Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(71)

Holly doesn’t answer.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, but it’s as if he’s talking to himself. “It doesn’t matter what you say. I know what I saw.” He rubs his wrist absently, although whatever mark was there is gone. “She was here. She called me Flea. She talked about riding a boat. A pirate ship.”

Those last words stir something in Holly, a scrap of memory. She wants to chase it down, but all her focus is on Jack. She sits down on the bed beside him. “Jack,” she says, “I’m really worried about you.” She shows him the needle in her hand.

“I thought it was all gone,” he says flatly.

“I had a last supply, and had someone send it over. I think we should use it now. All of it.”

She waits, but he doesn’t speak.

“Jack . . . ,” she begins.

“It’s Eden, isn’t it?”

He’s looking at her the same way he looked last night, a mixture of fear and . . . something else. Repugnance? Her stomach clenches.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not stupid. When you have low iron, you take pills,” he says. He turns away. “I worked it out. That’s why there was all that medical equipment in Cornwall. Not because she was sick. But because she was some kind of perfect donor for me. And when she disappeared, so did the blood supply.”

“Jack, she was sick.”

“And all these years, you kept her that way for me?”

“No! Jack, listen. I—”

“You’re the one who’s sick. Not Eden. Not me.”

“Please, Jack, you need to listen. And you need to stay calm.” She tries to keep her voice steady.

“You kept my sister chained to a bed, and you’re telling me not to get worked up?”

“It’s not like that.” She reaches out to him, but he recoils, and it’s as if he’s slapped her. Too late, she realizes her mistake. By not telling him the truth from the beginning, she’s allowed him to imagine it now as so much worse.

“Listen.” She tells him again about the accident, how Eden never woke up. “I did everything I could. I took Eden to every doctor I could find. You have to believe me.” She blinks back tears.

“Right. If you loved her so much, why did you use her like that?”

“After the car crash, your right leg was destroyed, and your left wasn’t much better. You had so many injuries, had broken so many bones—you fatigued so easily,” she says. She looks at him and realizes some part of her still sees him, will always see him, as the frail child he once was. “You spent all your time trying to follow her, but you couldn’t. And then I came home from the hospital, from being with her, and you ran to me.”

“So?”

“You hadn’t been able to run—hadn’t even been able to walk, not really—since the car crash.”

He looks at her uncomprehendingly.

“When Eden fell, she hit her head—that’s why she couldn’t wake up. There was a lot of blood. And somehow it got on you, on your injuries, and it . . . healed you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s something special about Eden’s blood,” she says. She leaves out any mention of magic, of Peter Pan. Jack is a child of New York, not London. He has no interest in fairy tales, and Holly’s always insisted this particular story wasn’t true. “But the help it gives wears off. It doesn’t last forever—only a month or so. You need another infusion of it or you start to fade.”

With a teenager’s self-absorption, he skips over the question of why Eden is different. “What happens if I stop taking it?”

“I don’t know. I swear.” There’s a long pause while Holly weighs what to say. She decides that in this case the truth can only help. “Worst case? There’s a chance you could die. You were injured so badly, the doctors were never certain you would recover.”

She sees it on his face, the knowledge that what she’s been doing has been keeping him alive all these years. And then she sees it harden into something she doesn’t recognize.

“There has to be another choice,” he says. “Something else that would work. A drug. Or therapy. Or maybe I’m really healed after all this time. You don’t know for sure.”

“I don’t think so,” she says gently. “Not the way you’ve been feeling. This is the longest you’ve gone without an injection, and every time you exert yourself, or do something like drink, you get worse. I don’t know what’s going on—maybe, because you’re hitting puberty, your body and how it responds is changing. But the injections aren’t working the way they used to.”

“But I’m fine right now!” And then it’s his turn to pause, and she sees him remember something. He looks at his wrist, rubs it. She follows his glance. There’s nothing there.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “I don’t care. I won’t take it again.”

“Jack . . .”

“You can’t make me. You’ll have to tie me down, keep me in a coma. Then I’d be the way you want. I can’t talk back, I can’t get into trouble.” He looks her right in the eye. “I can’t get hurt. I can’t grow up.”