Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  I’d spent the past year doubting my belief in Jim’s innocence. I road-tested my theory obsessively, kicking the tires, trying to make the doors fall off. I wondered about all the occasions when Jim said he couldn’t meet me in the canteen during Evening Spells, how he was on a tear and had to stay sequestered in his dorm room writing. I wondered if he’d been lying to me every time he said he was at work on Nowhere Man, his musical about John Lennon.

  My heart insisted no. He couldn’t have been. He’d lied to me about other things.

  Not about that.

  * * *

  —

  “I know where to start,” I announced.

  The others had lapsed into thoughtful silence. Now they looked up at me, apprehensive.

  “Vida Joshua.”

  “Kitten?” yelped Kipling in surprise.

  “She knows something about Jim’s death. I’m positive.”

  “How do you know?” asked Whitley sharply.

  “Remember how Jim was acting that final week?”

  Kipling arched an eyebrow. “Like I remember a hot summer with a water shortage, backed-up sewage, and zero air-conditionin’.”

  “He wasn’t himself,” I went on. “He was moody. A short fuse.”

  “All because of his musical,” said Whitley.

  “Oh, Lord Almighty, his musical,” drawled Kipling, grimacing. “It was eatin’ him alive.”

  “He was stressed about his musical, definitely,” I said. “But there was something else going on too. Something I found out about.”

  They were watching me, rapt, waiting for me to go on.

  “I’m pretty sure he was hooking up with Vida Joshua.”

  No one said a word. They just stared at me in shock.

  “The day before he disappeared was the first night of Spring Vespers, remember?”

  They nodded.

  Spring Vespers—it was a two-night performance of skits, speeches, and original songs commemorating the end of the year and preceding finals week.

  Around five, Jim texted me. He said he had a fever and chills, and was heading to the infirmary. I was shocked. After all, a medley of original songs from Nowhere Man was being performed that night. It was the cornerstone of Spring Vespers, the first time anyone had heard it, so for Jim to abandon his own production on the eve of its debut was very strange. Even if he was nervous about it, he’d never quit. Later that night, after eight, I was running late for Vespers, having stayed longer than I realized in the library. I veered behind the cafeteria on my way to the auditorium. It was the shortcut Jim and I sometimes took. That was when I saw him. Sitting by the loading dock. Not sick. At all. He was fine. Just sitting there in a black T-shirt and jeans, as if waiting for someone. Alone. I stood behind a tree and texted him.

  How’s the infirmary?

  One hundred and two fever, he wrote back, plus a sick emoji. I watched him write this, completely nonchalant.

  I’ll come visit you, I wrote.

  No. No. Don’t. I’m going to sleep.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was about to confront him right then and there. Only that was when a car slinked up. Slow. No headlights. Taking care not to be noticed. Jim hopped off the ledge and climbed right in. Vida Joshua was driving.

  “You saw her?” asked Cannon.

  I nodded. “It was Mr. Joshua’s beat-up red Nissan. The one he kept behind the music school with the keys in the ignition and the For Sale sign in the back window. The one the administration was always asking him to get towed.”

  “Poor Mr. Joshua,” said Whitley. “If his head wasn’t attached, he’d lose it.”

  “Did you ever confront Jim, child?” Kipling asked.

  I nodded. “The next day. He didn’t admit anything. But he was furious.”

  “Furious at you?” asked Martha, squinting skeptically.

  I nodded.

  Leave me alone, Beatrice. Stop spying on me. What are you, my father?

  Jim’s reaction had scared me. I’d never seen him like that before: trembling hands, tears in his eyes, anger like a sudden venom in his veins, making him scowl and spit and contort his face so he was unrecognizable. He’d been on edge for weeks, a mood I’d attributed to the pressure of getting his musical ready for Spring Vespers and recording the producer’s demo Mr. Joshua had set up. I want it to be glorious, Bee. I’m going for glory. He had turned inside out with anxiety, self-doubt, despair. The notes have lost their velvet, he whined. What had once sounded like a haunting theme song had suddenly become shrill to him. His lyrics were clichéd. No amount of insistence on my part that they were good could convince him otherwise. Our relationship had become brittle, a series of botched conversations about stanzas and syncopated rhythms, finding a better rhyme for dissipate.

