by A. C. Wise
MAKE BELIEVE
The crowing call goes out across the island, echoing through the trees, seeming to come from every direction at once. A flare like lightning, like ice-cold water, runs the length of Wendy’s spine—joy and fear all wrapped into one.
His call. Not quite human, not animal either, and for a moment, it undoes her completely. The sound is home; she knows it as well as she knows her husband’s eyes, her daughter’s smile. It’s written in her bones. It means adventure. It means something terrible and wonderful is about to happen and she aches to rush headlong toward that call with all its promise and threat.
Even now. Even after everything. Peter. She wants to run with him. To stand at his side and conquer the world.
And in the same heartbeat, she wants to put her hands around his throat and squeeze until the light leaves his eyes. He took Jane away from her. He stole her daughter, and Wendy has crossed worlds to get her back.
Her boots sink into the sand. The call comes again and she turns, trying to pinpoint it. The boys are close enough for her to hear them shouting to each other, though she can’t make out the words.
The wild riot of sound bounces deceptively, first in front of her, then behind. Among the trees, then further up the beach. She runs a few steps, then stops. She backtracks, frustrated, and loops over her own path, erasing her footprints with new ones. The next time she hears Peter’s call, it’s faint, far distant, and she can’t hear the boys anymore at all. Neverland twists around her, confounding her and keeping Peter out of her reach.
Behind her lies jungle. Up ahead, birch trees, their bark peeling away in papery strips to reveal curls of pink as soft as sunrise. To her right, a massive willow trails long, silvery leaves into the clear waters of a pond.
As a child, she’d delighted in the way Neverland constantly changed around her. She would follow Peter up the beach only to end up in the skirts of a snow-covered mountain. Or they would trace the path of a secret river through pine trees to find the smoking peak of a volcano. Now, the fractured puzzle pieces of the island infuriate her.
Before she can decide which way to go, movement among the trees catches her eye. It’s the same flickering she saw as she looked out over the trees from the lagoon, leaves rattling, branches swaying without any wind, and her breath catches. A shape darts from one slender trunk to the next. Fear presses a hand to her chest, but in the next instant, anger overwhelms it.
“It’s no use skulking about. I can see you.” It’s a lie, but miraculously her voice doesn’t shake.
Between two of the trunks, a shadowy figure resolves. Human, or at least she thinks so. Suddenly, the trees don’t allow enough light. Wendy squints. The shape resembles a woman, but her skin is like a wasp’s nest, papery grayish-brown. She’s like a dead thing, lain ages in the ground, and yet there’s something familiar, like Hook’s ship, like the lagoon. The thought fills her with revulsion, familiar yet utterly wrong, the Neverland she knew perverted, unraveled and poorly stitched together again. She knows the woman; she can’t possibly know her.
“Are you…?” Her voice breaks. She takes a step, then stops.
She isn’t a child to be frightened by ghosts. She’s a grown woman, and she’s faced real monsters, the kind who wear uniforms and wield needles and restraints. She drops her hand to the hilt of Hook’s sword, ready to draw.
Leaves crunch under a light step as the woman moves closer. Wendy gasps. This close, she can’t pretend. If the laws of Neverland hold true, the woman before her should be a girl still, just as Wendy last saw her. She isn’t though, she’s older, but not as old as Wendy, not as old as she should be if Neverland were a rational place. Not a girl, not quite a woman either. Perhaps not even living, but something else, something caught in between.
“Tiger Lily.” The name cracks in Wendy’s throat and lodges there.
The woman flinches, as if the name were a blow. Thin, her skin like dried mud, baked and cracking. Her hair, which should be dark, framing her face in thick, glossy braids, hangs lank, wispy and brittle. Her eyes are worst of all, sunken above cheeks that protrude like blades, and full of pain.
Wendy knows those eyes like she knows Peter’s call. Tiger Lily, trapped inside the husk standing before her, swaying slightly as if the next breeze might knock her down. Tiger Lily, a ghost haunting herself.
