The Lost Girls Read online

  It would be too easy to say that I was ravished. Rape is too strong a word, devalued not strong enough. For I believe the shadow had its way with me. I know it had some sort of horrid meat hook for an arm. They say it even named itself after its appendage. That this shadow was human.

  Even now in my forties, I pull the chain on my night-light before I slip into bed. I shudder the moment the sun goes down and can’t be held at my waist without becoming queasy—without feeling that something is terribly wrong. If I were a crime scene, I swear you’d find fingerprints on every inch of my skin—that’s all I can tell you. For The Neverland is one big projection, and I had very little to project at the time.

  * *

  THE day I stripped the bandage off my freshly healed knee—my first attempt at flying had netted me a long, wiggly scar and yet a delicious new confidence about what my own limbs could do—Peter paid me a second visit. This time he demonstrated even less patience with me, allowing that we were already terribly late. Late? He grabbed a sheaf of my poems, not bothering to read a single page, and waved it in my face. “Wendy, time is a-wasting. Take a gander at your poems, do your deep thinking, and let’s boogie!”

  This time I didn’t need the poems; the mere thought of flying by my own hand did the trick. I was out the window and, within the hour, rocketing through the blue skies over the coast at Santa Barbara. But by the time Peter and I found ourselves gliding through a yellow, poisonous film that clung to the Los Angeles basin like suntan oil, my stomach was in an uproar. It wasn’t the smog that disturbed me—it was the idea of landing. It turns out that Darling girls, no matter how ungainly, excel at flying, but landing can be a hazardous business. To steady my nerves, then, I took a little detour and flew dangerously close to MGM Studios hoping to touch down on some old stage set from The Wizard of Oz and make myself at home. At this point in the journey, Oz made for a better prospect than The Neverland, for the Oz story has a happy ending while my own was still up for grabs.

  But where I saw the locus of movie magic, Peter only saw rows of bland gray buildings and demanded that we press on. With haste, then, we flew off toward the stars, leaving behind the known world and the good sense that accompanies it. When Peter remarked that I looked radiant, I felt like a star myself!

  I landed in The Neverland with the softest of thuds—a meadow of spongy pink flowers cushioning my fall—and then bounced in place like a big rubber ball. The flowers smelled sweetly of pink bubble gum, the kind that comes with little wax-paper comics, and each time my body banged against the leaves, I thought I heard a boing.

  In spite of the heavenly scent and the springy flowers, my stomach was beset with butterflies. Surely, my travels to London to visit Great-Nana had always been interesting. But never eye-popping, never intoxicating. What’s more, this trip had been notably longer than the storybooks suggested—and hence I was intoxicated and cold. No book has remarked on the dramatic changes of climate one must endure, or discussed the failure of one’s nightgown as travel wear.

  Eventually, all the excitement took its toll and my thoughts turned to safety, to self-preservation. I sat up, supported by the dense bed of flowers, and on the chance there were onlookers, tugged the flannel gown over my exposed legs. But I was all alone. I struggled to get a firm footing, only to regret it: the boy landed on my bad knee and knocked me down all over again.

  “How clumsy is that?” I said to Peter’s face.

  “Dreadfully clumsy,” he replied. Then he smiled with such unalloyed pleasure that I knew I would be all right. The smile aimed an undeniable heat on my chilled skin and banged knee; I watched the goose bumps on my forearms fade, felt my stomach ease up. The boy gave me his hand and pulled me upright. Now I could see that the flowers were waist-high, their floppy leaves as long as dog ears, and that they were supported by an undergrowth of thorns. As I took in the brilliance of the meadow—the pink was so concentrated it tinted the surrounding hills and the boy’s dirty cheeks; even the horizon looked rosy—Peter encouraged me to follow him to an enormous oak tree at the edge of the field. I was bone tired and yet he egged me on—with real eggs, mind you. Where the eggs came from and how they got hard-boiled, I hadn’t a clue, but since I was famished I did what the boy said.

  The great oak was distinguished by a trunk as thick as a one-hour photo booth and a silver plaque that read THE HANGING TREE: “Are people really hung here?” I asked nervously.

