The Lost Girls Read online

  Then she was asleep.

  It was a simple question: should I cling to Nana or run?

  Stepping out from her bedclothes, I tiptoed at high speed out of the room. No doubt, I had contracted my great-grandmother’s illness—if I wasn’t already bonkers, I’d soon be mad as a hatter. And that is how I became a burn victim of Great-Nana’s imagination, for she branded her own dreams into me that afternoon, and I caught a fever that would not subside over fourteen thousand days. That day in the hospital, I said good-bye to common sense, to rationality. But what was I saying hello to?

  II

  NOTHING that happens after the age of twelve matters very much.” So said Sir James Matthew Barrie, most certainly about my great-grandmother and her “mythological” clique. But I say, What a terrible prognosis, our destinies fixed. I’m perhaps foolishly hoping Sir James was wrong, that those things that happen to us after the age of twelve matter very much indeed. You could say I’m betting the house on it.

  Like it is for most preteens, my twelfth year was a time of arousal and unease: vexing allergies, inflating boobies, over-the-top expectations about school, about life. There were the requisite pimples and perspiration and new dance steps to learn. There was a rash of new “likes” (Pop-Tarts! nylons! Herman’s Hermits!) as well as what I called the “horribles” (anchovies, beer, jocks, skateboarders). While my secretiveness and dreamy nature, accentuated by the floaty dresses I wore, tended to scare away classmates (they assumed I was silly or fey—“off” in some unfortunate way), I did have one close friend. Melanie Lawrence, a black émigré from South Africa, harbored a similar creative streak. A promising writer of mysteries, Melanie featured in her stories an African-American teenage sleuth who bore her own name. Mel and I liked to act out the plots to her stories on my backyard deck. Alas, our flights of fancy were routinely interrupted by Mummy: “Can you do something with my hair, girls?” “Would you girls mind listening to this bitch of a chapter I’m writing?”

  While Melanie was entranced by Mummy—Mother’s wine-colored locks were romantically long compared to the blunt, modern-looking cuts of my schoolmates’ mothers—I was outraged. None of the other mothers in the neighborhood swore, and it was hard enough to build friendships when one was perceived as a weirdo.

  “Your mother’s so beautiful,” Melanie gushed one afternoon. “I’m even thinking of changing my protagonist’s name to Detective Margaret Darling.”

  “How about Detective Margaret Doo-Doo?” I offered and bit away at my nails.

  At the time I hadn’t begun to write fiction; it was poetry that piqued my interest—all that messy emotion corralled into tight little phrases. e.e. cummings was my current favorite, although Mother had recently forced Anne Sexton on me. “She’ll open your eyes with a pitchfork,” Mummy had said a tad gruesomely.

  I’ll admit that Sexton shocked me:

  Let me go down on your carpet

  your straw mattress—whatever’s at hand

  because the child in me is dying, dying

  I had never been in the presence of writing that revealed such stripped-down truths. Although I couldn’t begin to fathom their adult mysteries, Sexton’s poems made me shiver with feeling and I promised myself that I would always tell the truth as a writer. I wasn’t aware that, soon enough, I’d be cloaking my own confessions in fables that starred barnyard beasts and forest critters—that obfuscations were essential for survival.

  Being twelve was a mixed bag. Like other girls my age, I both dreaded and looked forward to beginning junior high in the fall: the social pressure from the boys, the social pressure from the girls, the dating, the nondating. In regard to one special boy, Great-Nana Wendy was wrong. Peter arrived sensationally late—far later than he had for her or for Jane or even for Mummy, who’d met Peter mere hours after her twelfth birthday and well before she’d been formally tipped off. Peter turned up in my bedroom on my thirteenth birthday, when I was, if anything, overprepared and had been waiting what felt like a lifetime. Every year, whether on the phone or in person, Great-Nana and I had had the same conversation, until I was convinced she was telling the truth. But after years of expecting Peter to make the scene, I’d aged considerably, not unlike those early American plainswomen who went mad studying the horizon while waiting for their husbands to return. The strain was even evident in my speech, for I took to stuttering words that began with P, and could hardly cry “For Pete’s sake!” without slapping my cheeks with brute force.