“No.” The word is a husk too, a dried, blown leaf scraping across the ground.
Is it a denial of the name, or Wendy herself? Both, or neither? But Wendy knows for the ache inside, heavy and bruised. This is her friend.
“Tiger Lily.” Wendy repeats the name, more firmly, reaching out her hand.
Tiger Lily’s shoulders curl in upon themselves, and she looks down, away. Scraps of cloth and leather cling to her narrow frame. Wendy remembers elaborate beads and beautiful stitching, more precise and perfect than anything she could ever produce, even with Mary’s patient tutelage. Behind Tiger Lily, other forms emerge to stand between the trees, but draw no closer, giving the two of them space.
Peter’s Indians. Like Tiger Lily, they are drained and dry. Hunched. Mere echoes of what they once were.
“Please,” Wendy says.
Tiger Lily drags her gaze back to Wendy’s. Her eyes go wide, but her posture straightens, even though the motion looks painful.
It’s all the sign Wendy needs. She closes the distance, throwing her arms around her friend. Tiger Lily feels hollow, and she’s afraid to hold her too hard, as if she might snap in two if Wendy holds her too tight.
Wendy forces herself to let go, step back, look her friend in the eye.
“What has he done to you?”
LONDON 1920
Wendy keeps her head bowed, sliding one foot in front of the other. All she has to do is make it to the door at the end of the hall. John is waiting for her in the garden; Dr. Harrington told her he sent ahead to say he had big news. Perhaps she is being released. His visits have been few and far between and all of them brief. It’s clear this place frightens him, leaves him feeling guilty for what he’s done. That he’s here again now, and made it clear he means to stay more than a few moments, must mean his news is big indeed. Perhaps John and Michael have finally come to their senses and remembered Neverland.
Three more steps. Two. Hope flutters in her chest, a fragile and terrible thing. She shouldn’t allow it, but she can’t help herself, even now. One more step and she’s outside. The sunlight makes her squint, and the smell of fresh grass tickles her nose. Wendy raises her head. John sits at a small table beneath one of the massive oak trees dotting the lawn. There’s even tea.
It’s so civilized, the picture of familial bliss. Wendy wrestles down the thing clawing at her throat—a scream, laughter, a shout. She makes herself cross the lawn at a steady pace. Flowers spill from neat beds all around her, wild bursts of color, like bright jewels scattered on the lawn. If she doesn’t look too closely, she can almost forget there’s a fence with thick iron bars hidden within the dense greenery on either side of the gate. If she doesn’t look behind her, she can pretend there’s no wall that she tried and failed to scale.
Wendy allows herself a moment to tilt her head back and look at the perfect, cloudless sky. The blue is dazzling. She could fall into it, fall and keep falling. At the end she’d find herself on the other side of the world, listening to the mermaids singing in the lagoon. She smooths her hands over her sleeves and her skirt, feeling the hidden pockets secreted away there. It keeps her hands from shaking.
She stops just short of the table and John rises to meet her. His expression is practiced, a veneer of calm plastered over nerves. In reality, there is nothing easy about him at all. Wendy makes a quick inventory of all the things hidden inside her clothes— buttons, a length of thread, a single page from a newspaper, folded and folded again into a long strip running around her hem. The litany calms her, but she doesn’t return John’s smile.
He kisses her cheek, motioning for her to sit. He’s spent years accusing
her of playing make-believe, but here he is acting as though this is an ordinary social visit, as though he’s simply a brother visiting his sister at home.
Wendy keeps her back stiff as she sits. Let John be the one to break the silence. She can see the words piled up behind his pained smile. It gives her a small amount of pleasure, but it’s a scant comfort. The terrible truth of it is, she could walk out the gate with him. All she has to do is lie. Tell John and Dr. Harrington what they want to hear. That Neverland doesn’t exist, that it’s all a story she made up. All she has to do is say she’s sorry and promise never to speak of it again.
“Tea?” John lifts the pot, holding it poised over her cup.
“Please.”
“Two lumps. I remember.” His expression softens.
