Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(95)

Inside, the warmth and light of the kitchen chase the shadows away. Jane is pacing, a teapot on the table. Her normally perfectly coiffed hair is scooped up in a messy bun, silver strands escaping in all directions. When she sees Holly, her face lights up. “I was beginning to think you might have gone with Jack and Peter and left me behind,” she says.

It’s the hopefulness, the naivete in Jane’s voice, that destroys Holly. It’s as if she’s come back from a different world. She can’t speak any of the terrible words burning under her tongue. Instead she pushes past her mother to the library, where she checks to make sure the windows are firmly shut behind the drawn curtains, then pours herself a healthy slug of whiskey, neat, to douse her internal flames. She drains her drink in silence as Jane trails into the room, the relief on her face changing to concern.

“You’re bleeding! Whatever happened? I called you a half dozen times, but you never picked up. I assumed after we spoke this morning that you’d found Peter and Jack. Where is he?”

Holly looks down at herself. Scratches from the thorns mar her arms, and tiny beads of blood glisten along her skin. The abandoned council house from this morning feels years ago, not hours. She ignores Jane’s question and refills her glass.

Jane frowns, gives a careful sideways glance, as if Holly is a wild animal she’s gotten too close to, as if she’s worried about the damage Holly will cause when she bolts.

“Do tell me what happened,” she says again.

Holly wants to smash Jane’s eagerness the same way she wants to smash the statue, wants to destroy it to make herself feel better. She reaches into her pocket, pulls out the photograph of Jack asleep, and tosses it onto the table in front of her mother.

“Maybe you should look at this first. That’s your grandson,” she says savagely. “Take a good long look because it may be the last photo of him you ever see.”

Jane picks the picture up. “I don’t understand,” she says, turning it this way and that. “Why do you have a photo of Jack asleep?”

“Why don’t you ask Peter?” Holly spits. “Since he’s the one holding Jack hostage.”

“Nonsense,” Jane scoffs, but her voice lacks its normal conviction. “Why would Peter hurt Jack?”

“He still wants Eden. He’s figured out she’s our child. But now he’s using Jack as bait. We should have seen this coming—I should have seen it,” Holly corrects. “Because I knew what he was all along.”

“There must be some mistake,” Jane repeats. Her hand holding the photo trembles.

“The only mistake was not telling you the truth from the beginning.” The whiskey is burning through Holly, making her light-headed. The anger that fueled her is deserting her, taking her strength with it. She’s exhausted and weak and suddenly unable to stand. She sinks onto the couch, almost dropping the whiskey glass, and closes her eyes. She can’t bear to look at her mother. But after all these years, after being this close to Peter again, she can’t hold what’s inside of her a moment longer.

“He raped me, that last night. He held me down and . . .” She can’t finish. “He threatened to kill Jack if I wouldn’t go with him.”

She waits, curled into herself. The clock on the mantel ticks, the only sound. Seconds pass, minutes, an eternity. When Holly can’t endure it anymore, she opens her eyes. She still can’t bring herself to look at Jane, so she trains her gaze on the floor, on her mother’s feet, encased in rose silk slippers and still as stones.

Finally Holly risks a glance upward. Jane is staring at her. But her face isn’t angry or challenging. It’s stricken.

“All those years . . . Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have believed me?” Holly asks, a flicker of anger still alight. “You spent years waiting for him, years building a monument to him in the backyard. My word against that, against a century of family legend? It didn’t seem like the best bet. I did tell you he was dangerous.”

“Dangerous is one thing,” Jane says. “Dangerous can be appealing. What you describe—what he did to you—is a completely different matter.”

“Would you have? Believed me?” The words spill out before she can bite them back. She doesn’t ask if Jane believes her now.

But she doesn’t have to. Her mother is already at her side, tucking a finger under Holly’s chin and raising it up so their eyes meet.

“Listen to me,” Jane says, and her look is unflinching. “You’re my daughter. Of course I would have believed you then. It goes without saying I believe you now.”

Something very hard and sharp shatters in Holly, puncturing the soft places it once protected. Tears prickle behind her lashes. She wants to curl up in her mother’s arms, wants to place her head in Jane’s lap and cry. But she can’t. If she starts crying, she may never stop. And time is a luxury they do not have.

Instead she lets Jane wrap an arm around her shoulder, and they sit together in front of the fireplace. Above the mantel, Wendy’s portrait gazes down at them, as mysterious, as secretive as ever.

Jane gazes back. “One thing I don’t understand,” she says slowly. “I believe you, of course, but why wouldn’t my mother have warned us? Perhaps she didn’t see that side of him? Perhaps he wasn’t always evil.”