Robots vs. Fairies(68)

étoilée moved closer, tapping her club against her open hand. “Want us to punish her?”

“You can’t,” I whispered. I raised my chin and waited.

“She’s a madwoman, broken and lost. Let her live, trapped in her own lunacy.”

When they started to disperse, I spoke without thought. “Don’t leave me, Tinka Bell!”

She flew back to me. “What did you call me?”

Fragments of memory cut through the dreams. “I used to call you Tinka Bell.”

“You said your daughter was one of my Found Girls.” She moved closer, peering into my eyes. “She wasn’t. But you were.”

They were the cruelest words she could have spoken. If Tinker Bell had taken Lillian, it meant there was a chance I could get her back. But she hadn’t. That truth pierced me like an arrow and tossed me to the ground, to memories I’d fled for so long. The beeping of hospital equipment. Pale, sunken skin. Powder spread on Lillian’s skin to prevent bedsores.

“We lived in a house outside Columbus,” I said numbly. “I was home with Lillian. She fell down the stairs and hit her head. She never woke up.” For more than a month we’d stayed with her at the hospital, hoping and praying.

“Little Angela. I remember you. So happy to come with me, away from rules and lessons and manners. Look at what you’ve become.”

I was a child again, burning in shame at Tinka Bell’s disapproval.

“Who was that boy in the trailer?”

“My son. I named him Peter.” My shame grew. He’d been eleven months old when I left. Too young to remember me.

“You pitiful ass. You meant to give me your own son?”

“No!”

“Then it was a trick!”

“It wasn’t—I didn’t know.” I’d forgotten my own son. Or had some part of me remembered? Had this been my unconscious goal, the endgame to my madness? Tinker Bell realizing this wasn’t Peter Pan and ordering her Found Girls to punish me, to put an end to my long hunt?

“I remember the night we lost you. We’d taken four girls, but a man with a gun shot you from the sky. He shot me, too. Your belief helped me fly away.”

I’d been with Tinker Bell for decades, never aging. When I returned to this world, my parents were both long gone. I’d been passed from one foster home to another, given countless colorful pills while doctors talked to about depression and psychosis, about abandoning my childhood imaginings of flight and freedom.

Slowly I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the other Found Girls. At Clover. I remembered the grief in her mother’s eyes.

For the first time in years, my thoughts were clear. My hand shot out to close around the fairy’s slender body. Fairy dust shivered from her skin onto mine. I clung to those memories of freedom and innocence and worship among the Found Girls, remembering a time before I knew what pain and grief truly meant, and I flew.

*

“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.” That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions.

—J. M. Barrie

*

The Found Girls tried to follow, but I remembered now. How to fly, how to maneuver between the trees, how to ride the whirls and gusts of the wind. I led them on a merry chase, laughing through tears as one by one they fell away, unable to follow where I was going.

Tinker Bell squirmed and fought until I gave a warning squeeze. I couldn’t kill her, but immortality wouldn’t protect her from the pain of crushed bones.

Soon we raced over another ocean, through salty, rumbling clouds. An island grew beneath us. I couldn’t tell if we were descending, or if the island was coming toward us. Maybe there was no difference.

I landed in a clearing made of granite, smoothed and polished to a cold, glass finish. Rose petals rained from the sky, melting into red-tinged rings when they touched the ground. Weeping willow trees surrounded us. Wind whispered through their branches.

I loosed my grip, and Tinker Bell shot up out of reach. “This is the Neverland. How—”

“It’s not, exactly.” I began to walk. “This is my Neverland. This is where I fled when Lillian died.”

With each step, the grief and nightmares came to life. A wet breeze carried the sharp smell of antiseptic. Through the willow branches, I glimpsed shadowy doctors rustling about, their fingers tipped with the needles they’d used to try to save Lillian.

“I never truly forgot you,” I said. “No matter how many doctors I talked to, how many medicines they gave me. No matter how I grew up. After Lillian made me a mother, you began to return in my dreams. You didn’t want me, of course, but I was terrified you’d take her. Night after night I woke up to reassure myself she was still in her crib. In her bed. Then, in the hospital, I woke to make sure she was still breathing. I still wake up in the night, but I’d forgotten why.”

“I don’t like this place. Take me back!”

“I don’t want to.” Here, I could forget. Here, I could fly. On this island, I was Peter Pan. I was key and compass and master and prisoner. “It took a long time to make my way back to the real world, last time.”

I hadn’t made it. Not entirely. My thoughts and memories were too heavy. I’d had to leave some behind. I’d smashed the remaining fragments together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces. “All those years I was afraid you’d take her. But at least if you’d stolen her, I had a chance of getting her back. So that’s the story I told myself.”