Husband and wife. Of one flesh. Is this what it means to be joined in marriage, truly? From now on, she must carry Ned’s burdens too, as well as her own. If Mary were truly part of their family, perhaps… No, she pushes the thoughts down again. It is too much, too soon.
She focuses instead on Mary’s question, thinking how to answer it. Ned. Wendy conjures up his face, his kind eyes, his blushing stammer. At times, it barely makes itself known in his speech. Other times, usually when his father is around or a visit is imminent, he can scarcely get out his words.
Wendy thinks of the day they met, how he could barely look at her. And she herself, newly walked out of this place, practically new to the world. Can it really be less than a year? It seems like a lifetime ago.
Wendy looks up and finds Mary watching her patiently. She aches, the urge to speak and remain silent warring in her. If she could simply communicate with a look and have Mary understand everything that she is, everything she and Ned are together, it would be so much simpler.
“I… I think I might come to love him in time, but it’s…” Wendy hesitates; the words refuse to come easily. She understands Ned, at least in part. It is her own piece of the puzzle Wendy now struggles to understand.
On their wedding night, instead of coming to her as a husband, Ned had silently handed Wendy a bundle of letters. The edges of some had been burned, the paper frail and flaking and smelling of ash.
“I barely managed to save them,” he’d told her. She’d looked at him, questioning, but he’d only said, “You should know, and understand who it is you’ve married.”
He’d moved toward the window, leaving her to sit on their marriage bed with the letters in her lap. She’d felt a moment of relief, uncertain how things would be between them once they were wed, uncertain she wanted him as a husband when she’d barely begun to know him as a friend. Her own emotions had been a complicated knot settled in her stomach, where Ned’s had been stark on his face—sorrow and pain, hope and the willingness to trust braided together into one.
She lifted the first letter, unfolding it with care. She’d read, and Ned had watched her, pacing occasionally, and occasionally still, restless fear shivering beneath his skin. The letters were written by Ned, from the trenches in Verdun, addressed to someone named Henry. As the letters named shared memories, Wendy came to understand Henry had been a school friend of Ned’s. And reading on, in wonder, she had learned how time had transformed Henry and Ned into something else, something far more than friends.
Periodically, Wendy had looked up to see Ned almost mouthing silently, as if reading along with her words etched on his heart.
“My father tried to burn them,” Ned said as she set the last letter down.
The reading had left Wendy feeling wrung out. It had already been late when they’d entered the bedroom and now, beyond the windows, dawn had already begun to blush the edges of the sky. She’d read the whole night through.
“Were they never sent?” Wendy’s heart had ached, thinking of Ned—a man she barely knew then—so lost in love. She could scarcely imagine how it must have been for him, love twisted into a source of shame, forced to bury his secret, never allowed to simply be.
“They were sent. Henry wrote letters in return.” Ned’s voice had broken then, not his accustomed stutter, but something more raw and wounded. He hadn’t looked at her but out at the rising sun. “Those letters, his letters, I burned myself. To keep them safe. Henry… passed away recently. Complications from pneumonia. His sister returned these letters to me. I don’t know if she ever read them, but my father found the package and…”
Ned shrugged, an inelegant and pained motion, bringing his shoulders up in bony defense against the world. But when he’d spoken Henry’s name, when he’d told Wendy the truth of him, Ned hadn’t stuttered at all.
In that moment, Wendy had understood his father’s desperation for Ned to marry, why Ned had agreed to marry a woman like her, sight unseen. She’d thanked him for his secret, and promised to keep it. In return, over the next several days, she’d given him St. Bernadette’s, and everything that had happened to her there. While she’d maintained the fiction of the Spanish flu with Ned’s father, she had given Ned as much of the truth as she could—Jamieson and Dr. Harrington, the tub of ice water and her shaved scalp. She’d given him everything except what had sent her there in the first place. She’d given him everything except Neverland, and Peter, saying only that there had been a time in her life when she couldn’t tell truth from made-up stories, but all of that was behind her now.
In the days following, they’d spoken, shyly at first, and then more boldly. Over breakfast, over tea, Ned had confessed to wanting a child of his own someday, and Wendy had felt a fluttering response between her belly and her chest. She’d never truly thought on the possibility before of being a mother for real, but in that moment, she’d felt a blooming of hope. Since their wedding day, they’d kept the promise made to each other on the day they met; they’d become friends. They are husband and wife as well, but not in a way the rest of the world might understand.
“Would you be happier with a wife of your own instead?” Mary’s voice is guileless, simple, un-judging curiosity in the tilt of her head and her watching eyes as Wendy’s head snaps up at the question.
The question is so close to her thoughts,
