Wendy, Darling

by A. C. Wise

  She wonders—is it that Hook couldn’t hurt them, or he chose not to? How easy would it have been for him to turn his sneering posturing into true violence, taking his impotence against Peter out on them instead? They had been in Neverland, but not of it, not yet. Did its rules still apply, or could he truly have fed them to the monster beneath the waves, or even simply snapped their necks?

  Wendy shivers at the thought, caught between horror and sympathy for the man she once hated and feared so much. That heady floral scent she’d always taken for the oil in Hook’s hair, what if it had been something else? A drug, to ease the pain of being trapped here, forced into the role of a villain.

  Wendy tries to picture the captain alone in his cabin, head heavy, breathing out smoke. The wavering light of a candle would make his shadow tremble as he tried to forget, tried to dream, tried to sleep. Wendy passes her gaze over the cabin walls again. The room seems smaller than when she entered, the air heavy, tainted and close. Redolent with ghosts. She can’t stay here.

  As Wendy climbs out of the captain’s cabin, she moves with less caution. What if Hook never belonged here either, as much Peter’s captive as Wendy and her brothers were his? Could he have been an actual sea captain once, a merchant, a soldier with a whole life beyond Neverland? If Hook had come from somewhere else, a place like her own England with real war and death, would this place have seemed like a paradise to him at first? Or would it have seemed a mockery of the real world with its violence and wars?

  It had certainly felt like a paradise to Wendy’s own young eyes even though she hadn’t been escaping anything. She and John and Michael had been happy, with parents who loved them. The terrible things hadn’t come until later—their parents’ deaths, St. Bernadette’s, the war. If Peter had given Jane a choice, rather than simply snatching her hand, would she have flown away as easily as Wendy, Michael, and John?

  Even now, she remembers clearly—there wasn’t a moment of hesitation. Peter held out his hand, and Wendy took it, Michael and John at her heels. She hadn’t spared a thought for consequences, the way her mother would feel, whether her brothers might be in danger. It had all been a grand adventure, a game, just like Peter and his boys playing at war.

  She remembers the day Michael, just after his eighteenth birthday, but still very much a boy, returned to the house, papers in hand, to tell Wendy and John he had enlisted and was going to war for real. There’d been a shine in his eyes, a kind of fever Wendy couldn’t understand. Had the war too seemed like a grand adventure? It was how most people had spoken of it early on; a lark, an assured victory, and certain to be over by Christmas.

  But the war had already been going on for almost a year by then, and still Michael had chosen to go. And then the reality had come for all of them, and boys like Michael most of all. While he lay in those mud-filled trenches, did he ever think of Peter’s games, and how little they prepared him for the true horrors he’d find there? She’d heard Dr. Harrington remark to John once how lucky Michael had been to come home at all when so many didn’t. But one look at her baby brother, even now, is enough to make Wendy question whether Michael himself felt the same. He’d come home broken in a way no bandages, medicine, or stitching could fix.

  When he’d first returned home from war, Wendy had never understood why Michael had continued to deny Neverland so vehemently. Wouldn’t he have wanted to cling to it as an escape, a shield, the way she used it later in the asylum? Now she understands perfectly well, a realization she should have come to far sooner. Why wouldn’t Michael continue to deny Neverland? Nothing here ever meant anything. The boys run through with stick swords stood right back up again and rejoined the battle. All she had to do was tie make-believe bandages around bloodless, invisible wounds, and they were good as new. Holding that truth alongside the reality of real war would have been like rubbing salt into a wound. Not just a lie, but a mockery of everything Michael had seen.

  Of course Neverland wouldn’t have been a balm for Michael. He’d gone deeper into the real world than either she or John, and he’d seen all the evil it had to offer. The boys that would never grow up in his world weren’t magic-touched, they were simply rotting in their graves.