  By the time I was twelve and a half, I’d completely given up on meeting Peter in the flesh. First disappointed, then numbed by his absence—something I could hardly quantify—I added another layer of resentment to my feelings about my truant father. Worse, I was forced to conclude that my mother and her female elders were out of their barmy minds. For as much as Mother tried to convince her open-minded daughter that “Mummy is on the level,” she could not produce one shred of proof about The Neverland. She couldn’t even produce her own mother, Jane. And so I had to connect the dots myself: make-believe and reality are two different universes. The truth is, they have never even heard of each other.

  During this restive time, I was successful in adding several inches to my height. An angular girl with a talent for performing improvised ballets and mutant strains of the Twist, at five feet, five inches, I resembled the elongated Alice in Wonderland, the Alice who outgrew her little house. Though long ago I’d made peace with my gaunt appearance—Mummy called it a “look”—the years of waiting for a boy to literally sweep me off my feet eventually took their toll, and I began to eat my way through the evenings. I rarely went to bed without consuming at least three Fig Newtons and downing a full glass of chocolate milk. For a chaser, I’d swallow a handful of Sweet Tarts—sleeping pills in my book—and nibble on cheddar cheese. Food couldn’t hurt me, I reasoned. Not like boys who don’t show up on schedule.

  The evening of my thirteenth birthday, I happened to turn in early. Already disappointed by my teenage hormones—I was a tall, bony thing with no boyfriend, after all—I took to bed when it was still light out. Mummy had showered me with distracting gifts—Jean Naté body splash, Yardley English Lavender talc, Mary Quant eyeliner, and other teenage sundries—to make up for my lack of a love life, but I’d left them half unwrapped on my nightstand. By now, I’d given up on the whole Pan business and chalked it up to family myth, a fish story. I was more determined than ever to navigate a different path from that of my familial Darlings: I would become a professional truth-teller, a highly principled journalist. Fantasies be damned, I’d traffic in facts and all things verifiable! If something wasn’t three-dimensional and rock-solid, it would have no place in my life.

  After putting away a pound of birthday sweets, I found myself in a deep sleep, uncomfortably stuck in a dream about Daddy and his latest girlfriend, Amanda Cohen-Smythe. They were flying off to Fiji without me—how typical. Daddy was escorting, well, shoving, me off the plane, shouting, “This is Daddy’s trip, not yours! Find your own trip.” Screaming back at him, I lost my voice and could only hear it drumming in my head: But you are my trip. You’re my father!

  Then, curiously, he kneeled down on the tarmac as if to propose and lightly kissed the tip of my nose. “Bon voyage, Wendy,” he whispered, once in each ear.

  “But you’re the one who’s going away,” I pointed out. “You’re the one who’s actually going somewhere.”

  “Don’t be so sure, ladybird,” he replied with an exaggerated wink. Then Daddy’s long, lean frame towered over me; I watched him promenade up the ramp to his private plane. When a noxious puff of blue smoke issued from the engine, I knew it was time to head home. I waved good-bye to Daddy, who was already air-bound and no doubt happy; at the very least, he was en route to a place where he could manufacture the emotion.

  I awoke with a start and the nagging sensation of having been left irreversibly behind. And there he was: the figment, the scalawag, the dreamboat.

  I am not fond of crying
boys. It’s not that I’m stoic; other people’s tears undo me. But I had been promised the sight of a crying boy dressed in some sort of vegetable-green getup for so long that when I finally set eyes on Peter, I saw a cartoon version of what I’d been expecting. His hair was a shambles; a forerunner of Ziggy Stardust or Bob Marley, it boasted both spikes and braids. His arms were caked with cobwebs and dirt, and old crumbs of chocolate framed his downturned mouth. His tears, mixed up with the dirt and crumbs, were grimy, too, and his outfit—distressed button-fly Levi’s of unknown vintage and a Fruit of the Loom tee—was undeniably modern. The tee bore the faces of Manny, Moe, and Jack—the Pep Boys—and made me laugh out loud. Nothing on his person was green.