  The boy had a laugh at that. “Not hung,” he said. “We lads hang from the branches whenever we want—which is most of the time.” He shook his head as if every bit of information I’d brought along with me was worthless here. Then, for a visual aid, he hung by his toes from one of the tree’s stockier branches and dangled precariously. After a showy dismount, wherein he executed a double flip, the boy touched down on the ground next to me.

  “Very impressive,” I told him, but already his attention was directed elsewhere. He was studying me the way guys back home check out girls, and I shuffled my feet in the dirt.

  “Listen, I’ve got to ask you a sticky question,” he said finally, and I prepared myself to say yes to life and to love, exactly as Great-Nana had instructed. This was my first date and I wasn’t going to blow it.

  “Will you promise me something, Wendy?” he said with the slightest hint of pressure.

  “I can promise you anything,” I said rather boldly. After all, I’d just arrived and felt capable of winning a gold medal at the Olympics.

  “Right.” He cleared his throat dramatically. “You must promise me that you will never grow up. Do you understand?” he asked, eyes wild with hope.

  I nodded gravely, but tried to look cheerful, too; our relationship was still young and open to interpretation.

  “It will kill me. It will just kill me if you grow up like the others.”

  The others? He was referring to my own relatives, of course, and I wondered where I got the backbone to attempt something as radical as this. But isn’t that the nature of new friendships—you feel that you can achieve practically anything?

  I wriggled around inside my voluminous nightgown, stretched my arms and legs out in front of me, and felt my body come alive. My body was a growing thing, and yet I was about to tell him that I would put a stop to that! “Yes, I promise,” I said with a clarity that came up like a burp. “I promise you I won’t grow up.”

  He sighed like the weight of the world had left his own body and taken off into the wind; then he stood up abruptly and made his good-byes. “Cheers, Wendy, we’ll see you later then,” was all he said, but it was enough for me to take heed. Daddy was in the habit of saying the same thing, and I hadn’t seen him for nine months.

  Just like that, I was alone in a new dimension, without compass or flashlight or savvy tour guide. This didn’t look promising. I took a wary whiff of the sweet-smelling air, then stepped onto a dusty path that offered to take me someplace special. I’m not clairvoyant—there was a hand-painted sign of a fairy pointing in the same direction. The sign said SOMEPLACE SPECIAL and who was I to argue?

  That same afternoon, I met the ragtag guys about whom Great-Nana had spoken so fondly. Though they turned out to be a more recent crop of homeless, soapless youth, they were just as blindly devoted to Peter as the original gang. Funny how Peter always ended up as Lord Master, Head Poo-Bah, or His Excellency. I could never persuade the others that there should be a revolving leadership on the island—or a council that included them all. The Boys were happy to defer to Peter; they actually enjoyed being governed by someone a notch older and wiser. Someone akin to a father, but still a fool.

  The path I’d chosen with such confidence ended at the banks of a creek so clear it reflected back all my imperfections. But I didn’t care! I promptly went about washing off all the muck I’d acquired in my travels, as well as many of my misconceptions. For while I was not crazy about being left alone on the island, I now felt a surge of self-reliance—a rare optimism that had come apparently from nowhere. I dipped
my wind-knotted hair in the mild springwater, and watched the strands float lazily on the mirrored surface. I half considered donating my entire body to the current and floating downstream. But when I lifted my head from the water, I was face to face with a profoundly tanned, surfer-looking fellow who sported baggy Hawaiian-print trunks and ivory dreadlocks. Though coated with a fine layer of dirt, he showed no interest in the cleansing properties of the water; instead he fished with his bare hands for guppies, tossing the slippery devils into his mouth like popcorn. I was—charmed.

  “Name’s Bert,” he said, mouth dripping.

  “I’m Wendy.” I waved. “Otherwise known as the Wendybird.”

  “No. You’re having me on,” he said. With the back of his hand he wiped the last of the fish guts from the corners of his mouth. “The real O. W.?”

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “Blimey, the Original Wendy?”

  “Well, I’m Wendy and I’m myself.”

