The Sunday trip to Jim’s house for the funeral—this very trip—would end in disaster.
Fast-forward five, six hours? I’d be taking a train home from New York early, alone, the reasons for which Jim and I always argued about afterward. To this day I found it difficult to recall what had really happened. What had I been so upset about? I could never separate my shyness, my self-consciousness at being painfully underdressed and awkward, from the truth. During the post-funeral buffet, held in some relative’s Gilded Age apartment on Park Avenue, I remembered Jim disappeared for what felt like a torturous period of time. I’d grabbed my coat off the hall rack and snuck out without a word to anyone. I cried the whole ride back to school. I vowed—unreasonably, because even then my feelings for him felt as inevitable as seawater in a rowboat full of holes—that this would be the end of my friendship with Jim Mason.
That Monday morning, however, during English, he placed a red Cartier box on the notebook I’d been drawing in.
“Forgive me.”
Inside the box was a diamond-encrusted bumblebee pin.
The bumblebee pin.
Thinking of how it had mysteriously gone missing from the sock drawer in my dorm room, then abruptly reappeared all these years later, jammed in the side of my neck as we lay in the middle of the coastal road, sent a fresh wave of shock through me. Clearly it had been meant as a means of sabotage, a surefire way to get rid of me, make me think of Jim, thereby pulling me into some compartment of the past. Whoever had done it had meant to hurt me, purposefully destroy any chance we had of voting and leaving the Neverworld.
Which one of them had done it?
“Cookie?”
I jumped, startled. I realized dazedly I was in the Masons’ living room staring out the window at Central Park, which from this height looked like an architectural rendering of a park with pipe-cleaner trees. One of Jim’s adopted siblings—Niles, nine or ten years old—was offering me a stack of cookies held between his thumb and forefinger.
I took one. “Thanks.”
He squinted. “You’re Jim’s latest girlfriend?”
“No. I’m a friend of his from school.”
“Well, take care you don’t go”—the little kid crossed his eyes, making a deranged clown face—“like all the others.”
I laughed.
“Whoa— Did you see that?”
The kid moved to inspect a large red Rothko, which had just fallen clean off the wall, revealing a dark square of what appeared to be mold.
“That was totally Poltergeist!”
I smiled stiffly, moving away as Jim led his mother over.
“Mom. This is the girl I was telling you about. Beatrice Hartley.”
“Hullo there.”
Mrs. Mason was beautiful, her black suit sealing her like an envelope. She extended her hand like it was a gift. I’d forgotten how chilly she could be: the boredom in her smile, the flick of her eyes over my shoulder, as if somewhere behind me something more charming was always happening, like dolphins leaping out of the sea.
“Darling, did you speak to Artie Grossman about the Currin?”
Mr. Mason stepped over. He was short and tan, with spiky hair and the tense stare of all moguls. His teeth were big and artificially white, hinting they’d glow in the dark during a blackout.
“Dad,” said Jim. “This is Beatrice.”
Mr. Mason smiled warmly, shaking my hand.
“Just started Darrow-Harker with Jimmy, is that it? How are you finding those old-school traditions and Kennedy smiles?”
“Fine.”
“Wonderful. Wonderful. Glory, did you talk to Artie?”
“I’ll do it right now,” said Mrs. Mason.
She was smiling again, drifting away. “Lovely to meet you,” she said unconvincingly over her shoulder.
I couldn’t help staring after the two of them, wondering how they had reacted to Jim’s death. What had they done, all these polished, perfumed people? Had any of them screamed and lost their minds as I had, or had life simply floated on?
Jim was dead now. He was lying in a coffin underneath a gravestone that read Life Now Forever in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. In this sunlit apartment with the thick walls and marble floors, the idea was unfathomable.
Jim smiled after them. He appeared to mistake my stare for admiration.
“They met on the R train when they were twenty years old. Still madly in love after twenty-eight years. Completely unforgivable. Come.”
He clasped my hand again. We slipped through the crowd, past mute housekeepers in gray uniforms, a waiter holding a tray of triangular sandwiches like little starched pocket squares. He whisked me out of the living room, past three siblings playing Wiffle ball in the foyer (“Totally inappropriate!” Jim shouted at them), a wood-paneled library with a ladder to retrieve the thousands of first-edition leather-bound books, a dining room with a modern steel chandelier that looked like a giant tarantula. In two years I’d eat Christmas dinner there and his mother wouldn’t say a word to me the entire meal. His father would call me Barbara.
Jim pulled me through a door and closed it behind me. It was his bedroom, a shadowed, chaotic rock star’s lair with electric guitars mounted on the wall and sheet music covering every flat surface, handwritten quarter notes and half rests spangling the bars. Synthesizers. A McIntosh stereo. Three laptops. Piles of notebooks burping up pages where song lyrics were taking shape in terrible handwriting. Lost Little Blue. A biography of Janis Joplin. Sweeney Todd: The Complete Score. A framed copy of a Bruce Springsteen Madison Square Garden set list signed with a note: Love you, Jimmy. Keep hearing the music. Bruce. Rumpled boxers and T-shirts and rolled-up posters swamped the corners of the room.
Jim was rifling through a bookshelf, looking for something.
“Okay, so, I have this song I wrote about a girl I haven’t met yet,” he said, pulling out a notebook. “?‘Immortal She.’ It’s about the love you have for someone that can’t die, no matter how far apart you are, even if you’re separated by death or time. That’s what I’m searching for.”
The lump in my throat was there again, a pile of rubble.
He began to read the lyrics, as he would countless times after this. I came to know that song well. It was one of the best he ever wrote. I’d sing it for him on a picnic blanket at school during finals week. He’d sing it to me some nights at Wincroft as I fell asleep.
I remembered this exact moment. I’d related it to Whitley a dozen times, because it was the classic chorus refrain of “The Ballad of Jim and Bee,” an old standard. This was the first time we were ever alone together, our first deep conversation. Our first kiss was seconds away. Having it before me again made me feel paralyzed, out of control. As he read, stumbling over a word here and there, pausing to scratch his nose, he seemed so beautiful and so young—younger than I ever remembered. He raised his chin and strained his voice a funny way on certain words, as if they were spears he was launching blindly over a wall.
“It’s beautiful,” I said when he finished.
He had a funny look on his face. He carefully set the book on his desk and sat beside me.
“I was going to wait to do this, like, weeks, and be this total gentleman and woo you like a knight in medieval times? But I’m punting that plan. I’m not a knight. I’m not even a gentleman. But I am devoted. Once I decide I’m with you, it never goes away. I swear to you that, Beatrice.”
He kissed me. There was a whole world in that kiss. Every moment of pain, regret, loneliness I’d felt since he’d died fell away. I’d missed him so much, how much hit me only now. As his hands slid down my back, I knew I was going to tell him about the Neverworld, the Keeper, the vote, his death. Would he be able to tell me why he died if I asked him? Couldn’t we run out of here, get into a car, and go live out the wake at a highway motel where the light was gold and the carpet full of vending machine crackers?
Tomorrow we could do it again.
And again.