That devotion, that belief was key to Tinker Bell’s immortality. Belief had cured her of Hook’s poison all those years ago. The belief of her Found Girls was stronger, more focused. More obsessive. So long as they believed, no one could stop her.
Shoot her, and the wound would seal. Burn her, and belief would heal the flesh. Sever her limbs, and they would reattach or regrow.
I’d seen it once, long ago. A single gunshot. A spurt of sparkling blood and dust. Tinker Bell falling toward the Earth, only to recover in midair and streak away like a golden comet, a shooting star, mocking those who tried to ground her.
I grabbed a handful of tissues and slashed them over my wet cheeks.
Bringing my Lillian home was only the beginning. After so many years, she’d have forgotten her true family. I had to prepare myself, because she would fight with all her strength to stay with Tinker Bell. Even after the fairy was gone, Lillian would try to run away. She’d cry herself to sleep and wake up in tears from dreams of magic. She’d spit her hatred in my face.
Clover had only been gone a couple of days. She should have an easier time returning to her old life. She might even come to forget her time with the Found Girls, rewriting these days into dream or story. But Lillian . . . with all she’d been through, my little girl might never come back to me.
I punched the wall hard enough to crack the drywall and bloody my knuckles. The pain cut through tears and despair, helping me focus. All this time I’d clung to my belief that I’d find Tinker Bell. That I’d see my daughter again.
Belief was all I had left.
* * *
“Who is Captain Hook?” he asked with interest when she spoke of the arch enemy.
“Don’t you remember,” she asked, amazed, “how you killed him and saved all our lives?”
“I forget them after I kill them,” he replied carelessly.
When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to see her he said, “Who is Tinker Bell?”
“O Peter,” she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not remember.
“There are such a lot of them,” he said. “I expect she is no more.”
—J. M. Barrie
* * *
I returned to Kensington Gardens the following night, my head a tangle of half-remembered nightmares. I reached the vandalized statue of Peter and tried to calm my thoughts. When I drew in a breath, I was alone. When I exhaled, I was surrounded.
There were more Found Girls than before. Fifty? A hundred? I couldn’t make them all out. Some flew from the skies. Others appeared out of the shadows.
Tinker Bell swooped down to alight on Étoilée’s shoulder. The girl preened at the honor.
The fairy looked nothing like modern merchandizing would have people believe. Her white hair was cut short to keep it from tangling in her oversize, insectlike wings. Her pale, smooth skin literally glowed in the moonlight. She wore a translucent gown, brown and veined like old leaves. Fairy dust flaked from her exposed arms and legs. Even I felt a stirring of longing and awe in my heart.
When she spoke, every girl fell silent.
“Where is Peter?”
“Where are Lillian and Clover?” I countered.
Tinker Bell waved a hand, and two Found Girls dragged forth a bound captive. Clover’s wrists were knotted behind her. A dirty rag was tied around her mouth. Fairy light reflected from her wet face. Tears of fear, after being stolen from her family? Or tears at the thought of being taken from her tiny goddess?
“What about Lillian?”
“Two children for one is unfair. Peter for Clover.”
“Peter Pan is worth a hundred children.” I stepped closer, trusting her hatred to keep me safe. So long as I knew the way to Peter, she didn’t dare hurt me. “Who knows how long it will be until he next returns to this world? Most years, he forgets. Just like he forgot you.”
Tinker Bell turned into a golden firework shooting directly toward my eyes. Had I pushed too far? She stopped so close I could feel the wind from her wings, taste the bittersweet dust that fell from her skin.
“I’ll make him remember. I’ll make him believe.” She took a lock of my hair, stretching it between her hands like a garrote. “And then I’ll make him pay for abandoning me.”
“He promised to visit Wendy and her descendants, but her family moved on ages ago. They’re not in London anymore, and neither is he. But he is in this world again. He came back, and I found him. Give me Lillian, and—” My voice broke. “And I’ll take you to him.”
She huffed and flew away, then spun in a shining circle. “My Found Girls are all here. None remember the name Lillian. Perhaps she’s taken a new name. Look for yourself if you must.”
It was like she’d flung me from a cliff. I clawed at the rocks to catch myself, but her words turned them to dust in my hands.
I forced my body to move, stepping toward the nearest Found Girl to search her face and features. It had been years. Lillian could be almost grown, or she could be the same age she’d been the night we lost her. I went to the next girl, then the next. “You’re lying. She’s not here.”
Tinker Bell laughed. The sound sent cold fear through my marrow. “Don’t you recognize your daughter? All this time trying to find me, and you’ve forgotten your own child.”
I did remember, damn her. I remembered Lillian’s soft brown skin. Her freckled cheeks. How her black hair fell in waves past her shoulders. Her eyes were a startling blue. She always tried to hide the scars on her right arm where a neighborhood dog had bitten her.
I moved from one face to another, despite the cold, hard knowledge in my gut: my daughter wasn’t here. “Lillian, where are you?”
“I’m bored. Take us to Peter. You can try to remember on the way.”
The world was cracking apart around me, leaving me surrounded by a moat of madness. I turned to Clover. “Do you know what Tinker Bell did with her?”
