Wendy, Darling

by A. C. Wise

“I promise you, Jane, as soon as I’ve spoken to your father, I will never ask for your silence again. You may speak to anyone you choose to about Neverland—your father, Cook, me, even your grandfather.” A look of fear flickers through her mother’s eyes, but she goes on.

  “You may ask me any questions you like, and I will always give you the truth. No more secrets. And you may take that truth with you out into the world, anywhere you like, but understand, Jane—it is a choice.”

  Her mother increases the pressure of her hands around Jane’s, then lets her go. Jane’s skin chills in the absence of her mother’s touch. She thinks of her mother in the terrible place she described, the asylum called St. Bernadette’s. She understands the choice her mother is giving her, and it’s no choice at all. To tell the truth and be called a liar, or to hold back the truth and lie to everyone she knows.

  And it isn’t only herself she has to worry for, but her mother. Jane senses it in the look in her mother’s eyes just now when she mentioned Jane’s grandfather, senses it was there too in the words she overheard between her mother and her father. If she tells the truth, Jane will not only risk hurting herself, she will risk hurting her mother, too.

  It isn’t fair, because the world isn’t fair, but perhaps that’s what it means to grow up. Not just the opportunity to learn more about the world, to become a scientist as she’s always dreamed, but to face disappointment, to hold secrets of her own, to choose between right and wrong, trying to do what is best with only her own instinct to go on, even knowing she might fail.

  Jane doesn’t want any of this weight, and she isn’t certain what she’ll do with it, but it’s too late not to carry it at all. She has crossed the threshold, and the door is closed behind her. She cannot un-know what she knows, and she hates it. She can’t bring Timothy back. She can’t tell her father the truth when he asks her where she’s been, not yet. She must keep secrets from her uncles, especially her Uncle Michael, because the truth would only hurt them. Worst of all, she cannot trust her mother, not fully, and yet she is the only person Jane can trust. She is the only person Jane can speak freely with, because she is the only one who will understand.

  Jane wants to push her mother away, suffocated by the knowledge that has been handed to her. At the same time, she wants to throw her arms around her, and beg her to stay close. She’s afraid of the shadows in her room, of seeing Timothy again, of fingers tapping on her window and calling her out into the dark.

  Jane doesn’t say anything at all.

  After a moment, her mother stands. She smooths down the front of her skirt, and sighs. She leans forward and kisses Jane’s forehead. Her lips are dry.

  “It’s almost morning,” her mother says, and her voice is indescribably weary, sadder than Jane has ever heard it before. “Even so, you should try to sleep, if you can.”

  Her mother takes something from her pocket and sets it on one of the many shelves lining Jane’s room. The object makes a soft click. When her mother steps back, Jane sees it’s an arrowhead, like the one she used in Timothy’s slingshot to shoot at Arthur. Her mother has set it beside the one Cook gave to her, but only the one her mother set down glitters strangely in the dark. Her mother’s fingertips brush the knapped stone, her expression one of loss, then she turns away.

  Jane watches her mother cross the room. She hesitates a moment, looking back with an expression Jane cannot read. It’s almost as though she is trying to puzzle Jane out, as though she’s a stranger her mother has never seen before. Jane thinks she understands. Her mother steps into the hallway, and pulls the door fully closed, stealing the light. It’s the first time Jane can ever remember her not leaving the door ajar, and the room seems so much darker in her wake. Only the faint light of the city, and the mundane light of the moon and stars—never as bright as in Neverland—will keep her company until the sun rises again.

  Jane climbs out of bed, kneeling and reaching into the space between the mattress and the frame. She pulls free a small stone, the one from Peter’s soup, the one she nearly swallowed on her first night in Neverland—at least the first night she properly remembers. She holds it a moment in her palm. It looks like such an innocent thing. The way a monster can look like a boy, or a smile be a dangerous thing. She closes her fingers around it, letting the stone dig into her skin as she crosses to the spot her mother stood a moment before, setting the stone next to the arrowhead from Neverland.

  She hasn’t decided what truths or lies she’ll tell to others yet, but there’s one thing Jane is certain of—she will not lie to herself, and she will always remember.