  He eyed me suspiciously.

  “Okay, I suppose you’re talking about my great-grandmother. Wendy the First?” I smiled broadly at the boy, turning on the ancestral charm.

  “So you know her?” he asked, agog.

  “Of course. She’s family.”

  “I don’t know ’bout family,” he said bleakly. “I hear stories, though. It all sounds pretty dodgy.”

  “Well, sure,” I told him. “But not always. Sometimes a family makes you stronger, connects you to a powerful force—to history and to the future!” Now the boy looked deeply bored. “You knew her, my great-grandmother?”

  “Me? Nah. But, bloody hell, she’s a legend around here. The O. W. made quite an impression on us lads.”

  So Great-Nana’s influence had continued to shape these young men. I got a little tingle. “And Margaret, what about Margaret? Did you . . . do you know her?”

  “Princess Margaret? Yeah, some of the blokes had mad pashes on her. Me, I don’t know the bird. But I hear good things. I hear she’s tasty.”

  Mother would be pleased to hear it. I grabbed a couple of shallow breaths before asking the inevitable: “And Jane? Have you ever heard of Jane?”

  “As in, me Tarzan, you Jane?” His lampoon was followed by a laugh that seemed hysterical under the circumstances. “Nope,” he said with a flip of white-gold plaits. “Never heard of her. Is she a looker too?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered solemnly. “I never met her.”

  “Are you sure ya don’t mean a bloke named Jason? ’Cause there was a Jason hanging ’round these parts, an evil sort who lost his hand in a card game.”

  “You mean he played a bad hand?” I asked, amused.

  “I mean he bet his own hand and lost it,” Bert said. “You best steer clear of ’im, miss.”

  “Oh dear,” I said. “But I was speaking about Jane. My Grandma Jane.”

  “You must mean John, then,” Bert continued, unfazed. “There was a bloke named John ’round these parts.”

  “No,” I corrected. “John is my great-grandmother’s brother. He was a little boy when he visited the island.”

  “You sure ’bout that? ’Cause this John’s a tall, strange-looking geezer who’ll have nothing to do with the lot of us.”

  “Well, John’s a very common name. I’m sure your John is not my Great-Great Uncle John.”

  “Great? What’s so bloody fabulous about ’im?”

  “Great-great is a figure of speech,” I told him. “Anyway, John returned to the Mainland. He’s a doctor, well, he was before he died.”

  “Died? Aw, cripes.” The boy slumped against me on the sun-warmed banks; together, we dipped our toes in the fizzy, Perrierlike water.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” I hugged the boy to my chest as if he were a toddler. He seemed to respond to my touch. “Great-Great Uncle John grew up and had this really amazing life. He went off to war, you know. World War One? He was a medic and saved the lives of hundreds of blown-up men. Later, he worked in a clinic as a baby doctor. An ob-ste-tri-cian. So he could be present at the beginnings of lives. Imagine delivering thousands of babies! When he was really old, like maybe forty, John told his sister that his life was the epitome of balance. He died a happy man.”

  The boy looked up at me with hooded, pale-green eyes. “Did the babies have parents? Did the parents keep their babies?”

  “What?” I asked, shooing a large, three-winged insect off my cheek.

  “Were the babies he delivered, you know, loved? By their mums and dads?”

  “Well, I didn’t know the babies. But statistics show—”

  “No!” he shrieked, and clung tight to my chest again. “No statistics. Give me the bloody truth.”

  I hadn’t a clue what to tell the boy, for I was a child of little certainty myself. The truth? Well, yes, all babies are loved. How could they not be? The whole world loves babies. What had Great-Nana said? That all of us are bathed in a cosmic love as we make our entrance into the world. Whether this love flows from each and every parent, too, I couldn’t remember. And whether love will be a constant, whether it will follow us around like a faithful dog for the sum of our days—who knows?