  I’d rehearsed the occasion too many times; Great-Nana Wendy had insisted on it. How many nights had I practiced her signature line, “Boy, why are you crying?” But a moment like this was ripe for farce and, under the circumstances, I could only grin cruelly. “You’re a mess,” I said.

  “Wha-at?” the boy stammered.

  Soberly, then, I delivered my line: “Boy, why are you crying?”

  “I’ve come for you, Wendy.” His eyes studied me like a doleful puppy.

  “Come for me?” I repeated, and let out an unfortunate chuckle.

  “Hey, what’s so funny? You find me funny, do you?”

  Peter rose to his feet and rested his hands on his hips. We were at eye level now and I could see beneath the grime. Peter was astonishing-looking, deeply cute—even cuter than Jay North in Dennis the Menace. A faint scent of mint, or was it clove, permeated the room. And then I spotted a crude, hand-rolled herbal cigarette burning casually on the windowsill, its violet plume undulating in the half-light. Great-Nana had not prepared me for a smoker.

  “I don’t find you funny at all,” I said, drawing a shaky breath. “I just don’t believe it’s you. You must be another bad dream I’m having.”

  “Blast, I hate bad dreams. They’re worse than hurricanes. We Lost Boys can’t weather ’em without a mother around. Get it? Blast. Hurricanes. Weather.” Now it was his turn to chuckle. He bent over to get a better look at me and I blushed, despite my superior knowledge that I was fast asleep.

  “Lost Boys?” I repeated, and considered the possibility. “Oh, you’re good. I just don’t believe in any of this. Sorry.”

  For a moment he looked dejected, an abject failure of a storybook character. He took a drag off the cigarette, then snuffed it out in the potted African violet on my nightstand. Brightening, he said, “I’m so real I’ll prove it to you!” Without warning the fellow blew in my ear.

  “Jeez!” I hissed. I tried to swat away his hand but it was too late: the boy had taken flight. Well, he hovered a few inches from the ceiling, if that counts.

  In spite of the tickle in my ear, I told myself to get a grip: I slapped both cheeks until they stung. But the boy bobbed resolutely overhead. So I asked him once again, though with a twist: “Boy, why are you flying?”

  To this, he swiftly touched down, landing a little closer to my face than is proper. “The question is, luv, why aren’t you flying?” He asked this with a smile as goofy as Terry Thomas’s and an endearing cock of the head. Really!

  “Because,” I said, stalling. “Because I have yet to be indoctrinated. Plus, it’s just a metaphor. Flying is a metaphor.” I sounded totally grown-up to my mind. “In this family, we speak of flying as often as we speak of shopping.”

  “You’re a queer girl,” he said.

  “Why, thank you,” I answered with a curtsy.

  “But you are as wrong as I am right!”

  “Says who?” I challenged, sacrificing any pretense at sophistication.

  “Says me,” he said. “You are dead wrong. All wrong. Girl-wrong!”

  “Girl-wrong? That’s not even a word,” I said disdainfully. A pinched smile leaked out against my will. “Please do get the words right. Civilization depends on it.”

  “That’s precisely why we need you,” Peter said with an earnestness I hadn’t detected before. “We need to speak gooder.”

  Either this was a calculated attempt to extract my sympathy or he was one dumb bunny. “It’s speak better. You need to learn how to speak better.”

  “See how much you can help us?”

  “Us? Now I don’t suppose you’re referring to . . . fairies?”

  “Crikey! Fairies don’t need any help when it comes to conversing, they speak the Queen’s English. I was talking about me mates.”

  Because I was mired in a dream, albeit a most convincing one, I blatantly rolled my eyes, making no effort to conceal my lack of faith in this exchange. I mean, I had heard them a hundred times—those quixotic tales of Peter and the Lost Boys—so often I could repeat them in my sleep. I was repeating them in my sleep! So I played along, privately hoping I would wake up before anything serious happened. Like falling out of bed. Or falling in love.

  “God help me,” I said under my breath.

  “You know my name!” the boy cried and clapped his hands. Freshly inspired, he scrambled over to the rocking chair in the corner and began to rock violently.

  “You mean, God? Oh, you are too much.” I crossed my arms to convey exasperation, but like a cowboy riddled with fake bullets, he twitched and giggled in response.

