“Let’s see, then.” Wendy carefully peels Roger’s hand away from the bloodless wound. She wraps the strip of cloth around the spot he indicated, careful to be gentle, and ties a knot at Roger’s shoulder.
“Do you like it here?” The question pops into her mouth as she works, surprising her. It feels daring.
“Yeah. It’s brilliant!” Roger grins, the gap between his teeth looking even wider. “It’s all games and no bedtime or vegetables.”
Done with the knot, Wendy lets her hands fall to her sides.
“What about before? When you… When you were with your mother and father?”
“Didn’t have any.”
“No parents?”
“I don’t think so.” Roger shrugs, but a frown carves lines around the corners of his mouth like he’s trying to remember something. She wants to ask who made him eat his vegetables or set his bedtime if he had no parents, but the line forming between his brows stops her. She imagines him like a cup, balanced on the edge of a table. If she tips him too far, he’ll shatter.
“Am I all fixed up?” His voice is hopeful and troubled all at once. Mostly, Wendy thinks, he just wants to get away from her.
“Yes. All healed. Run along.” She waves him toward the door, watching as he bounds off, back into the war.
Over the course of the war, she sees every boy at least once, all except Peter, because Peter always wins. Later, when the war is done and they’ve had supper, Peter sits beside her on one of the logs circled around the fire and nudges her with his shoulder.
“Are you terribly cross at me, Wendy?”
“I suppose.” Wendy doesn’t look at him.
Mostly, she’s tired. She asked every boy who came into the tent some variation of the questions she asked Roger, and their answers were all the same. The only ones she didn’t ask were John and Michael. What if she already found forgetting in their eyes? What if John and Michael couldn’t remember their parents? She’s already found that if she doesn’t concentrate, she starts to forget home, or ever being any place other than here. So she didn’t dare ask, afraid of what the answer would be.
“Come with me.” Peter seizes her hand suddenly, startling her and pulling her to her feet. He grins at her, the glint in his eyes promising adventure, and just like that, she’s forgiven him, wanting to follow him wherever he might go. “I promised you a secret and I’ll show you now since you were so good about fixing all my soldiers up. It’s a really good secret, too. I’ve never showed it to anyone before.”
NEVERLAND – NOW
Wendy braces herself and crawls inside the torn ship. Despite knowing it to be grounded in sand, she half expects the deck to sway beneath her, timbers creaking as Hook leans over her, his posture designed to intimidate. She can’t help straining after the sound of shouting voices, the lines groaning, and the sails snapping in the wind. The other half of her expects skeletons like the bones littering the lagoon, but the ship is eerily empty, eerily still.
The ship’s interior is largely intact, only tilted askew. The mermaids in the lagoon, as horrible as their deaths are, at least those are deaths Wendy can understand. Here, it’s as though she can feel the missing crew moving around her, as though at any moment one of Hook’s pirates might brush against her sleeve hurrying from one end of the deck to the other. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, not the kind that haunt houses and ships. Yet, as a girl she saw an impossible monster with dark mottled skin and slavering jaws rise from the waves to snap at Hook’s remaining hand. She’s met mermaids; she can fly. So why not ghosts, too?
If Hook were here, would he still seem a villain to her eyes? As a child, she’d failed to see the truth of Peter, or even consider there might be more to him than his games and bright smiles. Had she misjudged his greatest enemy as well? Might she see a flicker of desperation in Hook’s eyes? Fear? Wendy can only imagine what his life in Neverland must have been, a grown man trapped by the whims of an impetuous child, as subject to Peter’s quicksilver moods as the tides and the winds and the weather.
Wendy tests her footing on the canted deck. The boards complain, but her foot does not go plunging through. How many years has the ship lain baking in the sun, all the moisture sucked dry, as though it always belonged on the sand and never upon the sea? The last time she was here, she and John and Michael spent most of their time tied to the main mast, until Peter saved them. She never saw this part of the ship back then. She has no idea what a real pirate ship might look like, but now that she’s here, she takes in Peter’s idea of one. The remains of tangled sleeping nets hang from the ceiling in one narrow room. In what must have been the galley, she finds overturned crates and emptied barrels. And in every space she crawls through, the pervasive sense of haunting remains, of being watched and yet utterly alone.
Finally, at the ship’s prow, she finds a large cabin that must have belonged to Hook. Shreds of rich brocade—dark like new blood—hang from the railing above a narrow bed. There’s a writing desk, overturned and smashed against one wall. A sea chest thrown open, its contents scattered around the room. The frame of a full-length mirror still holds shards of silvered glass. They glint dully in light slanting in through a window that once looked out to sea and now points toward the sky.
The heavy, warped glass distorts the light, turning it a sick-yellow color, like weak tea. A shadow passes in front of the glass, flickering through the shard of mirror