She wants to be angry with him, but his smile disarms her. Light slants through the leaves, catching his hair, burnishing his glasses, and he is only her brother again, not one of her captors. Buried deep behind his eyes is the ghost of the boy who flew with her, who whooped and hollered at Peter’s side, who played at war and follow the leader.
Wendy opens her mouth and closes it again, searching her mind for something safe to say. If she asks where that little boy went, if any part of him remembers, it will only cause disappointment to crowd his expression.
Behind the shine of his glasses, faint crow’s feet line his skin, and the sight of them takes her by surprise. When did he grow up? When did she? She was so determined to hold onto the boy John was—the one who flew with her through the stars—that she utterly missed it.
This John simply appeared before her one day, not a boy but a man, full of demands about her behavior. It strikes Wendy—even though he’s her brother, she barely knows anything about him. There’s nothing she can ask him about without looking like a fool. Who are his friends? Does he have a sweetheart? Does he hope to marry one day?
He has mentioned important meetings in the past, usually as his excuse for not staying long. The first time he visited her, months after leaving her here, he mentioned a business opportunity, something to do with importing goods from all around the world to sell in England, but he’d never mentioned it again. When she’d asked, his face had grown pinched, drawn with shadows, and in a clipped tone he’d told her that matters of business were not a woman’s concern. She wonders now, did the investment he made go badly for him? Is it money that troubles him, worrying about paying for her care here, and keeping the house they grew up in?
Guilt and fear needle her. Lost for what to say, Wendy chooses silence. She folds her hands in her lap and watches John pour tea, add sugar, stir, and precisely set the spoon aside. His movements are careful, as though the entire world around him is breakable, not just her. There’s a touch of gray in his hair, just above his ears to go with the lines at the corner of his eyes. She thinks of his arms around her, holding her back as she screamed, clawing and trying to get her hands on another plate to smash. There’d been no gray in his hair then, but she can’t miss it now that she’s seen it, even though he’s younger than her.
All at once she sees it, how he aged so quickly and she never noticed. Her heart turns over in her chest. She hasn’t been a big sister to him since they came home from Neverland, not the way she should have been. The weight of their parents’ deaths fell upon him more squarely than it did on her. The weight of her, resting on John’s shoulders on top of it. He had to grow up and put Neverland aside. He had no choice.
And what of her? She’d had no business concerns to occupy herself with like John. Unlike Michael, she could not go to war. As a woman, what could she choose? Only marriage, only motherhood, and she’d had enough of playing mother in Neverland. The thought of being a wife—it had frightened her in a way she couldn’t say. John had hinted at it, more than once, before St. Bernadette’s. He had even tried to engineer a chance meeting, inviting a young man to the house as if he had no idea Wendy would be there, and inviting them both to sit down for tea.
He’d meant well, she knows that much. It hadn’t only been wanting to get his troublesome sister off his hands; she’s certain he genuinely expected her to be happy at the prospect. What woman wouldn’t want to marry, after all? But Wendy had found herself stunned to silence by the very idea, terrified and angry at once. She’d barely spoken a single word to the man, stretching awkward silences through the room until the young man had taken on the look of a frightened animal, desperate to flee, and John had finally admitted defeat.
If growing up meant marrying, then of course she would cling to Neverland all the harder, refusing to let go.
She sees the weight of all that on John’s shoulders now, and more. She’s been cruel, thoughtless, digging into John’s wounds again and again, demanding he look at the blood. She opens her mouth, an apology crowding her throat. But John speaks first.
“I have good news.” John hands her the cup. It rattles in its saucer. “I’ve found someone—that is, Michael and I have found someone who’s willing to…” He clears his throat. “I mean, there’s been an offer for your hand, Wendy.”
The words land like a blow, and all thoughts of apology fly from her mind. Wendy’s fingers go numb around the eggshell thinness of the saucer. The cup slips, crashing to the table. Shards fly and hot liquid splashes. John leaps up, knocking over his chair as he does. His cheeks are ruddy above his moustache. He’s flustered, but he recovers quickly, waving away the attendant standing at a discreet distance as he looks their way.
