Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(79)

She’s still reeling when Barry speaks again.

“Holly?” he says, his voice gentle. “I hate to say this, but you’re not the only one with a family.”

The comment wrecks her. In all the years she’s worked with Barry, he’s never asked her for anything. She thinks of all the nights she’s seen Barry rush home to Minerva and their kids, a jaunt in his step even after a fourteen-hour day, all the times she’d felt . . . not envy, not quite, but a wistfulness at what might have been if she’d trusted him from the beginning. But she’d kept him out, kept him at a distance. And even so, he’s been her most loyal friend. Now he’s putting it all out on the line. And for once, after everything he’s done, he’s asking her to do the same. What choice does she have? She hesitates, but there’s no other answer she can give.

“I need a few days,” she tells him. “And I can’t stay long. But I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Thank you,” he says simply.



* * *





She books a flight for three days out, then spends those days making a last-ditch effort to find her daughter. She stalks the atrium, following flocks of birds, diving down back alleys at the glimpse of a blonde head. When the atrium turns up nothing, she works outward in an ever-widening spiral, searching streets over a two-mile radius. Something jogs at the back of her memory, something Jane once said. The starlings landed on Big Ben. A murmuration. They stopped time.

Tinker Bell had summoned starlings. Why would they congregate there?

She stands beneath the giant clock tower at noon, but there are no starlings, just a handful of pigeons cooing on the sidewalk. Despite the heat, the air around the tower smells fresh and clean. Like springtime. Like Eden. The website said there’s a tour, but the guard at the door tells her it’s been canceled for the foreseeable future. “Maintenance,” he says. “They’ll be doing a big restoration project soon.”

She walks around the clock tower searching for another way in. She doesn’t find it. So instead does the only thing she can—she calls her daughter’s name, screams it over and over again until the guard tells her to stop, that she’s being a nuisance, that if she doesn’t quit he’ll call the police and have her arrested for being a disturbance to the peace.

She’s no good to her children in jail, so she stops.

She doesn’t find Eden.

Her leg is aching—a sure sign of stress—but Holly doesn’t use the cream, can’t bring herself to even look at it. She tries not to smother Jack, but it’s so hard. Every time she looks at him, she sees his face the way it was in the hospital, so still and white he could have been carved of marble. There’s a clock ticking in her brain, moving relentlessly toward the time the last infusion from Eden will wear off completely.

And what then? Will he gradually weaken, his legs shriveling, his lungs contracting, the scars on his skin rising to the surface, forgotten monsters pushing up to show they’d been here all along? Or will it be a sudden, horrifying end, his body overtaxed by one of the activities—lacrosse, running for the bus, roughhousing with his friends—once made possible by Eden’s blood?

Even as she’s trying to hold on to him, he’s slipping through her fingers. He spends whatever time he can away from the house, leaving while she’s out and not coming home until she insists. When she asks where he’s going, he mutters and looks away. He won’t talk to her about anything—about Eden, about the injections, about how he feels. He’s flat-out refused to come to New York with her as well, a decision that surprises her and that he won’t explain. She spends every minute from the time she wakes up until the time she falls into a brief, restless sleep absolutely terrified.

She knows he’s spending time with Ed. Ed at least has the decency to look embarrassed when she stumbles across him on the front stairs or in the kitchen, where he’s most often waiting for Jack. He’ll unfold his long legs from whatever perch he’s found and stand to greet her. “Hey, Dr. Darling,” he’ll say, towering over her. “Thanks for having me.” Jack may snort and roll his eyes, but Holly can’t detect any sarcasm in Ed’s brown ones, just a bashful politeness.

She doesn’t like them together, not one bit. She worries that Ed, with his glowing good health, is a bad influence, always talking about lacrosse. She can tell by the tightness of her face that Nan’s worried too, that the boys will push it too far and something bad will happen and Holly will hold her responsible. She’s always shooing them out of the kitchen when Holly walks in, always suggesting movies and shopping or other low-key activities. And her squeamishness about storing the syringe of blood in the crisper bin has forced Holly to buy a small refrigerator she keeps padlocked in her room.

“If she quits,” Jane says once, after a particularly stressful breakfast where Holly discovered Jack had left the house at the light of dawn to meet Ed for a game, “I’ll blame you.”

“Add it to the list,” Holly says, pushing back her chair and taking her tea with her. It’s a banner start to her day.



* * *





Christopher too keeps his distance, and Holly is curiously disappointed by this. She tells herself it’s because she’s anxious. She wants to know what he’s going to do with the information he’s found. It has nothing to do with Christopher himself, his long black hair, the easy way he moves.