Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(28)

One lazy summer day she and Robert found their way here. The twins, exhausted after a morning spent swimming in the ocean, nevertheless grumbled as the nanny shepherded them back to the house for naps. At the split in the path, Holly turned to follow them, but Robert tugged her away.

“Just for a little bit,” he told her. “Let’s walk.” So they had, into a grassy hollow studded with age-grayed stones. They’d lain on the ground, listened to the sleepy buzzing of insects, watched the clouds pass overhead.

“?‘Lark song and sea sounds in the air and splendour, splendour everywhere,’?” he’d murmured into her neck. Holly stands stock-still as she remembers and touches the hollow of her throat. When the time had come, she’d known where he and Isaac belonged.

On her trips to Cornwall she’s never failed to visit them, to spend an hour in the quiet, her hands on cool stone, whispering love notes and a lullaby. Jack hasn’t been here in years, not since they left England for the States. Those days are lost to him. The crash and subsequent surgeries blotted the early memories from his brain. Even if they hadn’t, the thick fog of adolescent oblivion keeps everything but his immediate wants and needs from filtering through.

But she doesn’t want him to recall, especially not today, when the air is heavy with their spirits and so much hangs in the balance. When the telling of one secret could lead to the accidental unveiling of another. So she makes her visit a quick one, before he gets restless and comes to find her. She closes her eyes at the large grave trimmed in white stones from the beach—a bit of flash—then at the small grave covered in grass, a handful of speedwell resting at its head. She whispers a prayer and an apology and turns away.



* * *





The path to the beach from the cemetery is a short one. As Holly catches sight of the water, the trees thin and Jack comes into view, skipping rocks into the gray Cornwall sea. For just that moment both her sons are there, two tall, lanky boys gazing into the sea, so identical that only someone who truly loved them could tell them apart.

She looks away, closes her eyes. For months after Isaac died, she thought she saw him. Jack would turn a corner, and she’d catch a glimpse of Isaac right behind him. Or she’d come into the bedroom to kiss Jack good night and see movement out of the corner of her eye, and for one heart-stopping second she’d be convinced it was her other son. She’d reach for him and find she was reaching for empty air.

Holly opens her eyes, and there is only Jack again. She has no time for sentimentality. No time for handsome dead husbands, for twins who never grew up. Not if she wants to save Jack, to keep him the way he is now, whole and vibrant, not the shell of a child he was after the wreck, unable to walk, to run, to live a day free of exhaustion and pain.

Not if she wants to save Eden.

“I’m all set,” she calls, her voice brusquer than she’d intended. She tries to soften it. “Ready to go back to the hotel and check out?”

Jack looks out at the water. His shoes are off, his pants cuffed up. When he steps out of the surf line, she notices his feet. They’re rough and calloused, and the smallest nail on the right foot is blackened and dead, a victim of his punishing training regimen. The feet of an athlete, of an almost-grown man. Not a child’s high arches and ten perfect toes she’d somehow been expecting.

Jack stoops to pick up one last rock. He hefts it, smoothing its shape with his fingers, and she thinks he’s going to throw it, but he slips it into his pocket instead.

“I thought we could take a few days and visit your grandmother,” Holly says with forced cheerfulness. “We’re this close, after all. And I have some other business in London.”

“What about lacrosse? And school?”

“I wasn’t sure how many days I’d be here, so I left it open-ended with your headmaster,” she says, ignoring the question about lacrosse. “So long as you get your work done, we should be good. And in any case, it’s nearly summer holiday.”

He doesn’t answer.

At the hotel, he packs up his things and carries the luggage down to the car with a lack of protest that’s unusual for him. She probably should be worried, but it’s a relief.

She calls Jane from the road. To Holly’s surprise, her mother picks up. In careful terms, since the call is on the car’s hands-free speaker, Holly tells her she’s been in Cornwall dealing with a business crisis, Jack is with her, and they’ve decided to stop in London for a few days.

“That’s wonderful,” Jane says. The Darling women are nothing if not quick. “I hope the crisis wasn’t too . . . severe.”

“One of my vendors—my favorite, really, the main reason I come to Cornwall—has somehow decamped. We can talk about it when I get there,” Holly says with a quick glance at Jack.

Jane, it turns out, has been visiting friends. She won’t return until tomorrow night, but she tells Holly and Jack to make themselves at home. She’ll call the housekeeper and make sure the rooms are ready.

“Can’t wait to see you, my lovely,” she says to Jack before hanging up.

Jack spends the rest of the drive staring out his window. At least he’s not fighting with her, Holly tells herself. She tries not to think about past road trips, when they’d play the alphabet game, listen to audiobooks, or take turns singing made-up lyrics to favorite songs loudly and off-key. She tries to appreciate the silence.