  Figure eight? Exonerate? I’d try.

  Just forget it, Jim would snap.

  That afternoon, I’d given Jim every chance to explain what I’d seen, tell me the innocent reason he’d climbed into Very Flexible Vida’s Nissan that night and lied to me about it.

  But he didn’t.

  You want to break up with me over this? he screamed. Good. I’ve had enough of your insecurities and childishness and your totally annoying inability to see the bad in people. Sometimes there’s evil in the world, okay? Sometimes the sickness is right in front of you.

  His words had made me turn and sprint down the hill, hot tears blinding me. When I stopped and looked back, I saw in surprise that Jim wasn’t following me as I’d expected. Instead, he was striding across the hill, a dark and consumed expression on his face, out of sight.

  Like he was over me. Like we really were done.

  That was the last time I ever spoke to Jim.

  Two days later he was dead.

  “The day after Rector Trask announced that Jim had been found dead,” I went on, “it was all over the newspapers. That same day, Vida disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Cannon.

  “She immediately left town, remember? They made the announcement.”

  “That’s right,” said Whitley slowly, wrinkling her nose. “At Final Assembly. ‘And in further news, Miss Joshua is taking a job in stem cell research at the University of Chicago.’ ”

  Kipling nodded, dubious. “It was like hearin’ a chimpanzee got employed at the State Department.”

  “You thought she was fleeing the scene of the crime?” Martha asked me.

  “The timing was strange,” I said with a nod. “Like she was afraid of something. Anyway, I checked Facebook, and she’s working as an assistant chef at Angelo’s Italian Palace, living at home again. I always wished I’d had the guts to confront her. Now I do.”

  I took a deep breath and stood up.

  “Who’s coming with me?”

  One by one, with uneasy expressions, they raised their hands.

  Vida Loretta Joshua was seven years older than all of us.

  She was Mr. Joshua’s only child. She’d graduated from Darrow and gone off to college in North Carolina, only she’d had some kind of mental breakdown—the exact nature of which remained vague—dropped out, and moved home.

  When you visited the Joshuas’ modest Tudor cottage on Darrow’s campus, it was like visiting two ordinary people housing a pet leopard. This was because: (1) Vida Joshua was stunningly beautiful, with black hair, far-apart blue eyes, alien cheekbones, a face so symmetrical and arresting when she finally looked at you (which she only did after a prolonged delay) that it was like finding a wildcat lazily regarding you from a mountaintop as you squinted through binoculars; and (2) Mr. and Mrs. Joshua seemed to be afraid of their daughter. They addressed her in soft tones. They tiptoed around (with no sudden movements) the spot where she could be found sunning herself on the living room couch with unwashed hair and baggy sweats, eating a bag of kale chips,
watching Real Housewives of Atlanta. They seemed too scared to arrange her reentry to the wild (college) or get her into a rehabilitation sanctuary (therapy). So they just left her alone, bored and depressed, or whatever Vida was.

  No one was really sure.

  Sophomore year, Mr. Joshua twisted someone’s arm to get her a job at Darrow. Vida started appearing in admissions, yawning as she shuffled unconvincingly between the copy machine and a computer; later she turned up in the Spanish department; then as assistant coach for JV field hockey, though when that didn’t work out (apparently few were comfortable working alongside a big cat), they stuck her in the remote outpost of the art gallery. Most of the time she left the front desk unattended, and could be found outside in the back by the dumpsters, chatting with a random student, always a boy. Rumors swirled that her nickname at Darrow had been Very Flexible Vida, that she’d had sex with the entire wrestling team, that she’d fallen in love with a professor in college and stalked his wife, which had resulted in a restraining order that led to Vida’s mysterious breakdown.

  That was all I knew about her before I saw her with Jim. Once I saw them leave campus together, though, Mr. Joshua’s nickname for his daughter, Kitten, seemed so fitting, because what had once been a cute little fluffball had suddenly morphed into a dangerous predator with a diet of horse carcasses and the capacity to kill without warning.

