Neverworld Wake(51)

It was the bumblebee pin, the one Jim had given me, the one stolen from me.

The rest happened at once. Headlights sliced through me. The truck was honking, careening toward us. Raindrops fell in slow motion. A howl of brakes. Someone was still screaming. I opened my eyes, catching a fleeting glimpse of a figure in a green poncho sprinting away, vanishing into the woods. Clanging metal. The truck was jackknifing, massive tires sliding on the wet pavement right toward my skull. A smell of scorched rubber. And hell.

One…two…

Bumblebee pin.

Jim.





When I opened my eyes, it was daylight.

I was facedown in the grass. I lifted my head, heart pounding, feeling an overpowering wave of nausea. I was sick to my stomach, my body spasming. It took a minute to catch my breath. I wiped my mouth, looking around, my eyes stinging in the light.

I was not on any coastal road. I was not being run over by Howard Heyward’s tow truck—at least, not anymore. I was in no physical pain.

I also wasn’t in the back of the Jaguar. For the first time in a century it wasn’t raining. The sun was shining. I was lying on the ground—dead leaves, dirt, surrounded by trees. It was brisk out, a bite in the air, the sky hard blue. I held out my hands, opening them.

They were empty.

The bumblebee pin. Where is it?

I looked around. I definitely wasn’t near Villa Anna Sophia or on any Greek island.

I was in the middle of a forest. I stared down at my clothing.

The burgundy Ann Taylor wool coat my mother had picked up years ago at a secondhand store in Woonsocket. Black tights. Black wool dress. Scuffed black leather pumps.

Puzzled, I stumbled to my feet. My shoes were too tight, my dress scratchy. I lurched forward, staring through the trees at a grassy clearing. There was a lake littered with small white sailboats, people milling around the perimeter. I stumbled toward it, wondering if I looked like some deranged lunatic. But as I stepped out of the woods and down the bank, no one gave me a second glance. There were at least twenty sailboats out on the lake, children and a few teenagers operating them by remote control.

I understood where I was: Central Park. The Conservatory Lake. I’d visited here a long time ago with Jim.

“There you are.”

Hearing his voice was like having the floor drop out under my feet. I couldn’t breathe. I closed my eyes, my mind jelly. I was falling through a hole a mile deep.

“Where’d you go? Are you already trying to get rid of me?”

He was alive. He was right behind me, his hand on my shoulder. He smelled the same: peppermint soap, wind, and fresh laundry.

“I came out here all the time as a little kid. Once, the remote control broke and my sailboat got stranded in the middle of the lake and my father said, as I cried, ‘If you want it, go get it.’ I had to wade out there and retrieve the thing. Clearly it was some survival-of-the-fittest, free-market personality test he’d learned in business school and— Hey, what’s wrong?”

He spun me around to face him.

What’s wrong? How can I begin to answer that question?

“Look at me.”

I opened my eyes.

The sight of Jim Mason inches away from me—sun blazing behind him, birds chirping, kids squealing in delight—was so unfeasible, my head turned inside out.

This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

But it was. It was Jim. He was the same, but he wasn’t. As I stared up at him, it struck me how no one ever really sees anyone. Memory turns out to be a lazy employee, intent on doing the least amount of work. When a person is alive and around you all the time, it doesn’t bother to record all the details, and when a person is dead, it Xeroxes a tattered recollection a million times, so the details are lost: the freckles, the crooked smile, the creases around the eyes.

“Come,” Jim said. “We can’t be late.”

He tucked my hand into the crook of his arm. I’d forgotten how he always did that. He escorted me down the path, past women wheeling babies in strollers—all of whom glanced at him with varying degrees of admiration—and a man pushing a shopping cart filled with plastic bottles.

It seemed the wake had brought me to one of the occasions when I’d visited Jim’s family in New York.

It wasn’t Christmas. And it was too chilly for spring break.

So when was it?

I could ask him what we were going to be late to, but it was a daunting prospect to speak. Every time I looked at Jim, I felt jolts of disbelief. I wanted to annotate everything about him, every blink, sniff, and sideways grin. I was terrified too. There was a lump in my throat like a giant wad of gum, threatening to dislodge. If it did, I’d end up crying or rambling on madly about the Neverworld, the fact that he was dead now.

You’re dead, my love. You have such little time.

Biting my lip, I let him escort me across Fifth Avenue. We rushed into his building—944 Fifth Avenue read the elegant script on the green awning—its lobby pungent with hydrangea and roses from the colossal flower arrangement on the table, asteroid-like and silencing. Jim casually waved at the doorman.

“Hola, Murdoch.”

Then we were alone in the elevator. Jim leaned back against the wood-paneled wall, surveying me. I had forgotten the way he studied people as if they were priceless pieces of art.

“Don’t be nervous,” he said.