After a moment, her mother takes Jane’s hand, and Jane allows it. They sit in silence, her mother stroking the back of Jane’s hand. Like the objects in her room seeming strange and familiar at once, her mother seems both close and miles away.
“Why?” It’s the only question Jane can manage, out of all the choices tumbling through her mind, and her mother looks stricken the moment Jane speaks it aloud.
She drops Jane’s hand, and looks up, meeting her eyes. Jane pushes, feeling for just a moment vindictive and cruel. Timothy’s death is her mother’s fault; her mother should know that. And if her mother accepts the blame, if she lets it hurt her, then perhaps some of the ache in Jane’s own chest will ease just a little bit.
“What happened? Why did Timothy die? He wasn’t hurt at all, and then you took Peter away, and…” Jane’s breath hitches. She’s run out of words. If she speaks again, the tears will come, and she’s done with crying. She presses her lips together, holds her mother’s gaze, and waits.
“Oh, Jane.” Her mother reaches as if to touch Jane’s hair, but lets her hand fall.
Even in her anger, Jane regrets the missed contact. She wants to lean into her mother’s hand, be petted and told everything will be okay. Lines at the corners of her mother’s mouth and eyes drag her whole face down, making her look years older than Jane has ever seen her. Jane regrets her question, but she will not take the words back. After so many years of secrets, she has the right to know.
She expects her mother to resist, to put her off, or spin another pretty lie like her stories of the Clever Tailor and the Little White Bird. Instead, her mother folds her hands carefully into her lap and straightens her spine.
“I’m sorry, Jane,” she says. “You deserve the truth, and I always should have given it to you.”
She meets Jane’s gaze. Even in the darkness, Jane sees the gravity in her mother’s expression. She feels it too. Regret, not just for what has passed but what will pass. Tucked up in her bed, Jane is suddenly on the edge of a threshold. Once she passes it, there will be no going back. Her mother is prepared to treat her as an adult, and it hurts her to do so. Is this what Jane wants? She almost opens her mouth to take it back, but she closes it again, presses her lips into a determined line, waiting for her mother to speak.
And she does. She speaks of a night when she was not much older than Jane and a boy came to her window holding a shadow in his hands and asking her to sew it back on. She unfolds a tale Jane can scarcely believe, not for the fantastic idea of traveling to another world, for she’s done that herself, but for what came after. How her mother was disbelieved. Locked away. Punished. All because she refused to deny Peter. When she came out of the place where she was kept, secrets were all her mother knew. Jane hears the pain in her mother’s voice—the places where it grows rough and breaks. She blames herself for Jane being stolen.
It’s too much. Jane is a vessel, overfull, on the point of flooding. Her head aches and she feels displaced—not the way it felt with Peter’s strange, sticky-sweet tea, but as though she’s been crying for hours and it’s left her hollow inside. Only her eyes are dry, burning in the dark as she tries to hold onto everything her mother has told her and make sense of it.
And the words aren’t even done yet. Her mother tells Jane of Peter’s true shadow, of sewing it back on, and making the boy and the monster into one. She tells her of making death in Neverland real.
At last, when her mother has run out of words, she lifts a hand and places it on Jane’s own. Jane doesn’t pull away, she’s too stunned.
“I know I’m asking too much of you, Jane, to take all of this in at once. But you’ve been there. You met Peter. You know.” Her mother’s voice is soft, and there’s a weary slant to her shoulders.
Jane glances toward the window, trying to gauge the position of the moon. How long has her mother been talking? Time has been strange ever since they returned, as though a bit of Neverland’s magic followed her back here. It feels as though Jane only blinked, and the cave in Neverland became her bedroom, as though no time passed at all. It feels as though they were gone for weeks, but she understands that in London, it was only just two days. It doesn’t seem possible, but sometimes the world passes slower here, and sometimes faster—her mother explained that too, with a sad weary smile.
“We should count ourselves lucky, Jane. We didn’t miss too much while we were gone.”
The way her mother says it, Jane knows it isn’t really a matter for smiling over, and she knows her mother knows that too.
“You know, I’ve kept this secret for so long, you’re only the second person I’ve told,” her mother says when all the other words are done.
“Papa?” Jane asks.
Her mother shakes her head, a look of regret crossing her face.
“Mary,” her mother says. “Cook.”
She lifts Jane’s hand, places it palm to palm with her own atop the covers, then presses it again with her other hand, closing Jane’s hand between her own.
“Your papa doesn’t know yet. I plan to tell him very soon, but until then, I would appreciate it if you would keep my secret for a little longer. I know it isn’t fair to ask.”
It seems like her mother will