“Oh dear. Well, never mind, darling.”
He cleans the mess, and Wendy watches him, stunned. She is a creature made of skin wrapped around a core of ice, solid and immovable. She is a girl in a bathtub. She never climbed out. She is frozen through and through.
“I know it’s rather a lot to take in.” John doesn’t look at her; the color never disappears from his cheeks. “But Ned is a good man. His father is… His father has been rather a lot of help to me, in business. They are a good family. Ned will be a good match for you.”
Ned. The name echoes, a dull thud against the bones of her skull. Does John realize how many times he’s said the word “good”? Is he trying to convince himself or her? How good can Ned possibly be, to offer marriage to a woman he’s never met? And has John forgotten his last disastrous attempt to matchmake? But nothing has changed since then. As a woman, she is expected to marry, to find a husband to take care of her, and at twenty-seven, she is already nearly too old.
She pictures a towering man with Jamieson’s face, neck thick, smile the thin edge of a knife—the kind of man grown from a boy who delights in pulling the wings off flies. She pictures a man like Dr. Harrington, one with a kindly face but a keen eye bent on studying her. A man who might mean well, but who is all the same set on picking her apart.
And what does John mean by mentioning Ned’s father? The way her brother refuses to meet her eyes, the flush of his cheeks makes her wonder. Does John owe this man money? Is she to be sold to pay back his debt?
How could John do this to her? Just when she thought she understood him, just when she thought the broken thing between them might finally heal.
“I thought you would be happy. Even if… Even if you think you don’t want to marry, surely it would be better than being in this place, wouldn’t it?” John’s hands finally still, and he looks at her, his expression pleading. “Say something, won’t you, Wendy?”
“What should I say?” She meets his gaze, steady and unblinking. Buried within the ice at her core, Wendy Darling, the girl who remembers how to fly, screams.
“Say you’re happy. Or at least that you’ll consider it.” John pulls his chair closer, sitting and taking her hands. The cuff of his shirt is stained with tea.
“Michael and I only want to take care of you, the way you always took care of us. All those stories in the nursery, the games. The way you sat with us when we were sick. You stayed awake with me when I had bad dreams. You sang lullabies.”
He means every word, Wendy
can see it. The rift inside her widens; she wants to forgive him, and she can never do so.
“You know,” John smiles, a fond thing, “Michael told me when he was over there, on the continent, it wasn’t Mother or Father he thought of. It was you. That was what got him through when the bombs were falling. When men were dying around him.”
Wendy wants to strike him. How can he sit here and tell her this like it’s a kindness? Has he never looked into Michael’s eyes? Does he think to make her feel better, giving her the burden of their little brother, alone and lost in the mud, whispering her name?
John lets go of her hands, straightening the cuffs of his jacket to hide the stain from the tea. His gaze is restless, uncertain where to land.
“You’ll be safe and cared for, Wendy. Please let us do this for you.”
John and Michael could take her out of this place any time. Being married is not a condition of her release, except that John is making it so. She should be furious with him. She is, but she’s tired as well. Wendy looks up at the sky again, the blue of it going through her like a blade. Accepting this proposal means she could walk through the gates, never look back. She could put all this, Dr. Harrington and Jamieson, behind her. She could finally lay the burden of Neverland aside and build a life for herself. Perhaps she could even bring Mary with her. A new life. A new Wendy Darling.
She lowers her gaze to look at John again. The fracture running through him is clear, the weight of Michael and her and everything else, the strain of trying to hold them all together wearing him down over the years. Whatever other reasons he may have, he genuinely believes that this should make her happy. There’s an earnestness to his expression—isn’t marriage and motherhood what every woman wants? He believes he’s giving her a gift, not delivering her to a new kind of imprisonment. Wendy takes a deep breath. Just this once, at last, she will choose kindness. Her brothers should not have to bear the burden of caring for her for the rest of her life. She will do this thing for John. For Michael.