  I hadn’t even known she and Jim were friends. He’d never mentioned her. She had surveyed Jim from her spot on the living room couch with only marginally less indifference than she’d regarded me and everyone else. After he was found dead, though, she suddenly vanished from her job at the art gallery. Her ergonomic swivel chair, her mug of pens, the gallery printouts of price sheets and artists’ statements of purpose mixed in with a welcome pack for a gym membership at the Jam, and Thai take-out menus—all sat there like nagging questions in the days following his death.

  I found myself calling into question my every private moment with Jim, as if I were a miser locking myself in my room to stare down at the stacks of cash I’d stashed under my mattress, counting the money for the millionth time to make sure it was all there, checking that it wasn’t counterfeit. In the intervening year, I kept tabs on Vida. I stared at her Instagram photos of camping trips in Wisconsin with some friend named Jenni who wore Bermudas; her loud move into a new apartment in Wicker Park (Anyone know a good mover in the Chicago area????), followed by a mute return home not three months later; her registration in a fashion design course; her interest in reflexology and a heavy-metal band called Eisenhower. I pored over these artifacts, looking for clues to her relationship with Jim. Occasionally I found them. She posted lyrics to a song Jim wrote—“Carpe”—to accompany a blurry photo she’d taken of a frog. Once we had days when we ripped up the skies. Swore it was real, no deception, no lies. On the one-year anniversary of his death, she posted a message on his Facebook page, which had become a living memorial. Miss you Mason.

  In some of my darker moments, I considered sending her a series of anonymous messages, a sort of I Know What You Did Last Year, to see if I could smoke her out, get her to reveal what she knew, what she’d done.

  I never did.

  Never would I have believed Jim capable of betraying me by fooling around with Vida. Then again, we’d never had sex. We came close. At the last minute I always said no. Jim would roll onto his back, prop up his head, stare at the ceiling.

  “What are you afraid of?” he’d ask with genuine curiosity.

  I deferred with various versions of “I’m not ready,” never having the guts to tell him the truth: that I was scared of losing the last piece of dry land I was standing on. I loved Jim, but our relationship could feel like a blackout sometimes. I’d get swept up in him, then days, weeks later suddenly look around, unnerved, wondering where I was, what time it was.

  “You want to wait for our wedding night? Fine,” he’d tease.

  No wonder he never broke up with me, I thought later. He wasn’t missing out on anything at all.

  He had Kitten.

  * * *

  —

  None of us had been back to Darrow, not even inside the Neverworld.

  Arriving felt the way it always did, as if we were traveling back in time to a lost past of driving goggles, candlestick telephones, and people wearing tweed sprinkling their sentences with grand and calling good times a gas. Darrow had always been willfully old-fashioned, a quality the school went out of its way to proudly maintain, as if the place were not a school, but a sanctuary for some endangered bird. Classrooms had the same wooden tables as fifty years before, the chapel the same pews. Most of the teachers looked like walking daguerreotypes, with stiff necks and expressions suggesting great depressions.

  I peered out the window, trying to ignore the nervousness in the pit of my stomach. Throughout the past year I’d wondered what I’d say to Vida if I ever had the chance to confront her, but now every scenario I had considered sounded pathetic and insecure. What were you doing with Jim that night? Why did you suddenly vanish when he died? Did you love him? Did he love you?

  Ahead I could see the old white wood sign swinging in the torrential rain.

  DARROW-HARKER SCHOOL. The bronze stag stood beside it. As we tore past I caught a fleeting glimpse of the antlers and eyes, FOUNDED IN 1887 flashing in the bloodred taillights before both sign and stage were swallowed by the dark.

  “Don’t worry, Bee,” whispered Whitley, leaning her head on my shoulder. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  “Every time you say that, child, someone loses an eye,” said Kipling from the front seat.

  She smiled primly. “I cannot vouch for the continued existence of anyone who messes with my best friends. They hurt Bee? They have to deal with unleashing the vengeful forces of the known universe.”

  “Well, Zeus, I’d pipe down if I were you,” muttered Cannon, slowing the car.

  Darrow’s security gatehouse was ahead.

  “What are we going to say?” asked Martha.

  “Oh, the usual. We’re former students. Kinda sorta dead? Stuck in a cosmic catacomb?”

  “That sounds so tedious,” whispered Whitley with a giggle, squeezing my hand.

