“Yes,” she said, although she couldn’t remember it. She knew she was supposed to know it, although she could also see that he didn’t expect her to. But she did feel that she knew who he was – his name was such a small part of that. “Does it start with a W?” she asked.
The sun was out. The surface of the water was a rough gold.
“What will you give me if I guess it?”
“What do you want?”
She looked past him. On the bank was a group of smiling women, her grandmother, her mother, and her stepmother too, her sisters and stepsisters, all of them smiling at her. They waved. No one said, “Put your clothes on.” No one said, “Don’t go in too deep now, dear.” She was a good swimmer, and there was no reason to be afraid. She couldn’t think of a single thing she wanted. She flipped away, breaking the skin of the water with her legs.
She surfaced in a place where the lake held still to mirror the sky. When it settled, she looked down into it. She expected to see that she was beautiful, but she was not. A mirror only answers one question and it can’t lie. She had completely lost her looks. She wondered what she had gotten in return.
* * *
There was a mirror in the bedroom. It was dusty so her reflection was vague. But she was not beautiful. She wasn’t upset about this and she noticed the fact, a little wonderingly. It didn’t matter at all to her. Most people were taken in by appearances, but others weren’t. She was healthy; she was strong. If she could manage to be kind and patient and witty and brave, there would be men who loved her for it. There would be men who found it exciting.
He lay among the blankets, looking up at her. “Your eyes,” he said. “Your incredible eyes.”
His own face was in shadow, but there was no reason to be afraid. She removed her dress. It was red. She laid it over the back of a chair. “Move over.”
She had never been in bed with this man before, but she wanted to be. It was late and no one knew where she was. In fact, her mother had told her explicitly not to come here, but there was no reason to be afraid. “I’ll tell you what to do,” she said. “You must use your hand and your mouth. The other – it doesn’t work for me. And I want to be first. You’ll have to wait.”
“I’ll love waiting,” he said. He covered her breast with his mouth, his hand moved between her legs. He knew how to touch her already. He kissed her other breast.
“Like that,” she said. “Just like that.” Her body began to tighten in anticipation.
He kissed her mouth. He kissed her mouth.
* * *
He kissed her mouth. It was not a hard kiss, but it opened her eyes. This was not the right face. She had never seen this man before and the look he gave her – she wasn’t sure she liked it. Why was he kissing her, when she was asleep and had never seen him before? What was he doing in her bedroom? She was so frightened, she stopped breathing for a moment. She closed her eyes and wished him away.
He was still there. And there was pain. Her finger dripped with blood and when she tried to sit up, she was weak and encumbered by a heavy dress, a heavy coil of her own hair, a corset, tight and pointed shoes.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She was about to cry and she didn’t know this man to cry before him. Her tone was accusing. She pushed him and his face showed the surprise of this. He allowed himself to be pushed. If he hadn’t, she was not strong enough to force it.
He was probably a very nice man. He was giving her a concerned look. She could see that he was tired. His clothes were ripped; his own hands were scratched. He had just done something hard, maybe dangerous. So maybe that was why he hadn’t stopped to think how it might frighten her to wake up with a stranger kissing her as she lay on her back. Maybe that was why he hadn’t noticed how her finger was bleeding. Because he hadn’t, no matter how much she came to love him, there would always be a part of her afraid of him.
“I was having the most lovely dream,” she said. She was careful not to make her tone as angry as she felt.
WENDY, DARLING
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN
On a Friday evening at the end of May in the year Nineteen Hundred and Fifteen, Wendy spent her final night in her father’s house in a fitful sleep, worried about her wedding the following day and the secrets she had kept from her intended groom.
The room had once been a nursery, but those days were all but forgotten. She had stopped dreaming the dreams of her girlhood years before, such that even the echoes of those dreams had slid into the shadows in the corners of the room. Now it was a proper bedroom with a lovely canopy over the bed and a silver mirror and an enormous wardrobe that still gave off a rich mahogany scent though it had stood against the wall for six years and more.
Some nights, though… Some nights the tall French windows would remain open and the curtains would billow and float. On those evenings the moonlight would pour into the room with such earnest warmth it seemed intent upon reminding her of girlhood evenings when she would stay up whispering to her brothers in the dark until all of them drifted off to sleep and dreamt impossible things.
Wendy had lived in the nursery with Michael and John for too long. She ought to have had her own room much sooner, but at first their father had not wanted to give up his study to make another bedroom and later – when he’d changed his mind – the children were no longer interested in splitting up. By then Wendy had begun to see the Lost Boys, and to dream of them, and it seemed altogether safer to stick together.
That day – the day before her wedding – there had been a low, whispery sort of fog all through the afternoon and into the evening. Several times she stirred in her sleep, uneasy as she thought of Jasper, the barrister she was to wed the following afternoon. She quite relished the idea of becoming Mrs. Jasper Gilbert, and yet during the night she felt herself haunted by the prospect. Each time her eyes flickered open, she lay for several moments staring out at the fog until she drifted off again.
Sometime later, she woke to see not fog but moonlight. The windows were open and the curtains performed a ghostly undulation, cast in yellow light.
A dream, she thought, for it must have been. She knew it because the fog had gone. Knew it because of the moonlight and the impossibly slow dance of those curtains, and of course because the Lost Boys were there.
She lay on her side, half her face buried in the feather pillow, and gazed at them. At first she saw only three: two by the settee and one almost hidden in the billow of the curtains. The fourth had a dark cast to his features that made him seem grimmer, less ethereal than the others, though he was the youngest of them. She had not seen them in years, not since her parents had gotten a doctor involved, insisting that the Lost Boys were figments of her imagination. She had never forgiven John and Michael for reporting her frequent visits with the Lost Boys to their parents, a grudge she had come to regret in the aftermath of Michael’s death in a millinery fire in 1910. How she had loved him.
By the time of the fire it had been years since she had seen the Lost Boys. After the fire, she had often prayed that it would be Michael who visited her in the night.
“Wendy,” one of the Boys whispered now, in her moonlit dream.
“Hello, boys,” she said, flush beneath her covers, heart racing. She wanted to cry or scream but did not know if it was fear she felt, or merely grief.