Wendy remembers holding her breath, feeling herself on the edge of tears. But Michael had looked at her, and offered a pained smile. Her brother, a stranger, both wrapped in one skin. She’d almost gone to her knees to take his hands in her wet and dripping ones to beg his forgiveness. But fear had locked her in place, and she’d remained still, letting her hands drip, letting the shards of the broken saucer lie.
“I want to remember,” he’d said, making her heart stutter.
Her first irrational thought was that he meant Neverland. Even then, after everything, after St. Bernadette’s, after the hurt she’d done to him that had sent her there, it was where her mind turned first. But he meant the war, his own scar, just as Neverland was hers.
“Some men, all they want is to forget, but I want to remember.” His hands trembled, one gripping a dishrag, the other the head of the cane he still used.
His wounded leg shook too, a sign of fatigue, but she knew his pride would make him refuse if she offered him a chair. His lost expression implored her, a child again, waking from a bad dream in the nursery and asking her to make it better.
“I want to remember every bit of it,” he’d told her. “But the harder I try to hold on, the more things slip away. I forget faces, names, and it’s like I’m killing them all over again. They’re dying, and there’s nothing I can do to save them. Then there are other times when all I can do is remember and it’s too much. I don’t want it.”
Michael raised the hand holding the dishrag, pressing it to his head, and Wendy could only imagine what horrors unfurled within the private theater of his mind. The world gone orange and black and red in an explosion, shrapnel and flame blooming like some great, terrible flower, men screaming and bleeding and dying.
“I survived. It’s my duty to remember. I owe it to the men who died, but they run through my hands and I can’t hold on.”
He’d lowered his hand; tears stood out in his eyes, hovering on his lashes without falling. Wendy had never seen him look so old and so young all at the same time.
“How do you remember, Wendy? How do you hold on?” It was the closest he’d ever come to asking her about Neverland, the only hint she’d ever seen that part of him might remember. He’d looked at her, heartbroken, breaking her heart in turn; he’d been her brother again, reaching out to her, and she’d had no answers. All she could do was put her arms around him, resting her hands against his back and leaving damp patches on his shirt.
He’d shuddered in her embrace, then gone stiff. When they stepped apart, it was as though they were strangers again. He’d retreated, closing himself off, and they’d gone back to silently washing dishes. Only Wendy had done it with tears running down to the point of her chin.
Wendy pushes herself away from the wall, feeling worn-through and thin, even more wrung out than before. She wants to be done with the onslaught of memories. They’re of all the wrong things, not the thing putting her, putting Jane, in danger here and now.
The sword bumps at her hip as she climbs back into the sunlight. The bowl of the sky is pale blue, like the shell of a robin’s egg. She imagines Hook and his pirates falling upward into that infinite blue. Soaring. Vanishing.
A new fear grips her. At her bedroom window, she was able to hold off doubt, but now with all the grief weighing her down, she feels utterly rooted in Neverland’s soil. There isn’t even a sliver of room for happy thoughts in her mind. If she tried now, could she fly? And if not, when she finds Jane, how on earth will she get them home?
THE HUNT
She turns the arrowhead over and over, trying to puzzle out its meaning and coming up with nothing. Something about it nags at her, familiar yet wrong. Like the moon shining over Neverland, the arrowhead is a little too perfect to be real. The flint shines against her palm, each chip knocked from its edge precise, and every one exactly the same shape and size.
A sound reaches her, soft and regular, and it’s a moment before she picks it out as crying, and not just another insect or a night bird. She tucks the arrowhead into the sleeve of her nightgown, warm between the fabric and her skin, and creeps to the edge of the platform, looking for the source of the crying. It isn’t quite dawn. The world is pearly gray and all around her, boys sleep. Like this—some curled on the ground, some draped in trees like big jungle cats—they look younger than they did in the harsh shadows cast by the moonlight. Even Arthur. Peter is the only one she can’t see. She pictures him roosted in the top of a tree like a wild bird.
The scene in the camp reminds her of pictures in her father’s books, black-and-white drawings of ancient ruins in far-off places. She’d hoped to visit those places someday, but now that she’s farther from home than she’s ever been, home is the only place she wants to be. The ache of missing it reaches for her, a palpable thing. The familiar scent of tobacco from the pipe her papa indulges in on special occasions. The smells of baking from the kitchen. Her mother, humming softly, unaware that anyone is listening. Even the ragged meow of the cat who comes to the kitchen door begging for scraps,