She kicked me in the leg.
It had to be a trick. No, not a trick, but a game. Tinker Bell had hidden or disguised her.
“She knows nothing. Kill her.”
The Found Girls closed in around me. One cut Clover free and handed her a small, crude sword—a hacksaw blade with one end wrapped in duct tape for the handle. Clover snarled and lunged at me.
“Wait!” Forgive me, Peter. I wiped my face and said, “I’ll take you to him.”
* * *
Fairies indeed are strange, and Peter, who understood them best, often cuffed them.
—J. M. Barrie
* * *
Four Found Girls seized my limbs and hauled me into the air.
“We fly west.” I searched their eyes for any hint of my Lillian. “As fast as you can.”
Higher and swifter we flew. The lights of London soon faded behind us. We passed over Reading and Bristol and Cardiff, and then the lights of civilization were replaced by cold wind and the dark waves of the ocean.
Faster yet we went—the shooting star that was Tinker Bell, the children whose hands dug into my clothes and flesh to keep me aloft, and the rest of the Found Girls. I studied each one in turn, trying to pierce whatever magical delusion kept me from the truth.
We moved like a school of fish swimming through the clouds. For hours we flew, following wind and moon and stars. It was like a memory of a dream, more vivid than reality itself. Even as my despair grew heavier, part of me yearned to fly like this forever.
All too soon, the lights of another coast rose from the darkness. From there, it was easy enough to adjust course over North America. I used my phone’s GPS to lead us to our destination. We dropped to Earth in the middle of an ill-maintained road winding through a familiar trailer park in central Ohio.
A few dogs barked as we walked. Figures peeked through their windows, but nobody challenged us.
I stopped in front of a green-and-white double-wide with a beat-up SUV parked beside it. The Found Girls started toward the trailer, but I put myself before
them, my arms spread protectively. “Where is Lillian?”
Tinker Bell flew past me to the window. On a faded curtain, the silhouette of a young boy bounced and swung a toy sword. The boy who had forgotten.
“You stupid ass. What game is this? That’s not Peter.”
I barely heard her. I couldn’t look away from that magical child who jumped and played and flew. I moved closer, until my hands pressed the cold aluminum siding. Tinker Bell might not see, but I knew who he was.
Uncomfortable laughter from the Found Girls. Two of them seized my arms. I had no fight left. Let them hit me and cut me and kill me, so I could fly again. Far from everything, until I found my Lillian.
A man inside the trailer called out, “Pete, have you brushed your teeth yet?”
The bouncing stopped. “Yeah, Dad.”
Another voice, this one female and tinged with warning. “Peter . . .”
“All right, all right.” If it was possible for a shadow to look sheepish, this one did. It vanished as the boy—Peter—hurried off to brush his teeth.
How I longed to be a fairy. To be too small to feel more than one thing at a time. Tinker Bell never had to deal with such a tangle of confusion and grief, longing and pain, all of it hollowing me out like a Halloween pumpkin.
“You’re a liar.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Who’s out there?” called the man. Peter’s father. I knew his voice in all its shades. Loving and tender. Pained and grieving. Cold and helpless.
The curtains parted. I ducked away.
Tinker Bell and the Found Girls vanished in an instant. I pressed my body against the trailer, out of sight, and hugged myself.
I barely noticed when the curtains closed and the Found Girls reemerged. I felt lost, trapped in that place between sleep and awake, where dreams and reality danced and chased each other in an endless game.
Lillian wasn’t here. All those years . . . I hadn’t been searching. I’d been running.
Étoilée moved closer, tapping her club against her open hand. “Want us to punish her?”
“You can’t,” I whispered. I raised my chin and waited.
“She’s a madwoman, broken and lost. Let her live, trapped in her own lunacy.”
When they started to disperse, I spoke without thought. “Don’t leave me, Tinka Bell!”
She flew back to me. “What did you call me?”
Fragments of memory cut through the dreams. “I used to call you Tinka Bell.”
“You said your daughter was one of my Found Girls.” She moved closer, peering into my eyes. “She wasn’t. But you were.”
They were the cruelest words she could have spoken. If Tinker Bell had taken Lillian, it meant there was a chance I could get her back. But she hadn’t. That truth pierced me like an arrow and tossed me to the ground, to memories I’d fled for so long. The beeping of hospital equipment. Pale, sunken skin. Powder spread on Lillian’s skin to prevent bedsores.
“We lived in a house outside Columbus,” I said numbly. “I was home with Lillian. She fell down the stairs and hit her head. She never woke up.” For more than a month we’d stayed with her at the hospital, hoping and praying.
“Little Angela. I remember you. So happy to come with me, away from rules and lessons and manners. Look at what you’ve become.”
I was a child again, burning in shame at Tinka Bell’s disapproval.
“Who was that boy in the trailer?”
“My son. I named him Peter.” My shame grew. He’d been eleven months old when I left. Too young to remember me.
“You pitiful ass. You meant to give me your own son?”
“No!”
“Then it was a trick!”
“It wasn’t—I didn’t know.” I’d forgotten my own son. Or had some part of me remembered? Had this been my unconscious goal, the endgame to my madness? Tinker Bell realizing this wasn’t Peter Pan and ordering her Found Girls to punish me, to put an end to my long hunt?
