She stops just short of the table and John rises to meet her. His expression is practiced, a veneer of calm plastered over nerves. In reality, there is nothing easy about him at all. Wendy makes a quick inventory of all the things hidden inside her clothes— buttons, a length of thread, a single page from a newspaper, folded and folded again into a long strip running around her hem. The litany calms her, but she doesn’t return John’s smile.
He kisses her cheek, motioning for her to sit. He’s spent years accusing her of playing make-believe, but here he is acting as though this is an ordinary social visit, as though he’s simply a brother visiting his sister at home.
Wendy keeps her back stiff as she sits. Let John be the one to break the silence. She can see the words piled up behind his pained smile. It gives her a small amount of pleasure, but it’s a scant comfort. The terrible truth of it is, she could walk out the gate with him. All she has to do is lie. Tell John and Dr. Harrington what they want to hear. That Neverland doesn’t exist, that it’s all a story she made up. All she has to do is say she’s sorry and promise never to speak of it again.
“Tea?” John lifts the pot, holding it poised over her cup.
“Please.”
“Two lumps. I remember.” His expression softens.
She wants to be angry with him, but his smile disarms her. Light slants through the leaves, catching his hair, burnishing his glasses, and he is only her brother again, not one of her captors. Buried deep behind his eyes is the ghost of the boy who flew with her, who whooped and hollered at Peter’s side, who played at war and follow the leader.
Wendy opens her mouth and closes it again, searching her mind for something safe to say. If she asks where that little boy went, if any part of him remembers, it will only cause disappointment to crowd his expression.
Behind the shine of his glasses, faint crow’s feet line his skin, and the sight of them takes her by surprise. When did he grow up? When did she? She was so determined to hold onto the boy John was—the one who flew with her through the stars—that she utterly missed it.
This John simply appeared before her one day, not a boy but a man, full of demands about her behavior. It strikes Wendy—even though he’s her brother, she barely knows anything about him. There’s nothing she can ask him about without looking like a fool. Who are his friends? Does he have a sweetheart? Does he hope to marry one day?
He has mentioned important meetings in the past, usually as his excuse for not staying long. The first time he visited her, months after leaving her here, he mentioned a business opportunity, something to do with importing goods from all around the world to sell in England, but he’d never mentioned it again. When she’d asked, his face had grown pinched, drawn with shadows, and in a clipped tone he’d told her that matters of business were not a woman’s concern. She wonders now, did the investment he made go badly for him? Is it money that troubles him, worrying about paying for her care here, and keeping the house they grew up in?
Guilt and fear needle her. Lost for what to say, Wendy chooses silence. She folds her hands in her lap and watches John pour tea, add sugar, stir, and precisely set the spoon aside. His movements are careful, as though the entire world around him is breakable, not just her. There’s a touch of gray in his hair, just above his ears to go with the lines at the corner of his eyes. She thinks of his arms around her, holding her back as she screamed, clawing and trying to get her hands on another plate to smash. There’d been no gray in his hair then, but she can’t miss it now that she’s seen it, even though he’s younger than her.
All at once she sees it, how he aged so quickly and she never noticed. Her heart turns over in her chest. She hasn’t been a big sister to him since they came home from Neverland, not the way she should have been. The weight of their parents’ deaths fell upon him more squarely than it did on her. The weight of her, resting on John’s shoulders on top of it. He had to grow up and put Neverland aside. He had no choice.
And what of her? She’d had no business concerns to occupy herself with like John. Unlike Michael, she could not go to war. As a woman, what could she choose? Only marriage, only motherhood, and she’d had enough of playing mother in Neverland. The thought of being a wife—it had frightened her in a way she couldn’t say. John had hinted at it, more than once, before St. Bernadette’s. He had even tried to engineer a chance meeting, inviting a young man to the house as if he had no idea Wendy would be there, and inviting them both to sit down for tea.
He’d meant well, she knows that much. It hadn’t only been wanting to get his troublesome sister off his hands; she’s certain he genuinely expected her to be happy at the prospect. What woman wouldn’t want to marry, after all? But Wendy had found herself stunned to silence by the very idea, terrified and angry at once. She’d barely spoken a single word to the man, stretching awkward silences through the room until the young man had taken on the look of a frightened animal, desperate to flee, and John had finally admitted defeat.
If growing up meant marrying, then of course she would cling to Neverland all the harder, refusing to let go.
She sees the weight of