  Cannon pulled to a stop in front of the gate, unrolling the window. We watched in uneasy silence as Moses—Darrow’s notorious security guard—took his time zipping his jacket, fixing his shirt collar, and opening a golf umbrella before ambling out. Grumpy, bent over like a question mark, he was whispered to have arrived on campus the same year the school was founded. He was a die-hard Christian, shoehorning God into most conversations, and a recovering alcoholic. Every Wednesday at midnight he secretly abandoned his post to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the gym at St. Peter’s, which meant there was a reliable two-hour window when you could stroll brazenly past the gatehouse, absconding from campus without getting caught, so long as you made it back before he returned.

  “Evening,” Moses shouted officially through the rain. “How may I help you?”

  “You don’t recognize us?” asked Cannon.

  Moses peered closer, his bushy white eyebrows bunching together in surprise. “Well, I’ll be. Cannon Beecham. Kipling St. John. Whitley. Beatrice. And little Martha. What on earth are you kids doing here on a soggy night like this?”

  “We were in the neighborhood and wanted to take a quick drive around,” said Cannon. “We won’t be long.”

  Moses scowled in apparent consternation and checked his watch. When he glanced back at Cannon, he seemed uneasy.

  “A quick look,” he said, pointing at Cannon. “But no mischief, you understand me?”

  Cannon nodded, waving as he rolled up the window, and we took off down the road.

  “No mischief you’ll remember tomorrow, old friend,” he muttered.

  * * *

  —

 
“My goodness. This is a surprise.”

  Standing in the doorway, Mr. Joshua looked exactly the same. He was still trim, with sparkling blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and a flagpole posture, plus a penchant for sweater vests.

  “To what do I owe such a treat? Come in. Out of this tempest.”

  He beamed with genuine warmth, causing me to feel a pang of guilt as the five of us filed inside, dripping wet.

  “We’re here to visit Vida,” said Whitley, smiling. “Is dear Kitten at home?”

  We’d already seen her car in the driveway, the red Nissan, the many lit-up windows, so we pretty much knew the answer to that question.

  Mr. Joshua blinked, puzzled.

  “Vida? Certainly. We’re—uh—just having dinner. Come in. Come in. Please.”

  We moved after him through a quiet living room into the dining room, where we found Vida and Mrs. Joshua. Mrs. Joshua, wearing a yellow apron, was forking corn on the cob onto the three plates as Vida, seated idly at the head of the table, scrolled through her cell.

  It seemed captivity had taken a toll on her, because she looked less intimidating than I remembered. She was stockier, with thinner, rattier hair. Though the five of us wordlessly assembled around her chair, she was totally oblivious, glancing up in apparent disinterest before returning to her phone. She was used to her father’s students visits at all hours for guitar lessons and rehearsals.

  “Peggy? Kitten? These are friends of Jim Mason’s. You remember, Jim, my student? The, uh, wunderkind? One of the very best young lyricists I’ve ever come across.” Mr. Joshua held up a finger, a soft smile. “He was going to go far. His musical about Lennon was one of the most gorgeous— A veritable tapestry of music and words…” He seemed to forget himself for a moment, blurting this with unabashed sadness. His face reddened. “Well. What brings you to our neck of the woods?”

  It had never occurred to me to consider how Mr. Joshua had taken Jim’s death—not until now, standing in the shabby taupe modesty of his house, the deafening rain pounding the roof, the faint smell of mothballs, acoustic guitars mounted on the walls hinting at some unplayed song. It had been Mr. Joshua, after all, who’d been Jim’s biggest champion, coaching him about out-of-town tryouts and a Broadway run. It was Mr. Joshua who had taken Jim’s dozens of demos, recorded on Logic Pro, and transcribed them into sheet music, Mr. Joshua who had pushed him to dream up cleverer lyrics, sharper characters, more variety for the ear, analyzing with him the ingenious phrasings and renegade words of Stephen Sondheim and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tennessee Williams. It was Mr. Joshua who had arranged for a major New York producer to listen to Jim’s demo of songs from Nowhere Man. The producer had loved what he’d heard, and a meeting, a lunch in New York, was being set up around the time Jim had died.