Robots vs. Fairies(67)

She huffed and flew away, then spun in a shining circle. “My Found Girls are all here. None remember the name Lillian. Perhaps she’s taken a new name. Look for yourself if you must.”

It was like she’d flung me from a cliff. I clawed at the rocks to catch myself, but her words turned them to dust in my hands.

I forced my body to move, stepping toward the nearest Found Girl to search her face and features. It had been years. Lillian could be almost grown, or she could be the same age she’d been the night we lost her. I went to the next girl, then the next. “You’re lying. She’s not here.”

Tinker Bell laughed. The sound sent cold fear through my marrow. “Don’t you recognize your daughter? All this time trying to find me, and you’ve forgotten your own child.”

I did remember, damn her. I remembered Lillian’s soft brown skin. Her freckled cheeks. How her black hair fell in waves past her shoulders. Her eyes were a startling blue. She always tried to hide the scars on her right arm where a neighborhood dog had bitten her.

I moved from one face to another, despite the cold, hard knowledge in my gut: my daughter wasn’t here. “Lillian, where are you?”

“I’m bored. Take us to Peter. You can try to remember on the way.”

The world was cracking apart around me, leaving me surrounded by a moat of madness. I turned to Clover. “Do you know what Tinker Bell did with her?”

She kicked me in the leg.

It had to be a trick. No, not a trick, but a game. Tinker Bell had hidden or disguised her.

“She knows nothing. Kill her.”

The Found Girls closed in around me. One cut Clover free and handed her a small, crude sword—a hacksaw blade with one end wrapped in duct tape for the handle. Clover snarled and lunged at me.

“Wait!” Forgive me, Peter. I wiped my face and said, “I’ll take you to him.”

*

Fairies indeed are strange, and Peter, who understood them best, often cuffed them.

—J. M. Barrie

*

Four Found Girls seized my limbs and hauled me into the air.

“We fly west.” I searched their eyes for any hint of my Lillian. “As fast as you can.”

Higher and swifter we flew. The lights of London soon faded behind us. We passed over Reading and Bristol and Cardiff, and then the lights of civilization were replaced by cold wind and the dark waves of the ocean.

Faster yet we went—the shooting star that was Tinker Bell, the children whose hands dug into my clothes and flesh to keep me aloft, and the rest of the Found Girls. I studied each one in turn, trying to pierce whatever magical delusion kept me from the truth.

We moved like a school of fish swimming through the clouds. For hours we flew, following wind and moon and stars. It was like a memory of a dream, more vivid than reality itself. Even as my despair grew heavier, part of me yearned to fly like this forever.

All too soon, the lights of another coast rose from the darkness. From there, it was easy enough to adjust course over North America. I used my phone’s GPS to lead us to our destination. We dropped to Earth in the middle of an ill-maintained road winding through a familiar trailer park in central Ohio.

A few dogs barked as we walked. Figures peeked through their windows, but nobody challenged us.

I stopped in front of a green-and-white double-wide with a beat-up SUV parked beside it. The Found Girls started toward the trailer, but I put myself before them, my arms spread protectively. “Where is Lillian?”

Tinker Bell flew past me to the window. On a faded curtain, the silhouette of a young boy bounced and swung a toy sword. The boy who had forgotten.

“You stupid ass. What game is this? That’s not Peter.”

I barely heard her. I couldn’t look away from that magical child who jumped and played and flew. I moved closer, until my hands pressed the cold aluminum siding. Tinker Bell might not see, but I knew who he was.

Uncomfortable laughter from the Found Girls. Two of them seized my arms. I had no fight left. Let them hit me and cut me and kill me, so I could fly again. Far from everything, until I found my Lillian.

A man inside the trailer called out, “Pete, have you brushed your teeth yet?”

The bouncing stopped. “Yeah, Dad.”

Another voice, this one female and tinged with warning. “Peter . . .”

“All right, all right.” If it was possible for a shadow to look sheepish, this one did. It vanished as the boy—Peter—hurried off to brush his teeth.

How I longed to be a fairy. To be too small to feel more than one thing at a time. Tinker Bell never had to deal with such a tangle of confusion and grief, longing and pain, all of it hollowing me out like a Halloween pumpkin.

“You’re a liar.”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Who’s out there?” called the man. Peter’s father. I knew his voice in all its shades. Loving and tender. Pained and grieving. Cold and helpless.

The curtains parted. I ducked away.

Tinker Bell and the Found Girls vanished in an instant. I pressed my body against the trailer, out of sight, and hugged myself.

I barely noticed when the curtains closed and the Found Girls reemerged. I felt lost, trapped in that place between sleep and awake, where dreams and reality danced and chased each other in an endless game.

Lillian wasn’t here. All those years . . . I hadn’t been searching. I’d been running.