  LONDON – TWO DAYS AFTER NEVERLAND

  Wendy sits in the window bay overlooking the street. She runs her hands over her skirt, touches her sleeves. There are no secrets hidden there now; the time for secrets is done. She rubs absently at her knee, the pain almost faded. She folds her hands into her lap, but they immediately want to fly away again. It’s an effort to keep them still.

  It’s been two days since she returned from Neverland with Jane. Two days, and she still hasn’t found the right words to speak to Ned. She’d told him that she’d found Jane lost among the trees, a half-truth, letting him assume she meant the park. She had not had to pretend to be exhausted, or terrified. She had been all of those things, her emotions catching up to her all at once—fear and grief, but also joy at having Jane home. It had left her drained, and she had pled for time.

  Part of her wants to lie sick in bed like when she first returned from Neverland all those years ago. Let fever wrack her. Let her loss manifest physically. But she is a mother now; she has responsibilities, and she cannot hide from them.

  Wendy had promised, if Ned would give her a little time to recover herself, she would tell him everything, which she fully intends to do. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t afraid. She and Ned have always been partners, but now she sees suspicion and doubt in his eyes. And Jane—she can’t quite read her daughter’s expression; she only knows that it hurts to look at her in a way it never did before.

  That isn’t even the end of the lies and half-truths piled up against her skin, weighing her down. She must think of her brothers and her father-in-law. The story Wendy holds in her mind is that Jane crept out of the house at night, intent on having an adventure all on her own. But then she’d gotten confused and uncertain how to find her way home, and she’d been afraid of getting in trouble, so she’d hid until Wendy had found her. It makes her daughter sound flighty and foolish, two things which Jane is not, but as much as it pains her, Wendy is certain that her father-in-law especially will believe it. Girls are fanciful creatures after all, without much sense in their heads, no matter what their age.

  Her brothers might have more doubt, but their own determination to forget might save her for once. It will be easier for them to swallow her lie than accept the truth.

  Which only leaves Ned. At the end of the day, Wendy doesn’t truly care whether or not her father-in-law or her brothers believe her. The belief and trust she wants is from Ned.

  Wendy glances toward the hall. She won’t have the house to herself for much longer. All the truths will have to come out of her soon.

  She looks at her hands. The minor cuts and scratches she and Jane both received fleeing the cave, the ones Wendy barely felt at the time, are almost gone. It’s likely they won’t even leave scars. She should be relieved. Instead, there’s only a kind of hollow numbness. It isn’t like the hollowness she lived with for years, the sense of something missing where Peter tore her memory away. This is the ache of a thing she knows should be there and now is gone, like a trinket or a photograph meant to sit on the mantelpiece, broken beyond repair.

  The last two nights, Wendy has sat at the window long after everyone else went to bed, straining to pick out the second star to the right from the sky’s darkness. All the stars look the same to her now, and she’s searched within herself too, reaching after the ragged fragments of Neverland. She can’t feel it anymore. It isn’t gone, but s
he can’t touch it. Either it’s changed, or she’s changed, or both. Either way, a door has closed, and she fears no amount of picking at the lock will ever open it to her again.

  Even the memories that sustained her all through her time at St. Bernadette’s have begun to fracture. When she closes her eyes now, she sees Tiger Lily burning. She sees Peter with his tattered shadow trailing behind him, monster and boy rolled into one. She chose Jane, and she would never choose differently given a thousand lifetimes, but that doesn’t ease the hurt.

  Some part of her always believed Neverland would be there for her forever, an escape if she ever needed it. Now that way is barred to her, and she must live from here on out in one world alone.

  Outside, trees stir against a clouded sky. Despite the threat of rain, Ned and Jane went for a walk. Wendy doesn’t blame either of them for not wanting to be cooped up in the house with her. Ned has been patient with Jane, but Wendy knows it must be a strain on them both. She’d gently explained that Jane had been frightened, that she needs time, and that she will talk to Ned when she is ready, but the hurt in Ned’s eyes as she’d said it had almost undone her.

  The truth had almost come rushing out then, but she’d been a coward. What if Ned doesn’t believe her? And what if he does? How will their lives change?