  Wendy lets the ship take her weight, unsteady in a way that has nothing to do with the canted deck. The memories drag at her, the heaviness making her feel as though she’s been trapped in the ship for hours, always climbing and never emerging. Did Michael feel the same in the trenches, hiking miles in the mud and always waiting for enemy fire or bombs to fall?

  She knows so little of what he suffered there, only the aftermath, only the pain, but none of the specific details. Ned and Michael speak of the war sometimes, making a show of playing at cards, but rarely glancing at their hands. She’s glad her brother and husband have each other. It used to hurt her—selfishly— that Michael could not speak to her as well.

  But then, what had she ever done to make him trust her enough to speak his pain? All those times she’d thrown his truth back in his face, demanding he remember Neverland? Why would he ever want to confide in her, after everything she put him through?

  He’d surprised her recently though. John, his then-fiancée Elizabeth, and Michael had all come for tea, while Ned had been out with his father and Jane. Mary had taken the day off, though thankfully she’d left the kitchen well stocked with scones, which Wendy surely would have burned. Afterward, Michael had offered to help her do the washing up, taking her by surprise. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d been alone together, and she’d been almost afraid, but she’d accepted Michael’s offer.

  Everything felt fragile and uneasy, despite the warmth of the kitchen. Wendy had been on edge, feeling like everything would shatter around her with the slightest wrong movement, remembering broken plates and cups of old, and screamed words. Then Michael had spoken, and his voice had caught her so off guard that Wendy had dropped the saucer she’d been holding. Soapy water sprayed the floor, and Michael flinched at the sound.

  Wendy remembers holding her breath, feeling herself on the edge of tears. But Michael had looked at her, and offered a pained smile. Her brother, a stranger, both wrapped in one skin. She’d almost gone to her knees to take his hands in her wet and dripping ones to beg his forgiveness. But fear had locked her in place, and she’d remained still, letting her hands drip, letting the shards of the broken saucer lie.

  “I want to remember,” he’d said, making her heart stutter.

  Her first irrational thought was that he meant Neverland. Even then, after everything, after St. Bernadette’s, after the hurt she’d done to him that had sent her there, it was where her mind turned first. But he meant the war, his own scar, just as Neverland was hers.

  “Some men, all they want is to forget, but I want to remember.” His hands trembled, one gripping a dishrag, the other the head of the cane he still used.

  His wounded leg shook too, a sign of fatigue, but she knew his pride would make him refuse if she offered him a chair. His lost expression implored her, a child again, waking from a bad dream in the nursery and asking her to make it better.

  “I want to remember every bit of it,” he’d told her. “But the harder I try to hold on, the more things slip away. I forget faces, names, and it’s like I’m killing them all over again. They’re dying, and there’s nothing I can do to save them. Then there are other times when all I can do is remember and it’s too much. I don’t want it.”

  Michael raised the hand holding the dishrag, pressing it to his head, and Wendy could only imagine what horrors unfurled within the private theater of his mind. The world gone orange and black and red in an explosion, shrapnel and flame blooming like some great, terrible flower, men screaming and bleeding and dying.

  “I survived. It’s my duty to remember. I owe it to the men who died, but they run through my hands and I can’t hold on.”

  He’d lowered his hand; tears stood out in his eyes, hovering on his lashes without falling. Wendy had never seen him l
ook so old and so young all at the same time.

  “How do you remember, Wendy? How do you hold on?” It was the closest he’d ever come to asking her about Neverland, the only hint she’d ever seen that part of him might remember. He’d looked at her, heartbroken, breaking her heart in turn; he’d been her brother again, reaching out to her, and she’d had no answers. All she could do was put her arms around him, resting her hands against his back and leaving damp patches on his shirt.

  He’d shuddered in her embrace, then gone stiff. When they stepped apart, it was as though they were strangers again. He’d retreated, closing himself off, and they’d gone back to silently washing dishes. Only Wendy had done it with tears running down to the point of her chin.

