“Wendy?” her father said, and she opened her eyes to see him looking at her.
He knew. Though he had always told her they were figments and dreams, hadn’t he seemed unsettled whenever she talked of them? Spirits, he’d said, do not exist, except in the minds of the mad and the guilty.
Which am I? she’d asked him then. Which am I?
Jasper clapped his hands twice, drawing all attention toward him. The unreality of the moment collapsed into tangibility and truth. Wendy breathed. Smelled the flowers. Heard the scuffling and throat-clearing of the stunned members of the wedding.
“All right, lads, you’ve had your fun,” Jasper said. “Off with you!”
“Wendy Darling,” one of the boys said, staring at Jasper, tears welling in his eyes. “Only she’s not ‘darling’ at all. You don’t know her, sir. She’ll be a cruel mother. She’ll abandon her children—”
“Rubbish!” shouted Wendy’s father. “How dare you speak of my daughter this way!”
Wendy could only stare, not breathing as Jasper strode toward the grim-eyed boy and gripped him by his ragged shirtfront. She saw the way the filthy fabric bunched in his hands and it felt as if the curtain between dream and reality had finally been torn away.
“No,” she said, starting toward Jasper… and toward the boys. “Please, don’t…”
Her fiancé glanced up, thinking she had been speaking to him, but the boys looked at her as well. They knew better.
“She’s had a baby once before,” a pale, thin boy said, coming to stand by Jasper, his eyes pleading. “Go on. Ask her.”
“Ask her what became of that child,” said the grim-eyed boy.
Shaking, Wendy jerked right and left, trapped by all of the eyes that gazed upon her. Jasper frowned, staring at her, and she saw the doubt blooming in him, saw his lips beginning to form a question. Her father still glared angrily at the boys, but even he had a flicker of hesitation. In the front row, Mary Darling stepped from the pew and extended a hand toward her daughter.
“Wendy?”
Shaking her head, Wendy began to back away from those who loved her, retreating down the aisle. She tripped over her silken train and when she fell amongst the soft purity of its folds, she screamed.
“Ask her!” one of the boys shouted. Or perhaps it had been all of them.
Thrusting herself from the ground, whipping her train behind her, she ran. Her whole body felt flushed, but she caught a glimpse of her left hand as she ran and it was pale as marble. Pale as death. At the back of the aisle, a few crimson rose petals had fallen, petals meant to be scattered in the path of husband and wife after the ceremony. To her they were blood from a wound.
She burst from the church, an abyss of unspoken questions gaping behind her, and she fled down the steps in fear that if she did not run, that yawing silence would drag her back. Pain stabbed her belly and her heart slammed inside her chest. Her eyes burned and yet strangely there were no tears. She felt incapable of tears.
At the foot of the steps she tore off the train of her dress. When she glanced up, horses whinnied and chuffed. Her wedding carriage stood waiting. The driver looked at her with kind eyes and his kindness filled her with loathing.
“Wendy!”
Jasper’s voice. Behind her. She dared not turn to look at him.
Racing across the street, she darted down a narrow road between a dressmaker’s and a baker’s shop. At a corner, she nearly collided with two more of the Lost Boys – names, you know their names – and she turned right to avoid them, racing downhill now. Another appeared from an alley to her left, but this boy was different from the others. He’d been badly burnt, skin and clothing charred, and unlike the rest he had no substance, flesh so translucent that she could see the stone face of the building behind him.
She wailed, stumbling in anguish, and fell to the street. Her dress tore and her knee bled, so that when she staggered to her feet and ran screaming – grief carving out her insides – a vivid red stain soaked into the satin and spread, the petals of a crimson rose.
“Mother,” the burnt boy said behind her.
She did not look back, but glanced once at the windows of a pub as she bolted past. In the glass she saw their reflections, not only the burnt boy but the others as well, one with his head canted too far, neck broken, another beaten so badly his features were ruined.
Moments before she emerged from between two buildings, she realized where she had been going all along. Had she chosen her path or had they driven her here? Did it matter?
Wendy stared at the bank of the Thames, at the deep water rushing by, and all the strength went out of her. Numb and hollow, she shuffled to the riverbank.
Somewhere nearby, a baby cried.
Glancing to her left, she saw the bundle perhaps a dozen feet away, just at the edge of the water. The baby’s wailing grew louder and more urgent and she started toward it.
She knew the pattern on its blanket. His blanket.
Kneeling on the riverbank, her bloodstained dress soaking up the damp, she reached out to pull the blanket away from the infant’s face. His blue face, bloated and cold, eyes bloodshot and bulging and lifeless.
The sob tore from her chest as she reached for the child, lifted it into her arms and cradled it to her chest. Still she could not weep, but she pressed her eyes tightly closed and prayed for tears.
The bundle in her arms felt too light. Gasping for breath, she opened her eyes.
“No, please,” she whispered as she unraveled the empty blanket. The empty, sodden blanket.
“Mother,” a voice said, so close, and a hand touched her shoulder.
Wendy froze, breath hitching in her chest. This was not the burnt boy or the grim-eyed child from the church. This was another boy entirely.
Still on her knees, she turned back to see his face. Nine years old, now, his skin still blue, eyes still bloodshot and lifeless. Her boy.
“Peter,” she whispered.
He thrust his fingers into her hair and she screamed his name – a name she had never spoken aloud before today. Wendy beat at his arms and clawed at his face as he dragged her to the water and plunged her into the river. She stared up at him through the water and his visage blurred and changed, became the face of his father, James, the butcher’s boy. He’d earned his nickname with the bloodstained hook he used in handling the sides of meat in the shop down the street from the Darlings’ home.
Her chest burned for air, the urgency of her need forcing her to strike harder at the face above her, which now became her own face, only nine years younger. The hands that held her beneath the water were her own, but she was no longer herself – instead she was a tiny infant, so newly born he still bore streaks of blood from his mother’s womb. An infant conceived by a mother and father who were only children themselves, carried and borne in secret – a secret safeguarded by her brothers in the privacy of the room they shared, a secret which destroyed her relationship with them forever. A secret made possible by a father’s neglect and a mother’s denial.
Peter, she thought.
Starved for air, thoughts and vision dulling, diminishing, slipping away, Wendy opened her mouth and inhaled the river.
Blackness crept in at the corners of her eyes, shadows in her brain, and she realized that she had stopped fighting him. Her arms slipped into the water and her hair pooled around her face. Bloodstained white satin floated in a cloud that enveloped and embraced her.