Wendy tries to picture the captain alone in his cabin, head heavy, breathing out smoke. The wavering light of a candle would make his shadow tremble as he tried to forget, tried to dream, tried to sleep. Wendy passes her gaze over the cabin walls again. The room seems smaller than when she entered, the air heavy, tainted and close. Redolent with ghosts. She can’t stay here.
As Wendy climbs out of the captain’s cabin, she moves with less caution. What if Hook never belonged here either, as much Peter’s captive as Wendy and her brothers were his? Could he have been an actual sea captain once, a merchant, a soldier with a whole life beyond Neverland? If Hook had come from somewhere else, a place like her own England with real war and death, would this place have seemed like a paradise to him at first? Or would it have seemed a mockery of the real world with its violence and wars?
It had certainly felt like a paradise to Wendy’s own young eyes even though she hadn’t been escaping anything. She and John and Michael had been happy, with parents who loved them. The terrible things hadn’t come until later—their parents’ deaths, St. Bernadette’s, the war. If Peter had given Jane a choice, rather than simply snatching her hand, would she have flown away as easily as Wendy, Michael, and John?
Even now, she remembers clearly—there wasn’t a moment of hesitation. Peter held out his hand, and Wendy took it, Michael and John at her heels. She hadn’t spared a thought for consequences, the way her mother would feel, whether her brothers might be in danger. It had all been a grand adventure, a game, just like Peter and his boys playing at war.
She remembers the day Michael, just after his eighteenth birthday, but still very much a boy, returned to the house, papers in hand, to tell Wendy and John he had enlisted and was going to war for real. There’d been a shine in his eyes, a kind of fever Wendy couldn’t understand. Had the war too seemed like a grand adventure? It was how most people had spoken of it early on; a lark, an assured victory, and certain to be over by Christmas.
But the war had already been going on for almost a year by then, and still Michael had chosen to go. And then the reality had come for all of them, and boys like Michael most of all. While he lay in those mud-filled trenches, did he ever think of Peter’s games, and how little they prepared him for the true horrors he’d find there? She’d heard Dr. Harrington remark to John once how lucky Michael had been to come home at all when so many didn’t. But one look at her baby brother, even now, is enough to make Wendy question whether Michael himself felt the same. He’d come home broken in a way no bandages, medicine, or stitching could fix.
When he’d first returned home from war, Wendy had never understood why Michael had continued to deny Neverland so vehemently. Wouldn’t he have wanted to cling to it as an escape, a shield, the way she used it later in the asylum? Now she understands perfectly well, a realization she should have come to far sooner. Why wouldn’t Michael continue to deny Neverland? Nothing here ever meant anything. The boys run through with stick swords stood right back up again and rejoined the battle. All she had to do was tie make-believe bandages around bloodless, invisible wounds, and they were good as new. Holding that truth alongside the reality of real war would have been like rubbing salt into a wound. Not just a lie, but a mockery of everything Michael had seen.
Of course Neverland wouldn’t have been a balm for Michael. He’d gone deeper into the real world than either she or John, and he’d seen all the evil it had to offer. The boys that would never grow up in his world weren’t magic-touched, they were simply rotting in their graves.
Wendy lets the ship take her weight, unsteady in a way that has nothing to do with the canted deck. The memories drag at her, the heaviness making her feel as though she’s been trapped in the ship for hours, always climbing and never emerging. Did Michael feel the same in the trenches, hiking miles in the mud and always waiting for enemy fire or bombs to fall?
She knows so little of what he suffered there, only the aftermath, only the pain, but none of the specific details. Ned and Michael speak of the war sometimes, making a show of playing at cards, but rarely glancing at their hands. She’s glad her brother and husband have each other. It used to hurt her—selfishly— that Michael could not speak to her as well.
But then, what had she ever done to make him trust her enough to speak his pain? All those times she’d thrown his truth back in his face, demanding he remember Neverland? Why would he ever want to confide in her, after everything she put him through?
He’d surprised her recently though. John, his then-fiancée Elizabeth, and Michael had all come for tea, while Ned had been out with his father and Jane. Mary had taken the day off, though thankfully she’d left the kitchen well stocked with scones, which Wendy surely would have burned. Afterward, Michael had offered to help her do the washing up, taking her by surprise. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d been alone together, and she’d been almost afraid, but she’d accepted Michael’s offer.
Everything felt fragile and uneasy, despite the warmth of the kitchen. Wendy had been on edge, feeling like everything would shatter around her with the slightest wrong movement, remembering broken
