“Oh, oh, oh!” Rosemary exclaimed, too excited for words. “Can I tell I tell some stories?”
She looked to everyone for an answer, but Gwen deferred to Chief Dark Sun. “Of course. Do you have stories for these redskins?”
“Yes!” Rosemary declared. “I have stories.” She lost no time in telling them. “This is Growling Bear,” she told them, pointing to a large man with a misshapen nose. “He got lost in a cave once and a bear found him so he had to growl so loud it scared it away. And the cave helped him, because it made his growl echo!”
Rosemary ran to the next statue, a gaunt woman. “This is Burning Bird because one time she found a bird that had been on fire and nursed it back to health, like the squirrel we found, Gwen, that ran away when it got better.”
Gwen had forgotten about the sick squirrel they'd kept in a padded box for a week, one long ago spring. In reality, the squirrel had died, but hadn't told Rosemary and she still didn't know. There were a lot of things Rosemary didn't know, and right now that worked to her advantage. She had no preconceptions and no hesitations.
“And this is Pouncing Panther!”
A shifting noise startled Gwen, and she looked over to see Growling Bear's arm reaching up for his face. The strong hand smeared away the clay facade and revealed sharp brown eyes blinking open. His other arm twisted up, struggling to animate, but then smudged more clay off his face. Underneath, a dirty but fleshy person came to life.
Her heart pounding as she witnessed this miracle, Gwen hardly noticed as Rosemary continued to christen the redskin statues. She watched more and more of them starting to move, as if only encased in a thin layer of clay.
They spoke with urgency in their own, gibberish-sounding language while Running Fox and Storm Sounds welcomed them into the world.
Chief Dark Sun watched with satisfaction as his newborn braves began to walk and run around the gorgeous maple tree—its leaves as beautiful and red-brown as the clay he shaped his tribe from.
“Tomorrow,” he announced, “we will fight for Neverland.”
Chapter 14
The afternoon found Gwen brooding alone in the underground home. She felt completely, utterly, and almost comically useless. She couldn't help the children build their traps—she didn't have enough confidence in her command of Neverland's magic. She couldn't assist with digging tunnels or building the sandcastle fortress on the beach. In fact, the children often complained that the work was harder or ran into strange obstacles in her presence. She hadn't even helped Old Willow with stories for the redskins. Gwen was already too old, and she wondered if she shouldn't just fly home and get it over with. She sat on her bed and clutched Jay's sketchpad, its unreliable tally of time etched on the back. Her days in Neverland felt numbered whether the children won their battle or not.
She opened the sketchpad and paged through it from the beginning again, lingering a moment on every picture. She'd almost gone through the entire book, and she turned some of the final pages revealing a still life with fruit, a portrait of a dog, a smudged sketch of a cafe…
She turned one more page, and gasped. Her mind moved fast with its thoughts, like fingers with the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In retrospect, she would never remember in what order she realized these things.
The small boy was Jay, much younger. The older boy must have been his older brother, Rodger. The four people were copied from a family portrait, a photograph Gwen had seen before. She remembered noticing the framed picture on her way to Jay's bedroom during his party, and she had passed it in his house's blue hallways since then.
The man in the portrait was Jay's father, but Gwen knew him from somewhere else.
With a sudden feeling of idiocy, Gwen remembered what Jay had told her the last time she had visited his house. “He’s working a night shift… He works in electrical maintenance. Basically, he gets paid to be a really smart guy who stands around in case something goes wrong.”
The very next night, infiltrating the Anomalous Activity's research facility, Gwen had made something go very wrong for Andrew Hoek. She had known she recognized the engineer who apprehended them. At the time, she hadn't connected his face to the man she'd seen in Jay's family photos.
She wanted to cry, and she didn't even understand why.
Magic attracted magic. Was that why she had pulled Jay into this mess so easily? Did his father track home the same magical residue that Mr. Hoffman had brought home and attracted Peter with? Mindless hypotheticals flooded her, and she wondered what would have happened if only Peter had come a few years sooner. Maybe he would have whisked both her and Jay away to Neverland.
The eleven-year-old Jay in the charcoal portrait looked so cute. Gwen's imagination pained her with the impossible image of a pre-adolescent paradise with Jay. The thought that she might have had enjoyed Neverland with Peter and Jay possessed a toxic allure. She shut it out of her mind, returning to her feeling of hopelessness and uselessness.
No. She would not wallow underground anymore. She might have gotten stuck in all the wrong middle grounds, but that did not make her useless. Thinking of the engineer, she remembered everything he had said about the advance of technology predicated on magic. If adults—full-blown, boring, salaried adults—could make magic work for them, Gwendolyn Hoffman could certainly come up with something. She stuffed Jay's sketchpad away and began raiding the underground home for supplies.
She ransacked room after room, digging through toy chests and sorting through shelves. She found a cardboard shoe box and some markers, which gave her a good start. She discovered a jack-in-the-box, and saw its potential. Breaking it open, she yanked out its spring. She found a plastic