  Wendy pushes herself away from the wall, feeling worn-through and thin, even more wrung out than before. She wants to be done with the onslaught of memories. They’re of all the wrong things, not the thing putting her, putting Jane, in danger here and now.

  The sword bumps at her hip as she climbs back into the sunlight. The bowl of the sky is pale blue, like the shell of a robin’s egg. She imagines Hook and his pirates falling upward into that infinite blue. Soaring. Vanishing.

  A new fear grips her. At her bedroom window, she was able to hold off doubt, but now with all the grief weighing her down, she feels utterly rooted in Neverland’s soil. There isn’t even a sliver of room for happy thoughts in her mind. If she tried now, could she fly? And if not, when she finds Jane, how on earth will she get them home?

  THE HUNT

  She turns the arrowhead over and over, trying to puzzle out its meaning and coming up with nothing. Something about it nags at her, familiar yet wrong. Like the moon shining over Neverland, the arrowhead is a little too perfect to be real. The flint shines against her palm, each chip knocked from its edge precise, and every one exactly the same shape and size.

  A sound reaches her, soft and regular, and it’s a moment before she picks it out as crying, and not just another insect or a night bird. She tucks the arrowhead into the sleeve of her nightgown, warm between the fabric and her skin, and creeps to the edge of the platform, looking for the source of the crying. It isn’t quite dawn. The world is pearly gray and all around her, boys sleep. Like this—some curled on the ground, some draped in trees like big jungle cats—they look younger than they did in the harsh shadows cast by the moonlight. Even Arthur. Peter is the only one she can’t see. She pictures him roosted in the top of a tree like a wild bird.

  The scene in the camp reminds her of pictures in her father’s books, black-and-white drawings of ancient ruins in far-off places. She’d hoped to visit those places someday, but now that she’s farther from home than she’s ever been, home is the only place she wants to be. The ache of missing it reaches for her, a palpable thing. The familiar scent of tobacco from the pipe her papa indulges in on special occasions. The smells of baking from the kitchen. Her mother, humming softly, unaware that anyone is listening. Even the ragged meow of the cat who comes to the kitchen door begging for scraps, the one who bites as often as she purrs, but still bumps into everyone’s legs asking to have her head scratched.

  She recites the details to herself, trying to fix them in her mind. If she doesn’t, they’ll become like a story someone else told her, distant and far away. Peter hasn’t given her any more of the sweet tea to drink, but there’s still something standing in the way of her name, like a door she can’t see beyond. It’s this place, the details of Neverland writing over the details of her home. Earlier, when she tried to think of them, she couldn’t remember the color of her mother’s eyes. She can see her mother’s face, but it’s blurred, out of focus, the eyes a muddy blue-brown-green, and it terrifies her.

  In the pre-dawn dark beneath the leaves, she can just make out a hunched shape on the next platform over. Easing onto the thick branch that supports both of their platforms, she scrambles across, quietly enough that the boy doesn’t even look up. It’s the boy who was hidden among the leaves where the sweet-smelling flowers were—Timothy. The one who asked to hear the end of her story.

  She’s relieved to see he made it back to the camp, but her relief doesn’t last long. His small body shudders, trying to hold in a grief so much bigger than him. She edges closer and sits beside him, touching his shoulder, and putting a finger to her lips when he looks up, startled.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispers.

  His tear-stained face is blotched red and pale, his eyes made bigger by the saltwater. He stares at her, and after a moment she lifts her arm, feeling awkward. He dives against her, burrowing into her side so she can feel his shuddering breath.

  “Bad dream.” His voice is muffled.

  She pats his hair. It’s gritty with sand.

  “You can tell me, if you’d like.”

  “I was in another place, and I had a bed so big it was like an ocean. There was a window, and two people standing in front of it, but they didn’t have faces and I couldn’t remember who they were.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  He shakes his head. She feels it against her ribs.

  “They just stood there, looking at me. One of them sang, and the other one reached out to touch my head, then I woke up.”