  She watches the leaves shiver, flipping to show silver undersides to the wind. There is a storm coming. She wants to trust Ned, trust that if she gives him this secret he’ll be strong enough, kind enough, to forgive her. But what if it’s a bridge too far? What if it’s too much to ask after he gave her his heart, placed his letters from Henry into her hands and with them all of himself, while she refused to do the same.

  Wendy thinks back on that first night with Ned, their wedding. It seems a lifetime ago. They’d been strangers, but Ned had reached across the gap, taken a chance on her. She’s never given anyone his secret, but is withholding her own worse?

  After reading the letters, Wendy had asked Ned whether there had ever been anyone besides Henry, and he’d told her no. Awkward and blushing to even think of it, she’d told him she wouldn’t mind if there was. He’d told her the same, and they’d laughed together at their nervousness, their embarrassment. That was the moment, Wendy thinks, that she’d begun to love him. Not as a husband, but as a friend. One of her best friends.

  Those early days of their relationship had been a careful negotiation, but never had things turned bitter between them. There had been no jealousy. They rarely fought. Tension only ever came with his father’s presence in their home, and then he was a shadow over them both.

  They’d even entered into parenthood the way they had entered into their marriage, as partners. When Jane had arrived, she’d increased the love between them. Mary had taken to Jane immediately, too, just as she’d taken to Ned. She became something like a sister to Ned, something between a sister and an aunt to Jane.

  When she was young, Wendy and Ned had carefully instructed Jane to call Mary by the title Cook rather than her name, lest she slip up when Ned’s father was around. It hurt Wendy’s heart to do it, but Mary, for her part, had seemed amused. Alone in their home, Mary had them all in gales of side-splitting laughter with her spot-on impression of Ned’s father. Together, they were happy. A family by choice.

  And even so, through all the years, Wendy held Neverland close and never let a bit of it go. Not to her daughter. Not to her husband. Even now she isn’t certain why. A childish thing, a desire to hold some part of herself in reserve, to control her truth after so many years of lies? Or were her motives worse? Had a tiny part of her left her daughter unguarded, bait, in hopes that Peter would return?

  A sound at the parlor door draws Wendy’s attention. Mary enters carrying a tray laden with tea. She sets it down and sits, and Wendy reaches automatically for the pot, pouring for both of them. It’s a moment before Wendy notices the uncharacteristic straightness of Mary’s posture. The weight of words hangs about her, and Wendy’s stomach clenches even before Mary opens her mouth.

  “This isn’t a good time for this, but there won’t be a good time, really,” Mary says, blunt and forging onward. “A place has recently come up for sale that would be perfect for my shop. I know it isn’t the best time to open up a business, but I’ve saved up most of the money I need, and the location is too perfect to let go. I’ve already spoken to Ned, and he’s agreed to help me talk to the bank to get me a loan for the rest. I’m not officially giving you my notice yet. The place will take a while to get ready, but I just wanted you to know now rather than later. I like to get unpleasant conversations over as quickly as possible.”

  Mary keeps her gaze locked on Wendy’s, her mouth twisting in a wry smile at her last words. Even now, Mary is needling her, and she knows Mary is right—unpleasant conversations are best gotten over with as quickly as possible, rather than leaving them to fester. At the same time, Wendy sees the brave face on the words, the fear behind them. She knew this day would come; it’s long past time, and yet she still can’t help feeling as though another part of her is being ripped away.

  Wendy had been heartbroken enough when earlier this year Mary had expressed her desire to move into a small rented room of her own. She’d come to Ned and Wendy both with her plan, assuring them she could afford the rent and still set aside money to build the life she wanted for herself, everything balanced out. Mary living with them was always meant to be temporary. Wendy understood, of course she did—Mary had never had a life and space of her own, carried by her mother’s marriage across the sea, locked away in an asylum. Now Wendy thinks perhaps Mary had been trying to prepare her for this moment, making her departure by degrees so it would hurt less for both of them.

  “It won’t change anything,” Mary had told her then. “We’re still family.”

