“She knows nothing. Kill her.”
The Found Girls closed in around me. One cut Clover free and handed her a small, crude sword—a hacksaw blade with one end wrapped in duct tape for the handle. Clover snarled and lunged at me.
“Wait!” Forgive me, Peter. I wiped my face and said, “I’ll take you to him.”
*
Fairies indeed are strange, and Peter, who understood them best, often cuffed them.
—J. M. Barrie
*
Four Found Girls seized my limbs and hauled me into the air.
“We fly west.” I searched their eyes for any hint of my Lillian. “As fast as you can.”
Higher and swifter we flew. The lights of London soon faded behind us. We passed over Reading and Bristol and Cardiff, and then the lights of civilization were replaced by cold wind and the dark waves of the ocean.
Faster yet we went—the shooting star that was Tinker Bell, the children whose hands dug into my clothes and flesh to keep me aloft, and the rest of the Found Girls. I studied each one in turn, trying to pierce whatever magical delusion kept me from the truth.
We moved like a school of fish swimming through the clouds. For hours we flew, following wind and moon and stars. It was like a memory of a dream, more vivid than reality itself. Even as my despair grew heavier, part of me yearned to fly like this forever.
All too soon, the lights of another coast rose from the darkness. From there, it was easy enough to adjust course over North America. I used my phone’s GPS to lead us to our destination. We dropped to Earth in the middle of an ill-maintained road winding through a familiar trailer park in central Ohio.
A few dogs barked as we walked. Figures peeked through their windows, but nobody challenged us.
I stopped in front of a green-and-white double-wide with a beat-up SUV parked beside it. The Found Girls started toward the trailer, but I put myself before them, my arms spread protectively. “Where is Lillian?”
Tinker Bell flew past me to the window. On a faded curtain, the silhouette of a young boy bounced and swung a toy sword. The boy who had forgotten.
“You stupid ass. What game is this? That’s not Peter.”
I barely heard her. I couldn’t look away from that magical child who jumped and played and flew. I moved closer, until my hands pressed the cold aluminum siding. Tinker Bell might not see, but I knew who he was.
Uncomfortable laughter from the Found Girls. Two of them seized my arms. I had no fight left. Let them hit me and cut me and kill me, so I could fly again. Far from everything, until I found my Lillian.
A man inside the trailer called out, “Pete, have you brushed your teeth yet?”
The bouncing stopped. “Yeah, Dad.”
Another voice, this one female and tinged with warning. “Peter . . .”
“All right, all right.” If it was possible for a shadow to look sheepish, this one did. It vanished as the boy—Peter—hurried off to brush his teeth.
How I longed to be a fairy. To be too small to feel more than one thing at a time. Tinker Bell never had to deal with such a tangle of confusion and grief, longing and pain, all of it hollowing me out like a Halloween pumpkin.
“You’re a liar.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Who’s out there?” called the man. Peter’s father. I knew his voice in all its shades. Loving and tender. Pained and grieving. Cold and helpless.
The curtains parted. I ducked away.
Tinker Bell and the Found Girls vanished in an instant. I pressed my body against the trailer, out of sight, and hugged myself.
I barely noticed when the curtains closed and the Found Girls reemerged. I felt lost, trapped in that place between sleep and awake, where dreams and reality danced and chased each other in an endless game.
Lillian wasn’t here. All those years . . . I hadn’t been searching. I’d been running.
étoilée moved closer, tapping her club against her open hand. “Want us to punish her?”
“You can’t,” I whispered. I raised my chin and waited.
“She’s a madwoman, broken and lost. Let her live, trapped in her own lunacy.”
When they started to disperse, I spoke without thought. “Don’t leave me, Tinka Bell!”
She flew back to me. “What did you call me?”
Fragments of memory cut through the dreams. “I used to call you Tinka Bell.”
“You said your daughter was one of my Found Girls.” She moved closer, peering into my eyes. “She wasn’t. But you were.”
They were the cruelest words she could have spoken. If Tinker Bell had taken Lillian, it meant there was a chance I could get her back. But she hadn’t. That truth pierced me like an arrow and tossed me to the ground, to memories I’d fled for so long. The beeping of hospital equipment. Pale, sunken skin. Powder spread on Lillian’s skin to prevent bedsores.
“We lived in a house outside Columbus,” I said numbly. “I was home with Lillian. She fell down the stairs and hit her head. She never woke up.” For more than a month we’d stayed with her at the hospital, hoping and praying.
“Little Angela. I remember you. So happy to come with me, away from rules and lessons and manners. Look at what you’ve become.”
I was a child again, burning in shame at Tinka Bell’s disapproval.
“Who was that boy in the trailer?”
“My son. I named him Peter.” My shame grew. He’d been eleven months old when I left. Too young to remember me.
“You pitiful ass. You meant to give me your own son?”
“No!”
“Then it was a trick!”
“It wasn’t—I didn’t know.” I’d forgotten my own son. Or had some part of me remembered? Had this been my unconscious goal, the endgame to my madness? Tinker Bell realizing this wasn’t Peter Pan and ordering her Found Girls to punish me, to put an end to my long hunt?
“I remember the night we lost you. We’d taken four girls, but a man with a gun shot you from the sky. He shot me, too. Your belief helped me fly away.”
I’d been with Tinker Bell for decades, never aging. When I returned to this world, my parents were both long gone. I’d been passed from one foster home to another, given countless colorful pills while doctors talked to about depression and psychosis, about abandoning my childhood imaginings of flight and freedom.
Slowly I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the other Found Girls. At Clover. I remembered the grief in her mother’s eyes.
For the first time in years, my thoughts were clear. My hand shot out to close around the fairy’s slender body. Fairy dust shivered from her skin onto mine. I clung to those memories of freedom and innocence and worship among the Found Girls, remembering a time before I knew what pain and grief truly meant, and I flew.
*
“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.” That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions.
—J. M. Barrie