  He pulls away from her so she can see his face. The tears no longer flow, but his eyes remain wide.

  “Do you know who they are?” His expression pleads with her, and something catches in her throat.

  Her heartbeat is an ache, the feeling of loss. Her mother’s blurred face hangs in her mind, the tune of her humming muffled so she can’t quite hear it anymore. For a moment, she can’t speak, and she swallows hard.

  Parents. Parents singing a lullaby and tucking him in for the night. And for Timothy, it is a bad dream. He can scarcely remember what he lost, but the terrible sense of something fundamental missing from his life remains. Looking at him, the bewildered fear on his face, she hurts. The pain isn’t just for him, but for herself as well.

  The longer she stays here, the more parts of herself she’ll lose. She’s certain of it now; it’s already begun. She’ll wake up one day and it won’t be just her mother’s features that are blurred. She might not remember that she ever had parents at all.

  Timothy continues looking at her, hopeful, expectant, waiting for her answer. Would it be crueler to tell him? If Timothy knows the people in his dreams are his parents, will it be like opening a floodgate, reminding him of everything he’s lost? Maybe it’s better to only know he lost something, and not exactly what. How awful or careless must Peter be to take a mother and father away from a child so young?

  “I think…” Anger, directed at Peter, cracks her voice. She swallows, trying again. “I think the people in your dream are people who love you very much. You don’t have to be afraid.”

  Relief washes over Timothy’s face, immediate and pure. She envies him, and hates him, and wants to protect him all at once as he nestles against her again. All she can do is not pull away, putting her arm around him and feeling the tension run from his body.

  “Will you tell a story? Like you did before?” He murmurs the request softly, barely audible. The sound makes her think of warm milk, but she tenses all the same, her muscles going rigid so he flinches away from her.

  Fear spikes. What if she can’t remember any stories? What if she gets them all wrong again?

  She forces herself to relax, pulling him close again, trying to ignore the speeding of her pulse. Timothy tilts his head to look up at her. He isn’t like Peter. He’s a little boy, so far away from his family that he doesn’t even remember what a family is anymore.

  She’s never thought all that much about the fact she doesn’t have brothers or sisters. Now that’s she’s about to have a little cousin—if she ever makes it home, that is—she’s started wondering what it will be like to teach someone the things she knows. If she had siblings, she likes to think she would be a good big sister, helping to keep them safe, loving them, just like her mother with Uncle
Michael and Uncle John.

  “I could try,” she says. She remembers her family, at least for now, even if she doesn’t remember her name. She hasn’t lost everything, so she can give Timothy this little bit of comfort.

  “What sort of stories do you like?”

  “Adventures.” His voice is already sleepy, lulled by the words she hasn’t even spoken yet.

  “All right, an adventure story.”

  Timothy nods, a motion against her ribs as she takes a deep breath. Off amongst the leaves, in the deep shadowed places where the air is thick black and purple, fireflies blink in a lazy rhythm. Neverland is paused in the space before morning, stars still twinkling overhead, brighter than the ones she knows at home. Insects chirr, and a night bird she can’t identify trills a strange song.

  “Once upon a time, there was a Clever Tailor…” Nerves grip her.

  But before doubt can fully take hold, inspiration strikes her. She doesn’t need to recite her mother’s stories; she can make up her own. That’s what her mother does, after all. She finds herself grinning as the next words leave her mouth.

  “And the Tailor had a daughter who was very clever too, but instead of sewing and doing magic, she was a scientist.”

  She swells with the thought of the words, pride filling her. Timothy pulls away from her side to peer up at her.

  “What’s a scientist?”

  “Oh. Well, it’s someone who studies books and learns things about the way plants and animals grow, and the way planets move, and how to make people better when they’re sick.” She struggles to find terms that might be familiar to him.

  Timothy frowns. His hair sticks up on one side of his head where he’s been pressed against her, and she reaches automatically to smooth it down. He tolerates the touch, but his frown lingers.