Tiger Lily made no move to stop her when she raised her hand, but still Wendy is ashamed. She has to be better than this, better than Peter and his temper-born cruelty.
She forces herself to look at Peter, really look at him. The boy who wanted to show her wonders, who taught her how to fly. Tiger Lily kneels, bracing Peter’s shoulders. Peter’s eyes are so wide that in the blackness of his pupils, Wendy is certain she sees stars. She thinks of the mermaids, dead in their lagoon. She thinks of Peter laughing and holding her hand. There is good and bad in him, just like anyone else, only more extreme.
“Hush, now.” Wendy brushes the hair back from Peter’s forehead. She almost leans to kiss his brow, a mother soothing a child awoken from a bad dream, but stops herself. A small kindness is enough.
She takes the needle and the thread from her pocket. Her hands are remarkably steady. Tiger Lily watches her silently, and it only takes Wendy one try to slip the thread through the needle’s eye. She leaves the rest trailing from the spool. How much will it take to join boy to monster, to make an ancient creature whole again?
The thought is idle. Wendy’s mind doesn’t rebel as much as it should. Here, now, at the end of all things, she is calm, filled with purpose. Peter stiffens, his breath quickening, but neither he nor the shadow resist her when she reaches for it. Touching it is like plunging her hand into icy water. The cold burns, but she’s felt worse. She will survive this too.
Wendy tugs the shadow closer. The weight of a beast so huge should overwhelm her, but it flows over her hands and arms, rippling yet remaining solid. It is everything, and it is nothing at all. A lifetime ago, in the nursery, Wendy remembers how Peter shrieked when the needle first touched his skin. She remembers the moments before she made her first tentative stitch, matching up the ragged ends of the shadow with Peter’s foot, and how it hadn’t seemed to fit at all.
She’d only been a child, and it seemed so natural then, tugging at the strange un-substance, stretching it to fit while Peter waited impatiently. She’d even teased him, asking how a boy could lose a shadow in the first place.
“Oh, lots of ways,” he’d replied. The response she’d taken for airy at the time is unnerving now, and she sees it edged with a smile less coy and more sinister. She thinks, too, of the bones in the cave, and Peter’s dismissal of them being someone. Could he have stolen a shadow from another boy? And if he had, what would that theft do? She imagines a Lost Boy being lost in more than just name, separated from himself and wasting away, unraveling as the shadow Peter had first demanded she sew to his feet did as soon as they arrived in Neverland. How many boys over how many years?
“You’ll be our mother when it’s all done?” Peter had asked, once she’d gotten the shadow to behave, once he’d stopped his whining and begun to watch her work with interest.
Though her stitches were clumsy and uneven, at least it grew easier without his squirming around so, though she’d still had to chide him for fidgeting.
“I suppose.” She’d barely paid attention to the question; it had all seemed a game—a boy who could fly, who appeared at the window in the middle of the night, promising adventure.
“Could you love a boy without a shadow?” The question strikes Wendy now as it didn’t then—again the slyness, the way Peter lowered his lids, his lashes almost touching his cheeks, and looked at her from beneath them.
“I suppose,” she’d answered again, tongue between her teeth, concentrating.
“Because it might come undone again, but if you were our mother you’d have to love me anyway, wouldn’t you? Even if I was bad?”
Had she looked up then, met his eyes? And if she had, what would she have seen? Something like the Peter before her now, frightened but defiant?
“Well, I shall just have to sew it extra tight so that doesn’t happen, won’t I?” Wendy remembers impatience, barely even listening to the words Peter had said, wanting the promised adventures, and not the work of stitching her mother had tried to teach her. If only she’d paid more attention. But how could she have known?
Peter watches her now, wide-eyed. She touches the needle to his skin, and unlike all those years ago, he does nothing but whimper.
Wendy steels herself, then pushes the needle through. As a child, she was innocent of horror, and there was no revulsion at pushing a needle through flesh. It hadn’t seemed strange that a boy and his shadow might become un-joined, and it was the most natural thing in the world to put them back together again. Now, knowing better, she expects her hands to betray her, but they do not. The shadow doesn’t resist her, yearning for the thread, yearning to be whole, its hunger guiding her steady touch.
With the second stitch, she feels the needle in her own skin— Dr. Harrington with his drugs to make her calm, to make her sleep. Trying to convince her Neverland was only a dream. With the third stitch, at last, Peter screams, whipping his head from side to side. Without Wendy having to ask, Tiger Lily bears down, holding him as still as she can.
Tiger Lily’s jaw is set and hard. But Peter. Peter… Tears wet his cheeks, and his trembling is such it’s impossible to keep her stitches straight and even.
Softly, so softly Wendy isn’t even certain Peter will hear, she sings a lullaby. He wanted a mother. At last, she can give him this, if nothing more. What emerges is more breath than song, hitching and broken. She used to sing it to Jane when she woke from bad dreams.
