.
“You’re not…” Wendy starts, but she swallows the words, a painful lump in her throat. Whatever she could say would be a lie. Tiger Lily isn’t dead, but she isn’t alive either. They were the same age when Wendy first came here. Tiger Lily isn’t the girl Wendy left behind, but she isn’t a full-grown woman either. She’s something else.