“No.” Mary snaps her answer. The wet-pine of her eyes looks darker still, the black at their center going almost all the way to the edges to swallow up the ring of brown.
“I don’t want anything from him, and I don’t owe him anything either. We were never family. He isn’t anything to me, and he isn’t worth even a moment of my time.”
Mary’s grip tightens, matching the vehemence of her words. It’s a different kind of anger than she’s seen in Mary before, and it makes her wonder whether Mary is trying to convince herself with her words. The man who married her mother means nothing to her, and yet he is a wound that hasn’t entirely healed.
“I wouldn’t go back to Canada either.” Mary answers Wendy’s unspoken question, and relief stings her eyes. She swallows hard as Mary goes on. “I don’t… My people are there, but I don’t know them, not really. I was so young when I left. I don’t know where I belong.”
Wendy almost shouts here, with me, but she holds her tongue. It isn’t her place to presume, no matter how much she aches at the thought of leaving Mary behind, going out into the world to marry a man she doesn’t even know.
“I’d like to travel,” Mary continues, “but it isn’t easy.”
Mary lifts their clasped hands; the sun dapples through the tree overhead and hits the contrast in their skin, speaking for her. Mary lowers her head, as if afraid her hope will betray her if she speaks too loud.
“Ever since I’ve been working in the kitchens here I’ve started to think that I would like to have a little bakery, my own shop, but…”
Mary raises their clasped hands again, the same answer, and it strikes Wendy that Mary doesn’t expect to ever leave; she expects to grow old and die without ever seeing the world outside the walls of St. Bernadette’s again. Wendy’s pulse snags on hurt, a vicious anger rising through her. The world of men and their rules, forever saying what women—especially women who look like Mary—can and cannot do.
The unfairness presses on Wendy’s skin, and her body feels too small to contain all the injustice.
“Are you really going to do it?” Mary asks after a moment of silence.
“Get married? I suppose.” With her free hand, Wendy plucks at her sleeve, trying to imagine herself clad in a wedding gown. “Play pretend. Play wife and mother.” Wendy tries to smile, and it hurts, a deep ache that goes all the way through her. “It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.”
* * *
“Wendy.” Tiger Lily touches her own throat when she speaks, as if speaking physically pains her. Her voice is a cold wind blowing from a lonely place. It hurts to hear it, and Wendy’s name in her mouth is a terrible thing.
For a moment, Wendy can only stare, wanting to undo everything done to Tiger Lily and bring her back to the girl she remembers. Tiger Lily’s twig-hard fingers brush Wendy’s cheek. They’re almost bone, and Wendy has to fight not to flinch away from the touch. The wonder in Tiger Lily’s eyes— that is real, that is human, despite the ruin of her flesh, and Wendy keeps her gaze there as if she could forget the rest of what Tiger Lily has become.
“I started to think I dreamed you.” The words scratch, and Wendy touches her own throat reflexively. “The girl from the other side of the stars.”
Tiger Lily’s lips crack when she smiles, but there’s no blood. A lump rises in Wendy’s throat, and she can’t swallow it down. Tiger Lily, trapped here while Wendy was locked behind St. Bernadette’s walls; had the rest of Neverland forgotten so that Tiger Lily been doubted and disbelieved too, told Wendy was only a story or a dream?
“But you’re here now,” Tiger Lily says.
“I’m here.” Wendy makes herself fold her arms around Tiger Lily again, feeling her hollowness. She is skin wrapped around bone, with nothing else inside.
“What happened?” Wendy draws back, wiping at her cheeks.
“Peter.” Tiger Lily spreads her arms, a dry, rustling sound, and her lips crack again, her expression grim this time.
Peter, of course, Peter. Wendy knew before she asked. Anger and guilt war inside her. If she’d stayed, she could have stopped this. She could have saved Tiger Lily and the mermaids.
“Don’t,” Tiger Lily says, as if reading Wendy’s thoughts. “Don’t blame yourself for him.”
Wendy lets out a breath, and a small measure of the tension inside her unwinds. She wants to believe what Tiger Lily says is right, and yet blaming herself feels like the only useful thing she can do. Peter is a breaking storm, too vast a target for her rage, leaving only herself in his stead.
“Come,” Tiger Lily says, jostling Wendy from her thoughts. “We’ll talk.”
Tiger Lily tilts her head, a gesture for Wendy to follow. As she does, Wendy glances at the trees, wondering suddenly whether there are eyes and ears listening. The birds could be spies for Peter, even the leaves themselves, for all she knows. The creeping feeling of being haunted returns, even though the source is different this time.
Tiger Lily leads her between narrow-trunked trees, ducking beneath branches and looped vines like massive snakes. Her footsteps barely make a sound. When she first saw the trees shake their branches, Wendy had thought of ghosts. Looking at Tiger Lily now, she wonders whether she was truly wrong.
Tiger Lily bends to lift a heavy section of ropy vines, revealing the entrance to a cave. Just one of the many cracks and fissures and secret tunnels riddling Neverland. Wendy remembers Tiger Lily telling her once it was possible to travel all the way across the island and never see the sun, like a whole second Neverland buried underground.
Wendy ducks through the entrance, and as she does, the ground shudders, a distant rumble of thunder. Glancing