  “I am too much!” the boy squealed, and stood on the teetering chair. Then a look of gravity took possession of his face, if only fleetingly. “You do know my name, Wendy. Margaret promised me she would tell you everything.”

  “Oh, yes. I know more than a person should know.”

  His eyes sparkled like a lunatic’s. “All right! Margaret was a real dolly bird, the prettiest mum of all.” On hearing this, my face caved in. “But she was a stubborn girl, impossible to tame. And a tragically useless cook. Surely you can do better?”

  I stood at the French windows, frozen in the pale-rose light of dawn; my room appeared to be drenched in fog—or perhaps it was my mind? Peter sprang out of the rocking chair and tiptoed nimbly, if broadly, over to the windows where I happened to be gripping the velvet curtains like a lifeline. Then, bending over balletically, he whispered in my ear: “Wendy, what exactly did Margaret tell you?”

  I gazed into the face of the dream-boy and measuredly told the truth. “My mother and my Great-Nana Wendy—they said a young man would come, a dubious person named Peter. That I would be taken in by everything he said. And that he would spirit me away to a place where life is never, ever boring. They promised me I’d have more adventures than you can stuff into a lifetime, which hardly makes sense, and that I—why are you grinning? Excuse me, but would you please stop grinning?”

  Peter sprinted onto my bed and began hopping up and down, trampoline-style. “You know my name! Isn’t it the most brilliant name ever?”

  “What? Oh, right. I forgot about your manners—they’re reputed to be poor.”

  He belly flopped onto the mattress. “My manners have massively improved over the years, I’ll have you know.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Wendy and Margaret.”

  “Shoot!” I blurted. Those meddlesome Darlings. “Well, I’m sure they’re right,” I said, lightly patting his head. His body jerked away from my touch. “Listen, Peter,” I said, undeterred. “I’m not too great at cooking or cleaning. I’m a modern girl: I eat convenience foods and do the least amount of cleaning possible in order to free up my time to pursue other stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?” he asked from a safe distance.

  “Oh, you know.”

  “Nope. Haven’t a clue.” Now sprawled impishly across my bedspread, he gazed up at me and, not quite against my will, something akin to warmth flushed my cheeks.

  “Well, I have my activities,” I said. “Nothing as exciting as smoking. Stuff like watching TV, playing records, writing poems.”

  “Po-ems?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. His head rested in the basin of my pillow—like he owned it.

  “God, what did those women
teach you?” I plopped myself down, with great emphasis, at the far end of the bed, and fixed my attention on what little I could see out the windows: nary a star in the sky, but the high beam of a helicopter cast the whole firmament in a harsh light. “Well, you could say that a poem is an odd sort of wish. A bunch of sensations and feelings and images all blended together to make the juiciest sounds. But it’s written down on paper, too.”

  He knocked on his head. “You lost me. Is it anything like Jack and the Beanstalk? Treasure Island?”

  “Not exactly. Oh, a poem can tell a story if it wants to. But it doesn’t have to. It’s more like a child’s nursery rhyme.” He looked crestfallen. “Gosh, I forgot. Peter Pan doesn’t like to be reminded of his early years.”

  “Why don’t you just shoot me? Any baby who fell out of his pram, who got locked in a motorcar or abandoned in the park by his parents does not care to stroll down memory lane, thank you.”

  “I’m really sorry.” I crawled up next to Peter on the bed, and he positioned a pillow for my head. Was this seduction? Was I being seduced? “Listen,” I said, “would you like me to recite one of my poems, so you can hear for yourself?” He nodded indifferently.

  With a small surge in confidence I cleared my throat. “ ‘Bliss,’ by Wendy Darling Braverman,” I said.

  The world is a place for no one with a heart. It loves nothing. It feels nothing.

  Boys come and go and kiss and wave.

  They know nothing

  Of my heart.

  And nothing lives there anyway

  But a world of perfectly forgotten happiness.

  Peter spent an entire minute glued in place; for once his legs and arms stayed put. Just when I was about to pop, he said, “So that’s a poem, ay?” More silence followed, then: “Are you sure?”

  “Of course, I’m sure.”

  “But it doesn’t rhyme.”