“I remember the night we lost you. We’d taken four girls, but a man with a gun shot you from the sky. He shot me, too. Your belief helped me fly away.”
I’d been with Tinker Bell for decades, never aging. When I returned to this world, my parents were both long gone. I’d been passed from one foster home to another, given countless colorful pills while doctors talked to about depression and psychosis, about abandoning my childhood imaginings of flight and freedom.
Slowly I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the other Found Girls. At Clover. I remembered the grief in her mother’s eyes.
For the first time in years, my thoughts were clear. My hand shot out to close around the fairy’s slender body. Fairy dust shivered from her skin onto mine. I clung to those memories of freedom and innocence and worship among the Found Girls, remembering a time before I knew what pain and grief truly meant, and I flew.
* * *
“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.” That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions.
—J. M. Barrie
* * *
The Found Girls tried to follow, but I remembered now. How to fly, how to maneuver between the trees, how to ride the whirls and gusts of the wind. I led them on a merry chase, laughing through tears as one by one they fell away, unable to follow where I was going.
Tinker Bell squirmed and fought until I gave a warning squeeze. I couldn’t kill her, but immortality wouldn’t protect her from the pain of crushed bones.
Soon we raced over another ocean, through salty, rumbling clouds. An island grew beneath us. I couldn’t tell if we were descending, or if the island was coming toward us. Maybe there was no difference.
I landed in a clearing made of granite, smoothed and polished to a cold, glass finish. Rose petals rained from the sky, melting into red-tinged rings when they touched the ground. Weeping willow trees surrounded us. Wind whispered through their branches.
I loosed my grip, and Tinker Bell shot up out of reach. “This is the Neverland. How—”
“It’s not, exactly.” I began to walk. “This is my Neverland. This is where I fled when Lillian died.”
With each step, the grief and nightmares came to life. A wet breeze carried the sharp smell of antiseptic. Through the willow branches, I glimpsed shadowy doctors rustling about, their fingers tipped with the needles they’d used to try to save Lillian.
“I never truly forgot you,” I said. “No matter how many doctors I talked to, how many medicines they gave me. No matter how I grew up. After Lillian made me a mother, you began to return in my dreams. You didn’t want me, of course, but I was terrified you’d take her. Night after night I woke up to reassure myself she was still in her crib. In her bed. Then, in the hospital, I woke to make sure she was still breathing. I still wake up in the night, but I’d forgotten why.”
“I don’t like this place. Take me back!”
“I don’t want to.” Here, I could forget. Here, I could fly. On this island, I was Peter Pan. I was key and compass and master and prisoner. “It took a long time to make my way back to the real world, last time.”
I hadn’t made it. Not entirely. My thoughts and memories were too heavy. I’d had to leave some behind. I’d smashed the remaining fragments together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces. “All those years I was afraid you’d take her. But at least if you’d stolen her, I had a chance of getting her back. So that’s the story I told myself.”
“I’ll let you be a Found Girl again. You’ll fly and dance and play and believe. You’ll be happy.”
I stopped walking. “I’m too old.”
“You don’t have to be.”
It struck me that Tinker Bell wasn’t angry anymore. Her rage would return soon enough, but right now there was no room for it. Right now, she was afraid.
“You can be one of my children. I’ll be your mother again.”
Had
I been happy? I knew I hadn’t wanted to leave. I remembered sobbing and screaming after her the night she left me behind.
I also remembered the four girls we’d stolen that night, and the man who’d fought so desperately to stop us.
When he found me, his grief and anger hadn’t changed, but another emotion joined them—compassion. He’d driven me to the hospital, made sure I was cared for. He never threatened or tried to hurt me. He simply asked—begged—for me to tell him how to find his children.
I couldn’t help him. Just like I couldn’t help Lillian.
I remembered my screams the night Lillian’s breathing finally stopped. Listening to the howling wind, I realized I’d never stopped screaming.
I twisted around and hovered directly in front of Tinker Bell. “I wonder,” I said carelessly, “how long it will take them to forget you.”
She brightened with fury as I flew away. I plunged through the willow trees. Tinker Bell followed, but I knew this place. I’d fought its hazards. I tore through branches that reached to drag us down. I dodged the numbing claws. I flew higher, shielding my eyes against the sudden rainfall.
It wasn’t long until the ringing of bells fell behind and faded into silence.
* * *
Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days, but it was real now. . . .
—J. M. Barrie
* * *
The Found Girls were waiting in the darkness around the trailer. They scattered when they realized I’d returned alone. Those few who still bore active fairy dust flew away like birds. The rest scampered like rabbits.
I swooped toward Clover and knocked her down in a patch of grass toward the edge of the trailer park. She tried to fight, but I caught her wrist and pried the blade from her hand.
She fought and kicked and bit and cried. I wrapped my arms around her and held tight so she couldn’t hurt herself.
She tried to claw my arms. I adjusted my grip and waited. Minutes passed, or maybe hours, until time extinguished the last glimmer of our fairy dust.
“I want to fly,” she whispered furiously.
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