  What I could tell the boy was, the moment we are born appears to be the very same moment we forget we are loved. Now isn’t that awkward? Shouldn’t the two things dovetail, love and memory? Shouldn’t a feeling that powerful be carved on a tree so no one can ignore its message? To come so far to be in this world only to forget something all-important—what kind of a journey is that? I’ll bet that 90 percent of the love that surrounds us is dismissed or discounted—the cup of tea a friend makes, the letter from a faraway auntie. The fact that no one feels loved enough merely proves my point.

  I would have preferred to die with my half-baked theory than to live with no theory at all. Or with a theory that presumes an emotional void at the heart of the universe. Believe me, I was no Pollyanna—but neither was I cut out for realism. Throughout the Spring, The Neverland would make sure of that.

  So, what to tell the boy? I couldn’t prove the existence of love, but I could assure him that someone must remember being loved or we wouldn’t have the idea to begin with. Besides, his parents—those “monsters” who’d rejected him—had been babies once too, were loved once too. Or maybe not. Already I was bent on rehabilitating the boy, hoping to convince him that he was not abandoned.

  It turned out that my good intentions fell by the wayside, for the boy and I were joined presently by a band of the officially unloved. Six other boys of unknown pedigrees sat down beside us on the bank, and began arguing over whose neck was thickest. I couldn’t glean the purpose of such a contest or the glory of such an honor, but the whole scene was pleasantly diverting. When I proposed that my neck was the thickest, I was heckled mercilessly; two boys with grubby fingers even jabbed at my swanlike stem. But when I coiled one of the Boys’ mildewed sweaters around my neck like a muffler, the group unanimously agreed that I’d won. I didn’t get it. The boys could have cheated in a similar manner. I guess, to them, the illusion I’d created wasn’t illusory. It was the new, improved reality—and was the very height of silliness.

  Now being understood and accepted is a peak experience for any teen; which is how a girl who’d largely known disappointment now found herself on cloud nine. Of course, the entire island was one whopping cloud nine, but being accepted had cinched it. I slipped off the sweater, ready to be stripped of my winner’s status. Already, it seemed, the boys had moved on to the next contest: “Which one of us ’as the biggest bone-crunching thighs?” Now this was one competition that I begged off from entering. In any dimension, it appears that boys will be boys and that large body parts play a large role.

  After many more pointless contests, including “Who burps loudest?” and “Who pees longest?” I yearned to take a nap. It was only then, as I started off towards a cave that Peter had arranged for my stay, that Bert formally introduced the Lost Boys. He did so with surprising fanfare considering that I’d spent the better
half of the afternoon with the guys.

  “Oi, listen up, lads!” Bert hollered. “This ’ere’s Wendy the Second, great-granddaughter of the O. W.”

  “You don’t say,” said a slack-jawed youth.

  “Well, bugger me,” said a freckled beanpole.

  “Oi,” scolded a now-red-faced Bert, “ ’ave I got to remind you to mind your language around a lady?”

  “What kind of language do you propose?” asked the slack-jawed boy.

  “Pretty language,” Bert said.

  “None of us is pretty,” argued another, this one six feet tall and counting.

  “Right,” said an exasperated Bert. “Just be good to ’er or I’ll tie you to a tree and give you a knuckle sandwich.”

  I waved a friendly finger in the air. “Excuse me, but . . . isn’t that playing a little rough?”

  “Yeah,” Bert agreed after a two-second deliberation. “Like the lady said, I’ll put you through the wringer. You got me?”

  “Yes sir!” the Boys chimed.

  “Now let’s get acquainted and call it a day.”

  “It’s a day!” cried the Boys in unison.

  “State your name and purpose,” Bert instructed, nodding in my direction.

  “Um, hi everybody. I’m Wendy Darling.” An ominous rumbling, like thunder, erupted from the group. “Of the Berkeley Darlings,” I joked. “By way of the London Darlings.” The discord grew, now punctuated with rude animal sounds. “But I’m totally American, completely myself. I’m not anything like the first Wendy.” A round of boos. “Sorry about that. And I’m nothing like Margaret, either. I mean, who could out-Margaret Margaret?” A couple of the guys hooted but still I forged ahead. “I’m just so tickled to be here, I can’t tell you. Guess I am telling you. I’ve waited my whole life to come here and tell you!”