There are husbands and wives, she knows, who barely speak, inhabiting separate realms in their households. She and Ned have learned to be partners. Friends. Her father-in-law would be scandalized to know that some of the ideas his son brings to him for their business originate with Wendy. He might drop dead on the spot if he knew Ned takes Mary’s advice as well. If he could see them sitting down to meals all together, or the private jokes Ned and Mary share that even Wendy has no part of…
The thought makes Wendy’s eyes sting, and she blinks rapidly. More secrets. It’s emblematic of her life, it seems. Truths kept from her father-in-law—working side by side with Mary in the privacy of their home, calling her Cook and treating her as a servant under the eyes of anyone else. Teaching Jane to call her Cook as well lest she slip up, no matter how much it hurts Wendy to do so.
And what of Michael and John? Is her reconciliation with them as much of a half-truth as her life with Ned? The breeze blowing from the cream-colored ocean carries a chill suddenly, nipping at her, and Wendy pulls her shawl closer. If John and Michael could return here, would they be happy? Would things be different between the three of them, all the weight of the intervening years melting from their shoulders? Could Michael laugh again, the ghosts slipping from his eyes? Might his shattered leg even heal, letting him run again the way he had as a boy? Might John finally smile without lines of worry crinkling at the corner of his mouth and across his brow?
Wendy thinks of Elizabeth, John’s young bride, impending motherhood just beginning to show in the slight curve of her belly and the glow of her skin. She’s seen the adoration in her sister-in-law’s eyes when she looks at John, but worry still shadows John’s brow. What if he could bring his child here, hold his or her hands as they splashed together in the tide?
The impossible simplicity of it hurts. Neverland isn’t what she once believed it to be, an escape, a cure for all ills. As children, they ran away here without even any troubles to escape from, and wasn’t it Neverland itself that left her scarred? The memory she couldn’t shake that caused the rift between herself and her brothers in the first place? And now it’s put her daughter in danger.
Wendy shakes herself. She’s been stalling, putting off her search. What if she can’t find Jane? What if Neverland keeps her hidden? Or what if she finds her and it’s too late? There’s a pull to this place, an allure Wendy can’t fully explain. It’s why even when she chafed under Peter’s rules, she longed to stay forever. Peter had made it easy to forget so many things—his unfair rules, the small cruelties she’d witnessed among the boys, even her home. There were times with Peter when London felt like a distant dream, when returning to her parents felt like the lie, and Neverland where she truly belonged. Even now, she feels the subtle pull, the way she’d wanted to run on the sand and forget everything else, even her mission to save Jane. What will Neverland do to her daughter? What if Jane forgets her, forgets Ned, forgets herself? What if when Wendy brings her home, Jane sickens the way Wendy herself did as a child, rages against London as her home, breaks her bones insisting she can fly?
Wendy should have spent every night arming her daughter against the day Neverland came for her instead of telling her half-truths couched as fairy tales.
She shades her eyes, peering down the curving length of beach. Just before the land dips out of sight, the prow of a ship juts up toward the sky, the angle of it all wrong. Behind her, a spire of rock rises from the trees, which are a scatter of deciduous, conifer, and tropical all mixed together. Above the trees, it seems for a moment that a ribbon of darkness drifts against the sky. Wendy squints, trying to see better. A murmuration of starlings? No. Smoke. Like something at the center of the island burning.
A faint memory of Peter promising to show her something, a secret, holding that promise like the sweet, crisp perfection of an apple, just beyond her reach. He would show her, as long as she followed his rules. Had he ever, or had the promise only been another of his lies?
Looking again, Wendy can no longer see whatever it was she thought she saw. Smoke, dissipated now, like a flock of birds moving on. Like something alive.
Wendy lets her hand fall to her side, pushing the unsettling thought from her mind and focusing on the trees again. If Jane were here beside her now, she would point out the difference in leaves and bark, sharing facts Wendy would never know if her daughter didn’t tell her. She aches for Jane’s explanations, her ordered world, and scrubs a hand over her face, trying to focus.
She should be able to cut through the woods here and come out at the sheltered lagoon on the other side of the island. Unless everything has changed since she’s been gone, Peter erasing the map of Neverland and writing it over again.
Wendy retrieves the rolled stockings from the toes of her boots and pulls them on over the sand-grit clinging to her soles. She shoves her feet into her boots, and turns her back on the water. Birds chatter as she steps beneath the trees, their voices subdued. Do they recognize her?
