Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(72)

“Jack!” she says, horrified. “That’s not what I want.”

“Isn’t it?” he says. He lies back down on the bed, turns to face the wall. “Go away. Just go away.” She can’t be sure, but it sounds like he’s crying.

She reaches out a tentative hand. “Jack?”

“LEAVE!”

So she does. She’s barely to the steps when she hears the snick of the lock behind her.

At least she knows where he is, she thinks.

And then it occurs to her—thanks to Jack, she may finally know where her daughter is too.





Chapter Twenty-Seven



Holly stands in a dim corner of the open atrium, beneath the soaring glass ceiling. A cool breeze blows off the river, carrying with it the slightest scent of decay. On either side of her are immense sand-colored buildings; in the center is an enormous statue. Holly stares at it and tries to block out all the afternoons she spent here. But as with all of her recent attempts to suppress the past, the task is proving impossible.

Eden told Jack about riding a boat. A pirate ship. Another Neverland echo, like Christopher’s lost boys and pixie dust, but this one might help her find her daughter.

Sheltered enough to be comfortable for Jack, large enough to keep Eden entertained, Holly often brought the children to Hay’s Galleria. As far as a young Eden was concerned, the highlight was always a trip to see The Navigators, the grotesque statue with blank staring eyes. Steampunk sailor, fish, and boat captured in one metal form, stranded in a pool of dark water, dreaming of other voyages as its gears and oars slowly churn. Eden even developed a very American habit of bringing coins to toss into the pool that surrounded it, wishing for something she refused to share.

Holly remembers one trip in particular. She’d parked Jack’s wheelchair in the shade and turned away from Eden for a moment to fuss over him. When she’d turned round, Eden had hopped over the rail and was standing on the statue’s long broad skull, trying to clamber upward, giving Holly and several other bystanders a heart attack.

“It’s a pirate ship,” she’d said when Holly scolded her. “Not a statue at all. Someone’s trapped it in bronze so it can’t sail, someone’s lulled it to sleep. But it wants to be freed. Can’t you hear it crying?”

From the distance of all these years, Holly sees the parallel and shudders.

She tears her gaze from the statue, searches the crowd of people milling about—tourists come to gawp, businesspeople looking for a quick lunch, couples out for afternoon drinks. She doesn’t spot her daughter.

She walks around the statue. A few feet from her starting point, she catches the faintest trace of the scent she associated first with Peter and, later, Eden—cut grass, spring, an effervescence she can’t quite articulate. But the scent is off. It’s heavy, decomposing. Rotten.

She turns in a slow circle, trying to locate its origins. A small woman is balancing on the concrete edge around the statue, ignoring the signs asking visitors to keep off. Sticking her tongue out toward the topmost fountain as if she’s a child, reaching for the water that’s spraying down. The tourists give her a wide berth, and as Holly gets closer, she can see why. The woman is wearing a stained white tank top and jeans that are too big, tied around her waist with what looks like rope. Her feet are bare and dirty.

And the scent is coming from her.

This close, although her frame is gamine, her face and body look bloated, stretched beyond their normal limit, like a tick that’s fed and is now engorged. The water from the fountain slows to a trickle, then shuts off, and the woman jumps down. She lands directly in front of Holly and smiles, displaying a mouthful of blackened teeth.

Holly flinches. “Excuse me,” she says, backing away. But then she catches sight of the tattoos along the woman’s shoulders. Small feathers, golden and lovely, so realistic they seem to move in the river’s breeze. Holly can’t help staring. The woman stumbles forward, and as she moves, the feathers take on a shimmering radiance.

The woman looks up, sees Holly’s gaze, and smiles again. She says something in a surprisingly musical voice, but it’s too quick, too high-pitched, for Holly to catch.

“Pardon?”

Before the woman can repeat what she said, a stranger intervenes. “That’s enough. Why don’t you take a nap?” she says, pointing to a bench on the other side of the atrium.

The small woman mutters again, looks at Holly dourly, but shuffles off, her too-large pants flapping around her legs.

“You could understand her? What did she say?” Holly asks, distracted.

“She said, ‘Hello, Darling. You like these? They don’t hardly work and I wouldn’t waste them on you if they did,’?” the stranger says quietly.

Holly looks up. The woman speaking has a pixie face with rosebud lips and eyebrows arched like butterfly wings. Her blue eyes are arresting under her short crop of white-gold hair. She looks as if she’s twenty at least, but . . .

“Eden?” Holly breathes. It’s her daughter. She’s found her, she’s finally found her, and she’s alive and whole and healthy. Joy and relief flood her as she reaches out to hold her darling girl.

But her daughter moves away.

Anguished, Holly follows. “Wait!”

Eden stops in front of the statue and roots through her pockets. She takes out a coin, tosses it into the pool of water, and closes her eyes, perfect dusky lashes dark against her pale face. Everything in Holly screams to hold this changeling child, to wrap her in her arms and never let her go. The need to touch Eden is so deep and visceral her arms ache.