  Wendy had struggled to believe it then. She struggles still to believe it now. But once upon a time, she had believed she wouldn’t survive leaving St. Bernadette’s and not seeing Mary every single day. She had survived that, and their relationship had only grown stronger. She will survive this too, and it will be the same. Living apart from them, working apart from them, living her own life fully—it is what Mary deserves. And Wendy trusts that Mary will still choose them, they will choose each other, as they always have. The love that binds them all now will keep them together, always. “Actually,” Mary says, looking down at her hands, “I’ve had the money for a while, but I’ve been a coward.”

  If Mary has been a coward, then Wendy has been a bigger one. She’s leaned on Mary for too long, and if Mary leaned back, it was never as heavily.

  “You’ll be brilliant.” The words come too fast, and Wendy feels tears wanting to rise. “I mean, you taught me to cook, after all. If you can do that, you can do anything.”

  She laughs, or tries, and the sound breaks her. She wipes her eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I’m happy for you, I really am. It’s what you’ve always wanted.”

  Mary sets her cup down, still untouched, and shifts closer, resting her forehead against Wendy’s.

  “This doesn’t change us,” Mary says.

  “No.” Wendy shakes her head slightly. There are tears in Mary’s eyes too. “It doesn’t.”

  That’s what happens when you grow up. Wendy hears her own words to Peter come back to her, mockingly, and she almost laughs again, a bitter, broken sound.

  “Hey.” Mary’s voice is soft; she nudges Wendy’s forehead with her own.

  The years drop away and they’re back at St. Bernadette’s. Everything is still in front of Wendy, and for a moment, she almost wishes she could go back. How was she to know that motherhood, that loving someone as much as she loves Jane, Mary, Ned, would be far worse than anything the asylum could ever offer?

  “What if she hates me forever?” Wendy asks. It isn’t where she meant to begin, but the words come out anyway.

  “You’re her mother,” Mary answers, no answer at all.

  When Wendy doesn’t respond, Mary dr
aws back, rolling her eyes.

  “You keep on loving her and you keep on fighting for her, because that’s what mothers do.”

  Wendy’s skin warms, as surely as if she’d been slapped. Mary knows Jane nearly every bit as well as Wendy and Ned, maybe in some ways better. She’s been there since the beginning, during those first sleepless nights as Wendy paced the floor with the new weight of Jane against her shoulder, exhausted and singing lullabies. She heated milk on the stove for them both, and whispered stories when Wendy’s own voice gave out—the same stories she used to tell in St. Bernadette’s, of Blood Clot Boy and the Bear Woman and the Sacred Otter.

  Wendy remembers how Mary’s eyes shone. Did Mary think of her own mother when she told them, or of her baby sister who had died as she was being born? If anyone knows what Wendy should do now, how to find the way through the rift she’s created between herself and Jane, it’s Mary.

  Keep on loving her. It’s that simple, and that complicated. Love. Fight. Never back down. It’s time for her to grow up, truly. It’s time to fight for Jane, for Ned, for Mary, even for Michael and John. She will not give up until she’s found a way to make things right, undo all the hurt she’s caused in Neverland’s name.

  After a moment, Mary lifts a scone filled with cream and jam, holding it to Wendy’s lips.

  “What do you think? I’ve been tinkering with the recipe. I thought maybe instead of just a bakery my place could be a tea shop, too. I could put these on the menu.”

  Despite herself, Wendy takes a bite, not caring that crumbs and a dollop of jam fall onto her skirt. The scone is buttery, melting in her mouth, the jam sweet but not overly so.

  “Perfect.”

  Mary sets the rest of the scone aside with a satisfied smirk.

  If you had your choice in leaving, where would you go? Would you go back to Neverland? Mary’s words from years ago, sitting under the tree on St. Bernadette’s lawn, return to Wendy. She’d called Neverland a lie then. She thinks of Timothy’s broken body, of Peter curled beneath the weight of his shadow. The door is closed to her, but if it remained open, with the truth of it laid bare, would she return? She’d claimed to want that truth, but perhaps Neverland was better off broken, better off without her interference. She’d put it back together, but too late to save the mermaids, to save Tiger Lily. She’d stitched the pieces one to the other, but that’s not the same as healed, or whole.