She pushes a lock of hair—sticky with salt and tangled with flight—behind her ear. Sunrise paints the waves a creamy orange-gold, too perfect to be real. The air is sweeter here, like ripened peaches warmed on a window sill, or hot, fragrant tea on a cold day. She breathes deep, the salt-tang invigorating her, carrying no hint of rotten fish and green weeds the way it would back at home.
Home. The word stops her. As she leapt from the window and into the sky, she had thought of herself as going home. But isn’t home the life she’s built with Jane and Ned? With Mary? There was a time she would have given anything to be back here, but she isn’t the child Peter stole anymore. That time is long gone. Or it should be.
She knows the pride of seeing Jane take her first step, watching her grow and learn new things every day. She knows the warmth of Ned’s hands in hers on their wedding day, and the feel of Mary’s head resting against her shoulder. She knows what it is to have her brother look at her with respect instead of fear, not like she’s a child about to break something, or a wild animal to be caged. She fought hard for the life she has now. How could this place ever be home?
Yet her blood hushes as the tide hushes, the rhythm of her pulse matched to the waves lapping the shore. She cannot deny part of her still belongs here, the part that raged against John, Michael, St. Bernadette’s, and Dr. Harrington. The part that refused to accept their truths in place of her own. Neverland is as much stitched to the fabric of her being as London. She cannot belong to one place or the other, but both together, a thread stretched between worlds.
Wendy feels it—a thrum along the length of her, the tension anchoring her both here and there. She’s always been divided, since the moment she landed on this beach twenty-seven years ago, since the moment she arrived back into the nursery in her parents’ home.
Is that why she was so sick when she first returned home? Her body rebelling, as if a piece of her had been cut away, a feverish infection come to rest in its place?
She can’t help but wonder—what would it be like if she’d stayed? If, like Peter, she’d refused to grow up? She could have spent a lifetime breathing this air. Running and jumping and flying. She would never have known the horrors of St. Bernadette’s. And she never would have known the new weight of Jane in her arms, rocking her to sleep and murmuring lullabies.
Her pulse falls out of time with the tide, beating a more complicated rhythm—half love, half fear. Wendy unlaces her boots, strips off her stockings, and steps gingerly onto the sand. It’s cool against her soles, just the right firmness for building sandcastles. This is the place her heart belongs; this is the place that stole her daughter away.
The first time she was here, everything seemed uncomplicated. And now? Is this what growing up means, the thing that terrifies Peter so? As a child she only saw bright colors, pure sunlight, or utter dark. All of Neverland is built around those stark contrasts—the sun becoming the moon in the blink of an eye, the sharp demarcation between beach and forest, Hook and his pirates versus Peter and his boys.
A tremor passes through her, and for a moment Wendy wants that surety again, the world flattened to black and white, right and wrong. She has the urge to turn a cartwheel on the sand, pound her feet along the line of surf and let the years fall away as she runs. Instead, she wiggles her toes, burrowing them deep before spreading her arms wide and twirling. Her shawl flares, the trees and sky, the ocean and the shore, blurring into one.
When she stops, she’s dizzy. The waves tumble smoothed stones and leave behind a delicate lace of sea foam. Nothing can ever be as simple as merely good and bad again.
She thinks back on the beach holiday she took with Ned and Jane in Brighton when Jane was six years old. Wendy pictures her daughter running along this shore instead of that one, chasing seabirds, her footprints tracking wildly across the sand. She pictures her pausing to dig for shells, trying to uncover the secret homes of tiny, scuttling crabs. She imagines Ned’s fond smile, his cheeks coloring with a day of wind and sun, Jane’s fingers sticky with melting ice cream as memory and imagination bleed into one. The ache is nearly too much. She should be sharing this moment with them. Her family. Or, she should have shared it with them long ago, the day she agreed to marry Ned, the day her daughter was born.
Even as the ache grows in her like a bruise, she knows Neverland is a lie. This is the ideal of a beach, the tide wild enough for adventure but never so rough as to be a threat; the water never too warm nor too cold. Every tree in Neverland is perfect for climbing, and the stars always make fantastic pictures in the night sky. It’s a world built by a boy to satisfy his every whim. It isn’t real.
Ned and Jane are her true home. She belonged here once upon a time, but they are the life she chose. Every day since leaving St. Bernadette’s, she has chosen them, and she will choose them again now. As much as that long-lost part of her wants to run, to fly, to be utterly free of responsibility, the star she navigates by now is Jane.
Wendy
